Elerond

Just to clarify: when I said "I keep finding flaming accusations to degenerative gameplay etc. etc." I meant in the forums, and that they are used by forumists, not by devs, to predictably shoot down any attempt of criticism to game design. But I stand on my position that should a dev complain about degenerative playing, he's shooting himself in the foot since it's exclusively his own resposibility to design/balance the game in order to encourage the kind of gaming he prefers.I mean, if I complain that people are not using my articles properly because they use them to make roll-ups instead of reading them, it's probably because my articles suck. But developers (at least PoE's) don't complain that people play their game wrongly, but instead they blame themselves doing bad job with game's design. It is forumists nature to use degenerative gameplay and any other term as they see fit best with their current argument. This goes especially for such terms like "spiritual successor", "combat xp", "objective xp", "quest xp" and "romance" in this forums.

It is hardly witch burning. If you actually ever played obsidian games, you'd automatically realize that their strong suit is Storytelling and not combat/game play design. I would have conceded to your point if there was SINGLE game where the combat was good. I am sorry to report, that there isn't. And I mean not just the design of the combat mechanics, I mean the encounters themselves which are practically very easy to get right even if you are working with a bad engine / some one else'e mechanics. Frankly, I am very surprised that they went for RTwP with Elves the first chance they got to go free for their own desires. I would think that if they haven't ever succeeded to design good combat there is even more need to them to emphasize their design efforts this time in that aspect of the game, so that they don't yet again reproduce their past mistakes, yes? I would guess that they went with their own sense of nostalgia .

According to Josh (by paraphrasing) degenerative gameplay is gameplay that against designers intent but using it benefits player in such degree that game encourages to use such gameplay is main way to play the game or not using such gameplay puts player unfavorable position compared to those that used such gameplay. And that degenerative is always designers fault and there is nothing wrong in that players play optimally in given ruleset even if it goes against designers intent and seem odd from game world perspective. Rest-spamming, save-scumming etc. behaviors that go against designers' intent and game world logic are symptoms that are caused flaws in game design. Which is why designers try not to create flaws in the rule set they are designing and not demanding players to use such behaviors if they are possible when they are playing games they have designed (at least usually this is the case) . I would guess that problem that some people have with term "degenerative gameplay" rises probably that they have absolute opposite view in game design than designers themselves, which makes them to associate term with themselves instead with designers like they do. Such terminological misassociating seems to happen time to time in projects with multidisciplinary approach, which makes defining terms even more important what they typically are in the projects. I also would guess that they don't use degenerative design instead of degenerative gameplay is that they describe how product works instead of how they work. But it seem somewhat malicious to attack designers time and time again because of this term, even though they have multiple times explained what they mean with it. But who I am to stop good witch burning.

As I explained (and quite clearly, one might even say. You know, in the post you just quoted yourself. In just a few lines, even) I genuinely though it amounted to a rethorical/marketing thing. But this would actually explain why the current trash mobs were never perceived as bad design. Oh, well. I hope at least that David Wallace will grant us all the gift of a "PoE Stratagems" mod... Kickstarter page is part of legally binding contract between Obsidian and the backers, and Obsidian was aware of this fact when they made their kickstarter campaign and they have always acted like this is the case, so you can be pretty sure that they try their best to follow everything that they said in that page and their following promises in updates. And it is also why their promises are quite vague in specifics, as they didn't want to tie their hands too much.

My friend, it's simply not you. Think of this as our own little version of the Blood Wars, and you've got two forces of absolute evil fighting to see which one can be worse. My vote is for myself, of course. It is endless conversation with no possible solution that everyone agrees with, because it is based on people's individual subjective notions what people feel to be best solution in question that don't have objectively best solution. This is similar issue than our endless parade of romance topics where people argue back and forth why romances are integral part of IE experience or why they generally make story focused games better especially when game is meant to work around players' decisions. Although romance threads have died in past months some what because of xp threads return to popularity in past couple months. But I would guess that romance threads will jump again when release gets closer and more and more backer come back to look how game looks (and maybe some non-backers that have read some articles about game at get interested about it).

