Number Six

We've literally said multiple times that's not the case, and bent over backwards to make the Prismatic Aether system and hard-mode rewards purely cosmetic items to show off with and not affect gameplay at all. Even after the 'nerfs' to get things a bit more even-keel, AE powerleveling is still faster than it was on retail and drops sellable items instead of tickets, merit costs are an order of magnitude lower, there's perma double XP available, market prices are way, way lower than they ever were and you can purple out characters for a fraction of what it would have taken. You get Incarnates for basically free -- tier 4s even! -- for doing other content, rendering iTrials mostly obsolete. Sure, I've said before I think it should have been tier 3s at most through that system, but we have no plans to change it. Other servers joke and say that HC is "easy mode" and comprised of nothing but people who farm all the time, and while I disagree with their perception and think it's not as extreme as some seem to think, it's definitely quite a bit less grindy than when people were paying monthly subs or being pushed into the cash shop. I mean if that was really our intent and all we've managed to do in that direction is add some costume change powers, then we're really bad at it. If you still don't believe it and think we're out to destroy everything out of spite or whatever, I don't think there's anything any of us can say that will make a difference.

I have some old numbers from back in August. As of 21 days after Page 4 dropped and added them to the game, a total of 71,566 aether had been generated. 21,270 had been spent and there was 31,477 spread across a number of characters and on the market. I assume the other 18,819 was in SG base storage or email or otherwise squirreled away somewhere. At that time, 7 characters across 6 different accounts had >1200 aether on them (1200 was going to be the price point for baby mode before it was lowered to 250 and the tier 4s added). I don't have current numbers readily available, but after another 2 months and with the Halloween badges now rewarding up to 10 per character, I can only suppose there's a lot more in circulation.

I checked the I24 data and that +100% ToHit is present there as well, so don't blame us for that one! You can blame us for the autohit special damage, which IIRC was changed to be autohit so that you had to actually get Ambrosia and couldn't cheese it with stacked Barrier. Though with that +100% ToHit buff unless you've got a team with you anyway it might as well have been autohit...

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.