Samuel_Tow

I appreciate your snark, but the only way I can tell whether I am or am not in Beta is to try to log in. I was sure I wasn't in Dual Pistols Beta until I tried to log into Test and realised I was. I never got an invitation e-mail, so I've no reason to expect I'll get one now.

Hmm... Good point. See, THAT kind of perspective is what I was after. No, I very much do NOT have Spider-Man levels of strength and approach to combat. Strength and force is central to the character's approach. Basically, punching through hard things is Crash's "thing." I guess that really does put things in perspective - Martial Arts is too much of a cheat for that kind of strength.

First of all, yes. I think you're right. I should probably just stick with Invulnerability. Guess I'll have to roll with the redundacy. Maybe if I can survive this, I'll make a Fire/Fire Scrapper to my Fire/Fire Brute, or a Dark/Dark Brute to my Dark/Dark Scrapper

As far as Willpower goes, though, the only thing it actually defines is the force of your will, not what that force of will actually affects. My original Willpower concept entails the spirit of a dead woman who has managed to resist crossing over because she loved her husband too much to leave him, and now resides in a tailor-made super-soldier body. No matter how hard the body is hurt, it can repair itself, but each time she feels pain, she gets closer to crossing over. Her REAL power is the ability to resist the pain, fight through the agony and stick to this plane of existence just by sheer force of will and defiance. That's Willpower to my eyes, just not on a living human body.

Yeah... That thread seems to have stopped being about this

See, it's a matter of approach. For instance, when BABs changed the Energy Transfer animation, people were in furore. He HAD to make it longer, but people still hated it and asked "Well, can you at least make it so I don't look at my fists in amazement?" "Sure, I can do that." he responded, and indeed in the next patch, that's what it was. When Castle makes changes to powers and powersets, he's very upfront about what he can't give us, but also about what he CAN and generally goes with whatever we pick. These people garner heat when people get burned, that much is obvious. But their approach to the community is "I know you guys don't like this, and maybe there are a few things we can tweak. Let's sit down and see what we can do."

Jack didn't do that. Whenever he spoke with us, he did so to basically tell us what had been decided, never to actually ask us how we liked it or if we wanted something changed. Obviously, the player base at large isn't suited for communal game development, but a GOOD developer needs to be able to take what people are telling him and figure out a good way to put it into the game. People tend to not know HOW the things they want should be implemented, but they very much do know WHAT they want.

See, this is one reason why Jack generated so much heat, and why you tend to generate so much heat on yourself practically every time you post. He treated his players like wayward children who didn't know what was good for them and had to be sweet-talked and lulled into sleep, but not actually taken seriously because the real adults know better.

Now, I'm man enough to admit I'm not a game designer and maybe my calls aren't always smart. That's fine, I can trust the professionals to design a game for me and I'll stick to just paying the bills. But when those professionals have been proven wrong time and time again, and when they appear to completely disregard my actual desires and wishes as a customer like I were a worker in a 10c am hour production line. Take it or leave it, they don't care about me.

Dealing with people, especially people who pay you money for a service, requires tact and the right approach. You get a free pass, because you're just as random a Joe as I am and I don't happen to be paying you for a service. When you dismiss me, I just ignore you and move on. Jack does not get the same free pass, because I was paying him a subscription and I expected a certain respect for it. Certainly $15 a month doesn't HAVE to buy respect, but there's no reason it couldn't. And I don't think Jack ever respected his player base.

I'd generally agree with you there, as this really was unprecedented... If a large portion of us weren't telling him "Do not do this. This is a mistake. This is not what people want. You are screwing us all over and cheating us out of the game we grew to like. Stop trying to push for this." Saying it to his face, in fact. This wasn't a question of MMO design or practical fears. The player made it VERY clear that we enjoyed soloing bosses and he should look for some other way to encourage teaming. He didn't. I don't know whether this was because he honestly couldn't see a better way, or because he couldn't see the forest for the trees and got too bogged down trying to force his way, but the result was that a lot of changes, ESPECIALLY the I4 boss buff, were simply not good.

