Number Six

That's... now how soul extraction works anymore. The likely cause is that your pets are getting some of the incarnate uberbuffs as well. IIRC one of them makes you completely unaffected by anything. If your pets get that as well, that seems like the likely reason Soul Extraction might fail on them, since it needs to put a buff on the target (your pets) to summon the spectres.

Not to mention the Rikti models use a different sequencer and that causes a number of things to be somewhat glitchy on them. If everybody had access to them we'd get endless questions and support tickets asking why they're broken or in some cases demanding they be fixed. It's unlikely something like that would ever make it out the door in the first place due to quality standards, as fixing them would be an immense undertaking for each weird model.

And there are people who want something to work towards long term. This is for them. These are either completely new things or things that were never accessible in a permanent form outside of getting lucky at Hero-Con. All the free stuff people have been getting for the last 3 years is for the people who want free stuff. There will continue to be more free stuff in the future. These are diametrically opposed desires that different groups want -- neither is going to get everything they want.

Nobody reported it. It was discovered somewhat accidentally when a developer set the AE XP scale on their local box to *0* for a different test (don't freak out, it's not what you might think) and found, much to their surprise, that they were still getting XP. Turned out to be because a booster was active, and investigating that led to discovering that the way the separate XP scale for AE was implemented was completely wrong and boosters stacked additively with it instead of multiplicatively. There was some initial disbelief that it could possibly have been wrong the whole time without anyone noticing, but at that point it was tested on live to confirm and sure enough turned out to be the case.

You mean the new shiny we put in to force everybody to run hard modes can be efficiently acquired by *gasp* FARMING?!?! zomg shut it down! Nerf it, nerf it all!!!!! (yes this is sarcasm why do I have to put a disclaimer on these things?)

Not to be confused with +

Not disdain for people. Disdain for certain behaviors like immediately attacking the forum moderators and assuming they're being totalitarian thugs out to get them. Something I couldn't believe to be the case, though I did verify to make sure. I apologize to Ukase for being harsh. I shouldn't have let it get under my skin. Based on their comments I think they were just being passionate about something as well. I could have taken a moment to let emotions subside, to formulate something more PR-friendly, something more... "corporate". And yes, you're right that there are many, many other things I'd rather be doing with my time. I'm here, because this is important. The community is important to me.

Trying to design by community consensus died with the Rage thread. Go back and read it and tell me what useful information we were supposed to get out of that other than (1) the power is broken, (2) any way that we try to fix it will piss off a different chunk of the player base, (3) so will leaving it alone. Now I don't disagree that we could communicate better. We could use a liaison to talk to the dev team from time to time and try to explain the thinking to people who don't want to hang out in the testing discord (and that's fair, some people ain't got time for that!). Jimmy used to do that, but he doesn't have the free time to devote to it these days. I sometimes try to step in when things get crazy because the yellow name comes with a lot of responsibility, but I'm not much of a people person and to be honest I'd much rather be spending my time optimizing server performance or building a storyarc variable storage system or any one of a dozen coding projects. So, anyone want to volunteer to be our PR person? I'm serious -- though I imagine we'd probably need to set up a formal recruiting process and jump through some legal hoops which may take time. But something to be thinking about.

@Wild Claw Well that's annoying and unfortunate. Thanks for the tip, I'll talk to Cipher and Telephone about it.

In regards to the 'us versus them' thing, one thing I want to point out is that the closed testing discord grew organically. It wasn't something we originally put together, it was created by players in order to help focus testing on specific items with less distractions than the main discord -- though the link was posted publicly it tended to only attract people serious about it. Over time it because such a useful resource that the devs tended to go there because it was already organized and easy to find groups willing to test early and often incomplete content. They could go there and get feedback with a minimum of drama (not to be confused with only getting positive feedback, that's definitely not the case, but people are good about keeping it civil). And that's not to say they ignore feedback on the forums -- open betas are useful in their own way at different stages in the process. I like to think of it is a process where any given item has to survive a trial by fire with ever-increasing levels of scrutiny, rather than just throwing things to the wolves on day one. Back on topic, my point is it was so useful and well-run that some of the players and frequent beta testers who put it together are now devs themselves and creating that content. They put in the effort to make it happen and went from everyday player to tester to so-called in-group to developer. If that's not community involvement I don't know what is. So when I say 'there is only Zuul' I'm not just being flippant. There isn't an us and a them, there's only an 'us'. What role people want to play in that is up to their individual decisions. I know not everyone will like that or agree with it -- nothing is perfect -- but it's a system that has worked reasonably well and allowed the content development pipeline to get off the ground.

