Cobalt Arachne
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Posts posted by Cobalt Arachne
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7 minutes ago, Black Zot said:
Or the player has been burned in the past by Discord and its complete lack of respect for privacy and the right to control one's own computer, and no longer trusts this spyware program masquerading as a chat server.
That's valid. Honestly that same argument could probably be made against any number of communication applications.
Personally, I've used Discord for many years, since its earliest days and have never had any issues with it, but I will always respect an individual's decision on what they do or don't do with their own computers. There are always non-install options like browser Discord as well.
However, Discord is what we use on the development team here at Homecoming. It's what we prefer for our work, that's just the reality of it, if you opt out for your own security preferences, I understand and respect that, at least you're not opting out because we weren't open about inviting everyone to participate.-
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34 minutes ago, laudwic said:
With that explanation, respectfully, you need to better decide if you are going to put things on Beta or not. Requesting feedback and then not responding is discouraging. Reading a post that chides about involvement after experiencing a complete lack of feedback leaves a very poor taste.
Won't disagree, honestly 'Focused Feedback' once on Brainstorm could probably be called something more fitting to ensure it conveys the right ideas.
Everything is different depending on the context of the changes, for some features even though it's called 'Focused Feedback' it's really more just hoping people find bugs, since some features are not really possible to deeply change direction by the time they're on Brainstorm.
Perhaps that naming convention has contributed to the schism of communication; I can bring up discussions on finding a better name for those.If I'm being honest, I think a lot of our dev practices we just inherited from how the retail devs handled things, but as a non-profit operation we don't have the same considerations and I think we could improve our work by challenging or redoing some of the conventions we've relied on that have honestly not served to help us at all, and have only made things more difficult as a result.
Example: The practice of not being forthright with design purposes is standard in the game's industry because very frequently the answer would be "We did this to make more money and increase our game subscription numbers" which is a business motive that obviously players are going to scorn, so rather than be honest about it, you keep silent. Which as paid game studo employees working for a publisher is the only move they really can make, but as unpaid volunteers who's only motives are making the best game we can, this doesn't serve us as much good.
Since we don't have any kind of profit motivations of that kind, I think us being better with our communication will only help make our job easier.-
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1 minute ago, Bill Z Bubba said:
Impossible if the reason behind a change isn't shared.
23 hours ago, Cobalt Arachne said:1# - Ensure your feedback is actually challenging the specific reason behind a change
If somebody can't see the change's reason (speaking for my own projects at least), and they ask respectfully, I am pretty forthright behind a change's intended purpose.
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3 minutes ago, Number Six said:
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44 minutes ago, laudwic said:
In some areas, there are robust replies from the CoH Developers, other areas, no response or feedback at all.
This more than anything else would be attributed to the fact that each of us on the development team have our own set of tempos that we operate by, our own methods and practices.
Some of the team like to be on the forums and responding more directly, others like to sit back and read the feedback without ever letting the players know its been read.
As I've said, I think we can do better on communication, but by the same token very different devs handle different parts of the game. Even I'm reading something in a powers feedback thread, there's almost zero chance I weigh in because I had absolutely nothing to do with those changes.-
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14 hours ago, Nurvus said:
Yes you can join the "gold standard" discord or whatever, but I don't think this is a proper solution. It's a really weird situation from an outside point of view.
We use Discord for development because it is the superior choice for quick & efficient discussions and throwing ideas around, it has nothing to do with trying to exclude anybody. Forums are slow, and responses often out of context because of the way they work, it makes our job harder. We also can't ping our testers for focus testing on the forums, as that's just not a feature the forums have.
If the low bar of downloading a free app and joining a server that is open to everyone is too high a hurdle to participate in development discussions at the stage where direction can be influenced, than it feels more to me like the issue is that being involved isn't something that matters enough to the player to make that effort.
The minor effort check is just to ensure people who join are actually are interested in helping discuss and test, and not because they want to tell their friends we're working on <experimental unconfirmed feature> that we never promised anyone anywhere, and then have to deal with people getting upset later when it never comes.
I'm sorry if that reads bluntly, but I just finished explaining earlier in this thread how anybody who wants to have a seat at the table where things get discussed & decided can very easily have one with minimal effort. We've already seen a handful of forum regulars join the test server since I posted just last night, it's not an exclusive club in any capacity, it's a meet-in-the-middle collaboration.
If you want to be involved and influence what we're doing, get involved.1 hour ago, Troo said:Thanks @Cobalt Arachne & @Number Six. This almost had a 'behind the curtain panel' feel which many appreciate and would like to see more of.
Most welcome!