I'm actually glad the current development team is less preoccupied with saving us from ourselves and more with giving us what we want, within reason. Slapping people's wrists and trying to convince them that they don't really know what's good for them is a BAD MOVE. Posi, War Witch and company seem to understand this, so they do roughly what we're asking them to do, but in a way that still ensures the system works how they want it to work.

People asked for Blaster buffs, for instance. If this were Jack, he'd just shrug, say Blasters give up personal protection for damage and go about his merry way. The correct solution isn't to just cave in and let players redesign the AT, either. What they did was the best of both worlds. We asked for buffs and we got buffs, but to Castle's judgement of what would work best. We got a stronger AT, he got to keep balance where he wanted it and everyone was happy. Sometimes you just have to err on the side of the players and give them a little more than is probably wise. As a player, I know this is well appreciated. Certainly more appreciated than erring on the side of the game and always leaving me out in the cold.

This is something I've been suggesting for years. Mine went more along the line of just padding up spawns with Underlings so that it LOOKED like there were many enemies to fight, but their actual threat wasn't too much higher. Especially if Underlings are designed to sort of resemble minions, this is an easy solution to the problem. But I got too much disagreement over this emphasising AoE builds and the engine not being able to handle it, so I gave up on trying to argue the point. Suffice it to say I agree.

And you know what? I would not mind having the bulk of my reward shifted in mission completion. In fact, I wouldn't mind if completing meaningful tasks were the only way to level. It makes sense logically, it makes sense thematically and it would actually serve to reduce the sense of "grind" by lumping rewards into fewer, larger chunks. I found out many years ago that a large job is much more pleasant to do if you break it down into smaller but meaningful pieces. The less you have to count your successes, the less this stresses.

Killing minions is a tedious task, especially when you end up having to kill thousands. A few more minions here or there don't make a difference, because you need a LOT. But if missions were the primary source, then conceivably each mission would bring a notable benefit.

Unfortunately, it is. But the game is too good to let the fact that it has other people in it ruin it for me. I just need to know how to avoid them

See, if there's anything I'd actually point to Jack and say "You dolt! This is stupid and it's all your fault!" it would be his incessant need to enforce HIS vision of difficulty. The famous "1 hero = 3 white minions" is just a personification of a larger problem - Jack's idea of where the difficulty curve should be did not match what the players thought. Easy example: Open your old City of Heroes manual and check out what the description for "boss" is. An enemy that's so strong that you'll need a team to take it down, and even though you might be theoretically possible for you to beat it alone, that would be an exception.

This is stupid for two reasons. First of all, this was NOT the case when the game launched, as many people were soloing bosses. Secondly, these things were thrown at us by the DOZEN in certain instances, and if a boss was supposed to be a challenge for a whole team, what on EARTH was a spawn of 6 +3 Chief Soldiers and Chief Mentalists that comprised every spawn in the Hydra trial?

Jack's vision of difficulty was that everything should be stupid hard, that we should be fighting for our lives at every turn and that we should be teaming. A LOT. Every bit of new content that was added was overbearingly difficult, and we had to fight him on EVERYTHING to make it just passable for us regular Joes not looking for the ultimate test of skill. The cape mission's initial incarnation was absurd, with a huge map and plenty of multi-boss spawns. The original respec trial was just too hard, and it had to be downgraded. And then I4 came and hit us with the now-infamous I4 Boss Buff. To me, after having spent so long trying to convince us to team for bosses, that patch was basically him saying "Fine. If you won't team for bosses, then there! Now you can't solo them and you'll HAVE to!" That was his whole approach - if players don't play quite how he envisions they should, he pushes for game changes to force them.

Of course, the boss buff was a colossal bust, as those able to solo bosses before - Scrappers and Tankers, largely - were still able to solo them pretty easily, and the rest of the characters were just boned. I have not seen another change of this magnitude rolled back as quickly and as completely as this. And you know what? I'm glad it was. That business with unsoloable bosses and warnings about them in mission descriptions that he was putting forward was AWFUL!

