Lady_Sadako

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Reasonable?

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Honestly? No.

The stated design intent is to help small SGs. The whole 'reasonably priced' bit is ancillary to that. If the design would be useless to the majority of small SGs, there would be no point in implementing it. And a lot of small SGs are very small indeed. They'll have to cast the net pretty wide in order to do what they intend to do.

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...and convinently refuse to respond to anything I said.

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Sure, the Devs have used ambiguous phrasing before. That doesn't make them stupid, incompetent or deceitful. Still, if you want to use a few precedents as a cause to fret about any statement that might be taken negatively, then I can hardly stop you. Fretting is a forum sport, after all.

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They don't make XP given for seasonal monsters too high, or make the effectiveness of defensive powers so good that you may as well be playing in God Mode, or anything like that.

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Of course they make mistakes. But to make that kind of mistake, they'd have to be drinking correction fluid on their lunch break.

Or do you perhaps think that the whole 'We'd have to put them in big unaffordable rooms!' bit was valid?

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A red name said it. I believe it. That settles it.

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I refer you to my last post:

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This all seems to come down to distrust of statements like 'reasonably priced' for being in the same kind of vein as 'small tweak' and 'no sweeping power changes'.

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I think it was "Because there's no way the devs could make the cost of obtaining an Enpowerment Station too high for a small SG

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... by mistake.

What they will have done is to set a cost. That cost will be based on what they think is reasonable. No argument there.

In setting that cost, they will have taken into account things like the kind of room that the Empowerment Stations need to go in, and the cost of upkeep.

What they will NOT have done is set a price for the Empowerment Stations, and then blindly set some condition that requires you to have a huge unaffordable room to keep them in.

Their idea of 'reasonably priced' may be slightly higher than yours; it may not. It may even seem generous. But whatever the price they settle on actually is, it will have been done by design. They are NOT about to price small SGs out of the market through incompetence, which is what was being suggested.

For that matter, it's highly unlikely that they'd price small SGs out of the market by design, either. They chose to use the statement 'reasonably priced', and of course people are going to fret like broody hens over what that might actually mean. But they wouldn't have used that description in the first place unless they felt they could deliver something that people thought WAS reasonably priced.

This all seems to come down to distrust of statements like 'reasonably priced' for being in the same kind of vein as 'small tweak' and 'no sweeping power changes'.

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Jesus, you are like a hawk. You really are their freaking body guard aren't you. Lady_Sadako, Protector of Devs.

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It's not the Devs I'm bothered about, it's the level of common sense.

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And some people have their head so far up the Devs you know what, that they are posting continuously to try to ward off the pitchfork citizens. You seem to have appointed yourself as the Devs body guard so don't get so upset Sadako when people have now started focusing their anger on you.

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What on earth gave you the impression that I was upset? I'm calling for rationality and common sense, not claiming that the Devs never ever make mistakes.

It's conceivable that these new Empowerment Stations might not be as helpful as intended, or as much fun as intended, or as popular as intended. But it's not conceivable that the Devs would accidentally make them more expensive than intended, by doing something as daft as requiring them to be put in a big room that small SGs can't afford. That does not make sense. Period. As the redname said:

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Everything in this issue will be "reasonably priced". It doesn't make sense for us to set out to help small supergroups and then charge large supergroup Prestige for the items.

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And yet, some people are fretting that they somehow might do this. Go figure.

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Ah. So even though the devs have made numerous easily predictable errors in the past, in this particular case that SIMPLY WON'T HAPPEN because... err.. because....

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Because there's no way even the most devious player can cause an Empowerment Station to cost more. Like I said.

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Your question, the one I responded to, basically implied that the devs were too smart to let really obvious errors or misjudgements slip past them.

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Errors and misjudgements that involve predicting player behaviour, not setting the price of their own additions. Nothing the players can do will make empowerment stations cost more, will it?

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We're pointing out the perception of need and what is "affordable" can be completely relative and subjective.

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Of course they can. That then raises the issue of whether you trust the person using the term to do so in a way that you would agree with; this is the whole issue, given that these statements are being made in the nature of an assurance. If they're not being taken as an assurance, which they clearly aren't given all this fretting, then it means people are being suspicious and mistrustful.

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The problem, in a nutshell, is that some people don't think they really mean it.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

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That's not an ad hominem in the slightest. Some people are doubtful that the Devs are going to deliver. Saying so does not amount to a personal attack.

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The problem is you are using subjective terms like "small SGs" and "unaffordable."

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So are the Devs. The problem, in a nutshell, is that some people don't think they really mean it.

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Empowerment stations are instant buffs. You are bathed in radiation/magic/etc. on the spot and get a bonus to your travel speed/lethal resistance/attack speed/endurance recovery/knockback protection/whatever you need at the time, right then and there.

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Hmm... Doesn't this kinda sorta invalidate the need for Acrobatics?

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Yes, it does - for all of fifteen minutes, assuming you have the right kind of salvage to make it.

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This argument only works if you assume that any possible design mistake made to help small SGs is can only be caused by or is due to idiocy.

