Community answers - part 2

[__________LostBoyJim]

Originally posted by Cz
LostBoyJim, I understand you personally feel a lot of disdain, and you are frustrated about the BBI's, but there is no need for the tone and language you show on these forums. Please calm down, and stop the name-calling.

If you have such big issues with the Community Team, feel free to e-mail me (cz@anarchy-online.com) about it.

Also, check out my little warning for you in the other thread.

Cz,
Just calling 'em like I sees 'em. As for the BBI issue, I am a melee adventurer, and I am quite happy with the adventurer gifts in the patch. That doesn't change the fact that the BBI should have been fixed long ago.

The problem here is one of priority. May I make the following observations:

1. The BBI issue should be a 5 minutes fix in the database. I know that it cannot be done overnight, but this isn't like rocket science to fix. You have admitted it's a bug. If the problem is that you're released all your db gurus, then let us know. I see no valid reason for not fixing it in the back end database otherwise.

2. "Please calm down and stop the name-calling." But when we don't curse and snarl and make a ruckus we are ignored. Look at the adventurer forum. People go to test and raise a list of important issued to be addressed. As has been pointed out, our comments were completely ignored. Noone even said, "hm, how about that. He hear you but we can't do anything about it." The only way to get your attention seems to be personal insults. Nothing else generates a response of any kind. I wasn't particularly irate when I wrote that, I was just trying to pound into your heads that your intermittant presence on the boards does not make us confident of you (again, see polls on player perception of FunCom honesty).

3. You and Cosmik have been very active on the boards lately. That is honestly very cool, and honestly very appreciated. Now, will you still be this active a week from now? Two weeks from now? Two months? CS at Funcom seems to suffer from consistency problems.

LostBoy
jim

[Darkbane]

Hmm, point #3 is a good one for sure. So far today they've posted very little, but time yet... I hope we can at least get some of the promised threads started here soon...

[Inocybe]

Originally posted by Cz
New items being boss MOB loot
The question is of course "why?" And the answer is to encourage social interactions; e.g. teaming and trading. Some ways to get these items are:
- Team up for team missions or outdoor camp bosses
- Hunt camp bosses alone
- Team up with to get a team mission, then complete it by yourself
- Trade with other players
- Ask friends and people in your organisation to help you out

Most of those require at least a little bit of social interaction, and that - I think - is not too much to ask. Yes, many people choose to go solo only, but then they will have to do some trading, or simply pass on some of the items available. Being social should have benefits in a multiplayer game.

Now, I expect a discussion on this, so please state your views calmly, and I will look into setting up an own thread for it if needed.

- Yes but why force a few out of 12 professions to do this? Where is the fairness?
- Why are Adventurer and Fixer class-fixes being tossed in the same pan as class bonus issues? Are you planning to do this to all 12 professions?

A long and well-discussed feedback/suggestion thread started more than 2 weeks ago which so far has been completely ignored by Funcom - Rather than repeat everything, here's the thread link:
Class-fixes should never be put on the same level as class-bonus issues
http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...threadid=31252

Kindly answer that topic because it's long overdue on FC's part.

Or do you want us Advys to continue thinking that you do not care? That IS the impression FC's non-response and non-action have pressed upon us for so long. There's no point setting up Forum Professionals to gather input from players when you DO NOT respond in return. Communication is a 2-way street, only then can something further be done to make it effective communication.

[Nepenthea]

Originally posted by Cz

- Team up with to get a team mission, then complete it by yourself

If it is appropriate to do as you have mentioned above--if soloing team missions is acceptable practice--then I respectfully request that the requirement of having to team with someone to pull team missions is removed, to allow for anyone, at any time, to be able to pull a team mission, without the requirement of having to be teamed with another, first.

Originally posted by Cz

maybe all people who want to team already do so, but then those who go alone make that choice and forfeit some of the good stuff they could get. If you really want to play the game as a single player game, you will miss out on some parts of it.

Does one have to interact with other players in the context of combat to qualify as "player interaction" and not being like a "single player game"?

It appears that teaming up in combat is an absolute for the definition of "interaction". What about the non-combat time spent in game, talking, interacting, "partying" with others? What if it's a player's personal preference to solo hunt for a few hours, and then spend another few hours interacting with people in a social setting?

"Punishing" a player by "forfeiting some of the good stuff" because he/she chooses the way in which they interact with the rest of the player base appears inappropriately restrictive. If a person prefers--or for a number of reasons, if it's their only available choice--to solo, they should also not feel "punished" for that decision.

