Discussion: MMORPG.com Dev Diary about Inventions
By
8_Ball,
Posted on: 2007-03-05 11:30 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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I really don't care, but I don't think it should be closed/limited to a certain amount of people.
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And it won't be. The floodgates will be opened. Given, however, that it's a system that will be integrated into almost every other facet of the game, the dev team wants to do some concentrated, focused playtesting first before letting the unwashed masses have a go at it.
Positron: "There are no bugs [in City of Heroes], just varying degrees of features."
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Isn't this where someone is supposed to point out all the threads about this topic from this morning? IBTL! 
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Given that this is the official redname created thread, this one's not going to be getting locked 
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On a side note...did you see the salvage requirments for just one Dual aspect IO? 8+ pieces is a little ecessive IMO...especially if some of those are uncommon/Rare.
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It's not 8 pieces. It's 4 pieces. One group of 4 pieces for levels 30-40, and one group of 4 pieces for 41-50. (or 5 pieces in the case of the +Rec/+Regen one)
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Ooooh. Thanks for clarifying that.
I had also looked at the table and thought, "damn that's a lot of salvage required". 
Well yeah, I invoked the anti-ban smiley, the one with the red tongue out.
There are no words for what this community, and the friends I have made here mean to me. Please know that I care for all of you, yes, even you. If you Twitter, I'm MrThan. If you're Unleashed, I'm dumps. I'll try and get registered on the Titan Forums as well. Peace, and thanks for the best nine years anyone could ever ask for.
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"Exclusives" are all well and good.
Official site first, please. Or just close it and let the other sites do the work.
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/agreed
Official site for official news. Or should we just give up and hit google for Co* news?
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/qouted for the sad truth.
=T_T=
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I don't even bookmark the official site. The forums are a better source of news, and invariably have links to articles and news about CoH on other sites posted by players before the community relations staff get them up.
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Thats what I do... red names usually comment on anything important, so it's easy to keep track of what's hot by using the trackers.
In terms of closed testing... I'm guarded. I remember the waves of players getting into CoV beta (1st wave <beams> and the sheer amount of pressure there was on the devs from the player base to speed things up and let *them* on.
Closed testing is a good thing : Players tend to have a lot of ingenuity and can horribly abuse a system in ways the designers never even thought of. Letting an initial, potentially broken, system into the hands of a few and letting them fire through the first few issues is a good thing.
Not killing the test server immediately with 200k+ trying to log on at the same time and setting fire to a datacenter : A good thing.
Good lines of communication can be created with a smaller user set by the devs, increasing the flow of information provided by the players and speeding the testing process up.
Closed testing is a bad thing : It can be seen as a reward. A player in an SG gets into closed testing, and suddenly 75 other players come storming onto the boards screaming that *they* are the only truly worthy ones.
Regardless of closed natures / NDAs, etc, information gets out. More specifically rumours get out. With no way for players to verify what they hear, these forums become deluged in speculation the like of which will get them closed.
Pick one, cos I can't... All of the above are true, and this is why it makes it really hard for me to (dis)agree with a period of closed testing.
I trust the devs for the most part, I've been playing this game since launch and I'm still here so they must be doing something right still.
Now, back to my maths and min / maxing...
Egor.
I think the closed testing is probably a good idea, assuming there's a closed forum to go with it for testing results. CoV's beta forums during the first few waves (1st wave myself), were pretty good as regards the testing:ranting ratio.
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I notice that on the drop/build table given for Numina's Convalescence, one recipe is listed as "Missions." Does that indicate that the recipe will only drop as an Arc Reward, or will we maybe see some recipes drop from completed PVP (or paper/whatever) missions, kind of like you're guaranteed a piece of salvage for finishing PVP missions now?
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Official site for official news. Or should we just give up and hit google for Co* news?
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I'm thinking that both of those articles were expected to be released this week. So they probably have the web page info set to go up today on it. It looks like someone on the UK site spotted the article they linked to and put a link into it fast. Not sure if they were working on a weekend or just jumped in anyway.
It probably wasn't an unreasonable expectation that the articles wouldn't go out until this week.
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Granted, I might be a bit grumpy right now, the kidlets aren't cooporating on the whole 'nap' issue. But it seems like we get most of our news from other places. I check the main page. A lot. And it's sometimes saveral days behind what we know on the forums.
Seriously, if I want news, I'll ask Lady Sadako before I ask a redname. And that just doesn't seem right, yanno? It's like that old joke about trusting the government. Is that what our main page is now, an old joke? Maybe it's the timing of it all too. Everytime I see something suggesting some love for our main page, for us, a short time later I see some attention given elsewhere. It's a little saddening that what made us a niche is slowly going away in the name of advertising...
Then again, I could be reading way more into it.