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I am not talking about any potential design mistake other than that concerning cost. I am not talking about utility or helpfulness at all.

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You whole rant is one long big restatement of: Because Positron said it's designed for smaller SGs, it will absolutely be perfect or close to it for solving the issue.

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No. My rant is simply: if Positron says these things are designed to be easily affordable for small SGs, it's ridiculous to come up with ways in which Positron might be wrong, such as overlooking the room size or the upkeep, both of which have been seriously suggested here.

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I could go on, but the point is, the devs might INTEND for their system to benefit small SGs, but their system could very well do nothing for small SGs, not because of incompetence or malice, but simply because they made a mistake.

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And, as I keep repeating, it's unfeasible that they could accidentally make these new features unaffordable for small SGs, which is what people seem to be fretting about. The suggestion that they could somehow have overlooked the cost of the room, or of the upkeep, is silly.

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They never thought that characters would have perma-MoG. They never thought that griefers would TP others into towers and trap them. They never thought that players would slot 1 acc and 5 dmg SO's into an attack power. They never thought that anyone would farm kracken in the sewer trial. They never thought that people with pre-i2 characters would complain about the impossibility of them getting the Isolator badge. They never thought anyone would level up insanely fast on Winter Lords (the XP pinatas). They never thought that anyone would farm the Hamidon for +50/+50 enhancements day after day after day. They never thought that anyone would use the wolf mission for PLing, or after that the "dead scanner" mission, or after that the "Dreck" mission....

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But this is nothing LIKE that. This is about how much something costs, not about unconventional uses for things they've put in. And no way on earth is something accidentally going to cost more than they intended it to.

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The devs accept they make mistakes, why can't everyone?

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Making mistakes is one thing; accidentally failing to design something around small SGs when that's what you've set out to do is another thing altogether. I believe the Devs are fallible, but I don't believe they're idiots.

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I wonder how much salvage a small group brings in on average.

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A lot more than it uses for crafting, that's for sure.

And since the salvage bins don't need power or control, they can store it up for whoever needs it.

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I'm just as much part of the player base as you are. And I think you're fretting.

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I'm not fretting. I am the leader of the #1 prestige earning SG on Guardian.

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Doesn't stop you fretting. Legitimate concern is one thing, but this is silly. Posi keeps saying that this is entirely built around small groups, but people keep trying to come up with reasons why small groups MIGHT not be able to afford it. And that's daft.

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I hope they do actually make something affordable that is also useful to small groups.

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I think they know how to do that, don't you?

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I'm willing to bet there will be extreme complaints once these things hit test server.

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When did something being good ever mean that people didn't complain?

Oh good grief, I'm turning into Friggin' Taser...

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And the Devs won't have thought of this because.....?

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......because they are the Devs? They don't have a stellar record going at the moment. It is common and appropriate I think for the player base to be skeptic. If the player base is this way Lady_Sadako you have to wonder why we are this way.

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I'm just as much part of the player base as you are. And I think you're fretting.

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Because they have not given any indications otherwise,

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Of course they have. These additions have been pitched as being the boost that small SGs needed ever since the Devs started talking about them.

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and in fact, by posting those picture, have proven the very opposite by advertizing large rooms.

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Which are obviously to show off the colour tinting and the banners as well as the Enhancement stations. They are promotional shots. They're big and dramatic. There are at least four items carrying SG logos shown off in those pictures: the transparent pillars, the banners, the conference table and the floor panel. That doesn't 'prove' that you need a big room to put such a station in. All it proves is that people will go out of their way to find reasons to fret.

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mistform, when people in your groups are leaving every 20 mins to go get buffs, I think you'll see what I mean.

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That might happen at first, and then the Salvage will start to run out. Hard to imagine, I know, but just think how quickly people will get through the stuff once it has some use.

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So even if the cost of the Room, Equipment, Power, and Control are all free, the space required could kill the whole thing.

The cost of empty space is quite high.

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And the Devs won't have thought of this because.....?

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It's entirely possible for a design to fail in implementation, and this is one of the potential failures we might see show up in play.

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Oh, don't. The Devs would have to be an entirely new category of stupid to make all this noise about doing stuff specifically for small SGs and then require you to have rooms too big for a small SG to afford.

As Posi said, that sort of thing doesn't make sense.

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If the empowerment stations are really only useful if you have minimal travel time (ie, a fully set up base w/ telepads),

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That's obviously not part of the design, is it? Positron says that we'll be given enough time to get from the base to the mission and to the sticky point before the buff wears off, and if fifteen minutes isn't enough, then it'll be increased. If they were anticipating telepads, they'd hardly offer to increase the buff time, would they? The whole idea is to make them useful to the kind of SG that DOESN'T have the resources to get telepads.

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However, we do not live in such a place, and pointing out potential flaws in an idea, especially flaws which can be extrapolated from how similar features were implemented in the past, is entirely valid criticism.

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Positron has said, over and over, that these additions are going to be for small SGs. It's just ludicrous to come up with something like 'so the station is cheap but OMG what if you have to buy a big room to put it in!!!! Then small SGs won't be able to afford it!!!!'