Why play a melee character at all?

[PermaBanned]

I certainly didn't. Judging by server pops, pretty sure I'm not the only one. So, what's the secret? Magical incantation? Proper variation on the pre-TR shamanic dance? Stevedores toting samolian-stuffed trunks to back-alley servers? Membership in the right country club?

Players may ask for things, or they may not. It doesn't matter. Only one party has the power to decide how DDO works, and that is SSG, not the players.

Apparently everyone in "the community" has been given what they wanted, then turned around and complained about receiving it - even the community members who lobbied against changes asked for by other community members.

What I've been wondering is if he considers himself a member of the community - which would mean he's just as guilty as everyone else in the community; or as an entity sepperate from "the community" and thus blameless - which calls to question why no one else is an entity outside the community?

Not that it would matter, the sanctimonious "lesson teaching" would continue regardless...

[Chai]

Not that it would matter, the sanctimonious "lesson teaching" would continue regardless...

Until the lesson is learned, and repeated over and over again until it is.

If game balance was a 6th grade math problem, the spreadsheet wavers in the community whose suggestions were consistently implemented would be the only kids in school with a driver's license.

[BigErkyKid]

Apparently everyone in "the community" has been given what they wanted, then turned around and complained about receiving it - even the community members who lobbied against changes asked for by other community members.

What I've been wondering is if he considers himself a member of the community - which would mean he's just as guilty as everyone else in the community; or as an entity sepperate from "the community" and thus blameless - which calls to question why no one else is an entity outside the community?

Not that it would matter, the sanctimonious "lesson teaching" would continue regardless...

I think the devs have adopted a clever strategy. They don't say anything and let us rip each other apart. It doesn't look pretty in the forums, but they can always count on the forums not being used anyway. Certainly they have taken steps towards diminishing the role of the forums as a community - dev interaction spot.

When they were still talking to us they revealed the massive misunderstanding they have of the game mechanics:

- Sev didn't know about fury shot.
- They thought holy sword only gave +1 threat range, as opposed to doubling it.
- There is a quote in the thief acrobat discussion threat by Sev stating that the self healing advantage of paladin over TA is minimal.
- Quotes in the hen shin mystic discussion thread claiming that the ki attacks do "sufficient" damage, and that cauldron of fire (the fire part) is "punchy".
- Claims to having "fixed" aggro.
- Apparently most population hasn't switched to at least reaper 1 (looking at LFM counts certainly gives a completely different image)
- The recent deity feats and domain feats are apparently "balanced", when it is painfully obvious they aren't.
- ES warlocks needing more nerfs, while the remaining warlocks remaining relatively untouched.
...and a variety of "our data shows".

I am sure on can collect many more "pearls", and I would expect the PC forums to be filled with them.

The disconnect between the game as perceived by the devs and their data and what I see every other day in the servers is profound. When I log, I almost never encounter:

- Pale masters (can count on fingers of one hand).
- Thief acrobats (cannot even remember last time I saw one, at all).
- Henshin mystics - I cannot even remember last time I saw one using a ki attack.
- I see very few barbs in epics
- Non of the few people that I know stay in epics and cap is running a swash / war chanter.
- Virtually every power gamer I know is running or has run the vast majority of their racial PLs on a warlock. At most I see some artis (not claiming everyone is doing that, but certainly disproportionate amount of power gamers).
...and again, I could continue, but it is pointless.

But I guess that staying quite just hides all of the misunderstandings and flaws in the logic behind some of the changes and the direction of development.

I don't know how things work in the PC, but the devs have definitely abandoned the forums. Reference to the first trilogy of the chronicles of the dragon lance? :P

[cryalotmaster]

That assumes they had a good enough game to make as much money that way to start with.

History doesn't support this.

The game was good now is garbage.

History prove this, the game had thousends of players now theres 20 guys playing borelocks.

[cryalotmaster]

Just because their goals may not be the same as yours, doesn't mean they don't have a plan either.

If their goals are make the game boring and garbage they are doing great.

[cryalotmaster]

Players don't design content. SSG does.
Players don't write code. SSG does.
Players don't upload patches. SSG does.

This.

