Ruin Mage

You're both pretty.

The Illuminati!?

Look at it from their perspective for a second. Someone makes a new thread accusing the potential of dev tomfoolery when in fact it was the thread owner nuking the thread for...whatever reason. After what's gone down in that now-hidden thread? I'd get a bit snippy too. Especially if a small number of players keep trying to push that the devs are silencing people. Unless you are now pushing that one shouldn't get irate at being baselessly accused of censorship.

Not everyone who donates jumps immedietely to "DEVS EVIL!"

If I could find the gif that comes to mind... I volunteer as tribute, as said in the Hunger Games.

40 pages of weeping/gnashing? Well, no. Because I, to be blunt, don't care for the idea of "deserve" and "must" know information on a private server run by people that aren't me. What one has done in the past in regards to subscribing, pouring hours in, and so forth does not mean we have to know everything. This is not live and this isn't Paragon Studios. The fact of the matter is that this is the Dev's show, and that's that. The luck is in that they do want to cultivate a community of some unknowable size. That they sometimes strike gold with what people want is just a cherry on top. I myself poured hours into the game both live and HC. I do not believe this to be my game. Perhaps that's where we differ. I'm more realistic in my views - I know that at any minute the game can go down and that's that. The power remains in other's hands that aren't my own if push came to shove. At any minute I could be banned and that would be that. Sure, I'd wonder what I did but I'd accept it. It's part of being an adult, or so I feel at least. Hush-hush closed beta is the best way to go about it. You do not want to cause more havoc by retracting a potential change because it just wasn't working. That is what part of the Alpha/Closed Beta is for. Hell, things in Brainstorm have been walked back but not in comparison to what has gone through. The secrecy works like anything with an Alpha Test or an NDA. It's just enforced through having your access revoked or through them further shutting out the means of access. The latter is an extreme I don't think ever will happen, but even the .1% risk is there - that if people pushed it, they would have to find some way to keep things in this method. We have earned nothing & we are owed nothing - plain and simple. This is how all private servers for any game work. I've been around a lot of private servers for World of Warcraft - they can shut down at the owner's whims and development/balance is at the dev team's whims. This is how it generally works, and that is a standard that is matched by the current open-ness of the Dev Team. I will reiterate that it would be nice to see more, but I am not going to throw up a manifesto on how we should do it. That, in my eyes, is entitlement and arrogance in the same. They steer the wheel because they are the ones in charge. They are the ones with a pipeline, and it is on them on if they wish to share it. If they do not wish to share a roadmap, pipeline, or general ideas for where HC will go? So be it. That doesn't bother me at all, because my enjoyment doesn't come from peering under the hood. I am personally in the Closed Beta to help test new content - until some power change comes that affects me (Katana, Willpower, Dark Melee, Shield Defense, Bio Armor, Energy Melee, Fire Blast, and Dark Miasma) and that's fine by me. What's broken about this method we have besides some supposed "earned right" to see more? I do not consider the backlash over Vet Levels/Emp Merits to be good evidence for that. All that told me is that they were taking up a risky change one way or another. Risky changes without consulting the community are a dime a dozen, because no one in majority believes that one's activity entitles or earns them any more right than a less active player. The idea that one has earned any extra right because they played the game more creates an us vs them situation. We are all equally gamers of a game we enjoy, but just because we play does not mean we are to thank for anything. I for one am just here to see what vision the devs put forth, and in conversations (open conversations in the Discord I linked) I am plenty happy with what's to come or what they have potentially brewing. But hush is the word of the day, and that is one I can follow.

I'd love to see that amount of agency removed, but then the fires it'd create would not be nice. Choices choices.

god damnit i fell for a trap. curse you.

