What Happened to GM Led Weekly Discussions?

[Vanden]

19 minutes ago, Krimson said:

It's been my dream for a while. Especially because it would mean level 50 Primal Clockwork. 🙂

 

...We've had level 50 primal Clockwork since issue 1.

[Nurvus]

I'm just going to dump a few random things that I imagine are possible causes of the drama around here. Gotta burn more bridges I guess.

 

Since this is a very small community, the devs are uncharacteristically close (compared to a retail MMO) to a small group of people. It's to the point where random people will speak for developers. I don't think a staff member even said anything about Faultline's break, it was players. This leads to the appearance that there's an inner circle. How do these players know what's going on with the development team? Leaking info on the inner-workings of the development team just doesn't happen elsewhere. 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.

 

Communication could help *a lot*. I was honestly disappointed that the dev blog about the AE vet level changes was canned due to the pivot to emp merit conversion removal instead. It felt like a cop-out. There was still a valid reason to explain the thought process behind these changes so people don't assume things and freak the duck out. Guess what happened. Writing a blurb about the reasoning behind a change is extremely useful. Here's the gold standard for patch notes: (click the "overview" buttons) https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/jobguide/battle/#battleaction

 

The moderators are doing a poor job. I'm sorry, but if people are harassing developers the moderators should be on top of that. If a player has done nothing but spout vitriol to the point where a staff member is feeling hurt, ban them. That should be a ban-worthy offense. Also, topics need to be shut down before they get derailed. We really don't need half a dozen topics about farming that all devolve into bickering.

 

Maybe the community is just too small with too much overlap for the impartiality required to avoid drama. This is my first player-ran MMO since my days in UO decades ago. I will say that many of those shards were filled with staff favourtism and unprofessionalism. I swore off private servers for the impartiality of retail servers until HC came along. This felt *very* close to a retail game until this last time I checked in on things. Now it's starting to feel like a private server.

[twozerofoxtrot]

7 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Calm posts with precise mathematical models showing why the changes won't work get ignored.

 

This is Bopper.

 

This is literally Bopper, and Burk, and Keen, and Elmyder and all the other number junkies. They are definitely heard when they speak.

 

 

[twozerofoxtrot]

42 minutes ago, Nurvus said:

I don't think a staff member even said anything about Faultline's break, it was players. This leads to the appearance that there's an inner circle.

 

Perceptions aside, Faultline plays on Everlasting under @Faultline. He's pretty easy to find and ask what's going on.

 

BTW Sovera and Shade, who both mentioned his taking a break, also play on Everlasting. 

 

It's not an inner circle when you can chat with a Dev who is open with their game accounts. 

 

 

[PeregrineFalcon]

17 minutes ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

This is Bopper.

 

This is literally Bopper, and Burk, and Keen, and Elmyder and all the other number junkies. They are definitely heard when they speak.

Yes, I know. You do realize that, in that post, I was not talking about the Homecoming forums, right? I was talking about video game forums in general over the past 20 years. Have the Homecoming forums been around for 20 years?

 

You know, as a teenager I never liked it when older people, who had no idea what they were talking about, tried to correct me. Now, 40 years later, when I'm nearly 60, I like it even less.

 

Well, I do hope that you got feel better now that you got your "mom fix." Peace.

[twozerofoxtrot]

33 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Yes, I know. You do realize that, in that post, I was not talking about the Homecoming forums, right?

 

I did and my point was in refutation of yours: that people are conditioned to behave on forums a certain way because it has traditionally gotten them what they want.

[Nurvus]

1 hour ago, CR Americas Angel said:

Most of the beta tests I've been involved in, accross many different games, all tended to use discord. Game Devs in general frequently use Discord to chat directly to playtesters. For the reasons Cobalt outlined above - it's a more useful  channel for testing things quickly than the slow pace of forums.

 

It's not "improper" or "weird" to use Discord for beta testing. It's a regular thing in game development.

 

If this is the case, everywhere else I've played at is much more covert about the arrangement and probably has an NDA or something. I have never seen such a free exchange of development information to the general playerbase by players.

 

Even now it looks like twozerofoxtrot shared something they shouldn't have and you're having to do damage control.

