Thank you for the welcome back.
The mission statement of the rebalance was to go through all the professions and apply systemic changes in order to make a larger pool of the professions viable for more areas of gameplay, while also improving their identity/uniqueness as professions; these changes would be in contrast to some previous changes made over the years which could be called "band-aid" fixes. These rebalance changes were presented in a number of different ways, as seen in the nano/perk docs. As I'm sure you're aware, however, a fair amount of time has passed since this Rebalance initiative was announced, the documents created, and the present...during this time, we've found ourselves rethinking a number of these changes, in addition to the overall scope of this project.
Here we are today, 18.7 is on Testlive, and it has brought along sets of changes which in essence stayed true to what we set out to do. Some difficult, large, borderline-earth-shattering changes were made; some parts of AO have been rocked to its very core. Once again, I do invite everyone to explore some of these changes on Testlive before passing too harsh of a judgment.
It is our job as developers to do what we feel is best for the game and community as a whole. That said, receiving such a strong reaction from the community reaffirms both how much passion is still here, that some marks may have been missed. It is with a fresh pair of eyes and ears that we are willing to go through these changes, making needed adjustments, before releasing 18.7 to Live. Please feel free to add suggestions to
http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...d.php?t=611967 (Do follow the formatting rules, though!). A nice chunk of the changes made from now until patch day will likely be inspired from that suggestion thread, my upcoming correspondence with your Professionals, and from some other sources/avenues/haunts that I choose to tap into.
I do apologize if development has seemed like a black box. Once we get past bringing 18.7 into a better state, we'll continue moving forward with enacting other items on the hit list; I believe next in the queue will be the new kind of Inferno mission.
Now I need to finish preparing for a flight I'll be on in ~18 hours. I'll have a long list of suggestions to go through to keep myself occupied until I return mid-next week.
Thanks again!