Devs moving on

Updated the OP.

Pretty sure most of the named devs will find work eventually, the ones we aren't too familiar with will probably have more trouble.

More to the point, Valor Points are worthless regardless of source unless you do those dailies.

Every single Valor Point item in MoP is gated behind Pandaria faction reputations - to be able to spend them, you HAVE to spend weeks (literally) grinding out the various faction reps first.

Imagine the entire Incarnate system being gated behind your character clearing 300 iterations of the Midnighter arc, and you get the idea.

Sounds fantastic. Like they took everything that turned me off of Cataclysm and magnified it by a thousandfold.

Well, you got to admit that is VERY new.

WoW is not "totally team based", you can easily solo your way to the level cap and then you are (were, Venture says latest expansion took a different approach) forced to team up.

Although WoW was never a herding game (should say not always, some classes did a good job at herding via kiting) solo was always an alternative. In fact, "soloing that next quest in my log" was the biggest appeal WoW had for me when I played it.

Mind you: the cross-server auto-find-team queue system made doing these team content easy for the soloist. He did not have to spam for group anywhere, or be part of a big and active guild, or be insanely social. A recluse can hop on a queue and get a dungeon team very quickly. Trials here would have benefit from such a cross-server teaming system.

Not saying I loved the iTrail based end game progression in this game. I sort of liked Dark Astoria as a source of progression but felt it was too repetitive. It would have been better if the repeatable missions simply had more variety.

Thanks for that. So... I guess at the end it's insanely worse than any solo progression we got.

No, it makes no sense to **** over those that don't wish to team and have avoided doing so for 8 years by time-gating rewards as they chose to do so for this incarnate progress.

No issues getting all your incarnate stuff doing DA arcs? By "getting your incarnate stuff" you are NOT talking about getting fully T4ed. The math has been laid out before and claims to the contrary are ********.

I did care about getting more than one character incarnated out. Attempting to do so with the solo incarnate path as it is now made that impossible.

The devs did a fantastic job of keeping things equitable for soloists for the vast majority of this game's history and then pissed it all away with the incarnate garbage.

My hope for Positron and company as they move on to other games is that they learn from this mistake. They did lose my money over it after all and it certainly didn't bring in more money, did it?

EDIT: Not to mention how ridiculous it was to leave the shard system in place for alpha. Bah, can you tell how absolutely sick I am of running Heather's arc twice a night every night?

That's not entirely accurate. Valor gear isn't mechanically required to enter the endgame content, it's just socially required, the first raid was tuned to be completed with gear from the 5-mans. Guilds decided that people must have valor gear. (People suck).

In an/the upcoming patch you can use valor to upgrade existing items, they didn't put that system in place in 5.0 so they put gear on vendors. You're actually still gated more by the limits on valor gain than the time it would take to get revered with the factions.

Not just math, Coulomb2's "Month in DA" threads collected a lot of actual data.

~4/5 chance of a common, which can't be used to upgrade above common, is just insulting, especially when you've gotten all your freebie tables. And NotW's not working for post-Alpha was just insult to injury, forcing you into waiting on a 5% per day chance of a rare, and Mot help you if were going for a very rare. The 2 emps per week per complete run through (no avoiding arcs depending on character type), when a VR needed 30, all I can say is "Really devs, really?"

Yes, the one component a night thing was bad enough when compared to being able to get a component for every itrial you ran no matter how often. To add on the insult of that contact handing out 2 emps per week no matter how many times per week you could run all 5 arcs + what's-his-face's final mission was downright spiteful.

Having different drop chances for solo arcs versus itrials... total BS.

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

It depends on their job. I suspect that the various programmers on the team will have no difficulty finding work (albeit maybe not in the video game industry). Paragon Studios was located in the heart of Silicon Valley and good programmers are always in high demand there.

Yeah I wished more things did dont focus on teaming. I dont mind it here and there but many times, it was long wait to form or find a group of people interested in the that particluar task at that given moment to get that particular goal done. Freedom and virtue, made it bit easier but most of the other servers unless ya knoew someone that knew someone running that task at that given moment, then trying to do something like UG in the later part of the day was nigh impossible and far and few in between. Even on the most populated servers, it was mostly magi farms, with few magi full runs, a UG ran about as often as a purple dropped soloing. I didnt mind UG but lotso f people hated it and thus the amount of people brave enough to run it was small. Thus in all the regularly ran and joined Itrials left only BAF, the one with Maurader, and a Keyes here and there. The rest was very far and few in between. But cant solo those because it's a forced team thing and if you cant just so happen to catch one at the exact right moment, then a person can forget about it. Same with SFs on villian side which was all but a dead zone. TFs, usually often enough but trying to join or form a non-speed run Eden trial for example wasa PITA.

