Phantron wrote: Pylgrim wrote: I have played Magic the Gathering for over a decade and I've been a faithful follower of their design and development journals through that time. They are a competent, game-savvy, decades-tested team of professionals with a designing and playtesting infrastructure perfected over the years. And they still manage to create a card or two that end being completely busted in a given format every other year. My point being that mistakes, mis-assessments, and oversights WILL happen. No matter how big your playtesting team is, no matter ho much time do you spend testing, you will never be able to emulate accurately the conditions in which a game will be experienced when played over a long time by literal millions of people. For us, nowadays, it may boggle the mind to wonder how didn't they notice that Sentry was broken but it may have not seem that bad in playtesting for reasons. We'll never know. The important part, then, if mistakes cannot be entirely avoided, is to be gracious, humble and properly understanding of the playerbase's feelings and how to make reparations in a timely manner. Basically everything that Alliance slots announcement is not. MTG learned a lot from its mistakes. This is a bunch of guys who started thinking Healing Salve is about as good as Ancestral Recall, and now they can be considered the golden standard for balance in everything game related. Part of it, of course, is because you can't easily take back MTG cards so you can't just make say a 1G for 4/4 and then say don't worry we'll change it to 3/3 later if that was too good. I don't think being polite/humble means anything. I'm sure there's plenty of hate mail when they banned Jace from one of the format too. You don't hear much trashing about MTG because MTG very rarely has to resort to such drastic measures which effectively wiped out people's investment in whatever the overpowered card that was banned (and usually 4 copies of it!). It's kind of puzzling since MTG guys don't mind sharing their design philosophy with other people and a lot of what they do applies to almost any game. For example read up on their article about card drawing and their philosophy around such a vital part of the game and replace card drawing with 'AP generation' and you can copy almost everything verbatim. Balance is a hard problem, but there's no need to reinvent the wheel. For Sentry you can pretty much look at their article about how losing life as a cost to activate abilities isn't a big deal if there aren't burn decks around and that is pretty much exactly the same thing here, except that MPQ has no such thing as a 'burn' character that can possibly punish Sentry's self-damage, which is hardly surprising since Sentry has one of the most HP amongst characters in the game, while the shockland archtype is equivalent of a character with the least amount of HP.
Pylgrim wrote: I have played Magic the Gathering for over a decade and I've been a faithful follower of their design and development journals through that time. They are a competent, game-savvy, decades-tested team of professionals with a designing and playtesting infrastructure perfected over the years. And they still manage to create a card or two that end being completely busted in a given format every other year. My point being that mistakes, mis-assessments, and oversights WILL happen. No matter how big your playtesting team is, no matter ho much time do you spend testing, you will never be able to emulate accurately the conditions in which a game will be experienced when played over a long time by literal millions of people. For us, nowadays, it may boggle the mind to wonder how didn't they notice that Sentry was broken but it may have not seem that bad in playtesting for reasons. We'll never know. The important part, then, if mistakes cannot be entirely avoided, is to be gracious, humble and properly understanding of the playerbase's feelings and how to make reparations in a timely manner. Basically everything that Alliance slots announcement is not.
arktos1971 wrote: stephen43084 wrote: Or they could shut down the forum. Hmmm... Which would be cheaper for them? Look, they're not the biggest part of the problem. It's nick picky ppl. Ppl complain they don't communicate, then they complain when they do communicate. All I can say is you're lucky I'm not in charge. The only communication I would have is in game. I would not waste resources hiring a PR person for the few ppl that need their hand held all the time BC the game does revolve around there special wants and needs. Take it easy Stephen. It wouldn't take that much time to communicate better.
stephen43084 wrote: Or they could shut down the forum. Hmmm... Which would be cheaper for them? Look, they're not the biggest part of the problem. It's nick picky ppl. Ppl complain they don't communicate, then they complain when they do communicate. All I can say is you're lucky I'm not in charge. The only communication I would have is in game. I would not waste resources hiring a PR person for the few ppl that need their hand held all the time BC the game does revolve around there special wants and needs.
