Writer_Tina

I'm not sure if this is a bug exactly, but I've noticed that the groups listing on an arc detail will not alert you to the presence of a group that is only placed via objective, e.g., the listing says "Hellions" but there are boss objectives from a custom group. Since that can make a big difference in how hard a mission is, it can be an unpleasant surprise.

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Subjective comment: The popups for "you have received your first X" (in this case, reward ticket) can be extremely distracting when they show up in the middle of a screen during the middle of a fight.

Could they please be moved to the right or left side of the screen, so that we can deal with them when we want to, instead of RIGHT NOW?

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Yes, please. In particular, too, the "first ticket" drop window is also very large, so it's even more distracting than the salvage one was.

I'd also like to suggest it be tracked on an account, rather than character, basis. I don't need to be told about tickets, salvage, whatever, more than once in any event.

So, you've been around for over 4 years, and you still took this job?

I either applaud your bravery or marvel at your insanity. Or possibly both.

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It's not, in fact, feasible to plan for some indeterminate amount of server load. You can only plan based on the load you actually see. If this is the first time their servers have been hammered this hard (and it's certainly the first time I've heard of it happening), how were they supposed to plan for it? Just because it's the Magic Pack doesn't mean it included a crystal ball for the IT people.

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That's straight up BS and you know it. They know how big their subscriber base is. The number of purchasers at any one time can't exceed that. This isn't WoW. There aren't millions of people who can clog the store for hours and hours. It's just sloppyness.

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So, your contention is that they should have the hardware in place to handle the total amount of the playerbase of all their games simultaneously?

Which means they should invest large amounts of money in purchasing and maintaining equipment that will sit around being idle all but a tiny percentage of the time?

I'm pretty sure you aren't going to find too many companies that agree that's a base standard for professionalism. Or feasible. Though I can imagine the conversation.

"Hey, Bob. I wanted to talk to you about server load."
"Sure, Jim. What's up?"
"Well, you know how we have it set up now... we usually only see a couple hundred people on the site at a time, but we've got enough power to handle several thousand."
"Uh-huh."
"Well, I don't think that's enough. I think we really need to make sure we can simultaneously handle several hundred thousand connections... you know, in case all our customers drop by at once."
"That's pretty funny, Jim. Ever considered a career in stand-up?"
"Come on, Bob, I'm serious!"
"Well, Jim, let me put it this way: I think you need to lay off the drugs."

It's not, in fact, feasible to plan for some indeterminate amount of server load. You can only plan based on the load you actually see. If this is the first time their servers have been hammered this hard (and it's certainly the first time I've heard of it happening), how were they supposed to plan for it? Just because it's the Magic Pack doesn't mean it included a crystal ball for the IT people.

Now that brings up a question.

If I write my briefings & dialogue in English, then run it through a translator and back, would anyone be able to tell the difference between that and what some people are putting out anyhow?

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I wonder which one is worse. WoW or EvE Online forums.

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WoW, though the potential for backstabbing leading to frothing arguments is greatly increased in EO.

And, on topic: I still don't understand why so many people are expecting that a rating of a certain number guarantees they'll like the result, particularly this early on when so many arcs have been rated by so few people. Not that lots of ratings is any guarantee... Dumb and Dumber grossed some insane number of dollars at the box office and I've heard a lot of people talk about how much they enjoyed it, but I thought it was horrible.

And that's why I don't really pay much attention to ratings.

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I have never met the man who has never reset a mission, or stayed on a team that reset a mission because it was good exp, good inf, or was great mobs for a badge.

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I'm a woman. Does that count?

TBH, I'm not sure I understand why Inf was excluded other than because everything was, since it's not like you can pack a mission with magic Inf-producing mobs. I probably wouldn't care if it weren't for a certain unlockable contact redside, though.

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Unless I wanna drop one of the two arcs I've poured hours of my heart and soul into. I can only write one more.

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Which is still 3 more arcs than you could've written and shared with the general playerbase a week ago.

Twelve "jackets" (some of which aren't), plus sleeveless variations, plus additional variations, plus ties, plus at least two hats, plus a belt, plus slacks, available to all three body types. All of which had a high level of detail. Plus approximately 3700 shields. And I may've missed something in there.

If you're going to complain about how little free stuff there is, at least be honest about how much we got.

