What can the other secondaries do better than /Shield?

Sadly, that does appear to be the case in certain industries...


I do have a great idea for how you can avoid such a mistake in the future though. Just increase Tankers to base 0.85 scale damage, and you'll never have to worry about accidentally quoting that figure.

Well, I can at least hope that Fire Armor will get some type of attention after this debate. My Shield Brute and Scrapper always felt silly overpowered with Shield Charge (particularly the Scrapper), so I expected this to come (a while ago).

Someone reads Cracked.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

O snap...

I would hazard a guess that you are not familiar with the software development process. Predicting every possible outcome and squashing every possible bug is just not realistic.

The developers' environment is by its own nature a very insular environment; so what might be a bug on the live servers may not appear in their testing. Your average developer will tweak the code and then test, tweak again and then test again and repeat as many times as is necessary. The result is an environment that looks nothing like the target live environment.

Any staging or test environments are closer to but will still not match the live environment because of the fact that they change more often as revisions move back and forth through the testing and development process. Also, unless they are truly regression testing their test results will be specific to the changes being made with a given build. Add to that the fact that the number of players on the test server or live server far outweigh the number of testers employed by Paragon Studios and it isn't beyond belief that things that slip through the cracks will ultimately be found by the players.


>

Because there are larger gorillas in the room that need to be taken care.

Uh huh.

Right. You're aware that the devs have been monkeying with the bad guys power levels without saying anything for months now, right?

Come on. Don't treat me like an idiot if you aren't sure about it.

Or here's an idea: Don't treat people like idiots. It's a bad habit and doesn't reflect well upon you.

Horse Puckey. It's all about the 'new shiney'. The art lies in keeping it all on the rails.

Given how horrifically this thing was broken at launch, and they still managed to piece it back together (oh Purple Nerf, how I rail at thee) I suspect they can run this artistically for a lot longer than you give them credit for.

Hell, I17 was all about 'New Shiney'.

Going Rogue is all about 'New Shiney.'

Un-screwing Invulnerability was a matter of 'New Shiney.'

The upcoming 'End Game' system (horrible, self-defeating naming on that, by the way.) is all about the 'New Shiney.'

Buffs and nerfs are ways to generate 'New Shiney' in existing content. Hard but true. "Hey, I hear that Invuln doesn't suck now, I was gonna come back and play again" has been stated IN THIS VERY THREAD.

What part of this are you failing to grasp?


Sure. That's why for ages, game designers kept their inner mechanics closely held indeed. Like this game did at launch.


You're talking about the stealth changes, right?

I don't bother with stealth often, so I don't care. But all the people I played with noticed it immediately, and promptly compensated. Without epic crying about it.

Because it was just stealth.

If it's something else, I'm all ears. Although I've noticed almost all factions have been getting sneakily tougher for years. At launch a team could farm +10's easy. My early tank would often solo +7 bosses for xp even after the Purple Nerf.

Nowadays? Nope, that don't happen. The Dev's have slowly but steadily tuned down the dynamic range of difficulty so that the restrictions of the Purple Nerf are no longer even visible.

Good for them.

From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinach
"...Popeye the Sailor Man is portrayed ...physically stronger after consuming it. A frequently circulated ..... story claims that an 1870 measurement of iron in spinach, performed by German scientist Dr. E. von Wolf, misplaced the decimal point leading to an iron value 10 times higher than it should have been. .... However, Dr. Mike Sutton tried to track down the claims of this story and could not find any reliable evidence of a faulty 1870 study on iron that persisted into the 1930's. Furthermore, Dr. Sutton's paper in the Internet journal of criminology shows that the creator of Popeye chose spinach for it's high vitamin A content, not for it's iron content."

Comparing programming to any other architectural discipline in the world, it would be basically akin to assembling a house by first constructing the wood -- atom by atom. You then must design exactly how each nail will interact with the wood, how a saw will cut it, and how electrical outlets will be recessed into it and the wires strung around it. You must then design all the laws of physics that allow electrons to flow, construct the plastic shells around the wiring, and account for how the wires will be joined at splice points.

And that's just to start. Then you have to create drywall, concrete, lamps, fixtures, plumbing, gas piping, furniture, appliances, etc., etc., etc.

You are so right, me.
Lets slow down and take a breath here. Lets talk up some positives about secondaries kids.
I'm tired of constant worry of my beloved powersets being nerfed, so why not rather concentrate on what we love.

That is what attracted Castle to this thread in the first place

The subtleties of programming barely enter in this case. Deflection of the issue via the standard code rant just doesn't hold water. The Shield Charge fiasco has developed because people weren't checking their work. Predicting every possible outcome and every possible bug was not required, just checking the power a handful of times before pushing it to live would have sufficed.

