Not a fun post.

[Ukase]

So, I decided I'd had quite enough of the new stuff this morning, and went back to the new alt I'd made just prior to the surprise update. I only need the master run of the new tf (and the advanced mode required one). All in due time. 

So, on my lower character, someone asks the question about why they can't convert 4 uncommon incarnate components into a rare anymore? And 4 rares into a very rare. 

I quickly tab out, look through the patch notes. I saw no mention of this anywhere. I thought..Bug? Nah. Not bug. Further discussion on the help channel reveals it's not in the patch notes but on dev commentary in the HC Discord. 

Apparently, this conversion is still available, but has to be done by Prometheus, the tall bluish guy who gives Avid Reader badge. 

The reasoning is to spare the noobs from the inf sink. Well...I guess I'd have 125M more inf if this change had taken place 6 years ago. 
But, I'm not sure how I feel about being unable to do the conversion in the spot I'm at - as this is generally done prior to some event, and leaving the zone can cost you the opportunity. At best, it can delay things for a team that would prefer you swap one Destiny for another, and you need to convert some of the many drops into the components you need to build it. 

What bugs me is why in a discord dev commentary and not here in these forums? Discord has an awful name. It's a fine tool, but it's not where game change info should be listed. That should be in in the patch notes. What's the point of reading them if the information isn't there? 
I'll use discord to coordinate in game challenges. But going there to get any information about CoH is just not sitting well with me. Now I have to pore over the patch notes, and then pore over Dev Commentary on the Discord? 

Look, nobody's perfect. Least of all me. But this seems like a lack of a policy. Changes to the game should be articulated in the patch notes - not in a dev commentary (until sometime later, I imagine, in a discussion of the why, perhaps) 

I am grateful that the conversion option didn't go away. But I don't care for the inability to do this where I'm at. I'm sure there were other ways to make this change. Why not let the players learn the hard way like I did? I wasn't rolling in it back in 2019. And clearly the lesson took hold, because I still remember it. Now I do it because I have it and it's convenient, and I'd rather not burn the emps. 

I'm sure my take won't be popular. That's fine. Most of my takes aren't. But I don't agree with stealth changes like this. Given the nature of Brainstorm, this is a change I wouldn't have seen unless I was specifically looking for it. Nobody bothered to ask players what they thought. So, that kind of galls me a bit. 

Please, in the future, use the patch notes, with explanations as to why you changed things. The benevolence behind the change can certainly mitigate most misgivings behind it. But the sneaky part of changing it without telling anyone other those few who use discord often enough to surf through it - that's just not sitting well with me. 

[Arbegla]

Seconded for 'Please put everything that changes the game in the patch notes'.

 

The change to Mastermind Primary Powers to have a 'circle' around them isn't documented anywhere in the patch notes, and while it is on the forums, its a change to the game that isn't listed. It was rather confusing trying to figure out what/why this change was made, and it had to be explained by a GM before I knew what was going on. 

[tidge]

I don't use Discord, and I really don't want to ever use Discord. To not copy something posted on Discord also here... seems rather petty.

[Glacier Peak]

17 minutes ago, Ukase said:

What bugs me is why in a discord dev commentary and not here in these forums? 

One may be preferred by the individual over the collective. Just as you prefer using the forums, perhaps members of the Homecoming Team prefer Discord. Both are official platforms of communication for the Homecoming Team.

[lemming]

Yep, that should have been in the patch notes, though I missed that the horribly expensive way to get a rare & very rare was moved to Prometheus.  Last I knew it was gone completely, but I hadn't checked if it was in this update or shelved until later.

 

The reason why it wasn't in the patch notes is not because they're trying to sneak it past people.  It just didn't get in the patch notes.

[madicen]

Changes should ALWAYS be in the patch notes. This patch has a few glaring omissions. Increased difficulty not having increased rewards/xp/inf yet is tucked away in a beta forum post here, but nowhere in the patch notes. 

