I rage about Wrobel in zone chat every day about the imbalances I see. Why? There isn't really anything better I can do about the balance besides that. Egregious imbalances exist as well as rather minors ones which could be considered stylistic... but whatever. None of that really matters or makes much difference because Wrobel doesn't communicate with us. Why doesn't he? I don't know. Is it unusual? No, not really in my experience. I THINK it's because he knows what kind of reaction he'll get if he shows his face, I think we all do. And the longer he goes without an appearance where we can actually interact with him rather than him selectively picking "safe" distances to talk from, the more feelings rage while the game is imbalanced. He's built up quite a tab.

Now if I'm right, that's pretty chicken *** of him. If he doesn't know... idk. Most devs don't talk much here, preferring to leave it to the CMs that play it safe/smart and keep away from the provocative threads, threads which often deserve answers to legitimate questions and issues. It all comes down to two things: communication and results. The communication is arguably the easy part, even if it can leave you in a bad mood for the rest of the day. If Wrobel could manage the results, which to be honest aren't as impossible as it may sound (there's a pretty large acceptable range for balance), we wouldn't need the communication but it would still be nice. We have neither, so we shout everywhere in hopes that we are heard. If Wrobel doesn't acknowledge our cries, we don't know if we've been heard so we keep yelling on. That's me at least.

Should he be fired? No comment. It's not my decision, and once again, we don't know what he has been doing. We do not have enough information to make a evaluation on it. I'm. It sure where you get off telling us to focus on the issues though, as if combat is not an issue. Personally, I think both are weighted equally and I appreciate speedy action on both, but I'll still play if either or both are doing temporarily poorly. Management has responsibility in these things, but in all likelihood they are incompetent technically so there hire people to do the nitty gritty for them, and those folks, who can actually do the things that need to get done, need our input. Management is doing their job if their employees has the tools and resources to do their jobs. Again, no comment on how well they are doing at that.

Last thing, Wrobel. Gamers (myself included) are fickle creatures. We may hate you now with your lack of... things above, but if you deliever, we can just as quickly and easily be in your corner again. No pressure (tons of pressure), but we're expecting you to deliver this coming update!

Nice post Eric.

To the OP,

Sure, perhaps not fire him. But there has to be some kind of 2-way communication for this product between maker and consumer. It's like going to Burger King and they screw up your order. You bring it back and they don't say they'll fix. They just give you something else you didn't want at all, and you have no say or recourse about it.

We play this game with our free time. Some of us pay for that time. I've said it in other threads that time is the one thing in life you can not repay, rewind, or recoup. You can not get it back. So to waste "our" time with pointless fixes, nerfs to things that didn't need it, and balancing gameplay without any consideration for the 2 styles of play? That's just irresponsible at best, and a rip off in the eyes of many of their customers. Yes, gamers are a fickle bunch. But many on these forums know the mechanics almost better than the devs do. Yet they are not confronted or asked about how to fix it and why it may or may not work from the devs point of view. The animosity grows with each patch. Yet we have no recourse but to stop playing. Easy enough for some, but when you've invested time into something for over 2 years? It's kinda hard to just walk away.

pattyLtd wrote: »

Lucky for him it's unlikely his employers will listen to anything that's being said over here

I do feel sorry for the ZoS staff too sometimes because regardless of all the *** we have to put up with we put up with it because we love it, right. Balance isn't that far off, it's nothing that can't be fixed with some small changes left and right but chances are something else will be OP after next balance patch just hope MC Lag gets hit by the nerf hammer .

Yes performance should be top priority right now stop adding stuff until the game runs like it used too again because somewhere something went wrong, i'm pretty sure most of us can agree with that.

lol

The issue with Wrobel is that he seems to either not to acknowledge or want to acknowledge the fact the combat system at a mathematical level is a disaster. Rather than building off the TES single player games he created a system where one skill has multiple functions. For example surprise attack can do damage, stun, debuff the target, buff the user, trigger weapon enchantments, and trigger programed random occurrence sets. One key can do six functions; then he decided to make a hot bar so players can place a multitude of these type of skill on one bar.

So now players can instead of having to choose one slot for damage, healing, buffs, etc; they can just take the whole tool box with them or at least most of it. So now there 12 slots with skills that have more than one or two functions; each creating a large cascade of events across a multitude of players. Making it nearly impossible calculate all of the permutations; which makes things difficult to balance and catch problems before they arise.

And that’s just for the active skills when the poisons, passives, crowd control, etc. are factored in it just gets worse. The passives probably should have been limited to a fixed number that could be active at any given time. All of the crowd control types should have immunity or at least diminishing returns without player having to use break free. Roots are a good example how not having those mechanics in place creates problems. Roots have no immunity or diminishing returns and not even a break on damage. So one player can just spam them endlessly and lock other player in to place with that person having not much of a way to counter it other than not running out stamina.

Then there is the whole classes problem and the morphs. What is the point to classes? He could have just made two books one skill book (or whatever they wish to call it) and one spell book. And placed all the stamina based skills and passives in skill book; and all of the magicka spells and passives in the spell book. And assigned one to two functions to each skill and spell. But instead he made a class system which added more difficultly to balancing the combat system.

Because then he had to make each one unique when he could have had uniqueness by allowing players to mix and match all skills and spells to their own liking. For the most part all he would have to balance is the skills and spells themselves and watch for interactions that would have been outside acceptable parameters. With the classes he has to preserve their each unique play style.

So for example say there is a problem with the templar class not being able to counter a skill. And the answer to correct that would be to give them a skill from the nightblade class. He can’t do that because then the classes would start becoming homogeneous. So now he has figure out a way to modify an existing skill so that it does “kind of” the same thing the nightblade skill does. Without creating more balancing issues.

If there were just two books for example all the player would have to do is pull the skill or spell from them and place in on the hot bar and the issue would be resolved. Little to no involvement on his part would be needed.

There are number of other examples like how he handled blocking and stam regeneration. Swaths changes to blocking’s mechanic, heavy armor passives, npcs, armor sets, etc.; when all that needed to be done is was make blocking not 360° and lower the turn speed while blocking. Or how he handled heavy armor’s skill’s immunity; gutted the immunity duration when all that needed to be done for the most part was to make the 10sec (or whatever the max was) only work for when players are in five or more pieces of heavy armor.

I do not have anything against him personally. He is imaginative but he should not be a lead on combat system team. A lead needs to have both vision and the ability create a solid mathematical foundation.

100% positive that there would be nerd rage and calls for blood no matter who held the position.