DISCLAIMER: Please read everything. I know it's long, but i don't type these without reason. I've tried to keep it as concise as i can without leaving anything out. I know this is rediculous to say about a forum posts, but take notes if you have to, just read all of it before you reply, if you do.
Here's what has me laughing.
The 4 main issues people bring up in this thread have absolutely no basis in reality. None. Zero. Zilch.
So lets start from the top, shall we?
Skills - "OMFG crafting skills are harder to gain" - Well duh. I've said it 50 thousand times, and i'll probably say it 50 thousand more. Crafting Patch. The gain system in place won't make complete sense until the crafting patch is in. It just went in early to prevent some huge abuses.
Magery, All Crafting Skills, Poisoning, Etc - It's not harder to gain, so shut up. What it is is actually faster to gm, just requires more effect and work.
Rather than make you spam a lesser poison pot 200 times, we can make you use only 50 deadly pots (made up numbers, not the real ones) for a gain to have the same effective resource usage. Heaven forbid i give people ways to EFFECTIVELY train a skill while playing, rather than requiring 5x the time investment while spamming their low resource skills macroing. You may not be able to use a skill as often due to the resource/mana cost, but it will gain faster to compensate, so the time will remain the same. That's all.
Loot - Yes it changed. Get over it. Yes a million gold is harder to get now, but for everyone who hasn't played for more than 4-5 years, it wasn't always the gold rainfall that you had with the broken loot tables. When t3a went down, the average loot per hour was near double what it was 5 years prior, and even higher compared to 7 years ago. The loot tables had slowly become either A. unbalanced, or B. outdated compared to other shard updates. All this does is set things back in line to where they should be. If you complain you don't have money, then STOP PAYING OVERPRICED AMOUNTS FOR STUFF. Take a look at buying and selling and compare it to 3 years ago. Most of the prices haven't moved, because people are trying to be too greedy, and other people are willing to pay for it. The economy will stabilize as more people get into the shard, and as the older people get used to the fact that your gold should not be measured in tens and hundreds of millions on a regular basis.
Notice all things in-game have been adjusted to the new loot costs, in terms of consumables, the only thing that haven't are housing. And that's because housing was never adjusted for the inflation in the first place like the other things were. If you're complaining stuff is too expensive, that's because it's the player economy and because you are willing to pay that much. Stop paying it and prices drop to acceptable levels.
Now that being said, will the loot formulas keep changing? Yes, they will. As i said i adjust them often in an effort to get them more in line with actual monster difficulty. They are out of wack, but not as bad as they were a month or 6 months ago, and they will continue to be adjusted as time goes on until they are perfect. I change them roughly every 2 weeks, since that gives me enough time between to check the data they generate and see what's balanced/not. Depending on my time i might add some new data gathering points to that system in a patch later next month since it's getting refined enough to need more data, which will help balance it faster. But that's if i have extra time after getting the other stuff on my list done.
Game Realism - When a shard gets neglected for 3-4 years, people find bugs and tricks to exploit it. After that much time, most people feel those tricks are "part of the game". Doesn't mean they are, just means admins weren't around to fix them. All i've been doing is setting things back to how broadband originally wanted it and how it was designed to be. On things i thought should stay i asked him and the game was rebalanced so that they could stay. If I have time in the next week, i will release a full overview of how skills and gains are balanced, as well as the original gain structure for the shard(if i can find them). But as i've posted elsewhere, it comes out to each skill takes approximately x time to GM from the buymark(25). Some skills take 1/2x or 1/3rd x, depending on thier implementation. But most take x. Just because some peopel found tricks to gm a skill in 1/10th x time doesn't mean i'm making the skill harder. It means i'm fixing the bugs.
People joined obsidian because it is a hard shard. Because gains are not ultra fast, and because getting GM means something. The minute you have people talking about GM like it's just something everyone should have in some things (such as poisoning/anatomy/magery/etc) rather than something earned through playing, you know you have a problem. The only skills that should be a given are the 1/3rd x skills. The 1/2 x skills are something most chars will have if not all. The shard is not going to get easy just beacuse some people got a "Free ride" while broadband was away.
corky1h wrote:Perhaps their should have been a bit more planing years back. Just my thoughts.
Here we have the crux of the matter. And like everything else, i've covered it before in many threads. But here we go again, lets put it all in one place.
