Poor programing or poor comunication skills from the devs?

Atheris

Personally I am going with crappy programing.

Skills are not working as stated, ravage in the one handed/shield line is not giving the amount of armor listed. Neither is blessing of protection from the resto staff tree.

rapidpalsy

are you soft capped?

Atheris

Most likely yes, although the skill line does not indicate this. Also not sure where it indicates the cap in game either other than when it turns orange and even then it is not letting you know what is happening other than being over charged.

Would not have spent the points to get their if the skills had indicated their use properly.

Shimond

Overcharge IS the soft cap. If your armor is already in the orange you won't get the full value from increases.

ZiRM

Some great programming and also terrible programming going on in this game.

Atheris

Usually my armor is not in the orange before I use the skill and I am not getting the amount of armor stated. Also does not stack if you double tap the skill. So I guess the answer is both.

Atheris

NiRN wrote: »

Some great programming and also terrible programming going on in this game.

Defiantly true, don't get me wrong loving the game.

ZiRM

Atheris wrote: »

Defiantly true, don't get me wrong loving the game.

I am also loving it.

RiverWalker

if I am understanding the situation right, I don't think this is that hard to understand, so maybe I'm getting it wrong.

you have less than the soft cap before activating the skill.
but the skill puts you over the soft cap.
and the amount you are getting is not the full amount you expect.

is that the situation?

if so... perhaps this is how it works. (arbitrary round numbers for ease of discussion)
soft cap is (lets say) 100
each 10% past that, is reduced by say, 10% more than the previous 10%. if it goes to 105%, then that # is reduced by 10%. if it goes to 115%, then up to 100% is full, 101-110 is reduced by 10%, and 111-115%, is reduced by 20%, ect.

you are at 90, and you add something that increases by 25 points, putting you at 115. thus, your stat "should" be (before soft cap) 115. but including soft cap at these numbers, its:
100+9+4=113. so, because of the soft cap, the increasing effect gave you only 23, instead of 25.

or if the cap was 500(but with same reduction slope), you were at 480, and the increase was by say, 137, (arbitrary numbers) then you would get:
500+45+40+12=597, so the soft cap would make your increase only give you 117 points, rather than 137.

Atheris

Thanks River, I get that although what I don't get is where it states this in the skill. Or on the paper doll any where. What I do see is that the skill states I will receive x amount of armor period and my armor will be increased by the amount of armor I strip from the enemy.

Shimond

When a stat is overcharged it will say what that means on your character attributes page.

Atheris

Shimond wrote: »

When a stat is overcharged it will say what that means on your character attributes page.

True for the few seconds the effect is active.

Lalai

Atheris wrote: »

Thanks River, I get that although what I don't get is where it states this in the skill. Or on the paper doll any where. What I do see is that the skill states I will receive x amount of armor period and my armor will be increased by the amount of armor I strip from the enemy.

I don't believe it does other than the stat turning orange when you pull up your character attributes. The soft cap will grow over time, but if you're constantly stacking the armor stat you'll likely always end up capped, and the cap seems pretty harsh in that it appears to take several points for the stat to increase even one point over that cap.

It's not uncommon for MMOs to have soft caps, usually the theorycrafters have to number crunch and the rest of us end up google searching them later to find out what they are. I do like that this game lets me know, and I've come to appreciate the diversity it ends up offering (right now my healer is sporting a few pieces of heavy armor instead of full light because she's magicka regen overcharged).

thjudgeman1142ub17_ESO

The implimentation of the soft cap just isnt explained very well anywhere and seems rather arbitrary. If you use a skill I would think that would circumvent the soft cap as it is a direct skill for a short duration and not just a bunch of blue+ items... which on that note at this point I am done crafting anything because the roi is just not worth it...so left with skills..which once you hit soft cap are...just not worth it. They have pigeon holed everyone into very set standards per level that you just cant exceed regardless of how well crafter your gear is or how you focused your skills. Makes every toon fell like the last one regardless of what you do.

Fun game when I can play...seems my free time and maintenance time always coincide...

Atheris

thjudgeman1142ub17_ESO wrote: »

If you use a skill I would think that would circumvent the soft cap as it is a direct skill for a short duration and not just a bunch of blue+ items

That would have been the right way to do and would have been good programing.

EDIT:
And yes their maintenance times suck.

Garrix

From what I've experience, as you level up the overcharge cap increases more than the ability to cap it out via 'regular' gear (it will require more & more blues/epics to max it as you level). At least up until the 40's - I am in full blues and just over the overcharge cap with full tanking stats & all heavy armor at 43 (without a shield), whereas before I could have a piece or two of medium/light armor. I would assume it will increase even more at vet10, otherwise there seems little point in 'legendary' gear.

crush83

Let me give you some insight from experience in the industry on how MMO development works.

MMO projects like this only have a handful of programmers who have any experience whatsoever making MMOs. Those guys are mainly in charge of developing a framework upon which the other "programmers" will build content (read this as *** and mutilate). They're often referred to by titles like Senior Developer, Senior Architect, Senior Programmer Analyst, etc. Sometimes they give them much fancier titles: Senior Project Overlord Architect Jesus.

