Lemur Lad

Welcome to yesterday evening: All over again, courtesy of Pax.

Good list Zombie. I would add a #11 myself:

11. No more contractual issues regarding money distribution. There was always a wall in place when it came to the Publisher/Developer situation, and the distribution of funds. Generally less overhead clears the way for some of the development additions we're seeing, but also it clears the way for the All Access Pass they have been hinting at for a while.

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Is Joe stealing Weaver One's orbital space platform of death since he isn't using it? Of course he will have to somehow get Lady Athyna out of it.

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Haha... you're funny.

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ain't he just? That won't last long, I almost have target lock.

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Shame on you targeting Joe/Hero One like that.

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we weren't. Hold still this is going to hurt a lot.

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Is Joe stealing Weaver One's orbital space platform of death since he isn't using it? Of course he will have to somehow get Lady Athyna out of it.

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Haha... you're funny.

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ain't he just? That won't last long, I almost have target lock.

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And you had better not mention the new TF in Issue 11 that requires a team of 1 to start... because that is definitely, most definitely NOT soloable, high level PvE content.

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I know this hasn't been posted in this thread but here is a link to the newly updated hiring page for NCsoft. For the COH/COV project check out the Mountain View location.

There are 19 positions that were just announced.

For those interested in gainful gaming employment, check out the NCsoft North America Jobs Listing. Positions for "Mountain View" would be in our newly formed NCsoft NorCal Studio.

Ex

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The fact that all those jobs are being hired for makes me a very happy lemur. There are some very juicy job titles up for grabs and they mean some very good things for the game.

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BTW, to those hating on Lallendos, I don't think you're being fair.

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No more or less fair than he was in his assessment of what qualifies as new content.

If he had just come in and said, I want new zones, and you haven't given me any. That could have floated. Instead he's trying to leverage a very technical definition of new zone into no new content AT ALL.

So tell me what's more unfair?

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I'm grumpy but loveable?

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They were only half right.

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and depending which half you pick, that's either a zing! reply or a bom-chika-wow! reply.

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We were told that this game would never see the loot focus that other MMOs have. Explain to me how the market is not directly representing true loot being in this game.

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Way to twist what actually happened and what was actually said, but no. We were told one of the strong points of the game was that loot wasn't essential to your progress. We were told that didn't mean there would never be any loot. When they came up with a way to add loot that added to the core game experience without becoming essential, they did it.

Tell me you can't play from 1-50 just as well as you could before Inventions, if you close your salvage and recipe windows, turn off the alerts, and just buy your enhancers normally. You can't tell me that because it's not true.

It's not the devs fault they made something a lot of players find fun and exciting. It doesn't hurt the game any, except maybe there's a little less spare influence floating around for superfluous costume contests under Atlas Statue.

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Anyone else have a sinking feeling that this game is goin' down?

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Sure, if you don't read anything except the headline to the announcement then try to post like you've actually thought about the change, I can definitely see where you're coming from.

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So who is still here?

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Everyone except Statesman.

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I'd be very suprised, since I rarely see people ask about them and it always seems hard to form one


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You're not looking in the right places then. The badge channel on my server launches them all the time. So do my groups of friends. It's much less of a hassle and an issue than it used to be.

Since Cholera isn't playing lately, I will answer for her.

Yes.

Amazingly, she made her first PvP kill using only the teabag emote, as the members of her SG stood nearby and watched in awe.

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It was BaB's first, too!

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It was and I gotta say, not impressed. But I grew up in the south and midwest. I've faced down hurricanes, tornades, thunderstorms, hail, sleet, blizzards, you name it I've been in it. Got myself into a load of trouble by venturing out into a hurricane with a trash can lid when I was a wee lad. I was trying to turn myself into an untethered kite in 100+ mph winds before my mother caught me.

This earthquake just rounded off my exposure to natural disasters. All I need now is a volcanic eruption to complete the set.

Okay, so sure it was surreal, but no more surreal than vibrant green funnel clouds or standing outside in the eye of a hurricane.

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Tidal wave? Avalanche? Mud Slide? Wildfire? Gotta catch em all.

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Quick, someone give me a good idea as to how I can get in the scoop!


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had the FAQ reprinted this week for a reason.

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I like the idea too. If they have some opposition to reorganizing them, I wish they would at least alphabetize them like Serpine suggeted. That would be a very simple thing for them to do and would be very appreciated on my part.