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Why do I have a funny feeling that someone's going to be upset that there'll be no Wizard's Beard for Female models....

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Beards For Wymyn Now!



(But, uh... what about those boots on the guys? I have a pirate. She wants the boots. She must have them. (She wants the coat, too, but, well, the boots more so.))

Though either way, I'll be getting it. I have a gothity queen of the night type who that cloakrobethingie would be awesome on.

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Well Dev's Choice was also way easier to get on test, especially during closed Beta and yet some of those are moving.

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After being re-evaluated. By two people. And the requirements aren't different, unlike for HoF, where they are changing.

Also, there was only one HoF arc as of last night anyhow.

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Meanwhile, we have a long standing 'bug' that we cannot fix:

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That says it ALL right there.

I don't even play PET classes and this still disgusts me. I'm through accepting THAT answer for all the things wrong with this game, Castle.

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Are you... actually opining that they shouldn't say they're fixing things because they're bugs?

If so, I'm curious what other option you think they have.

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The only concern I have is the flipside. If pets can't be affected by -recharge, does this extend to pets summoned by enemies? That would change the tactics you need to use with some characters against some mobs, if so, and I'd like confirmation one way or another on this point, particularly as regards custom MA mobs like Masterminds.

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Direct from Castle: It is not intended to extend to enemies, but in some cases it does. This is when enemies use the same powers we do. The devs will not add this feature to enemy pets that we players do not summon.

Yes, it's very likely that Mastermind critters in the MA will summon pets that cannot have their recharge debuffed, and some other sets may summon such pets too. It depends on whether there are critter versions of the pets which can be summoned instead.

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Okay, that's actually about what I figured would be the case. I wasn't sure if enemies were definitely using the same powers, but I presumed that probably was the case when it came to MA customs... just wanted to be sure.

Hopefully the patch note for when this goes to live will be extra-clear on this for people like me who were all head-scratchy.

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Arcanaville recommended that the devs go over this and possibly clone any pets that are currently shared at a future time. I think that's probably the best solution too.

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That would be great if they can, of course, though I know the sheer number of pets out there will make that a fair amount of work, so I'll work under the assumption we won't see that for a while and just assume -recharge won't work on mob pets as a tactic until further notice.

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I have several Masterminds and Controllers, including an Ill/Storm. This will not affect my playstyle in the slightest. I hit the button, the cloud appears, bad guys go flying. It works like this now, it will work like this after I14. If there is a reduction in effectiveness, it just means that that following attack I'm already hitting won't land on something that's already defeated.

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*laughs*

This is more or less my feeling. My Ill/Storm is fun (and effective!) pre-LS, and somehow I don't think that when she gets to L38 I'm suddenly going to hate her because I can't make LS hit people as often. I've never really understood how a change to one power makes a character unplayable in some people's eyes. If you don't like a large subset of powers in a powerset, why pick it in the first place?

(That having been said, I do hope the devs will consider offering a freespec with this change, since I can see why some people might want to rebuild to take this into account.)

TBH, I didn't even know that recharge could be passed along to attack rate on something like that... I always assumed the only thing it would affect was how often I could summon. I suppose I might notice a difference with, say, Spectral Terror or Phantom Army, but since I enjoy the entire playstyle of the set combo, I'm not really concerned about that part of it.

The only concern I have is the flipside. If pets can't be affected by -recharge, does this extend to pets summoned by enemies? That would change the tactics you need to use with some characters against some mobs, if so, and I'd like confirmation one way or another on this point, particularly as regards custom MA mobs like Masterminds.

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Level Pact plus XP Off switch

Server: Pinnacle
Zone: Port Oakes
Character name: Seer Skittle (Seer Keekee is the pact mate)
Time: 12/8/08 approx 11:30 am
Location: n/a
Mission: n/a
Mission Contact: Angelo Vendetti
Bug Description: Character is level 10. I turned off xp to try and get a badge mission before outleveling the contact. I was solo, but when my partner logged in I discovered she was ahead. I turned my xp earnings back on to see what would happen, and the Pact server gave me all the xp I thought I had given up by turning it off.

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I reported this in game, but something similar happened to me and my SO as well in the last couple days. (We're not sure if we got the XP yesterday or the day before.) We both had XP turned off, yet after turning it back on, both were awarded 2 levels, from 18 to 20. Didn't realize it until we went to try to get Penelope Yin yesterday and she refused to give us missions and moved immediately to inactive contacts.

