Friday with Means - November 20th, 2009 - Nanomage says "Wut?"

[majere]

I should add that all credit and good karma for this addition should go to directly to Macrosun as making breed change work will *ahem* suck. This feature represents a similar amount of work to the entire mail system.

Ouch, I admire the work you are willing to put into it.
Wouldn't it "simplify" the process if people who wanted a breed-change, had to remain logged off for eg. a certain amount of time, while the characters get "deleted" and all IP and items transfered?
I remember the early character creation process, where we would run around as sexless "drones". Would it be possible to reuse that part?

I know this pretty much would be "Make a new character at whatever level you want".

[Raggy]

Means, you better be buying Macro a round at the pub for this.

[Mereditche]

Means has been a bit to long on forums, I think.

He's becoming quite the troll. Even IHHN bites the dust!

(Please someone click the little box in front of "activate account" on my Zirkonium forum account. I can't find anyone who can. I tried support@, account@, forum mods, god himself, ...)

[agentgimpy]

Awsome, I can never leave AO now. This is like watching a train wreck.

Means, I love that you have the stones to try big things, but you have opened a way bigger can of worms than I think you realize. I mean cmon, a breed change to off-set the 'tweaks' to perks? Sometimes it's better to just leave well-enough alone.

What's next, a one time only chance to transfer your WoW toon to AO servers?

[erozc]

If Nanomage says "Wut?", what does Opifex say?

[Ebondevil]

If Nanomage says "Wut?", what does Opifex say?

They don't, they'll be extinct.

[IHaveHugeNick]

So nick, what you're saying is if they completely remove pistol from engineer you wouldn't want an ipr to reset pistol?
.

If i made Crat to use stun procs and they completely removed stun procs from Crats , do i get to reset my Crat to something else?

[Ayria]

If Nanomage says "Wut?", what does Opifex say?

Tune in next week to find out maybe?

[szszsz]

I have never seen a game director participate in open forum flame before.

Breed change? Who knows, why not...

[meatybtz]

Actually thats hillariously amusing.

Means is out trolling the trolls... does This Means he has been infected by AO FORUMITIS? Will he start to prefer Forum PVP to the game he works on? Wait and see.. the transformation is going according to plan.. all according to plan... *queue evil laugh*..


Ok this one goes out to all the haters, and kermudgeions here on the forums who hate when ever anything is made "easier" when a change comes that might actually make the game more attractive to people other than no-lifers who don't have time to regrind 220/70/30 and all the included nodrops.. who quad log and solo every playfield in the game..

I'd like to let you finish but Means just said he was adding breed changes to the game...


+1 for making a move to make the game less odius and terrible. Every little step makes the game that much better and more likely to get new life and players (money). I am not activly paying or playing anymore. I will once the new game engine comes out and or we get a population on RK2 that is enough to fill a geo Metro as currently the dustbunnies under the Geo's seat are wondering where everyone is.

[Alternity]

Making an option to change breeds feels like nothing else but admiting you're unable/don't want to balance the game properly. The ultimate bandaid fix.

Greetings,
Your Party Pooper.

Right


So when FC does a major overhaul of the breed perks, ensuring that all breeds are viable and attractive for different reasons.
Instead of forcing you to reroll to take advantage of this, and give you a 1 time option of a change, this is a bad thing?


Yes you really are stupid.

[Autohead]

Good but imho not good enough. If you add a chance to change breed make it also possible to:
1. Change profession to ****e the game up a bit and ressurect those long forgotten characters on our accounts.
2. Appear on different server after "chocie"l a bit of love for those lonely rk3 folks!

Whoa there partner, just because they gave us an inch doesn't mean we deserve a mile.

[SoldiTwo]

Even in my flame retardant teletubby costume I felt the heat from the conversations related to the release of the "first version" of the breed perks last week. I know you guys might find this surprising...but this is a "good" thing. The community is involved, passionate and commited to helping us get this right and I have every confidence that we will get these changes to where they need to go...there was NO chance that those documents were ever going to be implemented in their first-version state...good feedback from ALL our experts is needed. I'm glad I can count on you guys.

That being said a "key" piece of information has been missing with respect the breed perks. Breed perks are currently not "trivial" buffs of little value...it really matters what breed you choose in terms of building your character. The team and I believe that this is part of what makes AO fun...the choice and determination to try out alternate setups to try and push the boundaries of what is possible. Reducing the breed specific perks to irrelevancy would be removing fun from pretty much everyone in the game...nobody wants that. So, the ONLY fair option if we are going to make even SMALL adjustments to breed related actions is to allow everyone to make that important decision again should they so desire.

When these changes are eventually ironed out and they go live EVERYONE will have the opportunity to change breed once (and the sex of your character if you like) for free. This is the only fair way to handle this issue. It is also important to note that when this area is done it should be a very tough decision as we hope to make all breeds a viable choice...and removing abilities from breeds is not the route we intend to take on the way to evening the playfield.

