LISAR

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I think players need to be more careful when responding to requests like this because their responses often are much stronger than the reality of the situation suggests. But conversely, this is also equally mischaracterized by the people making the requests as well.

For example, no dev ever said power customization was impossible. The *closest* any dev came to this was BaB, who said that the amount of work involved was so high, it would probably be better to implement it in a future game engine rather than attempt to retrofit it into this one.

A few *players* then starting saying "the devs" said it was impossible, and I personally tried to post in as many of those threads as I stumbled across that no, the devs didn't say that.

Conversely, no one said power proliferation was impossible either. The closest was Castle who said, a long time ago, that given a choice he wouldn't arbitrarily proliferate powersets between archetypes in general. But of course, it wasn't entirely his choice. However, there was no mass numbers of players jumping in to say powerset proliferation was impossible or even unlikely. Most were simply asking for it. Some (including me) were advocating against it, or at least against some aspects of it. But that sort of opposition to an idea is entirely fair. I like it, you don't, so you say so. A lot of people now seem to characterize powerset proliferation as an example of "The Man" trying to keep them down, when that's not an accurate portrayal of reality at that time.


Here's my own view. Whether the devs have said X is impossible, difficult, or unlikely, there's no harm at all in a new player saying "I wish we had X." At worst, they should be gently pointed to prior discussions about X to familiarize themselves with the history of X on the forums.

However, new or not, when a player starts expousing how they know how easy X would be to implement, or demanding to know why the devs can't figure out how to implement X in a reasonable amount of time, they voluntarily surrrender the right to be treated with kid gloves. And this is the sort of common sense everyone is supposed to have when jumping onto the internet.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: every guess about how the game works or how development of the game works has been wrong. Every single time, from 2004 to now. Every single post that has started off with a resume, proceeded with some guesswork about how to add something to the game, and ended with an analysis of how difficult that would be, has been not just wrong, but wildly wrong, unless it has been based entirely on publicly released information about the game system.

So: ask for whatever you want to ask for. People may jump on you for that, but they shouldn't. If you really think you're being pounded on by know-it-alls just for expressing a preference, PM me a link to the thread and I'll jump right in if I can. But if I find out the reason why they are jumping on you is not because you're just expressing a preference or a suggestion but because you're arguing about technical details and you're wrong, I'll probably jump in on *their* side.