The obligatory DOOM thread.

Woolenthreads

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Image of Character from "Dad's Army"

Yooouuu Bassid. Now I have that Bally Themesong stuck in my head....

On the OP, One thing I have noticed in any "negative" thread is that, aside from "wasting our time" and "you're an idiot"+explanation comments, the commenters can come back with "The devs already know this and are considering it already" arguments. That's a POV that tends to come up for any negative comments too.

My basic response to the "Dev's Know" POV is simple, "Not necessarily, just because a conceptual problem occurs to a client doesn't mean it occurs to the developer". Or to put it another way, things do not improve due to positive feedback, they only improve because of negative feedback. So I applaud the OP for providing us with considered negative feedback. Hopefully the Mods will read it and pass it along, so that the Devs can consider how to avoid the issues, if it hadn't occurred to them yet.

I like the idea of questing to become more strongly powered. That seems to be the core of the Spell Crafting proposal. I would assume that it's going to be a post-L50 thing because it seems unwieldy to provide it for the Pre-L50's. No doubt there will be many who claim that the resulting spells make classX or classZ overpowered, while forgetting that they can have their cake too .

Anastasia

Ralathar44 wrote: »

timidobserver wrote: »

ZOS: "We want to stress that all of this is still in motion. This is just a snap shot of where we are now. All of this may change based on feedback."
Dumb guy from forums: "Doom doom doom. You keel game."

They've gone in front of thousands of people and said "We are doing this!!" and got applause. That's not something you can just go "lol mulligan" and fix. For example if something was being abused with the Justice system and they had to change stealing for value after it was implemented there would be like 10 threads on it in record time. If they canceled it completely, even if they had justified reason, people would flip out.

You know why I used that system as an example, because that's comparatively minor and people would still flip out.

---

This is the FIRST time they have "gone in front of thousands of people and said "We are doing this!!" and got applause? Are you completely unaware of any of the promo's, fansite and media interviews, dev updates etc pre-launch? Do you think the games supporters were not astonished and excited then...?

There was sooooooooooo much connected with the whole 'unique' take, the challenge we would find in an ES setting, the soloing AND traditional MMO PvE grouping content, the radical making crafting RELEVANT and having a strong economy, the company's absolute dedication to COMMUNICATE with the player community. The lure for MMO PvP and PvE vets was very strong and marketed very heavily.

The erratic and dismal changes thus far definitely do not provide any sort of justification that we should be able to expect timely, effective implementation of many of these new features.

Hope does not equal fact. But, here's hoping I guess.

Ralathar44

kaer426 wrote: »

Mr. Ralathar, what you've just posted is one of the most insanely pointless things I have ever read. At no point in your rambling, opinionated babbling were you even close to anything that could be considered an actual fact. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Look, you are definitely allowed to disagree with me and that is not only fair but reasonable. However to say that NONE of my points were even close to being an actual fact completely discredits you.

While some points are controversial, for example grouping happening too late could be considered subjective and the Justice system is both minor and more of an inference than a supported fact, others like the magic system causing large balance problems and the battleground robbing Cyrodil population are entirely reasonable 100%. Both of those concerns were even mentioned by the devs of ESO themselves.

This is a perfect example of how to see a viewpoint you don't like and then show yourself off as completely and totally biased. Also I doubt any higher beings are going to give a crap whether I post future predictions on internet game forums or not lol.

Ralathar44

moxiesauce wrote: »

I skipped over a bunch of comments to this, so sorry if I repeat.

#1 grouping, I get it's an Elder scrolls game, questing is what it's about, but 80% of people that hit Craglorn just grind and don't quest. For the most part you can still quest with friends and it's a tedious process to fix all that. It's fine that it's coming over time

Fair enough, problem is this is one of the largest problems that have caused people to quit the game. I think it needs to be priority #1 and to be honest I think they should have devoted many more resources to it and it should have been fixed already.

#2 justice system, if any exploits are found with this they will be fixed. ZOS has already proven, to me at least, that they recognize issues and try to resolve them as quick as possible.