In a sci-fi world why shouldn't breed change be an option?...this is also likely to be an option heading into the future for AO.

Whoever wants breed change, gz to them.

I don't know but most of the Fiday with Means make me a bit sad.
Macrosun needs support, he can't possibly implement all the new stuff alone!

AO will die, if the team stays at it's imho too small size.

PS:
The new engine was announced way before Cryptics STO, guess what's coming out in february?

PPS:
"From June 2010 the company expects monthly cash outflows relating to hosting, bandwidth and
lease of servers to be reduced by 350-400 TUSD."

Is that the final Server shutdown for AO? SCNR!!

[lazarus]

Right


So when FC does a major overhaul of the breed perks, ensuring that all breeds are viable and attractive for different reasons.
Instead of forcing you to reroll to take advantage of this, and give you a 1 time option of a change, this is a bad thing?


Yes you really are stupid.

it seems you and alot of other people is missing the picture/train.

a BREED choice should NEVER make or break a PROFESSION!

like it's now, and will be after the balance changes... (atleast of what I have seen so far)

[meatybtz]

Actually Autohead, it was origionally intended for players to be able to .. "multi-class" or rather change proffession. If you were about back in the day of the old Lab Character Creation you would know this, because the game voice over directly states this fact to you. My guess is they just wanted to take the game in a different direction... or more likely the disaster of launch basicly killed any and ALL plance for advanced game development. ALL PLANS. Except for the arrival of Means and our Foam Headed Worker of Wonders real true innovation in AO has been pretty lacking for all these years.

The introduction of a MAIL SYSTEM is a good sign
Breed Changes and Sex changes are another.

This game is horribly STATIC when I think it was envisioned to be DYNAMIC. Mr Bug threw a wrentch into the works and AO has never really recovered its feet.

Other concepts I would like to see returned:
-Trade Skills as a Major part of the game
-Trade Skillers able to level or finnaly readjusting the template for trade skill profs to allow full combat and tradeskilling by making tradeskills essentially free for them. The Prof Template for Primary Trade Skillers reflects the OE concept of being a non-combat Tradeskiller. This is very old ground and it should be turned up and fixed
-Player Driven Economy (that is the majority of items in game are "made" by players or makable)
-Everything Available from Missions or Through Tradeskills (nodrops were a bad idea and the masses of them today... are an even worse idea).

I said to the wife when she showed me the Mail System.. I said,"Means is introducing a New Age of AO. Players who start now will never know what a "reclaim" terminal is or why it is so central to our vernacular. Or how they used to be Social Hot Spots, its all gone at last." Yeah, I am a snarky punk, but I say what I want to say when I want to. Usually its either as just plain trolling or because I am trying to simply be noisy to make a point. However that doesnt mean I do not think that what is going is is bad. I honestly don't know if its GOOD even. It simply is AO going through a morph into something that it surely was not before. The perk changes are just the tip of the iceberg and I am sure that Means has alot more he ISNT telling us up his sleeves. When its all said and done and the new Game Engine is live and the advertisement starts again, it won't be our (older players) AO. It will bear only the echos of the past. I think thats good. Alot of those "echos" are ghosts of a tired and calcified playerbase that has spent years living with all sorts of whack ass stuff that are tied as a legacy to the games failed origins.
I am still waiting for Means to pop up one day and say the old database was lost or incompatable and we all have to start over but older players get some kind of consolation prize. I would sign back up in an instant for that, a clean slate with all the changes applied that Means wants. Something without all the legacy dragging it down, or the Fossilized Remnants of Old Players clogging up the gears.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King.

[Berinda]

PPS:
"From June 2010 the company expects monthly cash outflows relating to hosting, bandwidth and
lease of servers to be reduced by 350-400 TUSD."

Is that the final Server shutdown for AO? SCNR!!

It's probably the contract with the horrible server hosting they had for AO - which they no longer use but are still paying for - expiring.

[Jihnna]

a BREED choice should NEVER make or break a PROFESSION!

Are you saying breed should not matter ?

[Camista]

The King is Dead, Long Live the King.

Awesome post.

[Alternity]

it seems you and alot of other people is missing the picture/train.

a BREED choice should NEVER make or break a PROFESSION!

like it's now, and will be after the balance changes... (atleast of what I have seen so far)

Your big fancy letters in the middle of your post, makes you look more like an illiterate than someone who has something to share.

There will never be perfect balance within a skill system like the one AO employ, don't fool yourself into thinking otherwise.

I'd rather have a slightly dented model, than a system that allows for no variety at all.
We might as well go down to 1 breed, because that's the only way you could be happy, thankfully that won't happen in AO.
But I do know a lot of other MMo's you can play where breed is pita.

[Sephiroth56]

*blinks*

Oh, I'm going atrox!! (no, not really)

Means, what about stuff that's breedlocked to our character? What about my cyberdeck, for an example?