Then you get a bunch of "junior developers" who are basically fresh graduates from <insert university that isn't MIT/Caltech>. They have no real world programming experience. They have terrible coding standards and practices. They've never programmed anything outside of their extremely isolated and vague course studies because they were too busy thinking that college was time to party and not time to get ready for their career. From this pool, you basically have three career tracks:

1. They get their act together, and research the heck out of their field. Start out crappy, but learn fast and eventually become a senior developer after 4-5 years of hard work and understudy. (5%)
2. They remain a junior developer for their entire careers because pretty much all they ever learned how to do is slap a for loop together, and don't put forth any effort whatsoever to better themselves or understand concepts in their field. They are pseudo-productive, or in other words, they meet all their deadlines, but they also produce buggy, inefficient, unmanageable, mangled code. (40%)
3. They fizzle out of the industry realizing that it's not as easy as they thought it was going to be when they were a freshman in college, having never even looked at a line of code in their life, playing Madden on Xbox while eating Taco Bell on their futon/bed, thinking about how they were going to make the game so much better because programming is such a simple thing. They probably end up taking some crappy web development job because web development doesn't really have a lot of consequences for awful code (sorry web developers, but you know it's true) (55%).

That's what you're looking at for a programming talent pool. The good programmers are tied up with stuff that is important and technically difficult. Stuff like figuring out how to cram 1 million players onto a single server cluster without lagging when Johnny Junior Developer writes linear searching for loops for every property on every item (let's just say O(n^n) trying to discover a single object in a player's inventory for a quest.

Let's say Zenimax has 100 developers on this project (I wouldn't be surprised to find it out it's half of that or less). If they have 100 developers, 15 might be senior developers, 30 might be junior developers that fit case 2 above, and the other 55 are probably interns or newbies still trying to figure out when they should be using a TreeSet instead of an ArrayList.

Why is it this way? Simple. The suits want to keep development costs as low as possible so that they can buy more yachts with helicopter landing pads and pop bottles of Cristal all day sailing the Pacific with 40 super models on board.

Sean Senior Developer, "Johnny wrote 15 for loops that is causing drastic lag. We need him to learn how to code better, and fix that buggy code or the server is just going to continue to lag."
Shirley SuitA, "Sean, what do we pay you for? You're supposed to be a guru or something right? Isn't that why we are paying you the big bucks? (read 60k/yr) Just make the server run more efficient, it can't be that hard. Plus, Johnny is busy writing new content. He's like our most productive programmer; you should probably be taking lessons from him. Look, I've got to run. I've got a meeting at 5 in the Bahamas. Big investment opportunity. Got to hit a home run here; it's going to be stressful. Have this handled by noon."

(yes, this is a satirical representation of the industry)

malais

All games have a soft cap this is true. However I've never seen a MMO so min/max unfriendly.

I have a 32 imperial Templar. I currently have health, health regen, magika, magika regen all at the soft cap. I wear 5 LA 2 HA. This is without any skill buffs (other than racial and armor passives).

If I was to play around with my points a bit more and take the imperial stamina passive and use stamina food on paper I could max out stamina an stamina regen as well.

While this is novel and all I would like to be able to specialize a bit more without the harshness of the soft caps. I currently have only blue gear. Imagine what will happen at vr10 with purple or gold gear.

wrlifeboil

crush83 wrote: »

Let me give you some insight from experience in the industry on how MMO development works.

MMO projects like this only have a handful of programmers who have any experience whatsoever making MMOs. Those guys are mainly in charge of developing a framework upon which the other "programmers" will build content (read this as *** and mutilate). They're often referred to by titles like Senior Developer, Senior Architect, Senior Programmer Analyst, etc. Sometimes they give them much fancier titles: Senior Project Overlord Architect Jesus.

Then you get a bunch of "junior developers" who are basically fresh graduates from <insert university that isn't MIT/Caltech>. They have no real world programming experience. They have terrible coding standards and practices. They've never programmed anything outside of their extremely isolated and vague course studies because they were too busy thinking that college was time to party and not time to get ready for their career. From this pool, you basically have three career tracks:

1. They get their act together, and research the heck out of their field. Start out crappy, but learn fast and eventually become a senior developer after 4-5 years of hard work and understudy. (5%)
2. They remain a junior developer for their entire careers because pretty much all they ever learned how to do is slap a for loop together, and don't put forth any effort whatsoever to better themselves or understand concepts in their field. They are pseudo-productive, or in other words, they meet all their deadlines, but they also produce buggy, inefficient, unmanageable, mangled code. (40%)
3. They fizzle out of the industry realizing that it's not as easy as they thought it was going to be when they were a freshman in college, having never even looked at a line of code in their life, playing Madden on Xbox while eating Taco Bell on their futon/bed, thinking about how they were going to make the game so much better because programming is such a simple thing. They probably end up taking some crappy web development job because web development doesn't really have a lot of consequences for awful code (sorry web developers, but you know it's true) (55%).