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In the past, Positron has made it very clear that it's not simple. Neither adding tabs, moving tabs, or re-ordering the lists is something that can be done easily.

I can dig out the quote if you like.

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I never knew about the Scoop until this past week. Great, now I'll be even more swamped at work after adding this to my to-do list!

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Be sure to check our Index at the top of this section. Plenty of back issues to waste time on!

Brickstown is about as common as Founder's Falls, which means: Not very many. The places Snow went into detail on have the most.

Athy will be back next week. RL concerns meant she posted after deadline, and since we've got our feet under us and the edition was 98% done at that point, we had to put it off.

Glad you like the new series, it's going to be a good one. We're going to try and get some Guest Writers in to keep it interesting.

I know people miss their favorites, but we've learned that as fun as the Scoop is, getting something done every single week can be rough, and we don't want people burning themselves out on something that's supposed to be fun.

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All that leaves for us to discuss, I must sadly agree, is the selection process. And I agree if could maybe be improved. But no act of tossing out the current, established pool of testers is an "improvement" IMO, so any idea that starts from there, I would have to oppose.


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Why?

What is so bloody special about these people that they need to be included in this and any future testing?

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Proven track record. I9-->I10-->i11 has been a faster process than ever before, and partof that is due to the greater intensity and focus of testing in the Closed Beta stage.

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You cannot say, with any degree of accuracy that the testers themselves have proven anything other than they can follow instructions.

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And you're trying to say there's no benefit in having not to endlessly repeat those instructions and make sure people are up to speed? Sorry, based on my experiences, I'll disagree. There's some new people in each test, but the more new people there are, the more disorganized things are, and the slower things go. People who already know where to look for instructions, people who know where to tell the smalle percentage of new people where to find info, and people who have experience in reporting things in the ways we've been told provide useful info all make things faster, and increase the amount of good info flowing around.

Each beta has been going more quickly and more smoothly, despite the fact that in many ways the new material has been more ambitious each time. There's no way to directly quantify it, but trying to say that the pool of experienced testers doesn't have much to do with it is downright ridiculous.

We're not saying these people are the only people. However these people are the ones that have shown they can do it, and in that case, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Everyone gets to play soon enough. In the long run it doesn't matter which half of which percentage of the population gets in early, except that changing things completely means added headaches for the people administrating, and less time to get good work done.

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The other problem I have with this idea, is that this is what they pay Lighthouse and Ex Libris for. Seriously, I don't see why they couldn't perform this role. It seems to me that having two full time staffers working on community would be enough to get information to the community and in a manner that the powers that be want.

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While I agree it falls under the scope of their jobs, I will say that 100% of their duties is not the forums. They have other things they do, so I can see there being some value in making sure the good info they need is making it out of the forums and to them. I see correspondents as less bringing the tablets down from the mountain, as representing what we want to the devs. But even then I see it as more bureaucracy than this community needs, hence the source of most of my objections.

As for Deus' point about giving it a try and seeing if it helps, I will say that any effort to improve relations and communications requires an expenditure of what a politician would call political capital. An attempt and failure can hurt things much worse than never attempting it. There's been a lot of forum changes in the last several months, with the Scoop, PvPEC, PERC, and some other discussions that have been happening in different areas. Part of me doesn't want to spread the efforts too thin, or change too many things too quickly, so that the things that have a legitimate shot at working, get that fair shot. Every project has a certain amount of overhead, and the only people that can decide if there's room for more would be the Community Reps, but that is a legitmate concern. Anything we do should be a solid effort with a reasonable plan for success.

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I think this response raises even more questions for me. I'm also not sure you answered the question that you quoted. If I missed it, I appologize. But again, for the sake of curiosity, do you see that system, if implemented here, working better than it did when it was used/abused by SOE?


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I didn't state the answer directly, but no. I see them both ending up being equally ineffective, for different reasons.

SOE misused it. Cryptic probably already gets all it needs and more by dint of being active and involved with an active and involved playerbase. I see the Correspondents as slowing down the process, not smoothing it out.

As it is now, the devs ask us about what they want to know about. That cuts down on unreasonable expectations and frustrations. Having an institutionalized correspondent system tends to imply their reports have a priority for upcoming changes (no matter how often you state otherwise that there's no promises implied). Like EvilGeko said, many of the things we bring up, are going to end up with the same sort of response, which is a big picture response.