Please consider the full spectrum of players, and their personal decisions and preferences for how they interact with other players.

Please consider this: Soloing IS a viable and appropriate methodology, and it should not be "punished".


Take care and be well.

[Medi]

If you choose not to add any new items to solo missions, then why would people want to do solo missions? Other than to get a token, I see no benefit at all.

If you are really concerned about Third Party Programs (aka. ClickSaver) make the time between mission rolls 30 seconds, instead of two. Sure you'll get a ton of whining, but you have to make the game enjoyable for those that do not wish to team.

I'm not saying add all loot to solo missions, but you could at least give us soloer's something to run missions for besides a token.

Thanks,

Mediccus

[__________LostBoyJim]

Originally posted by Cz
LostBoyJim, I understand you personally feel a lot of disdain, and you are frustrated about the BBI's, but there is no need for the tone and language you show on these forums. Please calm down, and stop the name-calling.

If you have such big issues with the Community Team, feel free to e-mail me (cz@anarchy-online.com) about it.

Also, check out my little warning for you in the other thread.

Now I'm off. G'night everybody!

Hey Cz,
What, did you get offended and take your toys and go home? You warned me, you ignored my email, yadda yadda. I will watch the language but I have not received much incentive to change my tone. If invective is the only way to get FunCom to respond to our comments (I/we do not know if you read them or not), then how else to you expect us to post?

LostBoy
jim

[Cz]

LostBoyJim, nope. Still around, working on content for the next thread of issues.

[Darkbane]

Oh goody!

/me gives Cz high caffine drink

[______________Scorus]

Any chance we can get an eta on 14.6 preliminary notes?

Scorus

[_____CountNerfedalot]

New items being boss MOB loot
The question is of course "why?" And the answer is to encourage social interactions; e.g. teaming and trading. Some ways to get these items are:
- Team up for team missions or outdoor camp bosses
- Hunt camp bosses alone
- Team up with to get a team mission, then complete it by yourself
- Trade with other players
- Ask friends and people in your organisation to help you out

Most of those require at least a little bit of social interaction, and that - I think - is not too much to ask. Yes, many people choose to go solo only, but then they will have to do some trading, or simply pass on some of the items available. Being social should have benefits in a multiplayer game.

Good intentions, evil EVIL methods though!

And yes, that "little" bit of social interaction IS too much to ask for class-balancing or class-defining additions.

Being social should have benefits yes. Vice-versa going solo should be harder. But going solo should not be deliberately punished!! ESPECIALLY not with regards to basic items that are supposedly being added to the gameworld specifically to address class-imbalance issues.

And actually, some classes (fixers and agents in particular) should be REWARDED for going solo! After all, they are the ones supposed to sneak and do dirty deeds from the shadows and all that! Hard to do when they can't perform even a 50% mission without dragging along a noisy menagerie of non-stealthy tanks, pets, medical teams, etc.

But that is beside the point. The point is, boss mob rewards, encouraging more socialization, class balance, and the "evils" of ClickSaver have nothing to do with each other. Each is a separate issue that should be handled on its own merits (intelligently and taking into account impacts on all the other issues of course!) NOT using one as a stick to beat players over the head with regards to another.

Some postulates for any MMORPG which aims to accomodate players who do not want to participate in non-consensual PvP:

Socialization is fun. Usually. For most people. Some of the time at least.

Being forced to socialize whether you want to or not is NEVER fun, even if it results in a fun time. Being forced to do anything is resented and likely remembered a lot longer than the fun time will be.

Carrots are good. Game developers who use carrots to reward people who play nice/correctly/skillfully/loyally/whatever are liked.

Sticks are bad. Especially when they are used to punish behavior which is not actually wrong. Developers who use sticks to force people to play according to their "Vision TM" deserve every single bit of bile and vitriol that gets thrown at them, and then some.

The player economy is just one of several possible forms of socialization. Teaming, organizations, political sides, trades and trading, discos and other social venues, player events and player generated missions are among the many other possible types of socialization.

The player economy is another form of PvP. Forcing people to trade is forcing them into PvP situations.

Anti-social behavior which negatively affects other players (griefing, cheating, macroing, camping etc) can and should be prevented/curbed/punished. Non-social behavior which has NO effect on other players (soloing) should NEVER be deliberately punished.


Discussion Questions for the devs to ponder:

What exactly is so bad about people being able to look for specific items as a mission reward? Were you developers willing to take the first job you found regardless of the nature of the work or the rewards (tangible and intangible)?

