How many new players have to complain ...

That is just plain wrong.

Plenty. It's not hard to do now with IOs.

Wow you're just a font of bad information.

Actually, as a person with a competent staminaless brute, a triform Warshade with Stygian Circle, and a job which requires me to deal with customers who are frequently dead wrong, I think he's spot on.

LOL, do you enjoy not knowing what you're talking about.

First, Stygian Circle will fill up your end bar. Problem solved. If there are no bodies to draw from, then you're not doing your job as a Warshade. Stamina also doesn't carry over into the forms.

Second, the customer isn't always right. That is fact. I prefer to think of it as(not sure who I'm quoting): "the customer isn't always right, but they are always the customer and it's ok for them to be wrong" For example, a customer walks into my bar already hammered and thinks they can drink more and that I have to serve them. Simple fact is they are wrong. When I used to manage a place they were also wrong when they were abusive to my employees.

Third, I'll give some examples of builds that don't need stamina. Some require IOs, some don't. I'll let you figure that part out.

Cold Domination(defender or corruptor)
Radiation Emission(Accelerate Metabolism is better than stamina if you get it perma)
Willpower and Regen characters(QR)
Energy Aura
Electric Armor
Warshade(already mentioned)

That is several possible combos that can be made more than competent without stamina. Just because you can't figure it out, doesn't mean it's not true.

Virtually any of the AT power sets that can go Stamina-less, do better with Stamina (make that all of them in fact).

Warshades included.

The customer is always right is an axiom used by those who understand that they are depending on other people for their livelihood. Failing to understand this is why I assume your management experience is in the past tense.

As mentioned earlier, need and desireable are two different things. Technically the most endurance intensive builds don't *need* Stamina. From a game playing point of view, Stamina increases the performance of virtually every build by quite a bit (and some of your examples are awful btw).

Epic fail.

No, it's an out of date concept that was wrong to begin with. SOME customers are genuinely a drain on your business and a company is better off without them. Most customers are worth fighting to keep - a handful most emphatically are NOT.

Sometimes a company needs to 'fire' a customer and, depending on the exact circumstances, it can be a wise and prudent business decision.

I'm not arguing that point. Never was. Of course stamina makes characters more end efficient. I was responding directly to competent builds.

No point in arguing this with you, no chance of either of us changing our minds. My management experience is behind me because it was a crappy paying job and bartending makes me a ton more money. In the right place bartenders frequently make more than most of their managers(GM's/owners typically excluded).

You're wrong again. Like I said, with IOs, it's not hard to do.

Cold Domination- High recharge build. Currently my cold/dark defender has less than a 10 second down time on heat loss(brings me much more endurance that stamina could ever hope to do). Not taking stamina allows that character to add more defenses.

Willpower/Regen- Quick Recovery is better than stamina. Non WP/regen builds do fine with just stamina, therefore those two sets can do just fine without stamina.

Electric Armor/Energy Aura- Both have conserve power and an energy leeching power. CP is long recharge but the others are 60 sec recharge on default which can be brought below 20 seconds. Depending how you slot that can be basically 5 end/sec recovery(more if your max end is above 100).

Warshades-already addressed this.

Radiation Emission(edited in)- This one might be a little harder to pull off. But AM is better than stamina. However with all those toggles and the extra attacking it may require some more finesse in the build to get it to perform the way I think it should(basically running toggles and attack pretty much non stop).

So tell me, how are those examples awful? Give some kind of supporting reasons.

It depends. If your job is to take direction, then the customer's direction is always right. However, if your job is to provide expertise, then the customer is not always right. They are paying you to be always right.

My motto is not "the customer is always right" but something closer to "the customer pays us to prevent them from being wrong."

Arc anyone can come up with a scenario where any axiom is not 100% correct. That's the nature of axioms ... they apply as a thought process, not a literal.

The customer *is* always right. Your (the merchant's) job is to make sure they are "right" in whatever you and the customer come to agree upon. If you've done your job correctly the customer is *always* right.

If you're the fry guy at a White Castle and nerdrage over what anonymous fools say on a message board, then I'm thinking you not only don't get it but don't want it either.

Shrug.

This was what I was getting at.

And the truth comes out. You don't actually have any real counter point to what I'm saying, so you resort to that. That's weak.

Why? Apparently you know I'm wrong.

Lol, that's the best you can come up with? I made claim and backed it up. You made a claim and put your hands over your ears and started yelling 'lalalalala.'

What can I say ... you win. Grats. (this is killing you isn't it?)