That's what you're looking at for a programming talent pool. The good programmers are tied up with stuff that is important and technically difficult. Stuff like figuring out how to cram 1 million players onto a single server cluster without lagging when Johnny Junior Developer writes linear searching for loops for every property on every item (let's just say O(n^n) trying to discover a single object in a player's inventory for a quest.

Let's say Zenimax has 100 developers on this project (I wouldn't be surprised to find it out it's half of that or less). If they have 100 developers, 15 might be senior developers, 30 might be junior developers that fit case 2 above, and the other 55 are probably interns or newbies still trying to figure out when they should be using a TreeSet instead of an ArrayList.

Why is it this way? Simple. The suits want to keep development costs as low as possible so that they can buy more yachts with helicopter landing pads and pop bottles of Cristal all day sailing the Pacific with 40 super models on board.

Sean Senior Developer, "Johnny wrote 15 for loops that is causing drastic lag. We need him to learn how to code better, and fix that buggy code or the server is just going to continue to lag."
Shirley SuitA, "Sean, what do we pay you for? You're supposed to be a guru or something right? Isn't that why we are paying you the big bucks? (read 60k/yr) Just make the server run more efficient, it can't be that hard. Plus, Johnny is busy writing new content. He's like our most productive programmer; you should probably be taking lessons from him. Look, I've got to run. I've got a meeting at 5 in the Bahamas. Big investment opportunity. Got to hit a home run here; it's going to be stressful. Have this handled by noon."

(yes, this is a satirical representation of the industry)

Since Zenimax is East Coast, wouldn't they be off sailing in Chesapeake or the Atlantic?

Yes, I quoted the entire message just to say that.

crush83

wrlifeboil wrote: »

Since Zenimax is East Coast, wouldn't they be off sailing in Chesapeake or the Atlantic?

Yes, I quoted the entire message just to say that.

Well, the suits are never in the office. That's why you can't even ask them questions until 11:45 (have it done by noon).

Plus, that's what the 50 million dollar fleet of Learjets is for.

Ilidio

I'm not sure if original post is talking about getting some armor and hitting soft cap, but for me I've noticed Blessing of Protection is not giving me any armor at all. I'm assuming it should work on the caster because I do get the spell resist but my amor amount stays the same number, not soft capped either. Anyone else notice this?

Lalai

Ilidio wrote: »

I'm not sure if original post is talking about getting some armor and hitting soft cap, but for me I've noticed Blessing of Protection is not giving me any armor at all. I'm assuming it should work on the caster because I do get the spell resist but my amor amount stays the same number, not soft capped either. Anyone else notice this?

That one I don't notice myself. Here's a before and after of my stats. Only difference is the blessing of protection buff. I have it morphed to blessing of restoration though.

Ilidio

Hmm odd. for some reason Im definitely not getting the armor buff, only spell resistance. Its still rank 1 unmorphed, will report back later when I get a skill up and see if it still does that. I've noticed some people mentioning skills not working at certain ranks.

MysticAura

Aside from the slightly abrasive title, there's nothing but good thoughts in this thread.

I do think something is off with some stat boosters. I'm not positive if it just isn't showing correctly all the time, or if it's actually not taking effect. I've seen other threads about similar things and it appears to only effect some people and not others.

Oh and guess what, I like the game..may the slang throwers raise their rifles now.

nerevarine1138

Sarenia wrote: »

Any moment now @nerevarine1138 is going to come in here and chastise you for saying something negative about Zenimax.

No thread shall be left un-fanboyed.

You know that when you tag someone in a post, you basically summon them to a thread.

Oh, and quit saying "fanboy." It makes you sound like you have no point.

Lalai

Sarenia wrote: »

Oh, I agree 100%

I absolutely _hate_ that word. I've never in my life used it in a sentence before now, and have called people out for it multiple times in the past.

Bear that in mind when you re-read my post.

So.. it's only legitimate when you start to name call, but not others? I hate the word, I never ever use it. The person you're trying to single out has also had their own problems with the game, and I hardly see going around chastising anyone. I actually see them going around being fairly helpful to the large majority of people. I see them going around giving their opinion, just like everyone else on the forums.. and they seem to like the game despite the bugs.. yeah, their posts can be a bit abrasive at times, but that's about it. The rest of it is just their opinion, which you're jumping on because it's mostly positive.

I wouldn't really be surprised if you labeled me in the same way. I like the game, I accept it's flaws and don't rage about them. I don't want a large portion of it to change, and I'll keep playing until it becomes not fun.

byghostlightrwb17_ESO

Atheris wrote: »

Personally I am going with crappy programing.

Skills are not working as stated, ravage in the one handed/shield line is not giving the amount of armor listed. Neither is blessing of protection from the resto staff tree.

Wow a little respect, where respect is due. You do an injustice to everyone who works on this game. Sure it still has a few issues to sort out, but to show much disrespect to everyone involved?

of course you could have listed your issues and been helpful but you choose just to complain. Not very helpful or polite.