We're not bad guys, I promise.
We're not trying to ruin your game, we aren't trying to force people into playing anything they don't want. We just want everyone to have a fair and fun experience in the game.
There's a common misconception that nerfs are because we don't want players who like X or Y being too strong, but that's wrong, it's entirely because we don't want players who dislike X or Y to feel pressured into something they don't like because of major balance gaps.
Balance is about ensuring all choices are relatively worthwhile choices so you can pick what you like without regrets.
I'm a member of over 20+ different CoH Discord servers (some anonymously others less anonymously) that play on Homecoming. I have City of Heroes friends who have disabilities, are roleplayers, farmers, PvPers, base builders, LGBTQ+, raid runners, AE arc makers... There's no one 'player type' that we favor, because we're trying to ensure everyone who loves this game can play it and find enjoyment in doing the activities they prefer.
Friends sometimes bring broken things to my attention, or mention suggestions that have resulted in very quick additions (Rogue Arachnos chest details on VEATs or the Hero Corps chest detail) but no matter how good a friend, they're never any kind of factor on deciding if I'm going to take on a major project that's going to be hundreds of hours of work; That would be an incredibly nonsensical way to prioritize feature development in a game that has thousands of players.
Most of the dev team rarely finds time to play regularly because we normally put that free time towards working on new things/improvements. We approach development work objectively (and it is work, not fun, scripting missions or FX is not 'fun') and our decisions are motivated entirely by what we think is best for everyone who plays our game.
We do this for free, as a service to the community. Our reward is the satisfaction/fulfillment that comes from doing high-quality work and seeing players enjoy things we add.-
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9 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:
Thank you for saying that. This is exactly the kind of info that players want to read. Not details. Not deadlines. Just "this is what we're working on, no idea how long it'll take."
Sure, I can be straight up about what, just without specifics/spoilers. 😄
Next update I'm working on:
- Remainder of the ranged weapon sets for Holstered Weapon support.- Wave 3 Aether rewards (I've got some cool new ideas cooking but I have to see if they'll even work first).
- Kallisti Wharf's zone map (gosh, there's so dang much to fix in there), new KW enemy groups, Warrior revamp, KW mission arc scripting, KW mission arc maps, and helping the rest of the team with KW things as needed.
...- The rest of the zones that need Tour Guide missions written, I swear they'll happen someday. >_>
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1 minute ago, golstat2003 said:
I will say that it would be nice if a boost were given to non-AE activities so that folks don't feel the need to farm as much. What you've been stating shows that other non-farming content could use one. (It was stated as something that they'll be looking into in the future).
It's on our to-do list, we've got a big ol' spreadsheet compiled of all the various rewards and datamined average completion times (10,000+ runs worth for most stuff) for most content, with time/reward ratios and such; It's been on our radar to go through everything again and decide how we're calculating those payouts and ensure that the various contents are relatively as rewarding as they should be. It's something we'll continue work on, we want everything to be fair based on the relative time/effort involved in the activity.
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13 minutes ago, Xiddo said:
Out of interest, roughly how long did the base Dr Aeon SF take to get working? Or was the hard mode side of it so intertwined that it’s hard to tell?
Quite a few people here have expressed hope for new TF/SFs or even a PTF (goldside). Basically, did the timescale mean the idea of making new ones something you guys dread?
I wrote the design draft for the Dr. Aeon Strike Force (ASF) in November 2020 during Page 2's testing while finishing work on the Tour Guide tip missions, when I officially joined the development team in I think... March? my first assigned task was to create the Dr. Aeon Strike Force I had drafted earlier.
The ASF released in November of 2021, so round about 8-ish months? But it also doubled as my learning in the out's of all the various City of Heroes systems, if I were to do it again it now, it would probably take me less than half the time. Honestly, the biggest time sink in the ASF was doing entirely new maps for every single mission, worth the effort, but maps take a lot of time to make high quality. Luckily, I had a lot of experience with the Morrowind map editor, and the City of Heroes map editor is not too different.
Well maps, and the feature creep was unreal, any cool idea that came up basically got thrown in... Mission 5's ripples could've been it's own TF honestly, Piecemeal did such great work on those. The final result was like x10 the size of the original design draft, but I did it with a lot of help from the rest of the development team on figuring out and implementing ideas.
The Advanced Difficulty mode was created alongside the ASF from the get-go and was originally going to baked into running the content automatically at level 52+, but Number Six decided to make it better and made major improvements to the Challenge Settings system (basically ripped it out by the guts and rewrote the whole thing) that drastically improved controlling variables inside mission content, so we retooled the ASF to use them and fleshed out the system more.