If an item is too good to get deliberately, isn't it also too good to get randomly?

If an item being introduced into a gameworld is so powerful it would unbalance the game if everyone had it, doesn't it actually unbalance the game MORE if only some people have it?

How would your answers to the above questions change if the items are required for a character to be balanced or to participate in the highest levels of content?


Some specific suggestions for addressing these issues:

Class balancing and class defining items should be available to all players. Having a unique or rare item drop from a static or boss mob is fine, but having that item should not in any way be required to play ANY part of the game. If a designer ever has to "balance" a mob or encounter based on the possibility a character will have a particular item, then that item is too powerful to only be available to a select few and should be available to ALL players (within the limits of class, level, effort and such). Truly rare stuff should only differentiate a character's looks or coolness factor or provide some fun (not class balancing/defining!) ability. Anything else will create an environment of haves and have-nots with all the resentment and social PvP conflict which comes from that. An alternative (better but much more work) is to have SO many rare items in the game that every player, even the most casual, has a decent chance at one or more of them. Even then, none of those rare items should unbalance the game!

You claim you want to encourage outdoor hunting. The players say they don't like having all the cool new toys drop as team mission loot only. Solve both problems at once by having team mission loot drop from random outdoor mobs also. That would still be CS-proof and contentious camp-proof.

Rewarding teaming with more exp/loot/tokens/whatever is more than enough carrot to encourage teaming, without the stick of forcing various classes to socialize just to get the things they see as "necessary" for their character. Even better would be to reward teaming by making teams more effective - making a true force multiplier effect for combining mixed classes.

If you want to encourage teaming without actually monetarily rewarding it (which might in itself be abused), make it easier. Fix the status bar bugs. Make it easier to manipulate aggro, select and change targets, see what is going on with your teammates, etc.

If you want to encourage socializing, make that easier also. Make it easier for friends and organizations to share goods through common storage areas (duplicate apartment keys, guild houses, etc). Make it easier to communicate with in-game bulletin boards, email, voice communications, etc.

If you want to encourage player-to-player trading, make that easier as well. Figure out ways to make trading less time consuming, tedious, and risky, and more rewarding, fun and interesting. What about a commodities bourse/exchange that brokers trades, records transactions (but not transactees), tracks prices, etc, all for small fees and commissions of course? You could pay a fee (like the mission terminal fee) to get a history of the price some good has traded for, submit your goods for sale at your desired price, search for goods you want and see the asking prices, place bids for goods that aren't currently available at your desired price, come back next time you log on and see if your goods have sold or if your bids have bought, adjust the price or take them back if not, etc. Now THAT would be a player economy! Have separate exchanges for Omni, Clan, and ICC (and let traders arbitrage across them ). Have outlawed items like the gun receptacles and maybe a lot of the tradeskill-produced items prohibited from the exchanges (or even confiscated and fines or guards start looking for you if you're dumb enough to put them up for sale!) so the individual-to-individual black market has some real meaning.

If you want to encourage interaction with the storyline and the gameworld itself, make the character's actions have some meaning IN THAT CONTEXT. Characters' actions *should* change the world, so have hidden counters that cause areas to change if more clanners do missions there than omni, or x number of rhinomen or mutants in a camp get killed in a certain period, or if more missions of type x get done than of type y, or whatever. If you can't do that yet, then at LEAST make character actions change how the world responds to that character. Think about EQ's faction system, then think about how you could adapt and improve that concept to AO's various omni departments, clan factions, etc. Have the kinds of missions available, mission rewards, etc vary based on what you have done and who you have worked for/angered in the past.

Make tradeskills meaningful, interesting, and NOT tedious, and don't make characters gimp their combat abilities to learn them. You may have painted yourself into a corner on that last one, but maybe think out of the box - what if IP spent on a tradeskill somehow improved your combat abilities also in some way? Certainly that is already true for Computer Literacy indirectly, but for most of the purly trade skills it most definitely is not. Maybe a trickle-down effect to combat skills from trade skills? Or new (or tradeskill modified!) weapons equivalent to the best of class weapons out there but with lower combat skill requirements and added trade skill requirements?


One totally off the wall request for the devs:

Please prettypleasewithsugarontop PpPpPpPllleeeeeeeease give us a function key/chat command to dump a list of our inventory/packs/bank/apartment/stats/worn items/whatever to a text file. Ohhhhh the pleasureable hours I could pass at work (ah, I mean at home, while the cable is out...) planning and sorting and seeing what I have, what needs upgraded, what I can sell, etc.