Approximately 3 months before T3A died the first time, I was aware of what was going to happen. At that time i figured we could fix it or work around it. So i did what i could to try to come up with a method of doing so. A month later, i was pretty convinced we were boned. There WAS a way to fix it, but it would have been ugly and annoying and cost us a lot. So i did two things.
I started looking at upgrading, and i sent out contacts to the few people who knew 51a sphere well enough to work with me to find a better way to fix it.
A month later and most of my contacts had gotten back. Only one person was willing to and had a reasonable plan for making a patch for 51a to fix this problem. The general consensus was that it was not worth the effort and the continual maintenance it would require. At this point i had most of the big problems from upgrading marked out and at least understood, and began talking to broadband about it.
So here we have two months before t3a died. I continued talking with Fallout (Author of lil.dll, a great reverse engineer and low level programmer) on methods to implement the fix, but we kept comming upon issues, and two weeks later we ended up scrapping the idea entirely. So we're left with two choices, Stay with t3a, which will require a lot of work each month to keep the fix working and ensure we're not losing data, plus have other bugs risk popping up because of it. Or upgrade to t4a. So i brought what I had to broadband, and after much discussion, it was agreed that upgrading would not only be our best bet in terms of shard stability, but would allow him to do a lot of stuff for the shard that he previously could not due to technical limitations(i know you could script around them, and obsidian has lots of that, but there was a few things that were flat out impossible if you wanted to run a shard with a lot of people, they're too inefficient).
So now it's 1 month before t3a dies it's first death. Keep in mind this is not counting the times where we temporarily fix it for months a few times before it dies for t4a. At this point broadband gets me completely access to the codebase, as well as two save files. One from mid to late 2002, and one from the current obsidian. What he wanted in return was a complete outline for obsidian's reconstruction in t4a, an outline of what changes were going to be done, and if possible a timeline, as well as what milestones i was aiming for and what each meant. The reason for the two save files was that the balance was to be considered across every year obsidian has been alive, not just the most recent set of broadband not being here and bugs going unchecked for ages. It was also for that reason that I also had to go through every forum post that was in the main obsidian forums(general discussion, bugs/suggestions, guild discussion, the moronic hall of fame(and it's predecessor the flamewar forum) and the staff forums). I was to consider not only current issues, but past issues that have been brought up, as well as things that have been broken for so long that people accept them as fact now. For those who look at the current forums and say its' not that bad, let me remind you that the forums were wiped completely due to an issue a few years ago. I went through the backups from before they were wiped as well. Fully 7 years of forum posts. This gave me a really different perspective on some issues. Even some things i considered normal for obsidian were shown to be things that were ghosts from earlier complaints and bugs that people were happier before, but grew to accept afterwards.
Fast forward to the final death of t3a, and the birth of t4a.
Broadband had in his hand all of the above information, before t3a died. Which is why we had so many extensions and life-support setbacks on t3a to keep it running. In addition, a LOT of the t4a codebase was already migrated over. But without a lot of testers, i could not possibly catch things fast enough or test as completely as i wanted.
Before we powered up t4a, i had another meeting with broadband, and we went over all the outlines and proposed big changes, and reaffirmed approval and questinos on it. Both he and i knew that he'd have times he wouldn't be around, just as he hasn't been around for long periods of time before, so we wanted to be sure that everything was understood.
What you've been seeing for the months of t4a, and will continue to see, is this original outline. We are off track of the timeline, I will admit this. Things have gone slower than originally anticipated. Partly because players didn't report problems in the first month and so we're having to fix them now, partly because new problems popped up that i didn't anticipate(necromancy i'm looking at you you piece of crap. I fixed you twice, how dare you break again).
As i said at the very start, I only ask three things of the players, if you want the shard to succeed.
1. Report everything that might be a bug or the shard not working as in t3a. If I have not said in a post or in changelog that it's supposed to be that way, it may be an unintended side affect of the upgrade to t4a.
2. Understand that I cannot patch everything at once and that I am upgrading things as fast as i can. Some systems will get patched earlier than others, and some patches will NOT make sense until other patches are put in later. While I will try to keep patches that affect each other close together, i cannot promise that there will not be gaps where things will seem more broken or not make sense.