Which later on made making the Advanced Difficulty Imperious Task Force far easier, and it only took me about two months to finish, the majority of which was spent scripting the new Romulus fight and making the hostless Nictus mechanics.
I'm sure we'll do more group content in the future, but all our current efforts are now focused on making Kallisti Wharf into a functioning zone with contacts, mobs, missions, arcs, and more. We've got some real spicy stuff cooking in the oven, though it may be a while, I don't think folks will be disappointed. 😉-
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21 minutes ago, BurtHutt said:
I have been beating the drum about the Devs making tweaks to the AE and the such to have players contribute missions and have them added to the other AE system by Devs. A continuous source of missions at the radio/paper/tip level. Has this been debated by the Dev team or is it not of interest?
We actually created a system in-place to accommodate that idea, but then ran into issues (like half the things we try). Primarily, once converted from an AE arc format to a contact arc format, there would be no easy way to make edits to the arc, meaning if there were bugs or typos found later, it'd be very difficult to fix them.
The other concern was logistics. The raw manpower needed to vet arcs and pick ones worth keeping would take a lot of time, since it involves actively and extensively playing/checking arcs, it's the hurdle that has caused Dev's Choice AE arcs to be an on-and-off affair (even though GMs do those). We're all busy adults and the amount of required extra hours to run the massive number of AE arcs that get submitted for consideration is not a small ask.
On-top of it all, if the AE arcs were being considered as official content additions we'd have to scrutinize them twice as hard, since players can hide things in AE arcs very easily. Worse, it would likely involve them surrendering the rights and source files for their story arcs, and that's not something we're particularly comfortable demanding from folks, but would be needed since we wouldn't want somebody to suddenly demand we remove their content after it was made a permanent contact story arc.
At least with Dev's Choice all we have to do is find their arc in the AE system and add a tag, and the player can remove the content themselves if they don't want it on Homecoming anymore, much less involved.-
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32 minutes ago, BurtHutt said:
I am wondering if you're able to tell us how the Dev team decides on what to add to game?
This is a great question, since it's the one that's often the most difficult for us to explain to players during feedback.
Decisions are often based around a couple factors:- How much is a feature is demanded by the players?
This one we try and balance around the areas of the game we feel need help, that don't have as many options, or feel marginalized even though they're perfectly fine in terms of fun and quality. It's a little vague, but things that help the game be more well-rounded are often things we consider more often. For instance the Advanced Difficulty content was in response to a demand for content that actually challenged players, and then the Aether Rewards were added to meet a demand for more goals to chase after since for veterans, completing a functional maxed character could be done in hours if you had a reserve of resources, as well give us a new way to control incentives as we'd been encountering problems where all content was competing with itself since there was a distinct lack of unique rewards due to accessibility changes. Basically if it's something we know can be done reasonably, and a huge amount of players have wanted it, like Sheathed/Holstered Custom Weapons, it's a lot more likely to get on our radar.
- How much a feature is likely to demand in new tech/code?
This one is harder to explain to players since they're not going to know what on earth we're talking about when we explain the specifics, since often it requires understanding the context of how certain subsystems in this game can or can't talk to each other in specific ways, and often that makes requests that seem 'super easy' to do actually far, FAR more involved than anyone (even us frequently) can imagine. Depending, this can be a more reasonable barrier, other times it's basically an insurmountable barrier. Things dealing with the oldest systems in the game (like sequencers) are often hard walls because they control so much of the game and rewriting them is akin to remaking the game engine. If the demand is going to require rewriting half the game it's obviously not going to happen.
- How much time is a feature going to take to create?
This one is a bit nebulous too, so it often is tough to give answers to it, there are lots of things that are distinctly 'possible' but committing to them could end up as hundred-thousand hour affairs for what seemed like a 'simple' ask. The common one people bring up is giving NPC costume pieces to players, without realizing that without source files (everything in City of Heroes is converted from a sane industry standard format to a dumb Cryptic proprietary format that the game can read) for these models and how they don't attach to player geometry without major gaps as is, as well as often they only exist on single body types, meaning our 3D artist (we only have one on the team) might have to completely remake some models from scratch just so we can player-ize them. If something is cool but is going to take us huge amounts of time for very little relative impact, it becomes harder to justify.
There's other considerations, but those are often the big ones that jump to my head when I'm in the design process...
Unfortunately, even when people participate in design discussions, half the time the answers are usually "Won't, Can't, Shouldn't" for the reasons above.