Failing that, listening when players asked why SC is better than L-rod probably would have helped. And finally when changing the power to follow AT modifiers and players asked "are you for real wanting to make SC do 200 base damage?" reading that might have raised a flag too.

Now I'm curious. I don't bother with stealth often either, but when I do, I've noticed that it... well, it hasn't been working very well. I've never bothered memorizing any stealth numbers, but the basic equation in my brain is "two stealths = invisibility". That doesn't seem to be the case recently. These days, while I can get near bad guys with two stealth's worth of invisibility, I can't spawn dance. I could swear I used to be able to spawn dance not all that long ago. Friend of mine had the same sort of experience with some version of invisibility - he just wasn't invisible. Very stealthy, but not invisible. I didn't worry much about it. Like I said, I never knew what my stealth numbers were, so I figured either I was remembering incorrectly, or they nerfed them. I don't often read patch updates, so stuff happens all the time that I don't know about. No biggie to me either way. I mean, how often do I need stealth? It's more to amuse myself than anything.

I can't really nail down when the apparent problem started since I use stealth so rarely. I'm thinking maybe a few months ago.

Or am I just smoking crack, and nothing changed here? Certainly possible too.

I've noticed this as well.. What was changed? Enemy perception radius?

I hope the people(s) responsible for the series of separate and distinct errors that have resulted in SC being what it is today get the wet noodle beating they deserve or however PS doles out reprimands to prevent such future easily avoidable mistakes.

It is a big disconcerting though, the "clients" have been sending in reports that should have been "audited" for a long time regarding Shield Charge. If the issue had just gone unattended that would be one thing, but it received green light for a major change and wasn't "audited" at that point either.

Is there a lack of communication at PS where the QA team doesn't have access to proper information on how the power designers have implemented powers to function? Something is amiss internally because this issue was easily preventable and is now either going to result in a massive nerf or at the very least another ill afforded time sink from an overworked power design team to rectify the issue.

What the old saying? "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Test stuff better before it goes live please and at the very least please don't authorize changes to powers without some form of audit performed on said power (this is honestly what is bugging me most). You're a busy guy and now look at the mess that has been created. We all want the game to succeed, but players have a right to be upset in this case. You strike me as being overly defensive about this issue, but regardless of where you want the blame to be placed it is not in the hands of the players. We have performed our due diligence with regard to Shield Charge and the same can not be said of PS. If you are getting upset at what players are saying now just wait until you go through with the necessary (and large) reduction to the power, it will be worse than ever because it was approved for a massive buff. And All in a short time frame relative to the evolution of other powers in this game.

We all understand that this may not be your fault directly, but you are the one addressing the issue and afaik you oversee the powers team. You are welcome to throw an underling under the bus if you want, some managers do that, or you can accept the responsibility inherent with overseeing a team.

I'm not interested in the forthcoming apology that has accompanied many of the power changes recently. I couldn't care less if you guys are remorseful about changing things. I personally think it is pretty tacky to attach emotion to the process and seems manufactured actually. I care about the specific breakdown in the process that allowed something like this to happen and making sure it is corrected so that future development is more efficient and productive. If the limited time card is going to be played constantly then I'm interested in making that finite resource stretch further.

I'm picturing Castle going "Holy shmoligins! Don't let bad things happen? Why didn't we think of that!? This will revolutionize the game making industry--nay, the world!"

I'm sure.

And no, I don't know that the devs have been monkeying with the bad guys power levels without saying anything for months now. Moreover, I can tell you what the bad guys power levels have been for almost every calendar day from this moment all the way back to I11 beta, on test and live. I can, in fact, give you that information faster than Castle can. So if you have some evidence that the devs have been "monkeying around" with bad guy power levels for months, post it. I can with 100% certainty confirm or deny that evidence. Give me a specific example.

By the way, the devs can't really change the power levels of critters without pushing a patch to the game, so the fact that the live game had minimal patching recently until I17 went live kinda calls that entire thesis into question.


The part where I17 and GR buff things as an alternative to nerfing them when there is a power imbalance. In other words, I'm failing to grasp the relevancy in anything you've said.

Relevancy is usually important. Like, if I were to say that the "buff not nerf" philosophy was something the devs have thought about enough and rejected firmly enough that Positron decided to write one of his first blog articles about the subject that would be relevant to the question of whether the devs themselves think they have any practical way to sustain a buff not nerf strategy.

I'm really not sure how to respond to this statement:

Buffs and nerfs are ways to generate 'New Shiney' in existing content.

I don't know many people that would classify a buff as "new shiney" and no one that would classify a nerf as "new shiney" content. Its just as irrelevant as everything else you've said about whether all buffing and no nerfing is sustainable but its in a completely different class of weird.