If they do changes based on players feedback it is still SSG fault.

They should know how the game works and test it. Not let us test then ignore those tests completely like they always do.

Here some feedback, delete warlocks and mail every player a message like: "I'm sorry it was a stupid mistake"

[cryalotmaster]

Until the lesson is learned, and repeated over and over again until it is.

If game balance was a 6th grade math problem, the spreadsheet wavers in the community whose suggestions were consistently implemented would be the only kids in school with a driver's license.

The only lesson here is you are either lunatic or Sev's sock.

[Tat2Freak]

When I log, I almost never encounter:

(can count on fingers of one hand).
(cannot even remember last time I saw one, at all).
Icannot even remember last time I saw one using a ki attack.
Isee very few barbs in epics
Non of the few people that I know
Virtually every power gamer I know
At most I see some artis

The disconnect between the game as perceived by me the devs and their data

...and again, I could continue, but it is pointless.

From the begenning, I thought about it last night, the reason people play melee is because they are not you chasing FoTM builds. Everyone didnt gravitate to Dual wielding W/P Rapiers and everyone is not going to switch to casters, get over what YOU PERCEIVE, your scope is VERY SMALL INDEED.

I don't know how things work

[PermaBanned]

While I do doubt he's a Sev~ sock, I...

The only lesson here is you are either lunatic or Sev's sock.

Literally laughed out loud!



Edit after second thought: How many times has Sev~ said "...based on player feedback..."
hmm...

[BigErkyKid]

From the begenning, I thought about it last night, the reason people play melee is because they are not you chasing FoTM builds. Everyone didnt gravitate to Dual wielding W/P Rapiers and everyone is not going to switch to casters, get over what YOU PERCEIVE, your scope is VERY SMALL INDEED.

And not everyone is doing racial TRs, and not everyone was playing a warlock...

Obviously not EVERYONE does something, but when enough people switch of melee, when enough people choose to grind racial PLs on certain builds, then it is completely rational to believe there is a reason for it. Knowing a bit the game mechanics should close the gap to a full conclusion.

Arguing that I can only speak for my experience is so obvious that it is irrelevant to state it. Whenever I have done counts of players by level or type of build / class, I also get comments regarding the arbitrariness of the time and server and what not. Those who don't want to admit to the obvious will always find a way to nitpick.

Turbine/SSG will not release their internal data because quite frankly it would show things about balance they don't want to or can't address.

Their silence there is a bigger concession than any dev / producer post.

[Forzah]

And not everyone is doing racial TRs, and not everyone was playing a warlock...

Obviously not EVERYONE does something, but when enough people switch of melee, when enough people choose to grind racial PLs on certain builds, then it is completely rational to believe there is a reason for it. Knowing a bit the game mechanics should close the gap to a full conclusion.

Arguing that I can only speak for my experience is so obvious that it is irrelevant to state it. Whenever I have done counts of players by level or type of build / class, I also get comments regarding the arbitrariness of the time and server and what not. Those who don't want to admit to the obvious will always find a way to nitpick.

Turbine/SSG will not release their internal data because quite frankly it would show things about balance they don't want to or can't address.

Their silence there is a bigger concession than any dev / producer post.

You know, I'd just prefer if they admit that they don't want to address balance. It would be sad, but then we're at least no longer in the dark about it.

[BigErkyKid]

You know, I'd just prefer if they admit that they don't want to address balance. It would be sad, but then we're at least no longer in the dark about it.

I guess it is strictly better for them to just shut up about it. If they admitted the game is blatantly imbalanced, we would have a storm of people saying that no achievement or good gameplay is due to the player, rather because they use broken things.

Right now there is still the illusion of some accomplishment integrity. People love to say it is skill and not build, "git gud", it is not the build it is what's behind the keyboard, and variations of the theme.

Obviously it is all BS, as we know there are archetypes that are strictly better, holding skill constant. But admitting it would destroy this last imaginary barrier.

Anyway, looking too closely at what they are doing is a recipe for frustration. They don't even fix the problems they have openly acknowledged many months ago (e.g. reaper XP in heroics vs epics or cap), do we expect them to own the rest?