This game is old and as a result there are tech limitations we just have to work within, making straight requests from players difficult because the answer is usually "It might work, but I'd have to see if it has any issues." or "It definitely won't work with the game's limits.", then when things are "Oh, that'd definitely work." it's usually the third issue that makes the call on it tricky.
If something was in high demand, required no new code, and was very quick to do, I imagine we'd have already done it without anyone having to ask. 😅-
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32 minutes ago, Neiska said:
"Massive?" Leaving aside what different people consider "massive", I would say it's on roughly equal footing with other activities.
Incorrect, and we already provided information on that during Page 4's discussions. Because AE farming is generally done with the three allowed accounts all rewards a farmer gains must be calculated by triple and because of that triple modifier it absolutely eclipses all other content types by a huge margin on a 'how profitable for me is this?'.
+4/x8 speed ITFs came close if we were limiting things to a single account, but because you're only getting x1 reward, AE still wins by a landslide with its x3 with multi-boxing.
If you want to dig through the Page 4 AE feedback thread, the graphs were posted there showing datamined influence income totals.
We're basing our decisions off of data, not speculation. We don't think the AE is making way more money than everything else, we have hard evidence that it does.-
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3 minutes ago, Neiska said:
- No, it isn't. I would put forth "market simulator" is the undisputed king, if sole wealth is your objective. You don't even need to fight things, go on missions to be absurdly wealthy.
That isn't a valid response as the Auction House doesn't generate any rewards itself except for the seeded items that can't be profited from above a certain margin. The AH is simply a way to manipulate items exchanging hands and taking a cut of the profit for yourself to reinvest.
Since the AH does not generate anything by itself, AE is still undisputed king for generating wealth, even if a large portion of it then ends up on the AH for others to profit from. Players have to actually play and put things on the AH for it to function at all.-
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22 minutes ago, MistressOhm said:
the DoubleXP power "bug" can exist for months without anyone actually noticing the math is off.
🤢 Ugh.
That bug was discovered like a few HOURS before Page 4 went to Brainstorm and it was the biggest moment of 'the timing of this discovery could not possibly have been any worse for finding and fixing a bug that impacts AE's rewards' because alongside the other changes, it massively skewed the landscape and perception of the other Page 4 changes and made everything look a lot worse.-
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34 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:
However, this is exactly why I think that a dev blog, or road map, or some kind of post regarding the devs' point of view on the game, on changes, on where they want to go with things, and on eventual goals would be very helpful for at least lessening the amount of forum flamage and vitriol.
You mentioned that some feedback gets ignored because it doesn't challenge the specific reason behind the change. Ok, but many times we don't know the specific reason behind the change. If you want us to respond to the specific reason behind the change then that information is going to have to be spelled out in the OP of the feedback thread, it usually isn't.
I don't disagree, I think better communications should be figured out. I was actually pretty dissatisfied with our overall communication levels in the last few Page updates and hope we can do better moving forward.
In good-faith transparency, the main 'issues' are just a result of volunteer hours, game development, code, and City of Heroes. We have no idea how long anything might take, no idea how much free time we might have to create it, and we have no idea if things we want to make can even work until we've spent time trying.
If I'm being blunt, we often keep quiet because half the time we spend a month trying to get this game's spaghetti code to do what we want, only to hit a roadblock that would involve rewriting half the game's engine and we have to scrap the cool idea entirely.
Things would be far worse if we announced a majorly exciting feature everyone was clamoring for, then later have to announce that it wasn't possible and had to be scrapped.
This is why if you want to be involved in the direction of development, join the testing Discord and participate in the discussions when we're in the design phase. Seriously, we love seeing forum regulars show up, even late in an update's testing! It's not a cool kid club, it's just the communication method we prefer for that phase of creating content and features since it works better than a forum for idea discussion.
Game development is a complex and wily beast, and the main reason by the time it's hit Brainstorm we often can't turn the car around is because the car was built on half a year's worth of coding spaghetti and major changes at that late stage would likely mean dropping the feature entirely from that update.-
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7 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:
With that said then, it becomes hard to claim near/close to professional standards and then make statements that show blanket dismissal of criticisms/feedback that very well may have valid points being given just simply due to someone saying "x is bad and killing the game" at the same time as said valid criticisms/feedback. Plenty of volunteer groups can maintain professionalism btw. Being volunteer doesn't validate a diminishment of professional conduct unless the group chooses to not maintain such professionalism. So, they fact that your team chooses to make that distinction is a shame.
The point is being missed here somewhat... My point was that volunteer work is often a thankless task sometimes, and players often choose to forget that we're doing game development, which is a complex multi-billion dollar industry, for free entirely out of passion because we love City of Heroes.