Phantron wrote: I'm not really concerned with how they're going to phrase an unpopular change like true healing or whatever because to me that's just paying the debt for a bad decision. The current alliance issue is another exampe of 'nothing good could've come out of this' so now they're just paying the debt for a previous bad decision and whether they want to have a nice PR or something like 'stop whining you guys got enough free covers' doesn't really matter to me, because people are going to hate them either way because it's debt that you have to pay. When Sentry gets nerfed that's another example of paying up debt. What I'm concerned is communication for things that aren't debts, like whether there's any plan for new modes or fixes to some of the game design problems (PvP shields, PvE scaling, PvE frequency of playing). I do consider the timetable of Sentry's nerf to be something that requires communication, as in I don't think they owe us anything for nerfing Sentry but we most definitely should know when to expect this to happen because there's going to be a huge shakeup to PvP when he's nerfed. Maybe there isn't anything you can do to prepare for something as significant as nerfing of Sentry, but at least I'd like to know a rough timeframe of when to expect it and I don't think that's demanding too much. The new guys definitely deserve to know this more than the veterans since it can be a large investment to get Sentry to a level where you can use him competitively.
Lystrata wrote: ...What I would like, is if when they make announcements about things that actually affect the game / player base, they showed they'd considered the consequences for all players. A company showing that it thinks about the consequences of its actions isn't really an outrageous demand. Really. For instance, the alliance slot thing would've been much less troublesome if they'd said upfront - "Sure, we know this is going to be a pain for players who've paid for slots, and while we feel that this will benefit the game overall, here's some measure of compensation for people who already invested in this." Rather than an announcement, a waiting period of complaints, then a back-peddling 'er, yeah, this might negatively affect some of you, get in touch and we'll see what happens.'...
Pylgrim wrote: Phantron wrote: You're not going to PR your way out of something like alliance which was a P2W mechanism from start and either you continue the P2W path or at some point you got to say 'well that turned out to be a very bad idea'. When Sentry invariably gets nerfed people will complain too, though these issues are design issue not communication issue. You're not going to design a game breaking character and then somehow convince people who pumped resources if not significant $ that it's all in the interest of the game to fix this stuff especially since games don't give out refunds. If there was a law that required you to refund money for a significant change on any major design we might see gaming companies (not just D3) being more responsible with design but since no such law exists there's always this tendency of 'make stuff overpowered at first and then balance it later after the money comes in'. I think the communication from D3 is generally somewhat lacking, but it doesn't change the underyling design issues. Anybody can say they're aware of some issue and it doesn't matter until the issue is actually addressed. Finally, I think people throw around the 'buggy' term way too much. A buggy game is one where you have to shut down with the task manager instead of using the game's quit function. The worst I've seen from this game would be a random crash in the middle of a game or some weird graphics glitch with some abilities (there seems to be one that superimposes a tile with a special tile together recently) but nothing that makes playing impossible. I have played Magic the Gathering for over a decade and I've been a faithful follower of their design and development journals through that time. They are a competent, game-savvy, decades-tested team of professionals with a designing and playtesting infrastructure perfected over the years. And they still manage to create a card or two that end being completely busted in a given format every other year. My point being that mistakes, mis-assessments, and oversights WILL happen. No matter how big your playtesting team is, no matter ho much time do you spend testing, you will never be able to emulate accurately the conditions in which a game will be experienced when played over a long time by literal millions of people. For us, nowadays, it may boggle the mind to wonder how didn't they notice that Sentry was broken but it may have not seem that bad in playtesting for reasons. We'll never know. The important part, then, if mistakes cannot be entirely avoided, is to be gracious, humble and properly understanding of the playerbase's feelings and how to make reparations in a timely manner. Basically everything that Alliance slots announcement is not.
Phantron wrote: You're not going to PR your way out of something like alliance which was a P2W mechanism from start and either you continue the P2W path or at some point you got to say 'well that turned out to be a very bad idea'. When Sentry invariably gets nerfed people will complain too, though these issues are design issue not communication issue. You're not going to design a game breaking character and then somehow convince people who pumped resources if not significant $ that it's all in the interest of the game to fix this stuff especially since games don't give out refunds. If there was a law that required you to refund money for a significant change on any major design we might see gaming companies (not just D3) being more responsible with design but since no such law exists there's always this tendency of 'make stuff overpowered at first and then balance it later after the money comes in'. I think the communication from D3 is generally somewhat lacking, but it doesn't change the underyling design issues. Anybody can say they're aware of some issue and it doesn't matter until the issue is actually addressed. Finally, I think people throw around the 'buggy' term way too much. A buggy game is one where you have to shut down with the task manager instead of using the game's quit function. The worst I've seen from this game would be a random crash in the middle of a game or some weird graphics glitch with some abilities (there seems to be one that superimposes a tile with a special tile together recently) but nothing that makes playing impossible.
