Aett_Thorn

MWA HAHA!!! Yes! He's finally let his guard down!




Oh s^#t, did I say that out loud?

Yes, different departments do different things, but they tend to need to work on things together. For instance, the powers guys and the animators need to work together to create a new powerset. World designers need to work together with other artists and programmers to make new zones, and then need to work with the story guys to flesh out the zone.

Tying up one part of that can mean that the whole thing needs to be delayed. Yes, the world designers can create the skeletons of 5 new zones, but without the other units working to flesh it out, what good does that do? If we have animations for 10 new powersets, but no numbers to go with them, do we get the powerset? No, no we don't.

Does new content also create new bugs? Yes. But when you're asking the Devs to just sit there and fix bugs, but don't account for bug fixes to create new bugs, you leave the door open for additional problems with your idea.

You want a whole issue devoted to bug fixes. You're making assumptions there that might not be true. The least of which is that the Devs can fix the bugs you want them to fix in an issues timeframe.

People tend to look at Tanks and Brutes at higher levels, and think that they can do that at lower levels as well. This tends to mean that they bite off more than they can chew at lower levels. People get aggro-generating powers early, and put off survival powers to take them. As such, any Tanker set can be survivable if you recognize which powers to take and which to skip (Chilling Embrace is a great aggro tool, but can mean very quick death to level 2 Tankers trying to tank for a team).

That being said, I think that SR/ is now probably one of the best low-level Tanker sets. Great defense at a very early level, with the aggro aura being one of the defense powers, which helps.

And if that means no new content for a year? There's no way to tell how long it will take to find and fix bugs. As such, saying "do nothing except fix bugs" has an indefinite end date for which any new content could begin being worked on. That's a bad business decision.

And again, there's still no guarantee that fixing current bugs won't create new bugs, which would then need to be worked on, which could introduce even newer bugs.

I don't know why this isn't on by default.

Because that #3 is basically what they already do. They look into bugs and work on new content at the same time.

Now, if they were to just focus on bug fixing at the expense of anything else, and then once they fixed every bug in their system (again, not a guarantee), went back to work creating new content within their field, then you still have the issue of things like new zones being created with absolutely nothing in them besides the terrain. Or new animations being created without any power data behind them. Or you get new story arcs created without any maps to go along with them.

Or, what you could do is have all of the Developers work on fixing bugs in their downtime from new content creation. Which is what they should already be doing.

Because the majority of bugs are in the realm of a few developers there. As such, most of the staff that isn't related to those systems would fix their bugs relatively quickly, whereas the staff that is will take a lot more time to fix all of their bugs (and this is still assuming that the fixing of Bug A won't create Bug B somewhere else). So you have created an issue where some of the Devs have to do one of two things:

1) Sit on their hands while the other Devs fix all of their bugs, so as to not risk creating new ones, or

2) Try their hand at something they've not done before, which contains a higher risk of creating new bugs and errors


#1 is bad, #2 is worse. Better for the Devs to try to fix bugs as they go, while still creating new content. What I am NOT saying is that they shouldn't focus on fixing bugs. Just that spending a whole issue fixing bugs is not a great use of resources.

"Why does Power Burst keep changing me into a dancing, flamboyant robot?!?! JAY!!!!!!!!"

Okay, now that is something that seems reasonable, and I might actually agree with. The OPs point and yours are different, though.

I agree that they should be focusing more on fixing stuff and making improvements to old features than on just throwing random stuff our way.

That being said, they did just come out with a new, huge game feature (Freedom) where they said that by changing their business model, they could get us a lot more stuff quickly. From a business perspective, for the first few months after that, you kinda need to keep up with that promise. Not saying I necessarily agree with that, but I can understand it.

Not all game developers have the same skillset. Fixing bugs in powers can't be done by artists sometimes. Fixing UI bugs is better handled by people who work in the UI system all the time than people who have never seen that code before.

Think of it this way: you're really good at plumbing. But your ceiling fan stops working, and you've never done electrical work before. Sure, it all has to do with your house, but it's going to take you a lot longer to fix your fan than someone who's good at electrical work.

It's the same situation here. Better to have the Devs who work on various systems within the game continuously upgrade and fix those systems than to have people who have never worked on a system previously muck around with the code (because that would likely just introduce MORE bugs).

More expensive =/= better. You can get to the soft cap and still get decent recharge pretty cheaply on a SD/Axe build. Putting more money into a build doesn't always make it better.

Yeah, I don't regard that as evil. I regard it as a natural reaction to that level of annoyingness. Jackholes shouldn't be annoying to people with superpowers. That seems like common sense to me. Can't tell if someone has superpowers or not? Then assume that they do, and don't be annoying.