I didn't say what I did as any kind of 'hostage' situation or 'make me happy or else', and if that's what you're reading you are entirely misinterpreting my point and misunderstand me fundamentally as game developer. I get my satisfaction and reward from doing high-quality work and seeing players enjoy the work I've done for them. If I woke up one day and found that working on the game invited more negativity into my life than positivity, I would just quit, because the only compensation I get for the thousands of hours I've spent adding new features over the years is the joy and positivity it brings into my life.7 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:very well may have valid points being given just simply due to someone saying "x is bad and killing the game" at the same time as said valid criticisms/feedback.
As I said in my post, it does not invalidate the player's concern or dissatisfaction, but reading "x is bad and killing the game" gives me absolutely nothing to work with as a developer.
- Why is X bad? How are we supposed to fix X if you don't tell us why you don't like it.
- How is X killing the game? Again, the implication here are X is doing a lot of damage, but nothing about how or why.
- X was meant to solve Y, what would you do solve Y instead? We felt Y was a big enough concern that we spent time making X to fix it, so simply doing nothing instead is not a valid solution.
So actually, no, it's not as valid as criticisms/feedback at all, because there's absolutely nothing there that helps us improve the game.
Even if they include more later in their post, us expecting feedback to maintain a degree of civility is just a courtesy between people who love City of Heroes, acting like it's unreasonable for us to expect people to be respectful is absurd.7 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:A dev in a different game once said (and I'm paraphrasing), that they well understood that people passionate about a game are the ones who speak up about it, be it angrily or otherwise. To listen to one group's criticism yet to dismiss another because one group's are presented positively and the other's are negative means you're extinguishing some of that passion for the game.
It then contradicts your goals for helping to "refine, improve, iterate" the game when you narrow down and filter only what you're willing to read and listen to.
Being a passionate players has nothing to do with how good they are at providing feedback or whether it is useful to us or not.
"NEW THING AWESOME! I LOVE CITY OF HEROES, HOMECOMING IS THE BEST EVER!"
-is just as useless as feedback to us as-
"NEW THING BAD! HOMECOMING SUCKS! EVERYTHING THEY DO RUINS CITY OF HEROES!"We've asked the GMs moderating feedback threads to remove both types of these responses.
7 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:Next, regarding your statement of "I'll insist you realize we don't ever make ANY changes with an intended goal to make the game WORSE". That's a loaded if not partially disingenuous statement.
No, it's really not. We have never made a change for no other reason than to make the game worse. Ever.
Some changes some player types may dislike, sure, not every change is going to make the game better for every single player unilaterally, that's not possible in any MMO. What I can state with confidence is that every change is aimed in making the overall game better as a whole, we don't nerf things because we like people being angry at us (despite memes), and our players being upset is very draining and disheartening for us, we don't ever take pleasure in it.7 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:All in all, unfortunately like Neiska, I think the chance of mindset changes of the team and what's to meaningfully improve are unlikely except in a worsening divisional direction. That wall is just going to continue to grow.
Entirely depends on the defininition of "meaningfully improved".
Something I saw during the Page 4 discussions, was one poster continually asking:
"Okay so if everyone agreed that we should keep farming as the undisputed best way to get everything in the game, how much better than every other type of content in this game should it be? Should farmers get x2 better rewards than players who don't like farming? x10 better? x1000 times better? What's fair to everyone?"
While I was reading thread at least, nobody ever give that question a real response, which is too bad because I was curious what people's answers would be.
"What's fair to everyone?"
"Meaningful improvement" to us is a City of Heroes that's both fair and accessible to all types of players, no matter what kind of content you like. If making the game more fair to everyone is causing a divide with players who want it to be unbalanced and unfair, than that's unfortunate, because we aren't aiming to cater to that.7 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:What you're actually claiming is that its not worse for -your- team's "vision" for the game and the way -the team- intends for it to be played. Arguably the protracted and entrenched, inch by inch war with and intent to diminish the effectivity of AE farming to the point of discouraging it would be a pretty good example. Notice that if I'd said it was being slowly removed, it would be easily misdirected away by saying "we're not removing it"....
Answer me honestly here:
- Is AE farming still not the uncontested king of all rewards numerically?
- Is AE farming's access to absolutely massive amounts of influence still not a gateway to obtain literally everything else of functional value in this game via the AH?
- Is AE farming still not extremely accessible, with the only type of farming that's been majorly marginalized being AFK farming? (A type of farming we don't support)
If we really wanted to nip AE farming in the butt without fail, we would've just returned it to AE tickets only (like every other CoH server out there as far as I know, and how the retail servers worked for most of its time online) and then washed our hands of the matter.
