What Happened to GM Led Weekly Discussions?

[Cobalt Arachne]

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.

[MistressOhm]

9 minutes ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

players who want it to be unbalanced and unfair

 

This of course is where a lot of the "nerfed!" hoorah is coming from, because people got used to certain things being 'unbalanced' and 'unfair' for so long that it became normalized.  Then when it's addressed, the ZOMG! chorus occurs. 

 

Another casualty of a volunteer dev team - you don't have a huge cadre of QA testers who can be assigned to testing specific things, producing data to be analyzed, and so forth, and so things like the DoubleXP power "bug" can exist for months without anyone actually noticing the math is off.  

[Cobalt Arachne]

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.

[Neiska]

11 minutes ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

 

---

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)

 

 

Your first question -

- 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. I also submit that is likely the least enjoyed playstyle. But what farmers earn per hour is chump change compared to what some of those market-players do. One acquaintance of mine manages 3 accounts with auctions on each one. If she isn't selling 100+ purples a day, she considers it a slow day.

 

Here is a picture she once sent me as an example of what one of her accounts looks like -

 

Your second question -

- "Massive?" Leaving aside what different people consider "massive", I would say it's on roughly equal footing with other activities. It can very greatly. The biggest impact is "how" one farms, and for how long. If you passively afk farm on one account? No, that is actually a pretty slow way to earn money now. Actively farming? Varies with speed. I think a big part of the contention with the AE changes specifically is that the change affected all kinds of farming, when not all of them were equal to begin with. Small concern to the non-farmers I expect, but to the farming community it was a pretty big change depending on what worked, and what now did not.

 

But I would like to add that from the farmers point of view, the non-farmers were compensated in other ways - Badges, Titles, Accolades, even random guaranteed incarnate salvage, merits, things you can't "buy" with mere INF. To the farmers, that was the compensation for non-AE activities. But now, non-farming gets all that, along with equal money, and the new cosmetic salvage as well. So if you are talking about options and rewards, the non-farming is now rewarded more than farming, and already was to begin with in all ways of different player rewards "except" inf.

 

Your third question - 

- Still accessible? Yes. But it feels like all the different farmers were put into the same pile. Take my example, I enjoy 3 boxing MMs to farm. The AI change made the farms faster, but the changes made it more difficult. I have yet to try now with the recent MM changes. Now even though I "active" farm, my "afk" farmers were still penalized, despite "playing" an active character.

 

My personal addition -

Ironically, in an effort to balance the different actives, to some you made farming more necessary, not less necessary. Again, using myself as an example, my main enjoyment comes from making alts, leveling them up, kitting them out, and taking them for a spin. So usually, I have 2 farmers with one alt getting leveled. Now before, I might make 250k or so when that alt reached 50. A good jump on getting fully slotted.  So I usually planned to spend about 400k on a new alt, as 650k is a good ballpark average figure for enhancement cost. Some are more, others are less. However, now I make less money, and it takes more time. So now I have to spend roughly 1/3rd longer time to level that alt to 50, while at the same time, earning less money to do so. So in effect, I now need to farm even more just to take a character I wanted to try for a spin. 

 

Now for people like myself who enjoy that sort of activity the most, I am not "encouraged" to do non-AE things. In fact, due to the conversations on the forums, I am inclined to team with randoms, offer free spots on my farms, and run ITF's even less. Which I suspect is the opposite intended result. Before I might have volunteered to help out, or play healer, or whatever a team needed. Now with it suddenly taking almost an entire day longer to enjoy my own activities, I have less free "hobby time" to do random things on impulse.

 

And I don't mind saying that when the EMP merits were talked about getting removed, well that made my heart leap into my throat, as that is more or less the only way I can earn Incarnate powers. And as a pretext to those who say "but you don't need incarnate powers" then I would encourage those people to try playing an MM at +4/8 difficulty without the pet level shift. It isn't fun at all. So I would argue that there is a "need" for incarnate powers in any 50 content.

 

This has been my personal experience thus far. I don't make any claim to speak for anyone but myself. Only hoping to answer some questions and hope it might help in some way.

 

 

[Cobalt Arachne]

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.

[Cobalt Arachne]

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.

[BurtHutt]

@Cobalt Arachne, thanks for replying here and giving us some info on why things happen the way they do. I am wondering if you're able to tell us how the Dev team decides on what to add to game? 

[Neiska]

2 minutes ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

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.

 

But your question didn't say anything about generation, only if it was the undisputed best method numerically? If you measure it as inf gained (by the player) per time doing X activity, then roleplaying as a market NPC is the way to go, if a player wants to get rich. I would also submit that farmers like myself suffer from alt-itis, so while we might "create" a lot of inf into a market, we are also likely the biggest consumers of it as well. Though (again personally here) with it taking more time and earning less, it is less incentive to have fun experimenting with new powers, alts, and builds than before. But I wouldn't be surprised if was the same for others.

[Doc_Scorpion]

1 hour 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.

I suspect that if you made a Venn diagram of the circles "people who make bombastic and hyperbole laden statements" and "who also then give actual reasonable criticism/feedback in the same post", the overlap would be thinner than the lines defining the circle.

That being said, the take home here is easy - if you want to be taken seriously, act like you want to be taken seriously.

[Neiska]

3 minutes ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

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.