 

**I'm not gonna keep dragging this out so don't worry about that. I've said what I felt needed to be said to maybe improve the situation and I honestly hate being confrontational. This is waaay outside my comfort zone and I'm only being a dick because I think it might be helpful. I don't think I have anything else to say that'll be constructive.

Edited October 27, 2022 by Nurvus

[twozerofoxtrot]

34 minutes ago, CR Americas Angel said:

Different Faultline. Not the dev.

 

My error, then.

[twozerofoxtrot]

1 hour ago, Nurvus said:

Even now it looks like twozerofoxtrot shared something they shouldn't have and you're having to do damage control.

 

 

Wait... does that mean my application to the Homecoming Illuminati was processed?!

 

Woo hoo, Rage Nerfs here we come!

[Nurvus]

11 minutes ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

Wait... does that mean my application to the Homecoming Illuminati was processed?!

 

Woo hoo, Rage Nerfs here we come!

 

I knew I'd regret posting that, but I figure either I'm wrong and look like an ass or correct and it leads to some reflection.

 

I will say that I at least tried to do some due diligence to back it up but it's not 100%. Very fucking sus, but not 100%. At this point I don't really care about the odds though.

[Sovera]

4 hours ago, twozerofoxtrot said:

 

Perceptions aside, Faultline plays on Everlasting under @Faultline. He's pretty easy to find and ask what's going on.

 

BTW Sovera and Shade, who both mentioned his taking a break, also play on Everlasting. 

 

It's not an inner circle when you can chat with a Dev who is open with their game accounts.

 

I'm not part of an inner circle. I don't 'know' Faultline since we have the most bare briefest interaction at the most surface level. But since I'm on that Gold Discord and devs talk a lot more there (so many complaints about code and servers going up in flame when something is tweaked in code) Faultline mentioned the extensive incoming AFK (I don't even know the reason for it).

 

When the forum people noticed and started asking a couple of us did mention to Faultline he ought to say something before rampant rumors spread but he just said he was going to change his signature. That's when I mentioned it on the forums. But it's not secret information. It's just something that came up in banter.

[twozerofoxtrot]

39 minutes ago, Sovera said:

 

I'm not part of an inner circle.

 

Well if it wasn't you, then who approved my Homecoming Illuminati application?!

[Sovera]

Just now, twozerofoxtrot said:

 

Well if it wasn't you, then who approved my Homecoming Illuminati application?!

 

It's a discord bot who uses an algorithm based on social media usage, forum posts, predictive behavior based on toilet paper used per year and a few other conditions. I am not privy on the details but it runs on CoH's spaghetti code so you can imagine the decisions made are not always... hinged.

[Neiska]

7 hours ago, Number Six said:

 

Expanding on this a little, the thing about making money from the AH is that it's a finite resource. Wealth acquired from the market is not generated out of thin air -- it's taken from other players who value convenience and getting things right now more than influence. But there's only so many "lazy players" to make money off of, so the more people who engage in marketeering, the less there is to go around. If everyone were to switch to using the AH to acquire wealth at once, suddenly nobody would be making any at all.

 

So maybe at a particular moment in time it's the best way to make money, but that can change at any time and completely independently of anything we do since it's based entirely on player behavior.

 

Yes, and I understand where that argument is coming from, reducing the amount of money going into the economy. 

 

First I will repeat my earlier question since it seemed to have gone under the radar - are non-money rewards doing non-ae activities, taken into account when balancing the rewards of each activities? Merits, Salvage, Badges, Accolades, Titles, etc? Or was it a strict money gained vs money gained comparison and adjustment?

 

Secondly, I think one thing might have escaped the staff when adjusting different activities - you took a straight 1 vs 1 comparison of an activity and made adjustments accordingly, but what may have escaped your consideration is the number of players doing each activity.

 

As an example (using purely theoretical numbers here) -

1 person farms for an hour and makes 100m Inf,

vs

8 people running ITF's for an hour and each makes 25m, "creating" 200m Inf in total, not counting the other non-money rewards they might accumulate.