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Official site for official news. Or should we just give up and hit google for Co* news?
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I'm thinking that both of those articles were expected to be released this week. So they probably have the web page info set to go up today on it. It looks like someone on the UK site spotted the article they linked to and put a link into it fast. Not sure if they were working on a weekend or just jumped in anyway.
It probably wasn't an unreasonable expectation that the articles wouldn't go out until this week.
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Granted, I might be a bit grumpy right now, the kidlets aren't cooporating on the whole 'nap' issue. But it seems like we get most of our news from other places. I check the main page. A lot. And it's sometimes saveral days behind what we know on the forums.
Seriously, if I want news, I'll ask Lady Sadako before I ask a redname. And that just doesn't seem right, yanno? It's like that old joke about trusting the government. Is that what our main page is now, an old joke? Maybe it's the timing of it all too. Everytime I see something suggesting some love for our main page, for us, a short time later I see some attention given elsewhere. It's a little saddening that what made us a niche is slowly going away in the name of advertising...
Then again, I could be reading way more into it.
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I definitely agree that the main site needs some work. At the very least I think they should arrange the timings so that the main site (and the forums) get updated with the external links at the same time that the articles go up on the external sites. I fully acknowledge that that can be very difficult to do, but it would be really nice for those of us who only read the official site (or just forums).
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Official site for official news. Or should we just give up and hit google for Co* news?
[/ QUOTE ]
I'm thinking that both of those articles were expected to be released this week. So they probably have the web page info set to go up today on it. It looks like someone on the UK site spotted the article they linked to and put a link into it fast. Not sure if they were working on a weekend or just jumped in anyway.
It probably wasn't an unreasonable expectation that the articles wouldn't go out until this week.
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Granted, I might be a bit grumpy right now, the kidlets aren't cooporating on the whole 'nap' issue. But it seems like we get most of our news from other places. I check the main page. A lot. And it's sometimes saveral days behind what we know on the forums.
Seriously, if I want news, I'll ask Lady Sadako before I ask a redname. And that just doesn't seem right, yanno? It's like that old joke about trusting the government. Is that what our main page is now, an old joke? Maybe it's the timing of it all too. Everytime I see something suggesting some love for our main page, for us, a short time later I see some attention given elsewhere. It's a little saddening that what made us a niche is slowly going away in the name of advertising...
Then again, I could be reading way more into it.
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I understand how the "exclusives" help get the game some coverage on sites that are frequented by other non-CoH'ers, but I think we need to strike a balance here. Something like an rss-powered announcement page- one that could accept and display approved 3rd party headlines as soon as they're made available- would use rather well-established technologies, allow for "exclusives" while insuring that CoH'ers can find said exclusive almost instantaneously.
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I understand how the "exclusives" help get the game some coverage on sites that are frequented by other non-CoH'ers, but I think we need to strike a balance here. Something like an rss-powered announcement page- one that could accept and display approved 3rd party headlines as soon as they're made available- would use rather well-established technologies, allow for "exclusives" while insuring that CoH'ers can find said exclusive almost instantaneously.
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Now that's not half bad!
Hey Lighty! Any plans for that... thingy?
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Good lines of communication can be created with a smaller user set by the devs, increasing the flow of information provided by the players and speeding the testing process up.
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Access to the closed beta test will be by invitation only. All participants in this phase of testing will be asked to not disclose the specifics of the test. By controlling just how many are in the beta test, we can better focus and manage testing to get the most out of it. The aim is to deliver a more robust version when entering our open testing phase.
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Looks like Lighthouse and the devs agree with me!
My advice (If it's worth anything at all) is too keep the lines of communication outside of the closed beta open. Daily status reports, how things are going, whether the players have managed to break the system entirely and it's being shelved... (JOKING!)
Basically, while it is a closed shop, control the information flow coming out too. If you aren't relying on rumours spreading the info about the testing, do it yourselves. A perfect chance to act on some of the other comments in this thread ;P
Egor.
Oi, I wish you'd post about the closed testing selection process already! I'm getting antsy over here! 
Playstation 3 - XBox 360 - Wii - PSP
Remember kids, crack is whack!
Samuel_Tow: Your avatar is... I think I like it
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Oi, I wish you'd post about the closed testing selection process already! I'm getting antsy over here!
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They have.
You know what smacks me in the face about that "Dev Diary"? The lack of numbers. We see a spreadsheet snapshot and think "ooh, raw information" but the relevant parts are missing! It's not really all that useful to know that a "Temporal Analyzer" is one of the components, but I think it's pretty important to know what the percentages on the enhancements are, don't you? Or the magnitude of those "additive HP"?
It's 3 years ago all over again. Just when I think they've outgrown that "don't share details and no one will care" attitude, it happens again.