But that's a good example of why, how and where disagreements happened. He WOULD NOT LISTEN to players who told him that forcing bosses to be unsoloable was a mistake. That's not what the player base wanted. But he tried to, anyway. And he shouldn't have.

Considering Jack went from hero to pariah in less than a year and Matt has escaped hatred almost completely in the last, what... Three years? I'm not too worried about Melissa generating too much aggro. Jack's mouth is what got him into trouble, and neither of the other "lead developers" have had that problem. Matt is so laconic he's practically mute and Melissa has a silver tongue, so they've basically steered clear of trouble.

But even Castle and BABs, who've been basically knee deep in the community for years now, have largely avoided any real problems. If BABs every gets heat for anything, it's his kidding around, and never for his actual development work, which is a testament to the quality of such work and his insistence to do it right. Castle's usually "the one to blame" for balance decisions that don't sit well with people, but even he has never been accused of wilfully destroying the game or having some other underhanded reason to "nerf." The I13 PvP changes came the close to giving him heat, and even that wasn't too bad.

Really, outside of Geko, Jack is the only one on the greater development team who's gotten this kind of heat, and he hasn't been the only target of opportunity we've had over the years.

I have a friend who says the same. Me, I make it my zone to avoid specifically for the people AVOIDING.

Yeah, yeah

Eh, I live clear across the world from you guys

More specifically, though, I'm really not a fan of social groups in general, and I'm not actually handy enough to build anything from physical materials. I'm more a story writer and programmer by heart, and ideally I'd like to study to be a bit of an artist, too.

I find the werewolf fascinating because, as a finished product, it's almost dissonant. On the one hand, I KNOW it's a costume with a crafty woman inside it (is it me or do more women walk on digitigrade legs than men?), but on the other hand, it walks and moves like something that shouldn't be alive and moving as freely. It's like a statue that turns to face you and chats you up

Oh... OK, then...

Boy, is my face red

I wasn't blaming this on "you," I guessed why he said it. I never claimed there was no reason to appease people, just that that seems to have been his intent. He said a lot of things to appease a lot of people over the years, and most of those things backfired on him.

And, really, does it matter WHO he was trying to appease? Point is, players expressed concern, he posted to alleviate it, only it turned out really badly for the guy.

The GDN was I5, I believe, and ED was I6. There really was no time left to release ED, because they couldn't afford to launch CoV and then have to slap ED on it AFTER people had already settled in.

I believe what he actually said was that they would no longer be tweaking powers, to appease the "regen nerf" crowd, and in this he was right, and has been largely right since. The GDN coupled with ED has ensured that almost to a fault, no power has been drastically reduced in effectiveness since. Before that, powers were changed a LOT, cutting values, redoing aspects and so forth. After ED, the adjustments ended. And look at how things are now - outside of the sweeping changes to Blasters, Stalkers and Dominators that largely aimed to improve them (and mostly did), we haven't had any powers really "nerfed."

In fact, look back on things. When's the last time any of you heard that something was "nerfed" in the game? Being that I mostly play this game, at one point I was seeing this word every day, but now it's practically out of my vocabulary to the point that I'm back to putting it in quotes. That ought to tell you he meant what he said. It's just that he had a mouth full of mush...

But again, I mostly mind Jack not for the things that he's done, but for the things he held back. At one point he had me convinced that I would never get exactly what I wanted out of this game because it wasn't being made for me, it was being made for someone else. That no matter what they add, there will always be some evil catch that would ruin the fun of it. I don't feel that way these days. In fact, right now I feel as though the game is being made for me, personally. And that's all I can really ask for.

That is almost EXACTLY the stance I was talking about. Note how the feet are stretched to be the longest part of the leg and positioned vertically and the thigh and shin segments are shorter and held at an angle, sort of like it's crouching. This thing actually looks kind of like it's the alien, but with eyes. That's pretty much the goal when I think "backwards knees."