Darn. I've been sucked into caring about this game. Now I'm going to get more and more frustrated as obvious problems fail to get fixed and dumb/shortsighted/wrongheaded/pennypinching decisions continue to be made (like level requirements ) and eventually end up leaving in disgust (again) like I have all the other MMORPGs I've played.

But the OmniTrade Commodities Exchange/Free RubiKa Bourse/ICC Galactic Market idea is really cool.

[Kuro]

Here's a suggestion:

If the current trend of additions to professions' abilities hold, this arguement is going to continue to come up frequently. So how about announcing clearly what addition is a class fix and what isn't?

Look at the fixer nanos. Extending the suppressor line a class fix? Maybe, maybe not. It's arguable (mostly between the players and FC). But one of the things that is inarguably a class fix isn't identified as one either: NCU Hacker Interfaces. You can find the components in any Starter vendor machine, it costs nothing to upgrade, and starts to help relieve some of the pain those dark blue nanoskills cause.

If you state, for example, "Metabolic Nanosteroid Device for boosting Nanobreed health is a breed balance item", people will expect it to be readily availible. Then if you say "New Skill Drain Lines (Enron Accounting Practices) is intended for highly skilled traders", people will not expect to find it in every vendor across Rubi-Ka.

Then the only thing that would remain is the players arguing with the developers over whose perspective of "necessity item" is correct.

[_______MartinDeShade]

Not too many people would have the balls to just quote themselves, just after saying it the first time.
RFLOL
RFLOL
RFLOL

Martin

[Kuro]

Originally posted by MartinDeShade
Not too many people would have the balls to just quote themselves, just after saying it the first time.
RFLOL
RFLOL
RFLOL

Martin

Bah...hit quote instead of edit

[Darkbane]

Good post CountNerfedalot, many good points there. I'd be interested to hear the devs thoughts on them...

(unlikely I know....)

[_______MartinDeShade]

Ah man. You removed it, or somebody did. That was hillarious.
In fact it was this hillarious.

Martin

[_______MartinDeShade]

Originally posted by MartinDeShade
Ah man. You removed it, or somebody did. That was hillarious.
In fact it was this hillarious.

Martin

[Cz]

/me copy-pastes CountNerfedalot's post, prints it, and brings it along as reading material on the way home, picking up a highlighter on the way out.

[_________Neurobasher]

What about adding some things into solo missions that carry those team boss only items aswell?

Depending on the difficulty of the mission you get 1-3 of these, but they don't show up in every mission:

a) A special chest that requires ALOT of B&E for that mission QL to break. It contains 1-3 of those special items. So those professions with high B&E have their fun. Make the chest visually different and no traps on it. Or maybe a 2nd type that has a danger sign on it with traps and more stuff in it. No risk, no fun.

b) a "mini" boss that's running around in the mission. Same style as in team boss missions, with glow so you can visually recognize him. Not quite as hard as a team boss of course. The boss should not count in the percentage to solve the mission to get a token so you can ignore it if you want. Drops less items than a team boss aswell.

This would give solo player at least a chance to get those special items.


And I really would like to see a reward type slider on mission terminals, like "melee weapons, ranged weapons, ncu items, nanos, armor, tools"

[________________Veha]

I must say that the team boss loot only Profession specific loot would be better if there was other ways of aquiring the item(s). i.e. quests or hard to get to shops.

I just want to complain because I was 115ish at the time of 14.4 patch release and now, 15 or so levels later of continuiously killing team bosses (*sigh*), I FINALLY got my MA suit last nite. Granted the leveling was nice, but I think the next 70 levels are coming from outdoor hunting and soloing

I just wanted to point out that maybe other options to get the Prof Specific items, besides team boss loot only, wouldn't make AO so tedious.

(Plus, it makes a player rely on getting a team for the rest of the characters ingame life. If you get used to playing in a team, you will notice that you will out grow your implants and armor that you worked so hard to get because they were so high level 20 levels ago.)

[__________Weebabeast]

Short patch notice
This was a big issue with 14.4.2, as people lost their chance at the full IP reset. We have talked internally in Community, and with others, and we will try make sure we have all patch information as soon as it is ready, and hand it out to you just as quick.

--------

Would it really be THAT huge of a deal for FC to turn this option back on for a week or something for those of us who were waiting for the bugs with the IPR Reset to be fixed before using it?!

My family has cancelled all six of their accounts of this issue. We waited a long time for is (our "newest" account is from last September) and decided to wait a little longer after we heard all the horror stories, then BAM! Option gone, no warning!