Oh no doubt they will resolve issues. But it will take time just like the other issues they resolves. I don't think it'll have permanent or lasting impact if things go wrong, but if it ends up resulting in griefing or economy damage while other problems hitting with the updates, or lack thereof, are happening it still won't be a good thing. Still a more minor issue than the rest.

#3 The main problem with stam builds is weak dmg and sustain, easy fix. Not to mention there's a good chance FG or DBH will be stam tree's.

Then why isn't it fixed already? Light armor is still hands down better than medium armor, restoration staff still gives mana return to everyone (why is this not based on the amount of resto abilties on your bar?), Weapon abilities still generally have less damage and less utility. This discrepancy is about to get larger with spell crafting.

Look, lets be completely honest. We have absolutely no reason to have faith that they are going to even up the balance between stamina and magicka builds. In fact being able to accomplish that task is going to be pretty impossible with the current light armor and resto staff vs medium armor.

Look at this alone without any of the spells even included, this is the baseline they start from:

Light armor: 21% Reduced Spell Costs, 28% Increased Magicka Regen, 10% increased crit for all spells, 6% increased spell penetration, 28% increased spell resist

Medium Armor: 14% reduced stamina costs, 28% increased stamina regen, 7% increased physical crit, increased stealth, increases sprint speed

Advantage Light armor by 7% additional reduced costs, 3% additional crit, 6% increased spell penetration, and 28% increased spell resistance. When is the last time you saw sprint sped and stealth matter in the middle of a fight?

Heck, Light armor can take off 2 pieces of armor and STILL be better.


Can you not see how laughable of a comparison that is AFTER adding stmaina cost reduction to medium armor? Even assuming abilities and spells were equal, which spells are definitely better in both damage and utility.

And Magicka also gets the 10% magicka return on resto staff, which stamina builds have nothing to match. Why resto staff lets any build get 10% magicka return for free in the first place is a huge balance oversight.


I'm sorry. I still love my stamina build. Even worse my favorite build atm is my 2h Nightblade who bounces around like a superball with Ambush and Critical Rush. I like him and to be perfectly honest, magicka builds being way stronger will not lessen my enjoyment of him whatsoever. As a player I'm slightly annoyed, but it doesn't really mess with my enjoyment much because I'm not the super competitive must be best build type.

On a professional level though from the standpoint of balance? HOLY SHIZZA, how did they screw it up THAT BAD? Where the baseline for magicka builds is way stronger AND the magicka builds themselves are way stronger. Heck, there were weapon skills and passives that were based off of spell power instead of weapon power. ULTIMATES were based off of magicka instead of both. I mean seriously, WHAT THE HECK? All stamina damage also has to be lower because one of the morphs of the fighters guild Ultimate, Flawless Dawnbreaker, gives a 10% weapon damage buff as a passive. WHAT? That's not even achievable pre-50.

That's just a heinous lack of balancing/polish. There is absolutely no excuse for that. Designing games, building games, making games, bug testing. Yes it's very hard and difficult, some mistakes are going to happen. Mistakes of both that level and as widespread as it is? No. That's not due to difficulty. That's due to bad managing/balancing/designing practices. That's beyond what you can get a free pass on.

It's like the difference between a game that releases with bugs, expected if annoying, and Battlefield 4. It's a matter of degree and a matter of how widespread it is.

#4 Spell crafting, You obviously missed the part where they are adding a spell that trades magic for stamina, and I'm just assuming they will also be adding conjured weapons+ other's unannounced that will benefit stamina builds.

Look at the above on magicka vs stamina. You don't need to touch Dark Conversion for Magicka to be superior in every way. Conjured weapons don't do anything for the current weapons and may or may not be any good.

#5 their "battleground" is actually just an arena, So far hold's 0 rewards. With the implementation of Imperial City which gives great incentive to PvP I hardly doubt it will be Cyrodiil breaking, especially if it's got a level requirement.