Instead we've painstakingly spent enormous amounts of time with system revamps and reward adjustments to try and find a better balance, where we can keep AE useful and a valid option without it being problematic by so thoroughly eclipsing the rest of the game and making everyone who doesn't like farming feeling compelled to do so because it's easy to do and far more rewarding than everything else they could spend their time on.
Our reward balance efforts recently were curated around ensuring we could keep the current incarnation of AE farming in the game for those who like it the way it is without reverting to AE tickets only.
That does mean that farmers have to give up some ground so we could find a better balance between the game's content types. The most profitable content type in the game still being the most profitable content type in the game just by slightly smaller margins is a compromise farmers will have to accept, because it's unfair how much damage it was doing to everyone else who didn't like farming feeling heavily pressured to do so because of how much more rewarding it was for their time/effort spent.
Imagine if we made PvP the uncontested best way to get everything in the game, how many farmers feel ill at the prospect of being forced to PvP or feeling like their time spent in the game was completely wasted relatively if they weren't PvPing?
It's all about ensuring everyone can do what they enjoy doing without them feeling like they're not getting fair rewards for it.-
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2 hours ago, Neiska said:
For some of us, we have done just as you prescribed. Something akin to "I enjoy X part of the game. This change damages/reduces/harms that part of the game" and it seemed to go unnoticed or unheard. I am not claiming that it did, but the lack of re-redress or response to such voiced concerns can lead to it be seen as received in the very same manner as your first example of giving feedback.
I can only speak for myself, as each individual developer is different in how they prefer to do things, and some are more willing to weigh in while others prefer to read feedback silently and make their changes based on what they've read. Other times, I 100% intended to respond to a post, but then I got busy during the day, and 14 hours later when I actually have a spare moment I completely forgot I intended to respond. Another side-effect of being volunteers is simply that time gets away from us, since when we can put time into things loves to change on us without warning.
In regards to specific things I was responsible for (Dr. Aeon Strike Force, Advanced Difficulty Modes, Aether Rewards) I have generally weighed in on feedback that warranted it, and have made changes based on the feedback when the points challenged the design goals in a valid way (the Aether costume badges were originally set over twice as high than the numbers they released at for example).Here is some insights, speaking to the players as a whole, in hopes people will approach feedback more constructively if they understand the best methods to make sure that their feedback is valuable to us, and thus more likely to impact development direction.
My recommendations to everyone if you want your feedback to be heard, at least speaking from the context of my own developer experience:
1# - Ensure your feedback is actually challenging the specific reason behind a change
Oftentimes a change is made with a specific reason in mind, take the starter zone AE building removals for example, which we stated in the first couple responses was to improve Atlas Park's zone performance and also ensure new players know how to change city zones before accessing power leveling.
A lot of feedback on that change ended up focusing on tweaking power leveling speeds or AE rewards instead of removing the buildings, which topically related to AE, didn't actually address the original reason why we removed them. As a result, some players who wanted the AE building to stay in Atlas Park felt their feedback was ignored when in actuality it was due to their feedback not actually being related at all to the reason the change was made in the first place. If that feedback had also explained why/how tweaking power leveling speeds would have also fixed the zone performance/new player guidance without needing to remove the buildings it would have been far more usable to us.If somebody can't see the change's reason (speaking for my own projects at least), and they ask respectfully, I am pretty forthright behind a change's intended purpose. But I also miss things, as mentioned before, sometimes I see a post while I'm busy at work and intended to respond, but 14 hours later I have forgotten to come back and do it, but I try my best! That being said, too often unfortunately, after we've stated the design reason, many responses to it devolve into loud/disrespectful variants of "That reasons sucks! I hate it!" instead of more helpful things like "That reason has some major drawbacks. What if we addressed that reason with another approach like this?".
The deeper a feedback thread devolves into an unproductive hate slinging contest (honestly, both sides are often at fault), the less likely we are to spend our very limited time reading responses in it and responding to them ourselves since there are, relative to the volume, less worthwhile responses worth looking for. This is why the GMs will often prune anything deemed non-constructive in those threads because those posts actively damage the potential for that thread to be useful to us.2# - Get involved in testing earlier, not later
There is a Discord server dedicated entirely to testing and discussing upcoming/perspective changes, I won't link it here since it's been linked in plenty of other places on the forums plenty of times, and if anybody asks, somebody will be able to provide a link. It's open-invite and participation is entirely voluntary. If you have a vested interest in the future of Homecoming's development this would be the best way to get involved and have your voice be heard during the earlier stages of the development process where broad direction can be challenged more easily.