 

Now these numbers are entirely theoretical, but I am using them to try and illustrate my point. I would argue, that if you are considering the balancing of rewards per activities, vs the amount of money being created, that the ITF's make more "In total", but not "per player." HC is simultaneously trying to balance both the wealth being "created" as well as the "balance" awarded for doing each activity, but that is a multi-sided problem. There are far more non-farmers than there are farmers.

 

I truly do appreciate the forethought going into protecting the in-game economy from the staff and steps taken to slow inflation. But I think the actions that were taken might have missed a few important factors, such as non-money rewards as well as the number of people who do each activity, as well as for how long.

 

Taking X (money gain in AE) and comparing that against Y (money gain in non-AE) and balancing rewards around that alone, exempts many things as suggested above.

[Bionic_Flea]

Neiska:

 

I am not a dev, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn . . . once . . . before COVID.  Anyway, I think it is fair to say that they did take non-inf rewards into account when they initially removed incarnate XP and Vet rewards from AE and then switched that to remove conversion of Emps to Reward Merits.  Why would they do such a thing?  Well, I think it may have had something to do with your theoretical numbers, but tweaked a bit in the other direction.

 

What happens when one player runs AFK farms of 2 characters on each server all day, everyday, at 100 million per hour?  That would be 2 accounts x 5 servers x 100 million/hour x 24 hours = 24 billion a day, plus drops and previously including a bunch of Emps that could be converted to Reward Merits, which in turn could be converted to inf.

 

The 8 people running the ITF generally spend at least a few minutes before starting to build the team and disband afterwards.  The Mega-AFK farmer can reset quickly all day long or set up a bot to do it for them.

 

I am not accusing you of doing this.  I am stating that I believe some people do this and that level of influence, emp, and merit reward accumulation was game breaking.

[Luminara]

7 hours ago, Nurvus said:

The moderators are doing a poor job.

 

@Cobalt Arachne just explained, very succinctly, that everyone involved with HC is a volunteer.  That includes mods.  This isn't their job, it's what they do when they're finished doing their jobs.  What they do when they could be spending time with their spouses/paramours, their moms and dads, their children, engaging in other hobbies.  What they do when they're not logged into the game, helping players with problems there.  And giving them grief for not babysitting the forums 24/7 isn't going to make them more excited to be mods, magically cause extra hours appear in their days, or bestow presentience on them so they can head off train wrecks before they happen.

 

There are half a dozen or so people trying to maintain order on the forums, at the expense of their own enjoyment of the game, their personal lives, their sanity.  Cut 'em some slack.

[Number Six]

2 hours ago, Neiska said:

but what may have escaped your consideration is the number of players doing each activity.

 

One (but not the only) metric we looked at was the total influence being generated gamewide, which doesn't need to take into account the number of players because it's a global picture of all influence. When that graph showed 80% of all influence being created in a single map (Shiva Fragment), something is out of balance.

[Sovera]

22 minutes ago, Number Six said:

 

One (but not the only) metric we looked at was the total influence being generated gamewide, which doesn't need to take into account the number of players because it's a global picture of all influence. When that graph showed 80% of all influence being created in a single map (Shiva Fragment), something is out of balance.

Eesh. I am goi g to screenshot this and post it on the next righteously angry thread asking the devs why they nerfed farming.

[Astralock]

1 hour ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Neiska:

 

I am not a dev, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn . . . once . . . before COVID.  Anyway, I think it is fair to say that they did take non-inf rewards into account when they initially removed incarnate XP and Vet rewards from AE and then switched that to remove conversion of Emps to Reward Merits.  Why would they do such a thing?  Well, I think it may have had something to do with your theoretical numbers, but tweaked a bit in the other direction.

 

What happens when one player runs AFK farms of 2 characters on each server all day, everyday, at 100 million per hour?  That would be 2 accounts x 5 servers x 100 million/hour x 24 hours = 24 billion a day, plus drops and previously including a bunch of Emps that could be converted to Reward Merits, which in turn could be converted to inf.

 

The 8 people running the ITF generally spend at least a few minutes before starting to build the team and disband afterwards.  The Mega-AFK farmer can reset quickly all day long or set up a bot to do it for them.