This game only works if you go with he flow and "exploit" early and often, or you just don't give a crab about how the overall design is set up. Other than that you are in for a ride of amazement at outrageous design decisions and frustration at what the game incentives have become.

[cryalotmaster]

You know, I'd just prefer if they admit that they don't want to address balance. It would be sad, but then we're at least no longer in the dark about it.

They don't give a flying f... about balance or about this game at all.

[KingNite]

No way...do you even understand how amp worked prior to the nerf? The most amp oriented build you could conjure up right now still wouldn't hit amp values people getting prior to the nerf. If you had average healing amp you didn't see much change with the nerf but the people with amp oriented builds definitely saw it.

You literally had people with 700%+ healing amp...nobody is hitting those numbers anymore, even after several years of power creep post amp changes.



They didn't nerf healing amp in reaper.



Do you even know how AC used to work, because you obviously didn't know how amp worked before or you wouldn't have thought high amp builds ended up right back where they started. Mobs would roll a 1d20 + their to hit bonus. Let's say a mob rolled an 80+1d20 and you had a moderate investment in AC and had 60 AC, which was pretty good for most classes back then...you get hit 95% on the time...mob would only miss on a 1. Let's say you have 10 AC...your AC would be just as effective in that example as the guy with 60. Meanwhile if you had 100 AC the mob would only hit you 5% of the time.

So what did it accomplish? It lessened the band devs had to balance damage around and gave us a system where investing in defenses was always good because things like dodge and prr don't fall off the bottom of the scale like AC used to. Like I said earlier, they could have tightened the band...but in the end it would have resulted in the same thing if nobody hit 95% on the top of the band and even a modest investment in AC was enough to put you in a useful range on a 1d20 scale. How do you balance damage when mobs miss person A 95% of the time and hit person B 95% of the time. Person A ends up a god, or person B ends up getting killed stupidly easily. It would have been impossible to balance around that...it would be like, oh, I don't know, maybe ramping up mob damage to ridiculous levels so they kill people in 2-3 hits and then wondering why we keep seeing threads about melee suck ranged OP because ranged just avoid damage via kiting while melees have to put themselves at risk to get close enough to deal damage.

We can have a normal discussion or resort to personal atacks like you don't know this I know that. I could easily say that most peps complaining about melee have no real clue how to play one and good players do good and toss here some numbers from 10 years ago , blah blah blah, but thats useless and no one really cares. I don't need numbers from werid build of 10 years ago to know that I healed for much more before reaper than I ever did before. So whatever they did to nerf healing didn't work cause they had to nerf it again recently, they kept you busy farming some heal ampli and positive spellpower items after nefing it, just to nerf it again, so you can farm mosre heal ampli positive spellpower again, the fact that you (and many more) yet fail to see it and keep falling for it after 10 years of compleining proves how smart of a strategy it is for them

So they reduce self healing on reaper to encourage grouping. Do you see more grouping now? Hardly with half the people. All I see is less players, all of them desperate for more positive spell power and heal ampli cause they wana self heal effectively again. Yet I'm 100% positive those same m***** will farm for more and then ask again for it to be nerfed in name of grouping challenge or whatever is the excuse of the moment doing the job for SSG and perpetuating the grind wheel they like so much to complain about. I don't need numbers to see that

[KingNite]

You know, I'd just prefer if they admit that they don't want to address balance. It would be sad, but then we're at least no longer in the dark about it.

You know, it will never happen cause they know better and are smarter than that. You know it, everyone who cares does right now you just have problems admitting/assuming it and moving on. Now if you expect any admission you can complain for 10 more years helping them push their agenda while being ripped of by them at the same time and you would still have none. Nothing could make them happier.

[KingNite]

Apparently everyone in "the community" has been given what they wanted, then turned around and complained about receiving it - even the community members who lobbied against changes asked for by other community members.

What I've been wondering is if he considers himself a member of the community - which would mean he's just as guilty as everyone else in the community; or as an entity sepperate from "the community" and thus blameless - which calls to question why no one else is an entity outside the community?

Not that it would matter, the sanctimonious "lesson teaching" would continue regardless...