I disagree with the bolded. I don't think bogging development down with "Here's what we are thinking", when it's entirely their show, is the way to go - it's simply not a guarentee that what they're thinking will make it past Alpha/Closed Beta. Things do get scrapped, and it would create a false hope if what they're thinking aligned with people's wants...only for it to be scrapped for reasons. The way we have things isn't broken, so why change it?

https://discord.gg/DptUBzh This is the Gold Standard Tester Discord. It is an unofficial-official Discord that serves as the place for the Alpha / "Closed Beta" section of testing. It also allows for those who WISH to test to engage with the Devs in a better format than the forums, but that's personal opinion. Either way, the point of me dropping the invite is this: Any one of you can help test the changes that MAY be coming or may just be experiments. What sort of stuff is coming is left into that Discord until it hits Brainstorm - where it is considered Open Beta. There are 20+ people on average testing each page or experimental changes. It would be nice for that to grow! However, as N6 has said in other threads, the process is opt-in. It's entirely optional if you want to test these things before the wider audience gets their hands on them. So it is on you at this point to join up or not. Reposting since Troll Troo hid his thread which had the invite link.

I believe Shield was/is intended to get sheathing options, but its not easy. One day, maybe.

Give me a knife reaction instead and I'll agree to this idea.

None of the Incarnate arcs are terribly hard. Belladonna, Number Six (hey wait a minute...), and now Valeria - they're not particularly hard, and aren't meant to be IMO.

There is no wrong kind of player. What has happened is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an attempt to drive farmers out. Has fire farming been made harder? Sure, but where there is a will there is a way. Player opinion aside, and I'll admit folks can be vitriolic in expressing their distaste for fire farming being there, it's not a thing that the fire farmers are in the wrong. Fire farming is just ludicrously the best way to "progress" in the game, and things needed to be dialed back. Does the fire sword change affect farmers? Sure, but that's the product of fire being the thing to farm. Anything done to Fiery Melee is going to, fortunately or unfortunately, affect fire farmers. Adjustment isn't a bad thing to ask for. I really doubt (and I can be proven wrong) that the intent of devs or players that ask people to test is to drive people away. Do the people asking it or expressing it come off like that? I can see it. People can get very defensive and passionate on all sides, and it can lead to more pushy sounding wording/opinion. Though I do know some people whose opinion is "burn it to the ground." in regards to the AE/Fire farming so I can see how that opinion (that there are "wrong" players) might form. No one doing testing has been shouted down as far as I've seen. What has happened in the past is Patch Note Reactors taking a single change or a single note and losing their mind. The best case example of this would remain the Attack Type Changes. People went mental that something was changing, and rather than testing it? They kept calling it a waste of time or a shit change. They did not express what wasn't working, they didn't express any bugs with the changes, and they most certainly didn't give evidence of them having tested it. Those are the people that make Betas a little more mind-boggling. It's not that disagreeing gets you shut down, but the lack of testing that gets side-eyed. What tends to happen, and I'm guilty of it in the past, is that people will try to challenge someone else's feedback even if they've tested it. That shouldn't be happening. If you test it and can provide that you have (i.e comparing Beta vs Live in feeling/numbers for power changes as an example) then realistically you should still be heard. Obviously all of that is semantics when some forum posters fall into challenging feedback despite the guidelines saying otherwise.

While I would love for more badges to be account-wide, I agree with Greycat.

I initially made somewhere close to 10bil selling mine on the first week. But not anymore.

I believe the stance is that they have to be able to make it fit across all 3 body types now, no longer anything exclusive. I may be wrong. Maybe there can be exclusives.

you wanna fight, mister? But for real - I would prefer a world where people didn't dredge up talk about cabals, inner circles, or a small group deciding the state of the game. I would love to be able to not multi-paragraph a post about how Industry Standards don't apply to private servers where the only money involved is donations. I would love to not have to contest with people that donations do not entitle someone to more of a say than anyone else, or something similar. I would love to be able to go to the forums and not see someone hit their keyboard about how the devs want to drive people off. Until that time comes, however, I will remain. I would absolutely love, as Captain of the Defense League, to see my posts hidden. Not deleted, but hidden - as per Faultline and other developers. I can't speak for the rest of my team on the Defense League, but if the world were a better place we wouldn't have to exist. I would love to hang up my hat as a forum cop, but so long as people pull out "The devs want to kill the population." tier takes? I shall exist. Now it's up to you to figure where I was shitposting and where I was being genuine in that.