I get the feeling this is going to be one of those cases where the poster is having a different conversation in their own head than he is actually having in real life, and this is going to turn into one of those situations where the reason why I just don't get it is because I've made the mistake of reading the words, and not telepathically extracted the actual point instead.


I got news for you. They didn't really keep anything secret. The game mechanics were there for anyone to know, if they just asked the right questions. The problem was that in the past, the devs didn't have the time to explain everything fully, and didn't want to spend the time building the requisite common language to explain it. And in some cases they didn't even know the correct answer themselves.

When people asked Geko about mez mechanics, he wrote an entire article about that. If you were paying very careful attention, they divulged the entire system of archetype modifiers back in I1 when Invuln was being looked at - but without context, the players didn't fully understand what they were being told. Even the mechanics of accuracy were released by the devs, but because the devs didn't all *know* the correct mechanics, different devs released different and contradictory information.**

What I discovered when I started talking to the devs is that for the most part, the devs were reluctant to discuss game internals for two reasons:

1. Some players refused to take a hint when the devs said a question entered territory they couldn't discuss.

2. Many players were asking technical questions for the primary purpose of being able to engage the devs in a technical debate.

When I separated questions from debate, I almost never had a problem getting technical questions answered. Statesman even told me his design philosophy on respec, something he never did on the public forums, just because I asked nicely.

Whenever the devs were asked a *specific* question, they often ran the calculations for us, exposing the game mechanics. They were not as forthcoming about their decision making processes (see #2 above) but frankly in terms of the basics we knew everything except tohit mechanics more or less correctly by I1.


Strike one. If its something you've heard of before, I'm pretty sure its not that. I am pretty sure that on the day I discovered the issue, I was the sole person aware of it, and to the best of my knowledge it has not been discussed or even mentioned on the forums from the day I discovered it to this day. You are not going to get it by random guessing.

This is a change that could have saved you, or killed you. From virtually level one to level 50. You just wouldn't know it was responsible.



** These inconsistencies are what prompted me to work out, once and for all, the defense, tohit, and accuracy mechanics with pohsyb. And I asked him to verify my description against the actual code. The defense description added to the Guide to Defense circa I6ish is essentially a source code-confirmed description of accuracy and defense, which is the one we use today. At the time, though, I couldn't specifically say "this is a source-code confirmed description of the tohit mechanics which I discussed with a programmer." Cryptic wasn't *quite* that open back then.

Indeed, it isn't. I am not a stealther, but lots of people I know in-game were speeding lots of content by rushing and clicking.

In addition, I suspect what Arcanaville is feeling so clever about is the fact that you can activate a glowy while defeated. (Naughty, I know, but I never bother, I like hittin' stuff too much.)

The Dev's also recently changed how the Cimmerorans spawn, so that the 'three guard' spawns on the sybils are often mixed in with an adjacent full-sized spawn.

All changes meant to reduce stealthing and rushing. Which is no skin off my nose, I play bare-knuckle destroyers.

I suspect they did the anti-stealth thing by going through the various factions and raising the perception radius of choice 'smart' mobs. Like snipers for Nemesis. I frankly don't care, it makes the game more fun and challenging in my book.

I have done similar tricks for custom factions I was designing for AE, to be honest.

In recent months I've noticed a lot of bad guys getting bumps: Cimmy's, for example, now seem to buff each other quite a bit more when you herd them up so they're much harder to hit, and the Engineer dudes now seem to get WAY more defense. (Due to the lack of armors. I bet they're super reflex now.)

My personal theory is that the Dev's watched to see how zesty people were making AE content, (for challenge) and are now upping all the other factions in-game to match.

I know for a provable fact that the standard factions are getting far tougher, because I designed a custom AE faction to fight and handily defeat Carnies. A few months ago, it was a slaughter. Now, the Carnies crush them.

Same with Banished Pantheon, for that matter.

Yay for the Devs! More challenge is fun!

I'd ask for more xp, but really? Leveling is cake easy these days.




Oh no, big changes are afoot!

But apparently we're all too dense to notice. Duhr for us.

And that is a perfectly fine and sane response to the situation.

Where I am disliking Frosticus in this regard is that he has moved away from attempting to help address a possible situation, and is instead attacking the character of a person who was looking into a possible issue, insisting that he must be incompetent for doing so. A situation Castle is only likely looking at because the original discussion included people who are made up of a group I like to call the "Know-what-the-hell-they-are-talking-about Brigade."

Blatantly displaying disrespect for someone, and then demanding they act professionally towards you is a **** move, and I expect better behavior than that from *anyone* regardless of whether or not they receive money or give it.

Yeah, okay, now I ignore you.

Yay you!