To dispel a common rumor: This has nothing to do with 'insider tester' circles that some players seem to pretend exist and everything to do with the fact Discord is just a better communication system than the forums for active in-the-moment brainstorming discussions about future ideas, details, and implementation. Forums have their own uses and we utilize them heavily later in the development process where they are most valuable for finding, fixing, and tracking bugs/issues, but at those later stages of development, massive changes are far less likely to be possible short-term.The only reason that the testing Discord is not more widely promoted is because of how many players previously joined only to get sneak peaks, saw extremely in-flux or experimental changes or discussions, and then complain/spread misinformation based on alpha-level builds of unconfirmed features that could change dramatically or even might not happen at all depending on how things go with this game's messy code.
Both Discord and the forums are very different communication mediums and we leverage both extensively depending on whichever is more effective for the aspects our work at various stages. For example this post you're reading right now will endure and can be referenced easily in the future vs. a Discord message that would certainly be lost. There are always pros and cons to every tool at our disposal.
If you absolutely refuse to use Discord than you are voluntarily putting yourself at a disadvantage in influencing Homecoming's future development direction, but you absolutely cannot say that's any kind of exclusion on Homecoming's part, as Discord is free to download on basically every smart device and the testing Discord is open-invite for anyone with an interest in joining it.3# - Back feedback with testing & specific examples
It is extremely obvious to us as developers when a player provides feedback who obviously did zero in-game testing. We literally created the subject matter of your feedback, there's no possible way to fool us into believing that you thoroughly tested our work when your feedback lacks the tiny details that would 100% be there if you had tested it in-game. Obviously this is sometimes more or less applicable depending on the nature of the change itself, but when I see a good feedback post and it includes specific examples backed by testing evidence it's always feedback I seriously review and consider.
2 hours ago, Neiska said:As usual, the debate became passionate and heated on both sides. But the only comment from any staff member on the topic, was a mocking comment in the discord. Suffice to say, I took that a bit personal.
This kind of behavior is not something Homecoming would ever officially condone and if somebody on our staff was disrespectful towards you, I would strongly urge you to bring it up with a Lead Game Master here on the forums or Discord via a direct message and include the details so we can look into addressing it.
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Not going to overly weigh in on the weekly discussions, since the devs weren't the ones who were responsible for those, but will say something worth mentioning I think in the context of all Homecoming volunteers.
The thing that players should keep in mind (that is specifically applicable to Homecoming) is that we are all unpaid volunteers doing this out of passion for the game, sacrificing our free time and energy to contribute in a sort of 'volunteer budget' that we donate to this game from our personal lives for no compensation, that obviously has to come with an inherent threshold of what we can realistically sacrifice before it begins to negatively impact our personal lives, which we cannot allow as this is an unpaid venture that none of us can afford to prioritize in that way.
If we exceed our 'volunteer budget' and the game begins to take more away than it gives, then in that scenario there are basically only two options available:- We have to adjust how we're managing our volunteer efforts so that the game isn't negatively impacting our personal lives.
- In the worst case scenario, step away from working on the game entirely because it's not worth sacrificing our personal lives for.
When dealing with extremely hostile feedback/player interactions, that very rapidly diminishes the 'volunteer budget' we have available, and between options #1 and #2, we're more likely to go with option #1 which is to just not interact with those players as much, because all of us love this game and we don't want to stop working on it.
Despite Homecoming's extraneous efforts to ensure we run the game at nearly-professional levels and quality standards, everyone should keep in mind we are NOT a professionally paid development team, and having to endure feedback laced with beratement and malice makes many of us stop reading almost immediately.
If anyone feels like they aren't being heard or aren't being listened to, I would ask you reflect on the manner by which you are communicating your feedback to us.I can confidently say that everyone on our development team is very flexible and extremely accommodating to players who are being respectful and provide feedback out of genuine concern for the game's health and we've made many changes based on those kinds of concerns, sometimes even bending over backwards with extreme efforts and redoing huge amounts of work just to accommodate their desires simply because they communicated to us in a respectful manner.
"Change Z is total crap and so is whoever thought that change should've been a thing. If you're trying to kill the game, you're doing a great job."
Something like this is going to be almost immediately ignored by all of us reading through feedback. Not to imply that this player's concern and dissatisfaction is any less valid, but it's unpleasant and draining to deal with this kind of hostile interaction, which hurts that aforementioned 'volunteer budget'. How many volunteer workers are going to continue volunteering if the people they're working for spit in their faces?