Thank you for my new signature in a few months.

You're welcome, forum person.

Well, I did say Page 4 and not Page 5. Page 5 has been tame in comparison.

I guess I am one of the Council members then. I know very well that you're not the only one who believes the developers only listen to a select group. I just tend to play ball with them a little too hard when I engage.

brb spawning ten lanaruus on top of miss liberty.

Anyone can become an alpha tester, that's the thing. It isn't a closed group. We're getting about 2, 000 people as a general max across all shards combined. That's not a lot of people compared to the 100k+ games that probably have way more room to cycle out testers. If it was a better set-up and better environment to changing who tests and who doesn't, I'd find myself more along the lines of agreeing with you potentially. There is no real inner circle. Otherwise the Gold Standard discord (which has 200+ people in it, mind you) wouldn't be as large as it is. Does everyone in it give their feedback or test things out? Absolutely not. They all have the same opportunity to - closed beta being more like an Alpha Testing that has a minor "Don't share this outside the Discord, things can get dropped/changed." caveat. I know its popular to call out some inner cabal, circle, or Illuminati-esque set-up but there isn't. It's literally just average joes like me who give our feedback and try to either get a change to be better or express through experience why the change may need more work. If they didn't want people's thoughts/views, there wouldn't be any form of Beta. I genuinely don't understand where the idea comes from that they don't want anyone's input except some inner circle's input. I don't think an inner circle is triple digits in size, but I am willing to accept being wrong. My whole thing is this: Anyone can test these changes. Anyone. You only need to join the Discord and request access + agree with the caveat that Alpha things cannot be shared in publicly accessible Discords (like HC's) or forums (HC's forums). I could list off a number of people well beyond ten or twenty who have had some form of feedback/input, but I don't quite know if that'd be convincing?

If only that worked in this setting. The closed beta isn't a "you must be invited" sort of deal like it is with other studio-backed games. Otherwise the discord with the channel for access wouldn't exist. You still need to go through a hoop. However, the fact it doesn't swap out testers is not a detriment. Not in this case - for what Homecoming is, it is better that people familiar with what HC is looking for get their hands on the changes. Knowing these things allows testers like myself, Veracor, America's Angel, and many more to offer our different perspectives - through either experiencing them or through experiencing them and comparing them to Live. Or both. Comparing it to real world companies such as Bungie, Blizzard, Ubisoft, or others is disingenous to the fact those have way more manpower and way more time to dedicate to their games. This has a dev team with small but coordinated teams within the dev team. You have maybe two or three devs for content, two or three for powers, and then floating devs who do things that don't have a team - like LUA coding or making base objects. Where as an actual company will have 10+ people per section, several meetings to discuss the game, investors to answer to, and more. You can't make a good comparison between HC and those. Bias is a weird thing to bring up. We all have our biases even in testing. We all have our own views of how the game should be. What we want to see. All we can really do is outmatch bias with hard evidence of testing and looking into numbers. Numbers which are accessible by stuff like City of Data. Mids. Playing the game and checking combat logs. Making comparisons. Patch Note Reactors can't do that and generally don't have the foresight to make the evidence-backed comparisons that is sought after. Don't get me wrong: If all you can do or are willing to do is read patch notes and react? Cool. Do that. Don't expect your feedback to be weighed as equal to those actually testing and giving posts based on their experience. That is how things work. Say for example they change Dark Melee or Shield Defense. I cannot expect them to take my feedback into the equation of those changes without me testing and comparing Brainstorm to Live. If I don't do that, then my feedback means nothing. If I am going off the patch notes only, then I am being unfair to the developers and to other players if I go and say 'this change is bad'.