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Ooh dear ...

Discussion in 'EverQuest II General Discussion' started by Tkia, Mar 26, 2020.

  1. Clementine

    Clementine Active Member

    Feedback is much more valuable to devs in the form of "I don't enjoy X" than it is in the form of "This is how you fix X." Players don't know what they're talking about and often times their solutions are just plain bad. But it is valuable that the devs know if players don't like something.

    Personally I don't really see the point of the community roundtables. It's not contributing anything that the forums aren't already contributing, and it won't solve the problem of the developers being out of touch. Kander (and possibly other devs) clearly don't understand why casuals enjoy the game or why people play TLE. And that's a problem - a problem that no amount of community roundtables are going to fix.
     
    • Agree Agree x 3
    • Winner Winner x 2
  2. Nawtey

    Nawtey Member

    Valid points to which I would respond that the devs job then becomes to educate. Not give them a crash course in development, but to explain. Sort of "Wow, a Supra with more cargo space COULD carry more. Here's what we'd have to change to make that happen: First, you'll take a performance hit due to increased curb weight, and it will take X number of people from other projects to change the body, drivetrain, and wheelbase length. Second, adding cupholders will require pulling X number of people from other projects to rework the interior, test the changes to make sure they don't impact anything else. So, we could do that, but it would mean giving up all this...." Yes, this is as much art as anything else but if you make them into evangelists for you, your job just got a whole lot easier.

    Again, I agree that a good portion of feedback can be tossed as useless for the reasons you mention. One that comes to mind is "convert EQ2 to 64 bit." Like it's as simple as adding another module or something.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
  3. Castegyre

    Castegyre Active Member

    Perhaps the real point of the round table is to protect the devs from having to acknowledge the voices of the plebs. If they hand select a group to pay attention to then they can seem to care while still insulating themselves from the mean people saying mean things.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
    • Funny Funny x 2
    • Like Like x 1
  4. Feldon

    Feldon Administrator Staff Member

    Well yes, you've described the problem with taking unfettered feedback from idiots and not filtering it. It brings to mind this scene from The Pentagon Wars:



    But the idea that player feedback should simply be ignored is absurd. It's called Focused Feedback because you hand-pick players who actually do know their ass from their elbow, maybe even have some background in modding games, and put them together. You set expectations, ask for very specific things, and get them to justify their feedback and suggestions.

    This is what ought to have happened with PvP in EQ2. Instead, the EQ2 team dedicated a dev to work on PvP for like a year and take player feedback from the general forums. It was a cluster and a few of those players had their own agenda and pushed through changes that ensured their dominance and that the game was a miserable grief bucket for everyone else. Already dying PvP got its funeral pushed up a few months.

    I don't think EQ2 devs know what makes a FUN game. HomeworkQuest is certainly not fun for me. How are they going to find out what's fun if they ignore all the players (which is actually pretty much what they've been doing for the last 5 years?).
     
    • Agree Agree x 5
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  5. Adoninilol

    Adoninilol Member

    "Dreamweaver: Right. And, I think we got time for maybe one more question that we can dive into. So, how do we feel about where auto-attack is at the moment? I know some players feel like it's not quite what it used to be; I know there are others who are feeling that it's maybe a little too powerful? Are we still in the process of tuning that and looking at those things?

    Kander: So, the story of auto-attack is, it had, it's had this metamorphosis over the years, and around, I wanna
    say around Tears of Veeshan, which was Expansion 10, it got to where, it was dumb. Like it, people could go AFK, you know, while they were playing, and they could parse meaningful, with auto-attack only. So we made some changes, and eventually what happened was that it kinda fell out of focus and we are trying to bring it back into focus. We've adjusted it some with Blood of Luclin, and we do plan future adjustments. One of the big things is, is that, we have stats that no longer matter, which we don't like. People are not concerned about auto-attack or flurry because, you know, auto-attack isn't meaningful enough in the damage process for them to care about those stats, so rather than, we, we don't plan on removing those stats, we wanna get auto-attack to where those stats matter, and we are sort of planning a revamp for some of these stats also because some of the stats are capped and that includes auto-attack stats. So, it needs some system changes, which is, that, that segways into the fact that we're planning the AA revamp this year with the, with the, with Expansion 17. So, we're hoping to make a lot of meaningful changes there as well. So, yeah. That's uh...

    Dreamweaver: *laughs* That's the answer I think.
    Kander: The short answer is we do plan adjusting stuff. Auto-attack is dangerous because we have to, there are some classes that use it much differently than other classes, so we can't just make blanket changes to auto-attack and just say "auto-attack is you know, 20% more" because, and then you have a class, I mean, for example, I don't know if it's still that way, but inquisitors could just do crazy amounts of auto-attack damage and they had an AA that was like "crazy auto-attack damage AA" and we don't want to end up replacing Tier 1 DPS with, you know, inquisitors, which might be fun for inquisitors, but it's not really their role."

    First of all, I truly enjoyed the dodging of multiple relevant topics to talk about how to pronounce Gninja's name; and how his father in law's bag space is an ever living nightmare. So far this entire podcast feels like vaporware, perhaps they've taken a note from the Pantheon camp, regardless.

