Massive Nerfs Inc - Melee, Tanks, Berserkers

There are 2 ways to exceed expectations.

1) Blow it out of the park of what your customers would expect. Benefit: Customers are blown away Cost: Requires a lot of resources and is expensive.

2) Communicate with your customers that the bar will be set lower, and over deliver the newly set bar. Benefit: Less expensive Cost: Requires open communication and some direction.

It is obvious that development does not have the same resources as in the beginning through PoP, so in order to exceed customer's expectations, communication is going to be your best tool. We all understand that this game is a dinosaur in terms of coding and adding new things. Stating a plan, with time lines that are adjusted as needed on a regular basis would be huge.

As stated before, coming to the player base for suggestions to gameplay issues is great on two levels, you gain a solution and they player base feels they are contributing.

Last, the CotF experiment (while I know its has not been fully rolled out yet) is looking like a failure in regards to cost versus enjoyment and content. Own up to it and let us know what you are going to do in the future to ensure you will not make they same mistakes in the future beyond just broad ideas.

Ruven

And this is why betas normally have NDAs. So trouble makers don't stir up crap storms every time the devs look at something and play around with it.

There hasn't been an NDA since Tier 1a CotF ~ content since has been "open" to the public.

We all want an answer to why rest is being nerfed and if you guys really understand how that is going to kill basically every melee class. A game where raids basically kill you just to kill you. Playing a melee dps rest is nice but you can die less and not have it effect you as much, but play a tank once these raids kill tanks just to kill tanks a warrior dies and you want him to sit for 60s to regen endurance ? A raid cant afford that.

Judging by what is going on it would probably be better if they go back to NDAs for all involved. This forum's population has always been incapable of containing itself. What is most amusing is that some people actually think that the Devs should be at their beck and call when it comes to demanding answer. Amusing indeed.

Preaching to the choir! I did say "in isolation it will cause more problems than it can solve".

The flip side is that if you give people only 4 days to respond, they will naturally want to take it off the boards as frankly it's too short to have a meaningful discussion.

It sounds like the main problem here is that there is no internal dev server, only beta.

also these nerfs arent related to CotF Tower of Rot but rather part of content that has been around for a while so even a NDA on CotF:ToR wouldnt apply =)

Beta was technically over by the time we got a reply on this.

We expect beta changes to be pushed to test tomorrow, then live next week. None of the smaller content releases have had an NDA and their beta server isn't even blocked from chat servers.

You do realize that these people have work schedules and time away from EQ for their families, chores, and other obligations, yes? Getting your hemorrhoid in a knot over someone off the clock not responding to an hours-old forum post is beyond ridiculous.

Hey guy...they can also log onto a forum and check whats posted there just as easy as we can. They could even post something. It might take oh...maybe an hour max of their time. That is if they bother to read most of it. Skimming it might take them oh...5 minutes? That is if they only read the posts from the more important people such as Rorce or any member of RoI, MS etc who tend to test rigorously during Beta.

The devs offered a four day beta over a weekend, which apparently also means they conveniently don't have to participate? Bull. These guys don't work a 9-5 gig, especially doing a new content push. If clashes with days off and family time were going to occur than why have the beta during a weekend that also contains a very family centric holiday? Isn't the beta schedule somewhat under the control of the developers? Calling Shenanigans on this.

So yah, find some other way to stick up for the devs, considering that this starting blowing up while it was still the normal work week. So they had AMPLE time to say something while on the clock and if they had a bit of consideration than they could post a quick something over the weekend. Heck maybe even bill the company for their time, even though they could have posted something from the bathroom using a smart phone while taking a dump.

Have you considered that logging into the forum takes away from scheduled development time? When the team needs to focus on releasing a patch, that's going to be the priority. You should be glad that they find the time to review and comment on the forums at all. Most software development teams (like the one at my company, for example) are isolated from the customers, and the reason is obvious.

Do you want a cohesive, intelligent response? Or do you want to hear the first thing that comes to mind from someone sitting on the toilet who is clearly distracted? It's not the developers' job to read and reply to everything. They go through a community relations person who acts as the conduit between us and them. Organizing professional communications takes time and effort. If you get one from a developer directly, consider it to be a bonus.

And I find that when we open up our software updates to user acceptance testing, things tend to devolve rapidly if we don't listen to their feedback.

The beta server is the internal dev server which has been inferred by the devs more than once throughout all the years this game has been going. Why they would make another server when one is unused 95% of the year is beyond me. Hell, I would just use Test.

That's how the world works. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. It is what it is. And it's not fair to blame Roshen. He may have been on top of this and waiting for input/info from the dev team. Meanwhile, if we learn anything from this thread it's that you guys can't take everything on a development server and say for certain that it will be pushed to Live. If it makes you feel better, I don't care for this particular change, but it was probably being looked at as part of a solution to a seemingly unrelated problem. The fact is we don't know, and no one is obligated to inform us of every code update on an internal server.

Hey I'm with you on this one. If it's possible to schedule customer service time into a development team's weekly process, it should happen. Interpersonal skills and productivity loss aside, the reason most companies choose to do things this way is because they want to have unified communications. Things can get out of hand very quickly when there are multiple sources of information. Call it what you like but that's what's going on, most likely.

I think that one of the biggest lessons of this thread and others is that the transparency we were promised is still a bunch of smoke being blown. Roshen isn't at fault most likely, he is only able to tell us what he knows and is allowed to communicate. Is this all a big misunderstanding? Maybe, or maybe we'll see a lot of these changes anyway. Regardless, it is unprofessional and poor form to not communicate with your customers. That is what Roshen is here for, not using him makes them just as much at fault.

Well, Moogs. Apparently the powers that be agree with your logic.

I haven't logged on to test. How much downtime does this add to melee classes? Is this more of a raid effect than a group effect? Does this kill off chain pulling because melee run empty too fast?

........

^ clearly not Daegun