However I will relate a story about the figurative "the customer is always right" that's stuck with me over the years and that I think is relevant to this thread.

Back in the 80s I had a chance to meet Tom Monaghan, who is the founder of Domino's Pizza and a former owner of the Detroit Tigers. He told me a story on this exact topic. Back then Domino's Pizza had a guarantee that if you weren't satisfied with your pizza for any reason they would give you another for free (this was spoofed on in the movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High in fact). In one of his stores a customer started abusing this ... he would call in every week, order a pepperoni pizza and a two liter bottle of coke ... have it delivered and call back 2 minutes later saying the pizza was overcooked/undercooked/missing pepperoni/too thick/too thin/what have you. And every week that Domino's store sent him another pizza. This went on for a couple of years until a local newspaper ran the story which was in turn picked up by a local TV station, which in turn became a national news item when ABC aired it.

At a press conference he alluded to the fact that while yes, they gave a person who obviously was just abusing their policy (i.e. wrong) free pizza every week, it had in turned more then paid for itself with the amount of free press the subsequent story had engendered in the various news outlets.

Talking with him afterwards, I couldn't help but point out that he (Tom) couldn't have known that this story would have circulated as much as it did, especially given the fact that this had been going on for years (in other words it wasn't obviously a press stunt of the moment).

He replied back that while it was true that he couldn't have known that the story would become as pronounced as it had, it still didn't really make a difference ... his store still made out.

You see the price of a large pepperoni pizza and two liter coke delivered was about $10.00 at the time. Dominos Pizza would write off the entire retail cost of the pizza as a loss amounting a tax credit of about two dollars and change. The pizza (with overhead and delivery expense) cost about a dollar fifty to make and deliver. And then you had the full price (and profit) of the soda (which by the way was their top profit margin ... not the pizza itself). For two years.

Additionally they tracked 13 new customers who mentioned the "bad" customer specifically, some of whom went on to do the same scam from time to time and others who just laughed about it but were "good" customers otherwise (this was before the story aired btw).

So Tom looks at me and says, "remember, the customer is always right ... even when he isn't." And winked.

BTW the cost of equivelant advertising as to what that story generated in print and TV amounted to somewhere along the lines of 10 million dollars (back then).

Anyways to make this relevant to the change I originally proposed in this thread (since this constantly goes off on tangents), some people have mentioned it *might* unbalance the game for that level of content, and it *might* give the new player an indication that this game is easier then it is (!).

My point to all this is who cares? the majority of the game isn't L1-20. This is the extended tutorial of the game for all intents and purposes. And too easy? Virtually every MMO starts their games off on a curve of easy ramping up to whatever difficulty the game is supposed to culminate at. This is one of the very few exceptions where the hardest parts of the game are in fact at the very beginning (due to clunkyness no less ... not very customer friendly eh?).

In other words ... make the customer happy .... you will retain the customer. And that's what recurring billing (CoH's primary mode of income) is all about.

You sound like some one that has never talked to the guy before.

Are you still crying in the corner about me dinging your precious charts?

Good lord man get over it (they made you produce better charts didn't it?).

Sheesh.

Like a bratty child, you think you make a bigger impact on people's lives than you really do.

But carry on.

You wanna spank me?

(_x_)

AFAIK I hadn't talked to him before. Lesson learned.

I'm fully aware of the intent of the adage. However, neither it nor its fundamental intent are always applicable. For example, thinking the customer is always right is why the Big Five are now the Big Four. And in the IT professional services arena, "the customer is always right" is not a motto, its a punch line. As much as that adage ought to operate in some industries, it should equally be discarded in others.

There's no "rage" behind that statement; its a simple statement of fact, backed by many years of professional reputation built on the notion that if the customer was right, they wouldn't need me.

Also, now that I think about it, I've never actually stepped foot in a White Castle before.

I would say good business practices tend to support my position over yours, but I don't really want to continue the equivocation wars (largely because this is more a state of mind then a literal). I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.

However I would refrain from having this discussion with a customer ... might not have em for long

P.S. - The White Castle reference wasn't pointed at you ... just an observation.

I think the next time your dealing with an upset customer, you should tell them that. "If you were right, you wouldn't need me."

I fight the urge to say that at work every day...

You can and will do that not uncommonly if you are, say, a lawyer, a doctor, or a dentist. Or a sought-after specialist in a number of other professions.

You may also find that outside the US, the customer isn't necessarily given as much deference when he or she is behaving stupidly. And even in the US, you may find that some companies do sometimes find that making abusive customers happy is not the greatest idea.