 

For better or worse game forums are going the way of the dodo. Many new games, AAA mmos even, just forgo it now in favor of Discord. Change is ever present. Whether you choose to avail yourself of how people are choosing to share information is of course up to you, but the only thing that's going to kill off Discord is something better than Discord.

[Snarky]

[arcane]

I agree that the devs sometimes appearing to prioritize discord communication over communication on their own website is weird and annoying at times. There are reasons people don’t want to be on their discord.

Edited yesterday at 06:24 PM by arcane

[DeathMcKillenstein]

Okay, if the combine is now done by Prometheus, where the HELL is the option to do so???

[arcane]

10 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

One may be preferred by the individual over the collective. Just as you prefer using the forums, perhaps members of the Homecoming Team prefer Discord. Both are official platforms of communication for the Homecoming Team.

Perhaps they shouldn’t be on the team if they’re weirdly averse to using all of the appropriate channels.

[Hedgefund]

9 minutes ago, madicen said:

Changes should ALWAYS be in the patch notes. This patch has a few glaring omissions. Increased difficulty not having increased rewards/xp/inf yet is tucked away in a beta forum post here, but nowhere in the patch notes. 

 

For better or worse game forums are going the way of the dodo. Many new games, AAA mmos even, just forgo it now in favor of Discord. Change is ever present. Whether you choose to avail yourself of how people are choosing to share information is of course up to you, but the only thing that's going to kill off Discord is something better than Discord.

The bolded part is infuriating to me.  The higher difficulty options are the first thing listed in the patch notes.  AND IT DOESN'T WORK.  It seems like it's on you, playerbase, to read through each and every beta testing post, not the patch notes themselves to see these details.  

 

In before the "well akshully" - yes, it works in that you can change difficulty to +5 to +7.  I can't imagine the player hours wasted so far by people who just said "oh cool, let's do +5" and didn't even realize they were getting bupkis for their efforts.

 

 

Edited yesterday at 06:33 PM by Hedgefund

[Glacier Peak]

1 minute ago, arcane said:

Perhaps they shouldn’t be on the team if they’re weirdly averse to using all of the appropriate channels.

Both platforms are equally valid choices to use. Just as Ukase and other posters prefer not to use Discord, members of the Homecoming Team can make the same choice.

[Troo]

15 minutes ago, Ukase said:

stealth changes

 

Look at Ukase throwing down.

 

 

Discord = Lazy (I'm not judging, I get that it's easier for some)

Having to convert Discord to Forum takes effort.

 

 

Trusting Discord itself.. well that's another conversation.

"Discord is a popular social media platform for kids and teens but parents should be aware of the risks Discord users face, from malware to cyber bullying."

"most reviewers were let down by their experience overall."

"need to verify by phone number too."

"hot mess"

"leaky security"

"Cybercriminals claim access to 1.8 billion Discord messages through paid scraping service, exposing 35M users to harassment and privacy risks."

"Discord Data Breach Leaks An Unknown Number Of Scanned Photo IDs And More"

[Ukase]

26 minutes ago, lemming said:

The reason why it wasn't in the patch notes is not because they're trying to sneak it past people.  It just didn't get in the patch notes.

I wish I had worded my initial post differently. 
I don't think it was a matter of "Let's sneak one past ol' Ukase and see what he does!" or even anything like that. 

I think it was a matter of a volunteer staff making a choice that it wasn't important enough to post, or it just got overlooked. 

This is another reason to not do large updates. Just the TF would have been enough. 
Just the changes in lab would have been enough. Small, bite size chunks of new stuff more often, as opposed to huge amounts. But that's just my opinion. 

[lemming]

I'm inclined to agree with smaller updates, but the HC team have their own schedules to coordinate, etc...

 

My experience from the SW world is that devs love documentation, but hate writing it.

[Arbegla]

If the incarnate salvage change was the only thing that 'fell through the cracks' I would whole heartedly agree it was just overlooked. But it's not the only thing that was changed and not documented. 