    This stuck out especially silly to me. The only reason auto attack was ridiculously broken in Tears of Veeshan was due to his failure as a designer to understand that adding earrings that were giving the group as a cumulative a hundred weapon damage bonus that stacked (practiced) was a terrible idea. This was also coupled with their failure to truly think about if you added thousands of weapon damage bonus, crit bonus, and not enough potency to offset this huge leap it would result in that kind of an issue. I think this really all stems from katanalalama (sp?) posting that parse of his swash being 90% auto attack damage. He also of course didn't stack any gear other than the auto attack gear because frankly? It was pointless on scouts.

    This was also due to the fact that they added in magical based weapons, and you could stack ears that added a final damage multiplier to the mob by 1.25%. These ears + practiced gear was so overpowered that bot raids were outparsing our raidwide in fatality by about 250%. There was also a physical ear that did this type of debuff but it was pointless when we could all just wear one earring instead of two.

    I think he's lying through his teeth. They needed a way to make combat arts produce a **** ton of damage and force people to pay into their new pay to win strategy, obviously auto attack didn't really work with that as players could just run scouts instead of mages and see similar/better parses without requiring massive amounts of pay to win.

    I also don't see why he's upset by inquisitor's finally parsing worth a **** enough to warrant a raid spot, the class hasn't been good since Skyshrine. Furies got the massive damage reduction back in CoE, and wardens got windblade. Leaving inquisitors in a spot that they were extremely good at ?. We still ran one, but it got replaced with a templar when we realized templars had a max hp debuff, and a templar actually pressing buttons wasn't far off on the DPS parse anyway.

    I don't see how inquisitor's could really get this overpowered, they have the ability to roll back classes auto attack multipliers whenever they wanted, it would just require.... testing.

    As far as TLE goes, this promised AA revamp in April will more than likely break the server. When Blood of Luclin launched we saw the Guardian ability 'Hunker Down' give the guardian 15k mitigation. Which was around 2.5x what a guardian had with every single healer buff on him. Ultraviolet beam hits twice now making Illusionist a T1 dps, and a myriad of other bugs that took awhile to fix. The former are still in game for questionable reason despite being feedbacked but who knows.

    In the past few expansions we've seen various abilities turn into the live counterparts and left them mostly useless for TLE applications, things like Manaburn, Focused Casting, etc. etc. I am extremely cautious with these live changes going forward. It can either make a lot of our AA endlines entirely useless, or do things like make divine recovery now give the group 25 fervor, essentially making anything but Clerics worthless.

    To make matters even worse, they also decided this was when healer mitigation buffs would no longer apply to tanks. Meaning if you don't run a guardian, good luck fighting anything hard like Avatars. We killed Mischief with a Monk, but his average incoming hits were about 40% higher than our guardians for a 3% avoidance report increase.
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2020
    • Appreciation Appreciation x 5
    • Informative Informative x 3
  6. JimmyBananas

    JimmyBananas Guest

    This is, unfortunately, very common. I remember watching them pull the same thing at my job a few years ago. Corporate wanted some "feedback" so HR pulled the people with the cushiest jobs and the highest pays to give their opinions on the company. They'll more than likely select people with opinions already very similar to their own.

    A LOT of developers don't. My wife and I have this conversation all the time. Whenever we play a game in which we find some sort of ridiculous artificial difficulty or time-gating nonsense, we can't help but wonder why the hell they programmed it into the game in the first place. Who could possibly find it fun? Who wants to waste their time in a game where you can only have fun for a few minutes a day? You go to the forums to find the loudest of the loud voices claiming X, Y, and Z aren't challenging enough, or it's "welfare loot for casuals," but then you look at the actual metrics and find that only a miniscule number of people are bothering to smack their head against the wall that keeps getting higher and higher. In one game we played, every single achievement that we earned in the high-end counted as being "rare," with most between 1% and 4% of players (who owned the game) having earned them -- and they were simple things, like beat the "main boss."

    These days, outside of my MMORPG, I mostly find myself going back to older games from back before everything was designed to feel like a chore, or center around Twitch streamers.
     
    • Appreciation Appreciation x 4
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  7. Fuli

    Fuli Well-Known Member

    I feel like people are way over-thinking this feedback stuff.

    At the end of the day, the questions that matters are: "Are you having fun with our game? What features do you like? What features don't you like? Where are we suceeding, where can we improve?....etc, etc

    I disagree strongly with these permanent "councils" focus groups, where the best of the best of the various hard core player styles are polled for input, because what you get is a game that reflects the tastes and preferences of THOSE players.

    This is not rocket science. Randomly sample from your ENTIRE pool of customers. That's it. Get the feedback, learn from it, and incorporate it into future development.

    Rinse and repeat.

    As the customer, it is not my responsibility to design their game, and I could give zero craps about what it takes to build it - that's their job. I care about the end result, and whether the product they sold me solves the problem I paid them to solve.