We've already had some internal conversations about that, and while a final decision hasn't been made (and probably wouldn't be implemented until the next beta go-round), one idea that seemed to get a lot of support was to split the beta forums into two entire forum sections: a "Focused Feedback" section for the FF threads with strict rules about directed feedback for the devs on a particular change to make it easy for them to peruse, and a "General Beta Feedback" section for people to express general feelings and have community discussions and conversations without needing as heavy moderation. The latter section would be a good thing to have since the patch notes tend to be locked to make them easier to find/read and we don't really have a good place for that kind of thing other than directing people to the General sections, which isn't really a good place for it and isn't intuitive.

Thank you, I appreciate that. It looks like it hid the entire thread. Not sure if that's a behavior we want to have enabled since sometimes these things sometimes turn into community-wide discussion spaces, but it looks like the default settings allow the thread creator to nuke the whole thing. It is hidden and not deleted, so it could be unhidden, but I don't want to unilaterally do that unless @Troo wants it to be resurrected.

There is no us. There is no them. There is only Zuul.

I checked the moderation logs. It was not hidden by a GM. The OP deleted their own thread and it took all the replies with it. But way to go assuming the worst. This is exactly why the initial testing stages are done with an opt-in group. Developers have enough demands on their time and don't need to have to deal with this crap too. This is why we can't have nice things.

Eat Arby's. https://twitter.com/nihilist_arbys

Aside from testing whether or not the mechanics work properly... does it improve the flow of power selection when leveling? Does it make the experience at low-medium levels better, worse? Does it make you completely overpowered at those levels or is it balanced out by lack of slots and fighting for power picks with pools and other options? Subjective feedback is absolutely fine for something like this, just without all the back-and-forth.

I've said it before, I'll say it again. If you want to leave feedback, positive or negative, then just leave feedback. Go straight to the point so that we see it clearly. Rule 5, people. Commenting on other people's feedback and getting into arguments and hurtling insults at each other over it just wastes everybody's time. We've asked the GMs to show no mercy on the feedback threads this round because it's becoming a recurring problem.

Oh did you mean the release date in THIS universe?

I'm not going to get into moderation decisions because that's a GM thing; I don't tell them how to moderate and they don't tell me how to code. If you want my advice on how to not get your posts in feedback threads hidden -- the #1 thing you can do to avoid it is don't argue with other players. Or if you're going to argue, put it in a separate post from your feedback so that when it inevitably gets removed it doesn't take the rest of your feedback with it. But seriously just don't. There's no point to it. Maybe there's some idiot who drives you up the wall because of how utterly wrong they are. Maybe somebody is replying to everything you say with "diD YOu tEsT iT?" and it's making you crazy. Devs aren't going to choose to listen to your feedback over theirs based on how utterly you destroy them on the forums. Quite the opposite. Ignore what other people are saying, it doesn't matter. Make your point clearly and succinctly. Solid reasoning and data to back it up (if you have it) are better than feels. Tune out the noise instead of adding to it.

Fixed in development, thanks!

If you have Super CoolNameGuy and he hasn't been logged on in over a year and you see the warning, you don't immediately lose the name. You may never lose the name. What happens is that if somebody else comes along and tries to create a character name Super CoolNameGuy, that character gets created and yours is renamed to Super CoolNameGuy1. But somebody may not come along and try to create a character, in which case the name is still yours, and if you happen to log him back in at some point it resets the time and makes it so nobody can take the name. Also important to note that the feature, by design, only works for creating new characters. If somebody tries to rename their existing Baddie McVillain to Super CoolNameGuy, the rename will fail, even if yours is past the time limit. They have to actually go through the trouble of creating a new character and maybe deleting it after.