Just last night I was explaining to someone the difference between Design and Development, how mistakes can happen on either side and they need to be analyzed separately. But here, we continually get the attitude that their Design is infallible, but they'll accept our help stumbling into coding bugs.
And of course it isn't, no one's perfect. But by not being forthright with the information, it just takes longer for it to be obvious, requiring "balance patches" down the line. Sound familiar?
Look, if you devs want to limit traffic on the test server, fine. In the meantime, why not release your spreadsheets? You can print "this is subject to change" every 5 cm just to make sure we get it, but then you get more brainpower on it. I mean, by your own words there are many thousands of possible combinations, right? Are you really sure you've considered every possible one?
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You know what smacks me in the face about that "Dev Diary"? The lack of numbers. We see a spreadsheet snapshot and think "ooh, raw information" but the relevant parts are missing! It's not really all that useful to know that a "Temporal Analyzer" is one of the components, but I think it's pretty important to know what the percentages on the enhancements are, don't you? Or the magnitude of those "additive HP"?
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Look on Paragon Wiki it is all there under the inventions section. Very easy to figure out the percentages.
But it's MY sadistic mechanical monster and I'm here to make sure it knows it. - Girl Genius
List of Invention Guides
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You know what smacks me in the face about that "Dev Diary"? The lack of numbers. We see a spreadsheet snapshot and think "ooh, raw information" but the relevant parts are missing! It's not really all that useful to know that a "Temporal Analyzer" is one of the components, but I think it's pretty important to know what the percentages on the enhancements are, don't you? Or the magnitude of those "additive HP"?
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Look on Paragon Wiki it is all there under the inventions section. Very easy to figure out the percentages.
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Or look at any number of posts in the Discussion of Issue 9's Invention Feature forum. There is a lot of numbers there too.
Yes but pretty much all from leaks, which are older and constantly labeled "subject to change." The latter doesn't bother me much, but it's still no substitute for a straightforward conversation with direct information. I mean heck, I even have some of the more basic IOs slotted in a lowbie due to my irresitable curiosity during the Steel Canyon bug.
Both Paragon Wiki and that forum are great sources, but it's not about what I do or don't know. I'm asking for a more level approach to it all, right from the source. Player-compiled information from bugs, leaks, and exploits will never be as reliable as simply released information. Nor will feedback based on that data be as trusted.
Just for example, look at Arcanaville's great post "Still Early but Worried." As you'd expect from her, it was thoughtful and based on existing knowledge. And _Castle_ had a very reasonable response, not surprising from him either. But the overall tone of the response was "well you don't have all the info yet." Which is true.
But imagine how good the discussion would be if she (we) did?
And what makes you think that the devs' numbers aren't subject to change?
As for released information, the devs released information in the Prima Guide. Look at how reliable and trusted that was. Player-compiled information has always been rather accurate. And look at City of Data. The devs didn't release that, but it's accurate up to I7.
I'm all for the devs releasing actual numbers. Once it's been determined what those actual numbers will be. Until it has been thoroughly tested (not just by their internal QA, but by the multitudes on the test server), they won't have the actual numbers.
Anything on paper tends to be outdated as soon as it hits the print...
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And what makes you think that the devs' numbers aren't subject to change?
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I want updated, directly-given information while it's subject to change, so that player feedback is actually useful and not just noise.
Unless this is some meta plot to convince me I'm overestimating people. I must confess, it's starting to work.
I'm fine with a closed beta. The trick is with the open test server is while some people actually test the issue, a lot of people (including myself) futz around on there, offering no real feedback. Go on, test a respec, dabble with any new/fun features (like Safeguard missions, radio missions, etc., for i8), stuff like that.
I'd wager the people who get in on the i9 closed beta probably have a history of good, detailed feedback, have been in previous betas, are familiar with how COx works at a deeper level than normal, probably technically savvy with PC's, etc. I know, given those criteria, I won't get into it, but that's fine. Let *them* put up with all the major problems and flaws, both technical and gamewise. They'll do a better job than I would, and it'll make the open testing that much easier for the rest of us....
On the other hand, the "futz around" people are important too. People who get used to testing end up doing somewhat predictable things. People there to goof around? Who knows what they'll do... it's there to be broken before it goes live.
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Official site for official news. Or should we just give up and hit google for Co* news?
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I'm thinking that both of those articles were expected to be released this week. So they probably have the web page info set to go up today on it. It looks like someone on the UK site spotted the article they linked to and put a link into it fast. Not sure if they were working on a weekend or just jumped in anyway.
It probably wasn't an unreasonable expectation that the articles wouldn't go out until this week.
But it's MY sadistic mechanical monster and I'm here to make sure it knows it. - Girl Genius
List of Invention Guides