Because Storm hold was a beta TLE server, where they put in minimal effort. And now they are telling us that TLE servers don't deserve the same amount of work as LIVE server does, despite every single player on TLE servers are paying customers. The entire business culture in DBG seems out of whack.
The issue is itemization, mob buff packages, and general game mechanics have been changed many, many, many times since this content was new. As a result, the play experience isn't remotely calibrated to an appropriate player experience for the tier that is being added. The result of not testing and tuning this content are likely to be: 1) no meaningful gear progression. You may do significant accomplishments and find no upgrades, and you might loot some rando-drop overland mob and find a best in slot item. Poor itemization and distribution significantly impacts the play experience. 2) Encounters can be a cake-walk or virtually unkillable due to buff packages and itemization. 3) You may do stuff and get no rewards for doing it. Those are the primary concerns,
You're spot on of course, but I interpreted his comment as "why is still a battle after the previous TLE server", "why is this new info", etc.
Which is why I suggested they consider crowd sourcing for TLE. If they can't really support it themselves, just admit it and crowd source it to the community. They'll make more money if better results retains more players.
Yes, we could last like one minute maybe at level fifty with it hitting that hard, i'm just saying with all the new class abilities/power increase of our classes its probably killable. We should of been given masters, and given raid gear that allows you to pull the mob. For example the gear before the named.
Because every game uses their playerbase as the crowd source tester. You really expect theybreak to put money into this server (even thou its the heaviest pop server bar none in the game). Nope this isn't DCuO, its just milking the cow before the slaughter.
No I don't. I'm suggesting they literally give the community the format they need itemization delivered in and allow the community to do all the work for them. Similarly doing the same for other elements of the game. Hand it over to a community council and let the players do all the work for them. Crowd sourcing works well. Some crowd sourcing revenue is shared with the sources, some it is not. I think the community here is both smart enough and motivated enough to take on the work that DBG simply can't afford to do themselves in the TLE space.
.[/qu We totally agree! The gear/spells we have now is fine for testing heroic content not raid content. But we were 60 not 50 with it hitting that hard. You have 3 phases to the game, solo, group, raid. Unless you are cool with just raiding tank and spank mobs of courts the other stuff isn't testable. You say probably killable. Maybe your right but we aren't going find out until we all gear up in a few weeks and then we can actually beta test the encounters that could be done in beta. Another few weeks of adjustments and tweaks after that? Too late now anyway beta is practically over and I don't being able to test these encounters is going to be possible. We'll see how this plays out over the next few weeks and I just hope to have fun in this expansion with content that isn't overtuned or broken
And pull the thousands of dollars in salary and benefits to hire this developer right out of your hiney at the same time, no doubt. Note the amount of complaining on these forums about how much it costs to do X, where "X" is usually "buy something on the Marketplace". You can't hire new employees without more revenue. DBG is not a charity, and even if it was, they'd still have to pay employees. So folks don't want "pay to play", they actually resent having to spend any money to play if we go by these forums, yet you want DBG to materialize another skilled developer out of the ether. The project manager (working in the background) has to divvy up work assignments among however many devs he or she has available. You start with estimated man-hours, which is never actually enough time allotted for whatever it is. A significant part of what the dev team is doing is going to have to be the upcoming Live server expansion. TLE is another profit center, but I'm willing to bet it doesn't generate as much revenue as a new Live release. To stay in business, DBG has to allocate its resources (the devs) wisely, even if it doesn't fit with any given individual's agenda.
Doesn't take a developer to do itemization, and I would ask you what you would estimate the revenue stream of the TLE to be. Do you believe that revenue stream isn't high enough to support a single junior FTE? Reality seems to be that TLE is now funding Live expansion development, or at least that is what it looks like to me. *** Edit *** The more I thought about this, it would only require 2 weeks effort per release of a contractor resource to get itemization done correctly. I do not believe you can make an argument that states the sales of TLE cash shop can not support this resource cost.
I'm pretty sure TLE makes enough money to at least allocate SOME of a developers time to finishing things like itemization, and balancing raid mobs. I could probably go from SF to DoF and itemize the entire game in around like 3-4 days if i really sat down and thought about all the items. Itemization only gets easier the higher we go in expansions because things like sets comes into play. Give me another week and I could fix abilities/AA's that don't really work for TLE. And of course all of this time can be spread out between every 12 weeks, I don't know how long it takes to actually code the items to change or abilities. I can say that my guild alone has probably spent around 12-15k between xp pots, familiars, and cash shop items. And we are a guild of maybe fifty people, a lot of it is shouldered by a few individuals but as a collective the server should make enough money to warrant a developer's time more than "we are in expansion mode sorry".
On Deathtoll we had a whale in our guild spend $20,000. I always laughed when people on the forum claimed that the TLE servers probably didn't have the players to justify an intern bashing through itemisation for a week every few months, and developer resources to fix bugs every fortnight, particularly when people like Onra were so willing to do the work for DBG.
I don't personally know anyone on FG that spent $20,000 so far. However, I am very confident that there are at least a couple guilds on the server that have spent enough to cover the man hours needed to fix the itemization. Especially when the player base is ready and willing to force feed them information.