But you're buying converters. Or, alternatively, you're not selling converters and missing out on the inf that you would otherwise have -- the opportunity cost is roughly the same. Since converters can be bought for inf, out of control inflation driving up converter costs would affect you either directly or indirectly. I know of a number of people with loads of wealth who stockpile that wealth in the form of stored converters rather than inf because it's easier to manage. That's one of the reasons I view suggestions to reduce availability of converters, which would just happen to make the value of all those stored converters skyrocket, with a bit of skepticism. Watching how much inf is generated, destroyed, stored, etc. It's not affecting market prices currently because the market is actually quite heavily regulated and a number of prices depend solely on the number of conversions it takes to get there. A bit of a contraction / correction is not unexpected as the market adjusts to the page 4 changes. Nope, that's not one of the methods we use. It's all on the supply side.

One thing worth pointing out is that the majority of the activities that let people earn inf from the market are also activities that provide value to other players. The most obvious one is taking recipes and crafting them. It can be tedious to gather up the various salvage -- precrafted enhancements are much more convenient and some people are happy to pay a premium for that. Converting is the big one and the driver of much of the in-game economy nowadays. Since converters are tradable now they have their own inherent value, but people converting in bulk also save other players the time of doing it, and absorb the risk of playing converter roulette, averaging it out for more consistent pricing. Even the much maligned flipping does have value -- one of the main reasons things can be flipped are fluctuations in price over time arising from inconsistent supply*. Flippers get a bad rap but do help smooth out supply and make sure that items are available during times of high demand when they might otherwise completely sell out. * Price also fluctuate because the AH's terrible UI makes it hard for players to know what something is worth. Ideally I want to fix that and make more information readily available, but the whole data backend needs to be ripped out and replaced with something more sensible before that can happen. There are some more aggressive ways to corner parts of the market that are more dubious, but they're a much smaller segment.

Some things in the game are fixed price (SOs, costume changes, etc), while others fluctuate based on market demand. Merit costs are a price ceiling, the market value of something like a rare recipe will always be less than the equivalent value in merits -- if it ever got higher someone would take the opportunity to make some cash by flipping from the NPC vendor. Crafting costs are basically a fixed cost and are added on to the recipe value when pricing enhancements, plus some margin. The source of inf is important because the value of those items is based on supply & demand -- i.e. how much is someone willing to pay for it? The more inf people have, the more they're willing to pay, driving up the price. Prices increasing because of more currency being in circulation is the basic concept of inflation. Think of it this way, if everyone got their inf through the market, eventually people's supplies of inf would start shrinking because no more is being added to the game and transaction fees slowly whittle away at what they have. Having less inf on hand means people are less willing to pay high prices. Crafters/converters have to lower their asking price or they can't sell anything. Eventually there is a floor below which people can't make inf from the market anymore and aren't willing to go through the trouble to sell, and the market collapses. Keeping inflation in check has been a priority for us since HC started. I'm sure some of you remember the runaway inflation on the retail servers that led to things like certain PVP enhancements having a value of more than 2 billion and having to be traded off-market, or purple recipes selling for 500m+. As it's a game and currency is being constantly created and destroyed, we can do things like tweak supply through drop rates or add inf sinks. We can even aim for a deflationary policy at times, which would be insane in real-world economics but since our target is equilibrium rather than constant growth it works. There is definitely some inflation in HC but overall I'm satisfied we're in a much better place than retail was, as the economy is reasonably stable and we still have levers that can be pulled if things start to get out of control. So when I talk about which activities generate inf or destroy inf, it isn't so much about how individual players fund their builds as it is about keeping the overall economy healthy and functioning at a level that is actually useful to players. I know some people hate the market and that's fine; for those who don't it gives them the ability to quickly get the items they want at lower prices than if it didn't exist and they had to use merits for everything.