I think the larger issue at hand isn't Discord vs Forums, or even large vs small updates, its that we're closing in on the holidays, and our volunteer staff is probably limited to those who want to work (for free!) during that time. Things happen.

[Mjolnerd]

I've been saying this for years, and I stand by it to this day:

Discord is great as a chat platform, but it's an absolutely horrible way to actually disseminate information. Especially information someone might want to refer back to more than an hour or so after it's posted there. Not everybody is watching every platform 24/7, or wants to.

It's like releasing patch notes via Twitter. Post a link there, sure. But make it a link to something static.

[Ukase]

25 minutes ago, DeathMcKillenstein said:

Okay, if the combine is now done by Prometheus, where the HELL is the option to do so???

Fair question. I was in a mission and fighting during the discussion about it, but I went through my chat logs and found this "those transfers are coming back, they're just getting moved onto Prometheus, so they're not as easily found as a beginner trap" 

Just a few minutes later, I saw this "im doing the convers as we speak" and I must have missed the context, because I assumed they were at Prometheus. My mistake, they must have been talking about something else. I'm guessing it's "bugged", or some such. 

[arcane]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

Both platforms are equally valid choices to use. Just as Ukase and other posters prefer not to use Discord, members of the Homecoming Team can make the same choice.

I don’t think that people like developers that have an actual obligation to communicate with the community get to have an aversion to using their own website in the same way that Ukase or I might have preferences. At a certain point people that take on a formal role will and should be required to do their actual jobs.

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

It was posted on the forums during open beta, but not by a dev.  There's always room to improve communication.

 

 

[PoptartsNinja]

Every change to the game should be communicated in the patch notes.

[Scarlet Shocker]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

Both platforms are equally valid choices to use. Just as Ukase and other posters prefer not to use Discord, members of the Homecoming Team can make the same choice.

 

I don't think this captures the issue entirely. The problem is that the patch notes are in two different locations and both are technically incomplete. There is a problem of consistency here. Where as players do we look? Do we have to look in two (or more?) places to understand the new content release?

 

Patch notes should be in one single location, complete and easily found. Where that location is, that's a debate but having part of it in place X and part in place Y is not good policy and helps nobody (not even the Devs) 

[Cobalt Arachne]

This was a simple mistake.
I disabled the conversion options, because we were moving them under Prometheus (due to the conversions being very cost ineffective, and thus being a potential new player trap).

Things got busy getting Page 3 launched, and I forgot to remember to hook up the new dialog option. Since I never finished the change, it also missed the notes because it was still on a to-do somewhere.

Those expensive conversions will be back next build, on Prometheus, under an option that says 'What can you do for me?'.

By policy, we don't do stealth changes. If something isn't on the notes, it's because we missed it.

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

6 minutes ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

The problem is that the patch notes are in two different locations

 

The patch notes are only on the forums.  Discord links to the forums.  But sometimes there will be a note or dev comment on Discord about something being changed and that doesn't make it to the official patch notes.  We try to be comprehensive and complete, but there's a lot of people doing a lot of different things and sometimes a change doesn't make it to the official patch notes.

 

We're only human
Of flesh and blood, We're made
Human
Born to make mistakes.

 

 

And Cobalt posted while I looked for the video.

Edited yesterday at 08:29 PM by GM_GooglyMoogly

[Championess]

I do agree that all changes should be documented into one section on the main accessible website/forum.  I'm not much of a fan of Discord either, any notes in Discord about changes that make it into the game need to make it into the patch notes where all can see outside of Discord's spyware ass.

 

Now looking at it from the devs perspective.  Simple mistake.  Changes done in good faith that are forgotten to be noted as it may be done on the fly are but a small price to pay for having such a dev team willing to interact and develop things based on the community's input with far more frequency than ever happened with the more corporatized team.

Edited yesterday at 08:37 PM by Championess