Friday with Means - June 19th, 2009 - AO Complexity

With a super-update in the works for release next week and multiple discussions already undeway about the changes I feel like sharing a quick peek into this Wednesday's work day here in the office.

Quick note first:

Balacing efforts that begin in this update should be viewed as temporary. The larger system changes to Aimed Shot and other specials in the very near future are going to have much larger effects on game balance. The changes to perks and weapons in this update are a small step in the right direction...I think these should more be viewed as a good indication of our commitment to make the hard decisions and do what is necessary for the balance future of AO. The FA buff associated with new Fixer weapons will not be working correctly at launch of this update...we are continuing to work on it...but we did not want it to delay this update...especially with the larger changes upcoming in the very very near future.

This Wednesday:

Case Study: Anarchy Online - Complex Team Game-Play Interaction Systems
Short Title: How many devs does it take to get an Alien Ship invitation after a city raid?

After discovering an issue with Alien Ship access after instanced city raids...code was cleverly adjusted by Macrosun and we set about running a city raid to try out the invite fix.

Attempt One

I ran the city attack myself and was surprised when 20 minutes later the ship left without giving me an invite.

Facepalm one: One player is not enough to get a ship invite.

Attempt Two:

Dual-logged I tried again. No invite.

Facepalm Two: Two players is not enough. Had a coder check. 4 Players are required. Crap.

Attempt Three

Macrosun and I run an attack..both of us Dual logged.

Facepalm Three: Genele laughed at us and mentioned we all needed to be on the General's hatelist to get an invite. Possibly 10 seconds after the death of the General.

After waiting for Genele to leave the room and lowering her desk an mind-screwing 4 cm.

Attempt Four

Four characters..all on General's hatelist.

Facepalm Four: One character was a GM. GM doesn't count apparently. Insert sailor profanity here __________.

Attempt Five

With the help of Genele and Lindelu supervising we run the city attack...and miraculously get a ship invite. The code works! W00t!

Friday at 18:00

If we could get out of normal mission ACG's this code would be perfect. Start the build again!

Insert Karma Here:

The painfull irony of this day was that I wrote the rules and conditions for getting on the Alien Ships almost four years ago. While this frustrating exercise did make us laugh...it was an excellent reminder of the reason we will be spending so much time and effort communicating with you, the players, moving forward into the future of AO.

A great many of you have been with us long enough to for it to be considered a "career". Thank you all for all the expert consultancy work.

Have a great weekend!

1st

2nd!!!

Not sure if I have to laugh or cry at the fact that the FC crew doesnt seem to know basic things like "how many people do you need for a ship invite"

LOL... thanks for the good laugh Means... :)
im glad to see alot of the changes you are making, and im looking forward to trying them out!

:)

Happens to the best of us. :)

Asking it on forums on a fake account 'might' have been faster. Well, chances are big you would have gotten two flames and 1 person directing you to search in a rude manner.

Edit: Btw, did you guys die on ship? Somehow I hope you guys are really crap at playing AO. :)

hrhr awesome

You tend to forget stuff you did 4 years ago, like how many ppl it takes for something to work, means is clearly not a botfarmer ;)
Did the gens drop any phats btw? hehe ^.^

Putting new build out on test before weekend maybe? curious to see if those doc -init procs finally show there :) (target ncu)

lol :)

10th!
and darn no 500fa for fixers this patch :(

It's me! I'm the Macrosun in that post!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Means

Facepalm Two: Two players is not enough. Had a coder check. 4 Players are required. Crap.

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Hehe, or you could have logged into AO and sent a tell to any random 220 with some AI armor :D

Nice to see some major balance changes.

I do have some questions(pvp related) about that:

Heal-Output: Up or down?

AS-Dmg: Up or down?
AS-Cycle: Up or down?

Full-Auto-Dmg: Up or down?
Full-Auto-Cycle: Up or down?

Sneak-Attack-Dmg: Up or down?
Sneak-Attack-Cycle: Up or down?

PS:
Played my crat a bit on bs, the fear thing is nice, but I think the duration (7 secs) could be longer(9 maybe?).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by means

fixer weapons will not be working correctly at launch of this update...we are continuing to work on it...

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eta?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Racatti

eta?

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I'm guessing the patch after this one :p

@Means: *Point and laugh!* :D

I'm curious what will be done to traders specifically seeing as aimed shot plays such a huge role in our PvP damage.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Macrosun

It's me! I'm the Macrosun in that post!

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All hail Macrosun!

Funny anecdote.

Oh and LOL at fixers :D

Means,

As a software engineer myself I know the feeling of forgetting the rules I developed years before. But as a tester that was excellent regression testing of those rules.

And for me there was at least one interesting note of info in that test case. All four players have to be on hate list. That explains why you can not park a couple of bank toons at the grid house on the back side of the city and get the invite to the ship.

Have to say that update looks good. Hope you keep an eye on the mech AR boost thread that is going on. Some good stuff and a fair amount of whine in that thread but the good stuff really is good.

Would be nice to hear that all this work is geared toward L1 to L220 and not just endgame. Quite a few people have talked about that lately. Would love a response.

counting issues tbh

18.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.00.1 -> 18.0.4 -> 18.1