3. Understand that when change things on obsidian, I cannot do it to make you all (the loyal current players)happy. I have to consider 3 things, in order of importance:
a. Broadband's direct requests (if he wants red turkeys, we get red turkeys, no amount of player complaining fixes that until he tells me otherwise)
b. Game Balance ( Does it force people to play a certain way, does it give veterans an advantage over newbies, will it equalize with time )
c. Player reaction (Good or Bad, Suggestive or Not. Do we remove it, change it, keep it the same, etc)
As i've told the few people who have volunteered, more scripters will not make most of this work go faster. Most of this is because it will take me more time to explain what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and what it needs to balance to, than it will take for me to script it myself. The rest of it is because it normally requires other patches to be done before it can be done.
What WILL make this work go faster is the bugs forum having more bugs fixed, and people doing more testing. I've been LOVING the 17+ player peaks we've been having, because it throws a LOT of useful data into my balance monitor. It also gets the economy kick-started into rebalancing itself, as prices drop and adjust to the new (old) systems and amounts.
There you have it. Obsidian has been following a plan, one we(the staff) put a lot of work into getting put together to be sure it makes sense, and has held up throughout t4a. I've only had to make 2 changes to it, both PVP related. And when i say the staff, i truly mean that. I want to take this time out to say something.
Important wrote:
T4A could not have happened without ALL the staff of obsidian. I know i'm the one posting, but a LOT of staff have put in countless hours behind the scenes helping me with stuff, getting data or input, doing research, or even just helping players.
Just off the top of my head and in no particular order:
Thassius - A LOT of the outline was brought up to thassius, specifically because he has a VERY different view of the shard than I do. We butt heads a lot, but that's exactly why he's staff. A lot of the changes were vetted against him and we spent over a hundred hours arguing in discussions on why things should or shoudln't happen. It's gotten to the point that we were both sick of each other, and still are a little bit. But we did it because it ensured that the end result was something that was correct.
Echo - Probably the staff who's put in the most hours outside of myself in this year. Echo has spent time fixing up in-game, doing research, and comming up with ideas for things. Echo also has taken over a LOT of the in-game stuff so that I can focus on fixing up t4a. And even with all that on his plate, the first thing he always asks is "need me to do anything?". Echo can't script, but he'll learn (and has) if asked too. In fact a lot of the NPC fixes and item fixes at the very start of t4a were him. He went through almost every npc fixing bugs on the stupid things, or fixing them back to how they were in t3a. And to this day he still asks what he can do to help.
Drakkar - He's been around for a long time, and is invaluable when testing things in-game. He doesn't get much online time but when he does he really does focus on making the shard a better place, and has participated in many discussions involving t4a's evolution and balance.
Admins (broadband, cybervic, blinkers, jorus ) - I know the players don't consider this, but realize that EVERY admin, including jorus, has been in-game this year. Not only that, but each has spent hours with me during the t4a planning giving me their thoughts on how obsidian should be and letting me bounce ideas off them for potential problems. A few of them have continued to do what they can even after t4a launched.
Staff I haven't mentioned - I know there are 2-3 staff who have been on a tiny bit who have helped with things. I'm horrid with names but you know who you are. If you've been on even for a few hours this year, you've probably been forced to help me with things. And not a one of them complained, but were instead happy to do so.
The Veteran Council - Those who are on this know who they are. But basically it's a group of players who are consulted on everything. The only limitation is there's only 1-2 person on it from each year of obsidian. This ensures that no matter which staff is doing things, they always get a fairly balanced viewpoint from players who have all had different experiences with obsidian. I can't count the hours i've spent with the different veterans talking back and forth and getting ideas, balance adjustment thoughts, and concerns.
Anyway, that's what's going on in a very large, eye tiring and long to read nutshell.
Obsidian has a plan, it's stayed on plan. Just taking longer than I'd have wanted. I know people are unhappy with some changes, and i'm ok with that. Sometimes i'm ok because i know the change has to be done. But most of the time i'm ok because i know it balances out in the big plan, just need to wait for future patches.
I'm sorry the crafting patch has been so late. If i told you how my IRL's been going, maybe you'd cut me some slack. But i prefer instead to just apologize, and focus on getting it done, without burdening you all with excuses and my issues.
Very few players will say obsidian isn't getting better. I don't ask you be happy with everything. I ask you be happy enough with some things, and have faith in me that when all is said and done, you'll enjoy the shard. Some pieces just might not fall into place until the last few patches, but i promise everything will make sense when it's done, and once you get used to it.
