Stun

That's right Mods, remove a Developer's post from this thread.

New approaches are always going to met with some resistance. New approaches lol. The vast, vast majority of video games do not grant XP for kills.

Well, alright. But if we're going to expand this discussion to include equipment as a build supplement, then I'd like to request that we stop claiming (as josh has) that you could create a bad build in the IE games and thus PoE needed to improve upon such flawed design.

Then that would mean that the weapons matter, not the build.

Why? Ok, here's a quick example. Lets say your Fighter is wielding a weapon who's base damage is 10. Now lets say that we adjust Might values so that: 9 Might = 0 bonus to damage 18 Might = +9 bonus to damage 1 Might = -9 to damage (Ie. a system where you're buying just 1 point of damage for every point of might after 9, and subtracting 1 point of damage for every point of might under 9.) In this system, your fighter with 1 Might will be doing 1 point of damage per hit with his weapon. This is what people would call a bad build. now Couple that with 3 in Dexterity, and this fighter will now have serious problems even hitting his opponent for 1 damage. People would call this a bad build, even IF the stat dumping and armor-wearing allowed him to be quite the survivor while doing practically no damage to anyone. It's completely viable and not much different than wearing no armor and pumping RES. My challenge to you. Roll up a wizard. Dump all his stats to 3, and wear no armor. Then watch as his magic missles, fireballs and arcane veils still make him a terror on the battlefield as designed. The stats are just bonuses. They don't *matter*

Offering XP for kills is not an exploit. And it won't ever become exploitable unless we're dealing with idiot developers who don't have the sense to eliminate respawns and make NPCs walk away/go away/disappear/be worth nothing when a quest is completed. Give your ridiculous hyperbole a rest already.

Unless by 'noticeable difference', you mean decimal point values, you're mistaken.

Again, the values cannot be adjusted too meaningfully, otherwise build failure will be a possibility. It will be just like how it is in AD&D. And therein lies the absurdity behind Josh's claim that you can have true build freedom *and* no bad builds at the same time.

Thus we have the Policing you falsely claimed doesn't exist.

You make the mistake of assuming that the majority thinks about exploiting in single player games the same way as you do. I did no such thing. I wrote my entire post in 1st person singular. Because that's all I care about in a single player game: ME.

So you think its fine if people do stuff like, sneaking through the vent tunnel getting sneak xp, running back to the start killing anyone at the normal route getting kill-xp, talking the boss out of the situation getting talk-xp and then kill him to get kill-xp again? That is what people usually do in games that give xp for every small step. Ooh! I can answer this hyperbole-ridden straw man! Answer: since this is a single player game and Gamer-Joe's exploiting doesn't effect my game experience in any way, yes. I don't mind at all. Stop trying to police the gamer.

Wait... didn't we just cover this, like, 5 minutes ago? As long as farming isn't required, what does it matter what an exploiter does? Oh that's right. This is the Policing you claim isn't occurring. It matters because the devs demand that we play their way.

Nuh-uh. Does not follow. If you dump a stat, you put the points somewhere else. The game doesn't require you to. You can *literally* dump all your stats to 3 and then start adventuring and see for yourself how worthlessly cosmetic the attribute system is....and must be.... in order to guarantee no bad character building. And whether that was josh's intent or not, that is how the system works. The classes are already totally viable regardless of how you choose to play them (ranged vs. meless vs. Spellcasting) The attribute points don't change this.

Correct. So then, what do we say to those tiresome Anti-Kill-XP peeps who repeatedly insist that we need to remove Kill XP in order to eliminate the need to grind for XP like in the IE games? Should we tell them they're full of Sh*t because they friggin are?

It doesn't mean that either. There's no need imposed on the player at all. You're trying to ignore the Obvious - that in this beta, you can dump ALL your stats to 3 and still be totally effective in melee, ranged, and spell casting, and that the system HAS to be this way, otherwise, there will be a chance for build failure... and build failure goes against the stated design goal.

That's nice. But that has nothing to do with your claim or what we were discussing. You don't have to grind in any of the IE games, yet that hasn't stopped your side from citing IE-game-grinding at every turn on this thread.

Oh no it's not. PS:T is the most attribute-dependent game ever created. And how do you raise your attributes? By leveling. And how do you level? By gaining XP. And how can you gain XP fast in PS:T? 1) By killing the endlessly respawning Abishai in the hive. 2) By making endless runs through Undersigil 3) By setting the modron cube to hard and clearing it...over and over and over And if you haven't already raised all your attributes to 25 by the time you've reached the Pillar of Skulls, you can, of course, grind Baator as long as you wish. Everything there respawns upon map transition.

You want citation that Josh promised us "no bad builds" and then delivered a system where you can't make a bad build if you try, due to the fact that dumping all your stats to 3 incurs you a bonus, instead of a penalty? Ok, I cite this Beta. Would you like a screen shot too? Or have you seen enough of them at Codex?