Before anybody replies with "Then just don't make bad changes." I'll insist you realize we don't ever make ANY changes with an intended goal to make the game WORSE, if a change we made has negative repercussions, you should express it to us like this:
"Change Z has me concerned because it actually undermines Elements A, B, and C in the game, and that kind of marginalizes the players who really enjoyed those elements, what was the development goal behind Change Z? Can we explore alternative solutions that don't marginalize Elements ABC? What about trying my idea Change Y instead?"
This is the kind of feedback from players we're super happy to accommodate, discuss, and explain why we did what we did and seek alternate solutions for if our first idea isn't hitting the right beats.
Occasionally feedback is missed simply due to it being posted somewhere that we don't check often, but more frequently it gets discarded because the feedback itself is written in a hostile/rude/malicious tone and as unpaid volunteers working for free, we're not obligated to have extended interactions with anybody who's being unnecessarily disrespectful. We're not trying to ruin the game, but if you treat us like we are, that immediately compromises any kind of opportunity for meaningful discussion.
You don't have to agree with our positions on changes, in-fact we welcome people challenging our changes, as it helps us refine, improve, and iterate, but that comes with a baseline expectation of it being a respectful interaction if you're hoping for your feedback to be heard and concerns addressed.-
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52 minutes ago, Daytona Ral said:
option from appearing for the pistols?
Dual Pistols have not been added to the Holstered Weapon System yet; At present, the only power sets weapons that have access to them are Assault Rifles, Arachnos Soldier Assault Rifles, Munitions Mastery Rifles, and Mercenary Mastermind Assault Rifles.
Holstered support for other ranged weapon sets will be added in a future update, as they were more complex to add than anticipated and we weren't able to get them all done for Issue 27, Page 5's release.-
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Fixed on our end. It was a mix-up when Uuralur the Mirror was added; The fix won't be in tomorrow's patch, but will be in the one after.
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11 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:On 10/12/2022 at 6:46 PM, Cobalt Arachne said:
As Six mentioned, the game suffers from an issue where players can reasonably get to maxed out very quickly.
I'm being misquoted to the entirely wrong effect here... Please include my entire post so you aren't misleading people:
QuoteAs Six mentioned, the game suffers from an issue where players can reasonably get to maxed out very quickly. For veterans, new maxed characters can be a done in matter of *hours*, but then these built-out characters have nothing to do and have nothing to work towards.
The issue I'm referring to is that maxed-out Level 50's have nothing to do once they've reached that point. We have no problems with how fast people reach max, it's more that once they've gotten there, there's almost nothing to do with them if you aren't interested in collecting badges. If the new reward system was trying to do anything to address progression, it's doing a terrible job, since aether is used exclusively for vanity cosmetics, which have absolutely nothing to do with character growth.
The recent changes are aimed towards giving maxed out 50 characters some things they can be used towards with regularity that's worth the time, either because you like costumes or you like the influence that people who like costumes will pay for your aether.
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1 hour ago, High_Beam said:
This was a transferred character from Excelsior (Munitions Mistress) Level 43. Female Body Type, Average sliders, eye patch. She has Burst, Slug and M30 Grenade. Use the Mercenary rifle without silencer but tested it with every gun once I saw it. Now this was in iCon because I was doing the costume change and when it went to the next page where it shows the animation, that's where you see it. Conversely I actually never committed the change (because it drove me crazy) so I will have to go home and do so to see if it remains after I leave.
Ah okay, yes, the power previewer doesn't handle the weapons right so that's not unexpected; If you can confirm in the zone when using a power on a target, everything should work properly.
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5 hours ago, High_Beam said:
I am seeing that comment about firing point desync fixes and this testing was done after the very latest patch (Like I tested around 11 PM EST) so either that caused it or it didnt fix it, or dev magic 🙂
Trying to reproduce this, but am not seeing it to on a new Mercenary Mastermind on Brainstorm; Can you provide more details?
Was this a transfer character? What body type? What powersets did they have? -
This can happen when multiple people are trick-or-treating in an area. If they can, Tricks will try to default to the nearest already open door instead of opening a new door, which can lead to multiple tricks worth of mobs all spilling out of that single nearest open door if there is one, instead of spawning from the door that was was actually clicked.
People who've done a lot of motel monster mashing have probably noticed this phenomenon.-
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What Happened to GM Led Weekly Discussions?
in General Discussion
Posted
Which is totally valid; I'll echo my earlier reply, we respect everyone's decisions on what they're comfortable doing with their computers/smart devices, but we use Discord heavily for our development process and have for years, that's unlikely to change, unfortunately.