Correspondents by their very nature are good at ferreting out minutae, and the game is at a stage where, apart from persistent bugs, the minutae wouldn't net significant improvements for the amount of work. To me that means setting the Corrs up to fail, and I don't want to see that.

Do I think there are ways the forums could be organized to be more helpful for Devs and players alike? Of course I do. I devote more of my time than anyone will know to that. I'm just basing my response to this on my own assessment of the way the communication channels are running, and I see it blocking or slowing the flow more than I see it smoothing it.

You're right, it is an interesting discussion, that's why I called it to Lighthouse and Ex Libris' attention after my first reply. You and I may not agree, but that doesn't mean their understanding about the communication flow at higher levels may not see this as something that would be useful.

My pride isn't on the line. I am willing to be wrong. However I see the entire process as working better when it's less formal, given the thinness of the barriers between dev and player that we've worked so hard to achieve.

Agreed. It's clearly stated, and well thought out. My only fault with it is there's a bit too much "rose-colored glass" between the OP's account and my memories of the day to day workings of the correspondent program. That's not just my old disappointments in the game of the dev team talking, I paid close attention to it across the boards, because for a while I wanted to be a Correspondent. I saw it accomplished very little other than add a layer of smoke and mirrors at the expense of overall player morale.

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I see it working here exponentially better than it did in SWG. Wouldn't you agree to that?


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Efficiency is a big part of how useful any feedback mechanism is. I'm really not certain that many AT issues get missed by our dev team, so I think my point is, that an added layer of administration just bogs things down.

I've already run into line of communication issues between what gets reported to NCSoft and how that info makes it back to Cryptic (or not) and what gets reported directly to Cryptic via these forums. I'm not certain an added layer of player volunteers would be that helpful in straightening those things out.

I think if the core issue you're trying to solve is filtering out the signal to noise ratio of the forums, a more efficient way to do it by educating the playerbase.

When we're bug hunting in Closed Beta and in Open, the bug threads have specific instructions on how to report, and that helps increase the useful feedback by a wide margin.

Official threads tend to do the same thing. That's not to say they don't wander afield at times, but they do get a generally better grade of response than the day to day forums.

And then of course there are the dedicated problem solvers in our community. People like BillZ, Arcanaville, and many many others, who are already de facto filling the role you're trying to formalize.

I just want anyone who is willing to to step up and do the good work and make the statements, without worrying about turf wars and formalities, and precedence. Right now, anyone can. With formalized correspondents, that's not guaranteed.

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Nothing negative ever came from creating player correspondents, as far as I was ever aware.


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Not addressing only this line of the post, but the basis of my response stems from this.

You and I have vastly different takes on the correspondent program and what it accomplished.

From what I saw in over two and a half years, all the correspondent program did was further isolate and alienate the players from the development of the game. The people selected as correspondents did a fine job, however by and large they were became the targets and there was very little actual flow of information in either direction.

This development team has always been hundreds of times more accessible than the swg teams. ANY player can send one of them a message, and have a good chance of getting a response back. I can site numerous examples of when the devs have gone the extra mile to stay in touch, and numerous times when they do listen closely to the community and players.

Splitting correspondents just filtered the information flow, and it gave the illusion that to get anything heard you needed to be a partisan of one particular AT or interest group. It also promoted the continued balkanization of the playerbase, where the community fought with each other over who "deserved" the devs attention more than they worked together to make the game better for everyone.

Our Archetypes are largely OK. In swg most professions were broken in some profound way. Most of the development work was centered around trying to fix and adjust them (still is). Here the main thrust of development is for new broad based additions to large groups of players. The focus of development has little to do with specific interests of specific groups. However when there is specific development, the dev that is doing it is just as likely to go to that section of the forums and address the community him/herself (e.g. _Castle_ and Blaster Defiance).

Correspondents worked hard. Correspondents took a lot of heat from the community. You say the devs listened to them, and I say the Combat Upgrade still got dropped on the community without much input from the community, and the NGE was even worse. It outright eliminated most of the work the correspondents had done. I went back and perused the SWG forums last month, and I still see Correspondents there, working hard. However I look at their issues lists and see things still there that were there 2 years ago, and I see things that were not broken and working fine added.

So, I just say in conclusion, that you say it worked there and it could work here, and I say it didn't do that much there and it isn't much needed here.