 

I am not accusing you of doing this.  I am stating that I believe some people do this and that level of influence, emp, and merit reward accumulation was game breaking.

 

This was the crux of the issue.  Too many people with way too many accounts AFK AE farming.

[Neiska]

1 hour ago, Bionic_Flea said:

Neiska:

 

I am not a dev, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn . . . once . . . before COVID.  Anyway, I think it is fair to say that they did take non-inf rewards into account when they initially removed incarnate XP and Vet rewards from AE and then switched that to remove conversion of Emps to Reward Merits.  Why would they do such a thing?  Well, I think it may have had something to do with your theoretical numbers, but tweaked a bit in the other direction.

 

What happens when one player runs AFK farms of 2 characters on each server all day, everyday, at 100 million per hour?  That would be 2 accounts x 5 servers x 100 million/hour x 24 hours = 24 billion a day, plus drops and previously including a bunch of Emps that could be converted to Reward Merits, which in turn could be converted to inf.

 

The 8 people running the ITF generally spend at least a few minutes before starting to build the team and disband afterwards.  The Mega-AFK farmer can reset quickly all day long or set up a bot to do it for them.

 

I am not accusing you of doing this.  I am stating that I believe some people do this and that level of influence, emp, and merit reward accumulation was game breaking.

 

Oh I agree that it is likely a small part of the community that might be causing issues. And I do know you weren't accusing me of anything but I appreciate the confirmation.

 

I do wonder though if an "farming boot timer" is an option, if its the "mega afk farmers" that's causing the majority of the problems. I have little knowledge in that, but I assume such a boot timer may not be able to tell the difference between keystrokes and/or autocasted powers. I mean, we have boot timers now outside of missions do we not? I do wonder how difficult it might be to tweak it to help with this issue in some way. I can't speak if it would or would not.

 

I mean, even when I 3 box, I have to alt+tab over to them and pilot them at least once a minute, either to help heal, pop a rebuff, use an incarnate power, and tab back. Even my afk'ers arent 100% fully "afk." But I lack the scripting skills to know if a boot timer could tell the difference between that, and by an auto-casted AOE going off every 30 seconds.

 

But that's just me musing.

[Alchemystic]

I find it concerning when a volunteer has to explain that their productivity is affected by negative/hostile remarks, even more so when those remarks continue in the very thread the explanation was given.

[PeregrineFalcon]

I find it concerning that players get constantly attacked by other players on this forum anytime they post anything about the HC staff that isn't complete, undying praise.

 

I understand that some of you completely worship the HC staff. That much is obvious by the way you attack any player who so much as asks a question about anything. But do you really have to keep attacking other players? And why do the mods continue to allow it?

 

Well, I guess we'll never know.

[Doc_Scorpion]

1 hour ago, Tyrannical said:

I find it concerning when a volunteer has to explain that their productivity is affected by negative/hostile remarks, even more so when those remarks continue in the very thread the explanation was given.

Yeah, the problem here isn't the action or inaction of the dev's or mod's.

[Alchemystic]

15 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

I find it concerning that players get constantly attacked by other players on this forum anytime they post anything about the HC staff that isn't complete, undying praise.

 

I understand that some of you completely worship the HC staff. That much is obvious by the way you attack any player who so much as asks a question about anything. But do you really have to keep attacking other players? And why do the mods continue to allow it?

 

Well, I guess we'll never know.

 

Bit of a strawman, don't you think?

 

There's members of the volunteer team who I dont really agree with, but just because I don't go out of my way to attack them like some people doesn't mean I unconditionally idolize them.

[lemming]

This won't be a very well constructed comment <then why comment?>  Three hours sleep and needing to pad some time before I can go home and maybe nap...

 

It does seem like the same people sniping at each other.

 

I used to develop & moderate for a free online game.   It's rough seeing your decisions constantly second guessed and wild ass theories being touted as the reason.  And trying to explain stuff usually didn't have the effect you though it would.  (Heck, the code was open source)  Herding cats is easier.  (I should know, I "work" in cat rescue. Work in quotes, since I don't get paid)

 

I don't agree with all of their decisions, but there's no denying they put a lot of work into HC and they wouldn't do it if they didn't love some aspects of it.