For completeness sake --

Server: Virtue
Zone: Mostly Faultline
Character Name: Tierra Cielo (pacted with Cyrus Lupercalia)
Time: 12/21 or 12/22 (We turned XP back on 12/21 right before logging off, but didn't notice the level gain until yesterday)
Location: Faultline
Mission: Jim Temblor's arc, mostly
Mission Contact: Jim Temblor/Penelope Yin

Also possibly of important note: our patrol XP time was used up despite our XP being off, so that may've been a contributing factor.

Objective: King's Row and Galaxy City still appear to have had their level ranges swapped for the spawns from presents. Specifically, KR presents spawn under 5s, GC spawns level 9s. I bugged this last year, too. I don't understand why this hasn't been fixed.

Subjective: My personal naughty/nice ratio is 3 or 4 to 1. As a hero, I'm offended. Well, no, not really. But TBH, I'd find it a lot less annoying if those "You've been naughty!" messages didn't show up at all.

Personally I think the best possible solution for the applied bonus is to make it a click or toggle. I have no idea how feasible that is technically, of course, but it would definitely address the problem of bonuses running out before one even so much as assembles a team and picks a mission.

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This leads to most level ups taking place at the end of a mission as you exit to the street (which means the level up bonus is essentially wasted).

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Or, in our case last night, after we went to PocketD. It was two brand new chars with no possibility of either debt or patrol XP complicating XP balance, so it does seem to be a little strange, though presumably it was the mission complete bonus for one of us that was at issue. I'm a little confused as to why the calculation doesn't just happen when the XP is awarded, but I admit it isn't exactly a pressing issue. Still, hopefully this will be tweaked later.

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but if you're like me and prefer to not show auto powers on your buff list, you can not tell when you've walked into a day job area. I've changed my settings for now, but if it's possible to change the applied effect's category so I can change it back to hide auto powers, I'd definitely appreciate it.

Alas, there's 2 reasons why that's not going to happen, Bill.

First one's practical: the computers were a gift from someone who lives elsewhere. The sheer logistics of returning bits and pieces of them and getting replacements and dealing with getting our old computers reset up in the meantime is a little much. And it'd probably be the mobo AND the card, as we have Crossfire-enabled mobos and we don't want to give up that possible upgrade capability. (Also I happen to know the gift-giver got the vid cards really cheaply, so it'd probably mean more money, and it's kinda hard to say to someone "Thanks for dropping a few thousand dollars on us, mind spending more?")

Second reason is simpler: I refuse to go buy a completely different video card because ONE GAME has piss-poor support for it. As I keep saying, every single other game I play right now gives me good results with ATI cards, and in fact we've already tested several on the NEW cards and had no problems at all. (In fact, heh, UT2004 couldn't track our FPS. And wow does that game look different in widescreen.)

And I'm not a hardcore gamer. If the card I have delivers 70fps instead of 90, I'm not going to notice or care. The new systems are already such a huge leap from the old systems that our actual performance increase has been insane, EVEN HERE despite the problems. Outdoor FPS actually tripled. Srsly.

I understand why you're frustrated. We are, too. But seeing as how nothing else I've played or mean to play in the future has this sort of issue with ATI cards, my personal opinion is that this is the GAME'S problem. If they can't resolve it, then either I will choose to put up with the problems because I like the game enough, or I will take my money elsewhere until they decide it's worth resolving. Again, still not sure which one's going to happen. Next bill date is the 23rd, so we'll be figuring it out by then.

Ironically, I might end up dropping this for another NCSoft game, depending on how things go. Maybe now that the game is fully under NCSoft's umbrella they can fix things, I don't know. But what I want to do is just play a game. I'm too old to champion a cause.

Like I said, I'll give the info to the devs and ATI and see if they can come up with a fix. What I'm less sure about is if I want to play with artificially degraded settings. I have to think about that.

When I'm feeling less frustrated, I'm going to try to consolidate all the testing we did into a clear report (all that QA background has to be good for something, right?) and send it off to both NCSoft and ATI support. Maybe someone will come up with a fix someday.

In the meantime, I think it's time for a drink. Er, dinner! I mean, dinner!

Thanks, Bill, for the input, even if the result was "wtf"...