It's like people say they love the game but in their actual actions, they want to speed through everything like it's a chore to play. That confuses me. It's like saying you enjoy a movie but skip straight to the credits. It just seem that not many people enjoy the ride as much as they say.

And there is a difference between "speeding" and murking anything in the way in a quick manner in this context.

Originally Posted by mauk2 Evil_Legacy became one of my favorite posters with two words. "Kick Rocks." I laffed so hard. Never change, E_L!

You mean all those TFs I soloed with the use of a single offline pad?

The big sticking point here is that had the devs not decided to **** over the soloists, you'd have still been able to run all the itrials you wanted.

The mindset of "well, you gotta team to get the incarnate goodies at less than a glacial pace" comes from the same mindset that gives us "gay people have the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex as everyone else!"

Originally Posted by Paladiamors I love you, I Burnt the Toast!

They were acquired in 2007 by NCSoft Corporation, the mother company in Korea. They are listed as a studio under their direct control in the investors literature.

Here is the PR at Carbine's site. Here is the first post about them at Massively.

Scary in that this was 5 years ago, around the same time as NCsoft bought the CoX IP and formed NC NorCal...

It probably helps in that they had another set of former Blizzard developers in Arenanet who might have helped influence the decision...

Although this not to say that former Blizzard developers are perfect. Flagship Studios discovered this...

QFT, Battler. Sorry to see all of 'em go, of course, but glad they're going somewhere that both plays to their strengths and where they can (maybe) prosper.

Games, life, how we treat each other here shows how we treat others elsewhere. Forcing anything on anyone when it's neither necessary nor warranted nor even helpful or beneficial is a waste of time and money.

How is knowing that itrials are/were run often contrary to my opinion? They'd be run often even IF the solo path wasn't a screaming pile of ****. That was the point. It was my point back when the first itrial hit beta.

The fact that you know how it feels to be ****** over in real life yet have zero qualms about it happening to the very real people that play this game here says a lot about you. It says a lot about people in general, actually. There's a whole hell of a lot of "I got mine, so screw you" going on in this country. Why should we lay back and take it in ANY area of our lives?

It IS the same mindset behind all of these: "I team so I don't care if soloists get screwed." "I'm straight so I don't care if gays can't get married." "I'm white so I don't care if blacks are mistreated." "I'm male so I don't care if women can't get legal abortions." Again, the mindset, "I got mine, so screw you/them," is the root behind all of these idiotic beliefs.

Is there a real world difference between them? Of course there is. On November 30th, the game dies and our real lives will keep going on. You'll keep struggling against prejudice and I'll keep struggling against religious fascism. Yay for us. Hopefully in the future we can ALL continue thinking about how are beliefs affect others.

It was just brought to my attention that I should reiterate the following: Obviously, getting screwed over by the devs of a game is of VASTLY less importance and weight than getting screwed over by a society and/or government. Anyone thinking otherwise IS delusional. However, the root of the opinion, the base of it all, still comes from the same spot in the human brain.

The rep comes quickly, there are enough things to do to break up monotony, you get the rep by playing the game and if you don't like playing the game, then why do you need another excuse to not play?

This is just looking for things to complain about.

Gandhi: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

I believe that how things that don't "matter" are handled is a good indicator of how things that matter will be handled.

If having a solo path that was equal to the team path would detract from the team path that means that those people who moved on to the now equal solo path were not in the iTrials for the teaming but merely because it was the path of least resistance. Why not let teaming stand on its own merits instead of browbeating the community into it. If it was fun people would be doing it. If you have to coerce people to do it a redesign might be in order.

You just said "Our system sucks, but because another game does it worse that makes ours perfect." Yeah.

Bam. I think that jumps back to my "Posi got more and more close-minded" bit upthread. That and he developed a serious Jack-esque attitude problem on the forums when anyone said something he didn't like. I remember he flipped his lid when people said gating the Ascension armor behind two ridiculous hoops, one being the level 50, was ******* stupid.

The second Rikti War, a massively significant event that brought so much to the game, was introduced and wrapped up in one issue. It included a solo path, an endgame TF, and a large raid which all rewarded you equally in their own ways. It's storyline answered many questions, raised a few more for future content, and overall had genuine meaning and intensity. It recycled and brought new life to a dead zone while also revamping a dated, awful looking enemy group into one of the most stylish groups in the whole game.

This should have been the standard for all content in the game. One issue per storyline. Maybe two issues for massive things like the Coming Storm. Not the six issues of Praetoria we got that introduced characters that had no meaning while completely ignoring ones that did, created entire new zones from scratch that became dead within weeks, answered questions no one asked, was filled with plot holes and inconsistencies, and overall lacked the quality and impact so much of the older content had in abundance.