Interesting fact: You can grind trash mobs for XP in Planescape: Torment. In fact you can do it more than in Icewind dale and Baldurs Gate combined. Everything endlessly respawns in PS:T. Remember? PS:T even gives you a portable dungeon you can carry around in your inventory. Anytime the urge to grind and grind for XP takes you, you can simply enter that dungeon and fight the endlessly respawning modrons for 4000xp each. Forever.

Nope. The system certainly isn't broken at all. It's working precisely as designed. The problem is that the design itself is crap. The attributes are cosmetic and don't have any sort of meaningful impact on a build in either direction. And Obsidian can't tweak the values too much otherwise it will be possible to create a bad build -which would go against the entire design philosophy.

The solution is to make it so that there's no dump stats - You know, where if a wizard does decide to dump a stat, it'd be a serious choice to make and the consequences for doing so would be that he'd pay for it at the *class level* - he'd be severely gimped because the stat he dumped was, in fact, a useful stat to pump regardless of his playstyle. But we didn't get that. We got the opposite of that. We got a system where ALL stats are dump stats. They're all just minor bonuses (the damage difference between 3 might and 20 might is ~5 damage if you're using a *2-handed* weapon.)

Oh, It's Far worse than that. It's one thing when a Wizard chooses to dump Intelligence and dexterity in favor of pumping might and constitution. At least in that case logic would dictate that such a build means that you're making a meaningful tradeoff (to be decent in melee in exchange for being a less effective spell caster) But the system in place even removes THAT trade off. As it stands, you can dump ALL your attributes to 3 and it won't make much of a difference. Your wizard will still be totally effective in melee, and totally effective casting spells. Which means your build choices are cosmetic, verging on placebo-like. The only thing that matters is the class you choose, which has already been designed to be good at everything. It's an idiot proof system.

Really? Then what do you call this one?. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61543-are-you-for-or-against-gaining-experience-points-only-for-completing-objectives/page-1 The exception to the rule.

For me, there are many many things that can factor into making a game replayable (and by replayable I mean 'making me want to play the game several more times', not just once more to see what I missed the first time, and then once again 5 years later because the urge hit me) In no particular order These things are: 1) Meaningful build choices - And no, I don't mean "oh cool, I can make a melee mage *or* a nuker mage". I mean REAL build choice. Where talents, attributes, and even weapon choices make playing my mage on a second playthrough feel totally different than it did the first time around. 2)Narrative depth- discussed on this thread already. The game would need to make it so that I'm seeing something significantly new when I make different choices than I did in my first playthrough 3)Combat depth - Combat should be robust enough, and deep enough and filled with enough meaningful choice on its own that I simply *can't* see everything it offers in a single playthrough (for clarification, THIS is what made BG2 so mind-blowingly replayable for me.) 4) Something to discover - Like an overpowered build. Or an underpowered build. Or, in a party based game, a significant level advancement/difficulty difference that alters gameplay depending on party size and party makeup. 5) meaningful Weapon diversity - sounds superficial, but it really isn't. I felt constant Urges to replay ToEE because the type of weapon your melee guys use makes a huge difference in how combat plays out (Reach weapons vs. Daggers, Fragarach vs. a Holy mace etc) 6) A meaningful spell system - another thing that made BG2 so replayable. There were hundreds and hundreds of spells. And discovering the various combinations, making the best use of the dozens of different status effects can, by itself, justify repeated playthroughs. 7) Exploration - As a rule of thumb for me, the more linear and constricted a game is, the less it will lend itself to replays. Therefore, if you give me a game that's more open ended, and where going off the beaten path will actually *matter* in the long run, it will probably result in me wanting to replay the game.

Yep, I do. With the amount of noise and heat the pro kill-XP crowd is generating on this issue, I'd figure that they'd have more votes, to be frank. What an interesting comment. Suggests that a gamer's tastes are malleable based on the amount of noise. Of course if that were true then anyone who makes a trip to BSN would come back the next day convinced that PoE should have romances, otherwise it's not an RPG. But, I can say from experience, that my last foray into the BSN cesspool had the complete opposite effect on me. Well, I can't account for any strange expectations you might have formed in your head, but this particular poll's results mirror every single poll we've ever had on the kill XP issue since about 2012. The Obsidian forum is, and always has been, split down the middle on the issue. This suggests that the people's positions on the matter are pretty much entrenched and final, and it will take more than "noise and heat" to get anyone to move. In fact, it will probably take the game itself to change anyone's mind. Eh? maybe a couple weeks earlier, tops? Which wouldn't support the point you're trying to make. The XP issue was first announced to us in Update #7, while weapon/armor degradation feature came a bit later when they announced the Crafting stretch goal. Both were design features they presented to us before Production actually began.