    The point of feedback is to detect meaningful patterns, and sorting through the noise is a trivial task.

    Edit:
    Btw, it is very easy and common with today's survey software to path survey questions tailored to suit the respondent.

    These councils might still be useful as a supplement, especially for raiding, I believe I raised this same issue a few months ago. Rely on them alone, and your feedback data will be biased.

    Also, focus groups are generally used to get feedback on product ideas and prototypes BEFORE they go to market.
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2020
    • Agree Agree x 6
  8. Zynt

    Zynt Active Member

    Kander reads like a dumb, guilty person who thinks they won't get caught being interviewed by a top notch detective who already has the proof and is going for a confession for shits and giggles.
     
    • Funny Funny x 4
    • Agree Agree x 2
    • Shocked Shocked x 1
  9. Tkia

    Tkia Active Member

    This is the bit that scares me. As with everything else they will attempt to tune it for max level which will not only break it for TLE but for every toon on every other server that isn't max level. :mad:
     
    • Agree Agree x 4
  10. Dano84

    Dano84 Active Member

    Episode 4 - Nothing crafting or casual related but all Class balance themed.

    The interesting thing at the beginning. Kander said that the Battlegrounds were not a dev thing. Employees above Holly/Kander "asked" to have this system implemented in the quickest time possible.

    Class Balance - Kander would like to have the AA revamp having the affect that AAs matter more and different templates for different encounter /play styles.
    The GU is foremost a Mages Balance thing.

    Also Kander annihilates full plates of Tater torts , just so you know........
     
    • Informative Informative x 3
  11. Endymion

    Endymion Active Member

    Which led to the character copy mechanism and all of the fun dupes and other bugs that ended up creating. :p
     
    • Informative Informative x 2
  12. Mermut

    Mermut Well-Known Member

    Episode 4:
    Kander: Even heroic content is based around the assumption that characters have experts...

    Then WTF are the recipe books so fricken' RARE this expac?!?!?!


    And it is clear, as always, that only dps, and maybe utility classes are considered when they talk about 'class balance'.
     
    • Agree Agree x 6
  13. Errrorr

    Errrorr Active Member

    Battlegrounds were fun,

    I wonder whos idea Proving Grounds, Overseer and Infusing were? Because they are not fun.
     
    • Agree Agree x 8
  14. Clementine

    Clementine Active Member

    Battlegrounds were super fun when they were first added, and they slowly ruined them over time.
     
    • Agree Agree x 2
    • Like Like x 1
  15. Zynt

    Zynt Active Member

    I'd still be playing regularly if BGs were like they were a few years back. I've still got a couple characters in the BG armor/weapons. I loved those.
     
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  16. Mermut

    Mermut Well-Known Member

    The other notable o_O was the comments about the 'flavor of the expac' class.
    They don't intend to make this or that class top, but they tweak arts and it might happen.

    Soo.. they make changes and don't to any testing to see the effects.. and/or decline to make choices based on the information that comes back from their tests and/or beta... *sigh*
     
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  17. Adoninilol

    Adoninilol Member

    Well yes, Battlegrounds were a direct order from Smedley. I thought this was common knowledge...
    Oh like the Ill will, set bonus, mount stacking, 2 hander/shield, stacking every purple adorn in game exploits? All of those? I had lots of fun breaking eq2 with battlegrounds. This is of course also limiting the ability to duplicate plat/transmute items that we saw in SF. Which still existed until BG's ended but, at that point they were looking for it.
     
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  18. Fuli

    Fuli Well-Known Member

    This "class balance" talk strikes me as a whole lot of largely meaningless spin, because each expac they manage to either directly or indirectly throw a handful of classes under the bus and let them rot for awhile.
     
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  19. Dano84

    Dano84 Active Member

    The interesting thing about this "flavor of the class expac" is that Kander used the "legendary" Aerilik/Assassin and Aerilik's biase towards the Ranger Class story during RoK. Although Kander didn't mention Aerilik's name but spoke of Assassins so it was pretty clear what he meant.

    The only DPS class that should be concerned of the near future is my beloved Ranger. Wizzies/Warlock can do more auto attack dmg than ranger this expac. Obviously with their Abilities being buffed to be T1 dps i wonder where this leaves the ranger.

    Also Kander said they take the whole year for class balancing and it should leave up to the AA revamp in the next expansion. I didn't know if Kander was making fun when he said Caith hadn't started on the AA revamp yet.

    Funnily Kander spoke about his Hardcore raiding time when he was "dispatching" mobs like no other :)
     
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  20. Nawtey

    Nawtey Member

    It seems like they managed to miss another golden opportunity. The past few weeks have seen an influx of returning and new players as Stay the F @ Home directives expanded. It looks like they are rapidly moving to the end of the honeymoon stage now, as several are starting to post about their negative experiences in the OF.

    For some reason I'm not surprised that many posts mention the game economy, pay to win, and mindless time sucks that they don't find enjoyable. I am a little surprised that DPG completely whiffed on an opportunity to hook these folks - although, it does sort of go to their general ineptitude.
     
    • Agree Agree x 6

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