Phantron wrote: Finally, I think people throw around the 'buggy' term way too much. A buggy game is one where you have to shut down with the task manager instead of using the game's quit function. The worst I've seen from this game would be a random crash in the middle of a game or some weird graphics glitch with some abilities (there seems to be one that superimposes a tile with a special tile together recently) but nothing that makes playing impossible.
Lystrata wrote: I think part of the problem here, though, is they got someone entirely new to the game to be their so-called 'CM'. I didn't understand then, and I don't understand now, how you can possibly open dialogue between devs and the player base, through a channel that doesn't actually know or understand the game. What the player base really needs is someone who can foresee how changes are going to affect people at each stage of the game - beginner, transitioner, vet. Or, at the very least, someone who can keep these different stages in mind. Having said that, I don't think this is entirely David's 'fault', either, or know how much it would change even with an experienced player in a CM role - given that atm all it seems the CM is expected to do is post notes about blog updates, interviews and facebook statuses. I really can't work out what else the role entails. Which, as Pylgrim said, is nothing personal about David. If that's the role, that's the role, but... it's a pointless one, and not what a forum - or a player base - needs.
Budget Player Cadet wrote: Lystrata wrote: I think part of the problem here, though, is they got someone entirely new to the game to be their so-called 'CM'. I didn't understand then, and I don't understand now, how you can possibly open dialogue between devs and the player base, through a channel that doesn't actually know or understand the game. What the player base really needs is someone who can foresee how changes are going to affect people at each stage of the game - beginner, transitioner, vet. Or, at the very least, someone who can keep these different stages in mind. Having said that, I don't think this is entirely David's 'fault', either, or know how much it would change even with an experienced player in a CM role - given that atm all it seems the CM is expected to do is post notes about blog updates, interviews and facebook statuses. I really can't work out what else the role entails. Which, as Pylgrim said, is nothing personal about David. If that's the role, that's the role, but... it's a pointless one, and not what a forum - or a player base - needs. I'm just gonna throw this out there. How the tinykitty did this role not get offered to Nonce? No, seriously. I don't think anyone who knows anything about this forum or what Nonce has done would have anything but praise for a decision like that. It'd be the most player-friendly move D3 could possibly make, and I'm 99% sure that Nonce is qualified for the job.
_RiO_ wrote: Budget Player Cadet wrote: Lystrata wrote: I think part of the problem here, though, is they got someone entirely new to the game to be their so-called 'CM'. I didn't understand then, and I don't understand now, how you can possibly open dialogue between devs and the player base, through a channel that doesn't actually know or understand the game. What the player base really needs is someone who can foresee how changes are going to affect people at each stage of the game - beginner, transitioner, vet. Or, at the very least, someone who can keep these different stages in mind. Having said that, I don't think this is entirely David's 'fault', either, or know how much it would change even with an experienced player in a CM role - given that atm all it seems the CM is expected to do is post notes about blog updates, interviews and facebook statuses. I really can't work out what else the role entails. Which, as Pylgrim said, is nothing personal about David. If that's the role, that's the role, but... it's a pointless one, and not what a forum - or a player base - needs. I'm just gonna throw this out there. How the tinykitty did this role not get offered to Nonce? No, seriously. I don't think anyone who knows anything about this forum or what Nonce has done would have anything but praise for a decision like that. It'd be the most player-friendly move D3 could possibly make, and I'm 99% sure that Nonce is qualified for the job. Because management didn't approve of him anymore.
_RiO_ wrote: Sentry-bombing a viable means to win? Bug.
stephen43084 wrote: I just want to make sure I understand. You rather them spend finite resources on this instead of fixing characters or developing new content or similar things? And if this is the case, when they start having these awesome PR announcements (that seem to be the panacea from what I've read in this thread), I hope you enjoy those with your 2 abilities 3*'s and repeating another re-run of a Heroic PVE.
Pylgrim wrote: _RiO_ wrote: Sentry-bombing a viable means to win? Bug. Calling that a bug is absurd. At worst is a exploit, but you can expect that the players will always find and heavily use the more effective/faster ways to win.