This is not a difficult concept. If 100 people are playing arenas that is 100 people not playing in Cyrodil.

Update 3 will reduce the number of campaigns making it more competition on every server, and basically removing the exploit of Emperor trading.

Now this, this is nothing but 100% good. The campaign change is a great decision and a long time coming. Reducing the campaigns is good. However that is the most minor benefit of the new campaign system. The biggest benefits are two fold.

One, it will give people level specific campaigns. This means no more VR12's farming level 30's. Why this took so long I don't know. You think they would have glanced at SWTOR and realized that putting in max level with leveling people was a bad idea. Pretty easy concept. Dumb mistake on their part. Still, they are doing it now and that's a great thing. Finally leveling people can go PVP without being slaughtered.

Two, the campaigns will now be shorter. People will care about winning more and it'll be less of a "Well, we are losing and we'll never catch up on points. Why try?"

Ralathar44

Woolenthreads wrote: »

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Image of Character from "Dad's Army"

Yooouuu Bassid. Now I have that Bally Themesong stuck in my head....

On the OP, One thing I have noticed in any "negative" thread is that, aside from "wasting our time" and "you're an idiot"+explanation comments, the commenters can come back with "The devs already know this and are considering it already" arguments. That's a POV that tends to come up for any negative comments too.

My basic response to the "Dev's Know" POV is simple, "Not necessarily, just because a conceptual problem occurs to a client doesn't mean it occurs to the developer". Or to put it another way, things do not improve due to positive feedback, they only improve because of negative feedback. So I applaud the OP for providing us with considered negative feedback. Hopefully the Mods will read it and pass it along, so that the Devs can consider how to avoid the issues, if it hadn't occurred to them yet.

Hehe, aye. What do you suppose the chances that the devs have caught notice of and read a thread on the forums that is essentially as bright as a bonfire right now? Contrary to the belief of some in this thread, I may be something somewhat sharper than a complete idiot . Thread got moderated on page 2 halfway down, indicating that the thread was if nothing else being monitored by moderators, who caring about the game, did most likely pass along some concerns. Apparently some player got nasty at me, small surprise.

It may not be a popular concern. But the job of the devs is to consider all concerns to determine if they are relevant to the health of the game. The more clearly expressed and the more solid design logic behind them the better.

I thank you for understanding, though it must be noted for everyone that has not realized this yet, you did not say you agree. This is very important. He doesn't have to agree to see the possible worth in an alternative point of view.

I like the idea of questing to become more strongly powered. That seems to be the core of the Spell Crafting proposal. I would assume that it's going to be a post-L50 thing because it seems unwieldy to provide it for the Pre-L50's. No doubt there will be many who claim that the resulting spells make classX or classZ overpowered, while forgetting that they can have their cake too .

Aye, with the amount of time this is going to take and the likely setup it's mostly likely going to be an end game thing. As far as individual class balance goes it shouldn't really favor strongly any given class. As far as magicka/stamina balance goes, stamina has yet another reason to cry.

The concerns about overall balance however are based on long term game health. Without challenge and being based primarily as level 50+ content (and so not very conducive to rolling alts for it), I do have the worry that the lessened challenge of the normal game will lead to lesser retention rates over time.

Because they've now finally adjusted veteran zones to be more in line with level 50 content (which i think is a good thing, people actually visit those zones now). Which leaves the only place that spell crafting is going to have the challenge to match increased player power is trials and veteran dungeons. Maybe the new level 50 solo zone, but we'll see how challenging that is. Maybe the PVE arena too, lets not forget this game version of horde mode .

Ralathar44

LOL the mods finally stepped in with some of the modern server tech, they sunk the thread. Essentially it causes new comments to stop bumping it and it's not person specific. So if they want a thread to go away without people knowing they touched it they will sink it. It lets them quietly manipulate what gets talked about.

http://www.wikihow.com/Manage-Threads-in-Vanilla-Forums

Method 3 of 5.


Granted I want to be clear I'm not necessarily against this being done against this thread. I'm just pointing out that it happened.