 

But that is only "money." Non-AE activities can earn many things that isn't "money." And I didn't see a single whiff of conversation about that. I would consider guaranteed epic salvage, merits, badges, titles, accolades, all those things you can't just buy as "rewards" as well. But AE gets none of those things, and I am not saying that they in any way should. Only that they should be considered when calculating different rewards for different activities, and I don't think that they were, but they should have been. If you wanted all activities to be "roughly equal."

 

I am not saying that AE needs to be boosted back, or even that non-AE needs to be reduced. I am just suggesting that the non-money rewards were not considered during all this fine-tuning of different activities rewards. 

[MoonSheep]

2 hours ago, Sanguinesun said:

 

First off, thank you for your post helping to give further insight into the state of the dev team, reps etc's collective mindset since you're seeming to speak for all of them. As well thank you for validating that there are issues between devs and players that exist that players have been expressing in various forms for a long time now. 

 

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, the fact that you state your team chooses to make that distinction is a shame.

 

Arguably that's helped groom the state of things now that have prompted your post to a certain extent: a growing distrust and animosity between players and devs due to the disjunction between both and with decisions made. 

 

Again, you've essentially admitted to as much with your post that, -Yes- there is a wall.  Everyone has known this on both sides of the fence for a long while now.  But understand that construction started with your team's decisions and has been growing and thickening in a vicious circle of reaction from both sides.   I'd say your whole post reflects that and relations between both sides will continue to grow worse as long as this mindset continues.

 

 

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. 

 

So when your calling upon then specifically and only for players to break that vicious circle in part with this point on criticism/feedback by holding hostage transparency and community interaction punitively, that's just reinforcing the wall and strengthening the vicious cycle of conflict.

 

That's how epistemic bubble development starts to become a thing with a team. And so, given your post, it seems compelling (and as evidenced over the years as it grows) that this situation -will- worsen.  

 

That's a shame.

 

Regarding too how you say devs respond to criticisms/feedback at the end of your post is also not quite that either... as Neiska additionally and anecdotally pointed out from their experiences.  Looking back over the threads in the beta forum section regarding feedback given (and Im not going to discuss the whole philotic to saying  _NOPE_ and quitting either), can people find evidence there where folks attempted to give what you consider positively framed criticisms/feedback that wasn't addressed, explained, discussed or are the citable examples where responses (or more aptly lack of them) to the contrary?  

 

 

 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.   3 years of forums discussions where the definition of "WORSE" depends on which side of the fence (and multiple fences too both on your dev team and with players) that perspective is coming from would seemingly throw that into question.  

 

So I think you can't make that claim with such confidence(well you are but I'm saying you shouldn't), because changes the team enacts, knowing full well it -does- intentionally diminishes play that other players have enjoyed/experienced for years, -is- from those players' perspectives worse.    

 

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"....

 

All that also loops back into(if not exemplifies) what I was saying concerning epistemic bubble development too.

 

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. 

 

Again, that's a shame.   

 

sounds like you need to run your own server and show us all how its done mate, looking forward to seeing it 

[Cobalt Arachne]

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. 😅

[BurtHutt]

@Cobalt Arachne, thanks for that news. That's awesome to hear and I appreciate your time here. 

 

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?

 

I know it would require work to make the AE changes on the front end but might be worth it. IMO, this would be a massive game changer - for the better.

[Cobalt Arachne]

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.

[Xiddo]

Thanks for replying @Cobalt Arachne. This is really appreciated and I hope it gives some players, who wanted to hear from the team, and the devs hope that we can talk more if people are willing to remember that everyone here is just a person who loves this creaky old game.

Really interesting to hear about the set-up, can’t believe there’s only one 3D artist!

 
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?

[Cobalt Arachne]

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. 😉

[golstat2003]

1 hour ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

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.

 

Thanks I missed those graphs and that data the first time it was posted. But glad to see that decisons ARE in fact being made based on hard data, not what the devs "feel" or "like".

[golstat2003]

1 hour ago, Neiska said:

 

But that is only "money." Non-AE activities can earn many things that isn't "money." And I didn't see a single whiff of conversation about that. I would consider guaranteed epic salvage, merits, badges, titles, accolades, all those things you can't just buy as "rewards" as well. But AE gets none of those things, and I am not saying that they in any way should. Only that they should be considered when calculating different rewards for different activities, and I don't think that they were, but they should have been. If you wanted all activities to be "roughly equal."

 

I am not saying that AE needs to be boosted back, or even that non-AE needs to be reduced. I am just suggesting that the non-money rewards were not considered during all this fine-tuning of different activities rewards. 

 

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). 

[PeregrineFalcon]

7 minutes ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

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. 😉

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."

 

We know you guys are a small team and that: New Content = (Mountain Dew * Time)/Spaghetti Code.

[Cobalt Arachne]

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.

[Cobalt Arachne]

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. >_>

[golstat2003]

ONE 3D artist!!!??? Good lord. LOL

EDIT: May God have mercy on his or her soul!

Edited October 26, 2022 by golstat2003

[golstat2003]

22 minutes ago, Krimson said:

Please consider having groups of Praetorian Clockwork getting into "scraps" with Primal Clockwork. Please and thank you.

THIS would be cool as hell! One of the most interesting parts of Going Rogue and that universe is the drastic difference between the two types of clockwork. Really showed how much of a crazy alternate reality Praetorian was. 😊

[Glacier Peak]

Dang @Troo you got a good thing going on in this thread. Lots of good feedback from Cobalt and minimal off topic banter - nice work!

[Number Six]

4 hours ago, Cobalt Arachne said:

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.

 

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.