Talen Lee

There are a few thousand reasons they can't do any old thing they want, and they all pay their subscription. Players and player reaction influence development policy. That's why, no matter how much I'm sure Castle would love it, you're never going to log in one day and find, without word or warning or rhyme or reason or replacement, Powerboost gone. No matter how much he hates the power.

You have to recognise that there is more to the process of change than you're making out there to be. In particular, you're seeing a reordering of a powerset that is not yet live as being tantamount to asking for a swap to a powerset that is live and has been for years on two different archetypes, and you're asserting that adding to and renaming a power is the same thing as completely transforming the power.

Can you not see that this is not done out of disrespect for the goal of fixing gravity, but rather contention with your asserted methodology? The devs don't make changes quickly and easily unless they're changes that can be made quickly and easily, and your assertation that the developers need to be asked to buff Gravity seems slightly disingenuous regarding them.

I can understand in particular the developers' reluctance to pipe up on the topic of Gravity - you can see just how well their efforts to provide us with honest information and feedback over the Dominator revamp went.

I think that just after a major revamp to the dom as an entire AT is a perfectly good time to not make more changes, wait a few months and see how the numbers shake out. It's entirely possible that gravity's slack early game is a design feature, its slot-light nature for powers like Dimension Shift entirely expected and desired by newer players who prefer to focus their early game on the damage powers they have access to. I wouldn't do it, but it's not a behaviour we can easily predict, nor is it behaviour that we should disregard.

Surely, surely you can see we're not being unreasonable here? Do you have to try and demonise us with the 'grav sux' talk?

Irony.

Back when DarkCurrant, CzarBal, Demodand and others whose names escape me were holding up their crusade of GRAVITY IS FINE it was I who was standing up and saying that they were demonising the opposition needlessly and that I figured Gravity needed help. I argued at length with people who claimed that anyone who disliked Gravity was just powerlevelled crybabies (and this is before AE!), with people who claimed that Gravity had as good area control as Earth control, and with people who said my opinion couldn't count because I didn't have a high-level gravity control character (without any proof of that fact, either).

Now that DarkCurrent has decided that actually, no Gravity isn't fine and could do with being buffed, and I point out that his reasoning for how it can be buffed is flawed, and that people need to consider play styles other than his own, I'm now the *******. I don't like Dimension Shift either, but it's sure as hell not my place to say that the people who do like it don't matter. I don't like Snipes or Smoke or Wormhole either, but my non-standard operating parameters are not predicates for game balance. There are people out there who like Dimension Shift for its truly unique properties, and weird as the power is, it has its place. Lots of people don't want it, but okay, fine. Look into solutions that don't negatively impact them before you leap to the solutions that do.

Besides, the Bible Verse in question grates for another reason. If someone has a plank in their eye, they know how bad having a mote in yours might suck, and how, and they're pointing it out. This argument basically says 'Nobody who isn't perfect can criticize anything,' which is exceptionally retarded and yet another demonstration of why bronze-age philosophy isn't quite as applicable to sophisticated modern dialogue as it'd like to be. But it does let people who can't support their arguments offer up snide commentary written better with an illusion of authority.

In essence, what I'm saying is, if the solutions to Gravity's problems were easy, they'd have been done by now. There's more nuance to MMO changes than saying 'Just' before your suggestion and assuming it's easy.

I'm flattered that you talk about me in private. On the other hand, I'm not the one advocating changing a power just because I don't like it and to hell with the people who like it how it is... so I disagree with your assessment of myself as having a log in my eye. In fact, as my understanding of the game has developed I have become more and more aware of how what I like cannot be used to define a game for thousands of people.

So where's the hypocrisy here?

So your level 26 unlock is something that sucks and your level 1 unlock is something that won't be good until you have other stuff to stack with it?

Really?

Skin your knee climbing mount cleverest, there?

And those people who use Dim shift as it currently works to phase out AVs so they can take them on one at a time... what do they do?

Only when someone's trying to use its IRL potency as justification for its application. And I wouldn't say I'm arguing.

Well, if I was doing that, sure, I'd be doing something flawed. I was just pointing out the man who claimed whips are a really potent weapon IRL was wrong.

I then went on to talk about the game.

I'm sorry, I'm talking about actual combat.