The Enzyme Nerf Cometh

This wasn't a well-guarded secret. It's near the top of the paragonwiki page on HOs, for example, and came up regularly in any forum thread where HOs were used. Enzymes say "defense debuffs" right on the tooltip, and Active Defense doesn't list defense as one of the enhancement types it can take, and Mids actually doesn't show HOs affecting Power Boost at all. Noticing any of these things might lead you to do a little digging on what's happening, which would probably lead you to the aforementioned wiki page.
Without the ability to predict the future, I can't say for certain they won't. But it's not terribly likely, and it certainly wouldn't be a comparable change to this one, where we have literally had years of advance warning.

Are you actually saying it's not your fault you slotted a defense debuff HO into a defense buff power?

Yep. If they decide to nerf purples, it would be them deciding to change something purples say they do. It would not be the same kind of change.

Except they do that deliberately. For them, that is "properly functioning."

I never said numerically constrained performance (what most people mean when they talk about a "balanced" game) was essential to the long term health of an MMO, or that virtually everyone believes this (actually most MMO developers do not believe that one). In fact, when this topic has come up in other contexts I'm quick to point out that game balance as this game defines balance is essential to the long term health of this game because and only because so much of the design of the game and its reward systems is based on and built upon those balance definitions. Breaking those rules would spin the rest of the design into chaos. But those rules are not specifically important to all possible ways this game could have been constructed. In fact, the less the reward system interacts with something the less constrained its required to be. If this game backloaded most of its rewards and experience into task completion and not combat, wildly unbalanced combat would not have a major impact on the game, for example. Alternatively, if you disconnect rewards entirely from the normal combat system and made a sandbox-like game instead, obviously numerical balance would be less important than opportunity-balance: making sure all options were equally desirable in terms of play mechanics than in terms of defeat potential.

It is when they used it for ENDRED reasons, which is perfectly innocent!

Though, Id then wonder why not just slot a lvl 50 ENDRED IO. >_>

I think everyone, and I do mean everyone without exception, playing that game would find this quote very amusing.

For that matter, even the head developer herself (who is... an university student. Yeah.) doesn't like the current situation and considers it broken. She's stuck with the current publisher, which is some flight sim company interested in milking licenses and won't sell the rights.

Whether the developer is forced to do it by publishing mandate or not wouldn't be relevant to my point. The point is the decision makers seem to be making decisions to do what is being done and the developers are doing it; its not happening randomly because the developers have no idea what happens when they type on their keyboards.

If the head developer is bemoaning the fact that no matter what they attempt to do, strange and wild things get introduced into the game, that would be an admission of a high degree of incompetence. But the original point was that no dev team believes that having a game that functions contrary to the intent of the implementation is a good idea.

In the very next paragraph after the one you quote, I specifically explain the difference between a game that is numerically balanced, and one that functions explicitly as the implementation intended.

... That's what I'm telling you is happening. Dev team purposefully introduce things that go against the point of the game, for the sake of keeping players playing (paying). There is less and less numerical balance. There is less and less opportunity balance. It's essentially a long run of special offers, designed to appeal to the gotta have it all nature of people as well as the natural arms race mentality that goes in every PVP-centered game.

I guess you could say your point means a properly functioning multiplayer game is a game with players, but if so that's banging open doors and saying essentially nothing. There is more to a game, even a multiplayer one, than just people. Otherwise it might as well be a chatroom, or a facebook wall.

You could also argue FarmVille is one of the better functioning games out there, but damn. If you define a properly functioning game as something that takes a lot of money from a lot of people to redistribute it to a much smaller pool of people, it works, but to me that's confusing quantity with quality. You bet every decision of theirs is intended - intended to maximise profits, intended to exploit people's weaknesses and addictions ; not intended to deliver a quality game experience.

I'm not peeing in your cornflakes here. If you'd step back for a second and stop considering every forum post as an argument you have to win, you'd see that. Crack dealers being successful doesn't invalidate the pharmaceutical industry.

...Ok, perhaps a bad analogy, as both are as crooked if in a different way and would fit better to illustrate the two examples I've named. Pharmaceutical industry vs doctors, perhaps.

There's two ways to sell a game, carrot or stick. This game fortunately sticks with the carrot most of the time, but not every other game out there does the same.

Or I could say what I actually said, which is that the intent of what I said in context was that no developer believes that its a good idea for them to hit the J key on their keyboard expecting to see a J appear, and have Ls appear instead. Everything they do when they add things to their game is supposed to generate a specific result in-game; no one thinks being surprised when their implementation does something completely different is a good thing.

What you're talking about is something completely different; something irrelevant to the question of whether developers naturally believe they should fix code or data that does something different than what they intended it to do, which is relevant to the multi-aspect enhancement fix.

None of this has anything to do with whether the game is good or bad. It has to do with implementation. When our developers make a power that does 1.2 damage, if it ends up doing 1.25 damage they don't say "close enough" they try to figure out how it can possibly be that 1.2 in the spreadsheet ended up 1.25 in the game engine. Is 1.25 perhaps a better value for the damage than 1.2 in the first place? Who cares: that's irrelevant.

You keep talking about game balance or "the point to the game" which I've said several times now is irrelevant to the question of whether developers believe they should fix bugs or not. I'm not so much arguing with you as continuing to state you aren't talking about what I'm talking about. I don't disagree with what you're saying in general, except to say that its irrelevant to what I'm saying. You keep conflating "intent of the implementation" to mean some higher design purpose, when it means "when I put a three there, three of something should happen." I tell the game to do X, and it does X. Whether X is a good idea or not is itself besides the point. If I tell the game to do X and it does X, it functions as intended. If it does Y and Y is much better for the game, it does not function as intended by definition, even if I have some higher intent to be a good developer and Y makes me look like a better developer. That's way, way outside the limits of what I'm talking about.

Actually, if you tell a program to do X, it will do X. If you tell it to do Y, it will do Y.

The problem is when you WANT it to do X, and it does Y :P But sure as hell you told it to do Y

If you tell a computer to do X, it will do X. If you tell a program to do X, it will do whatever the programmer told it to do.

And here I thought you were talking about CoH.

@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."

Thats what I meant, was talking about the developer point of view :P

(ok, sorry about the OT)

I got this far in the thread, please enlighten me, bots nerf? what gives?

Originally, both of BotZ's set bonuses were much larger (3.13%, if I recall?). This was eventually reduced to the values it has now, and there was some outcry over it at the time, but as you may have noticed, we went on with our lives, and softcapped builds are as prevalent as ever.

I am late getting to this thread, but this post made me laugh.

calling a fire tank more survivable and having more offense than a shield anything is funny. I can add all the defense I want to my fire tank... and it will do well in regular PvE. When you get to the Incarnate stuff... not so well.

Frankly, my Kin/Energy brute is better, I think, than my SS/Shield brute in incarnate trials. I dont run my ss/wp brute because it didnt do well in the beginning with the trials. (may be different now though)

I did not use enzymes on my SD toon, so this will change nothing for me. Hopefully it will make them cheaper for my storm toons though.

Ironically, the name of my SS/SD brute is "Internet Nerd Rage" and it fits after reading some of this thread.

So you've been playing the character using a known exploit, and one that the devs have said that they intend to fix, and now it's just so horribly unfair that they are fixing it, because you've gotten used to getting away with the exploit?