Wow. Still hurt is see... Good lessons are always hard to swallow at the moment but with the time are apreciated. And yup to certain degree you are right, the proof is that the game is running, if they didn't offered what peps want no one would buy it and the game would be dead... Yet they have been selling it for 10 straight years so yep I think one can conclude they mostly give what players want. Is that the same that players say here? Most time it's not. Why that happens? Only those complaing about something they buy after know that.

To certain degree everyone who plays even those who never post here are resposible of the good and the bad, casue they constantly validate/invalidate what they do by buying/not buying it. You can create 1000 new posts b***ing about balance, none of that matters if you ( and everyone) then buy warlock class the same day of its release. If you complain and don't buy you make sense, if you don't complain and buy you make sense ( what most do) , if you complain and then buy you make 0 sense and you will get continually ripped of.

Not that it would matter, the sanctimonious "my class is a gimp nerf everyone else so we can all re-farm more power creep" would continue regardless...

[Tat2Freak]

And not everyone is doing racial TRs, and not everyone was playing a warlock...

Obviously not EVERYONE does something, but when enough people switch of melee, when enough people choose to grind racial PLs on certain builds, then it is completely rational to believe there is a reason for it. Knowing a bit the game mechanics should close the gap to a full conclusion.

Arguing that I can only speak for my experience is so obvious that it is irrelevant to state it. Whenever I have done counts of players by level or type of build / class, I also get comments regarding the arbitrariness of the time and server and what not. Those who don't want to admit to the obvious will always find a way to nitpick.

Turbine/SSG will not release their internal data because quite frankly it would show things about balance they don't want to or can't address.

Their silence there is a bigger concession than any dev / producer post.

And arguing with your empirical evidence vs. those who have ALL THE DATA...whats that?

Go ask Coke for their formula, see how loud the wall of silence is...this is a business and from your own mouths, you agree that they do MANY things no other games do and do it well...why would they give info to YOU? You going to start funding side projects, pay for all the things YOU want? Maybe you should go start your own company, instead of feeling entitled to someone elses hard work. While you sit at home with all the obvious time in the world, they are at WORK...whats your excuse?

p.s. what are you REALLY upset about that you waste all your energy arguing about some game semantics? Maybe you should...nvm, enjoy your game, its safe here.

[Chai]

Turbine/SSG will not release their internal data because quite frankly it would show things about balance they don't want to or can't address.

Their silence there is a bigger concession than any dev / producer post.

You know, I'd just prefer if they admit that they don't want to address balance. It would be sad, but then we're at least no longer in the dark about it.

While this is a good pipe dream, and Id be happy as a player if they did it, from a business standpoint, this is a no brainer as to why companies do not do this. The grand conspiracies people would spin up would make the conspiracies they have already spun up regarding what the silence and lack of communication means look like old school Saturday morning cartoons.

I mean think about this for a second. They talked about implementing druids in 2007, and that was taken as an iron clad promise right off the bat, and as an outright lie later on that it got brought up in many feedback threads over years of time. Think about what would happen if they came out and stated D&D (especially 3.5E) is not really a balanced game to begin with so that was not our vision with DDO etc...and they say this after all the hilarious amounts of complaining about game balance over the past 3 years or so.

Not to mention Redenbacher stock would split twice in the same day.

[KingNite]

The game was good now is garbage.

History prove this, the game had thousends of players now theres 20 guys playing borelocks.

Yup everything else that was remotely fun to play and close in power got nerfed. By those same 20 borelock players obssesed with in game power crying here about balance. Oh the irony of this....

[KingNite]

I'll oversimplify it for the TL;DR, in two simple points.

1. What you want, doesn't make money.

2. They gave it a shot anyhow, and the "nerf everything the forums cry about strategy" didn't work.

Right on the spot. Oh they know it, they can't just get over it. They are special and turbine should treat them as spoiled kids and bow to every one of their brilliant ideas like not selling what actually sells in the store, remove it or give it for free. This and that everyone should play the way they like it or the game is ruined for them and thus for everyone... Just grow the f up dudes lol. You are not a spoiled kid on yer mom basement you are a customer of a company who wants to make as much money out of you as they can.