Doctor Archive
Thread: IGN interview post CU
http://pc.ign.com/articles/610/610552p1.htmlIGNPC: While we're on the subject of items, how are you compensating players who have invested a lot of time or money in items that they can't use now?
Dallas Dickinson: I'm going to chalk this one up to a misconception. We changed the statistics on almost all the items that interact with the combat game, but we kept their relative values the same. If I was making the number one, top of the line blaster, it's still the number one, top of the line blaster. We just made the spread of the value much more reasonable. As you know, you can get the number one, top of the line blaster and it would make you invincible. It would, in fact, be orders of magnitude better than other blasters. We brought them into a standard deviation, but we kept the relative value the same. If someone wants to that number one, top of the line blaster, they still have to talk to that same guy who built the number one, top of the line blaster. It just happens that it won't make them ten times more effective in combat; it's going to make them a percentage more effective. For the hardcore player, that's still valuable. You still want to have the best weapon.
I sat and looked at my inventory of Subcomponents, converted meds/stims and buffs, backpacks full, houses full, factories full.... all that crafting andall that money that went into getting the best resources and making the best subs to make the best meds and buffs that I possibly could - and right now it's not worth a single credit to me. I don't even know if a BE would want it or take it off my hands.... sigh
Already read it, the link got posted in Smeds thread also, and I was amazed how they can state their original goals and claim to have achieved them, blatantly ignoring the forum outcries here and just saying its all because people havent adjusted yet, and the people complaining are the minority.
But what should they do? They cant say in the press that they failed and the game is now worse than before CU, they dont have a way back without looking stupid.
But what really got me was the paragraph where they say they had to push it live at the time they did because they did not get enough bug reports, and that testing was not efficient enough. I can remember that the devs promised that the CU would _not_ go live before it is finished in full, unlike other patches before. I guess they dont need to honor their own word.
The IGN people were too kind and didnt want to poke a little under the hood in my opinion.
Im getting a little upset at SOE propaganda currently - its really sad when players have to contact external sites with huge traffic to get any responses from the devs, and in SOEs own forums red names just make a post from time to time and dont follow up, eliminating all discussion, either by not responding or by finding anything that remotely looks like a flame and deleting whole threads with very valid points.
There are a few exceptions, but most of the time they only touch peripheral issues, not the core system issues people have.
If this goes on for too long, im gonna end my time here and come back in maybe 2 or 3 months to see how it looks then. I didnt order RotW because I wont give SOE additional money before they got the CU right. Too sad I paid a monthly fee to SOE to get improvements to the game, and Im not even asked if I really think it is an improvement before it is pushed onto me.
But to be constructive, the current damage modifiers calculated from level difference need to be taken out, and the combat level needs to be determined by the weapon wielded, the armor worn and the specials (boxes) that can be used with that weapon. No need for weapon cross-certifications and group combat levels that every member gets in order to be able to level efficiently.
Just a few impressions of the current state of combat upgrade:
"Hey look - a Nuna! Lets kill it" "NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Are you out of your mind? That thing is level 150! It will swallow you!"
"I just got hit for 600 after leaving a group. The same critter hit me for 100 when I was still in the group, and never were any group members nearby."
I guess the players failed by not giving enough feedback so the revamp went live. Good GOD this propaganda is so ridiculous.