It is difficult not to be involved in politics, because many see not taking political stance as silent support for status quo. And video games have been part of several political issues and it rises such time and time again. So one could argue that games media that don't cover political issues don't do their job as good as they should. But I would also say that games media should look political issues from every point of view even when issues is banning/censuring/etc. things that are generally seen as bad thing by industry, consumers and gaming media themselves, because it is media's job to educate people about issues as comprehensively as they can. So media should not support single political view or be silent about political views, but instead cover all political views that they can cover. Addition to other things that they cover. But sadly main thing that gaming media does these days is to work as additional advertisement venue for gaming companies and even more sad is that seems to be what majority of readers of gaming media want (by looking most read articles in big gaming media pages). So one could say that biggest enemy for consumers are actually consumers themselves

Just for interest. In which MMO's you control party of characters?

In regards to point B - It would make sense that avoiding combat would make you worse at combat...right? It also make you worse in sneaking...

Here you make false assumption that things that aren't necessary to complete game don't influence on its balance and what is the optimal way to play and especially how many people play the game, which are things that designer worry over.

Gromnir has been doing his charachter for ~15 years now. You aren't the first to complain about it and you aren't going to be the last. Hell, Bioware put a charachter in Throne of Baal (I think?) based on him. Yep, Gromnir Il-Khan http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67656-pictures-of-your-games-part-5/?p=1505700

That runs totally counter to what others have stated. How odd. Although he suggestion to change system is to add more objectives in the game, where one is to kill x number enemies and get xp and second is to add more exploration points in the game that give directly xp when found instead of tying them in the quest and tasks, so there isn't much change to current system. And last week it was a nearly insurmountable problem according to some. Funny how things work out. But all they will do is to rename some quest differently and change how they are triggered so that people don't know that they are quest and that solves problems that people have with their quest xp system?

By metric that Josh uses you get most XP by doing quest first and then kill everybody after wards. And taking combat option brings more experience than sneaking past enemies. Using thief open locks and remove traps brings more experience than using knock spell or strength to open locks and using detect traps spell to find traps so that you can avoid them. A) Doesn't killing people (Like quest givers) lower your reputation which causes other problems? Can you give me an example of the kind of situation you are talking about? B) Isn't sneaking past enemies safer than fighting them? If so; fighting them should yield more xp since it is more dangerous/challenging. That would be balance. If fighting enemies yielded no more xp than sneaking past them; then the game would be unbalanced in favor of sneaking. C) IIRC in the original BG1 disarming traps/opening locks didn't yield any xp. A) Not really as you have virtually unlimited pool of money and you can buy reputation from temples and reputation really matters for those that play good characters and maybe in some extent for those that play neutral characters. B) It may be safer but it don't help when there is encounter that you can't avoid and you are under powered because you sneaked past previous encounters. C) I give you that I have played too much versions with BG2's engine. But absence of such source of non-combat xp only works to tip the xp scales towards combat xp.

This is the real root of all otherwise baffling decisions, including the absolute need to avoid the Spectre of Quest Staggering. Although a backer (I'm not) might say "balancing Baldur's Gate 2 wasn't easy either. So?" Baldur's Gate 2 had much more people working on it and it still failed in that balancing (similarly as all IE games failed), why they want to do things differently this time.Will PoE's final price be a fraction of what was Baldur's Gate launching price, in order to reflect the low number of people working on it? If not, why should it matter to the final quality? By the way, I'm sure all those people who remember Baldur's Gate's Chapter 2 so incredibly fondly do so exactly because it failed completely to achieve any semblance of balance. I can't say what will be launch price of the PoE as that is to Paradox to decide, but budget of the game is smaller than what Baldur's Gate 2 had, which means that do achieve similar overall quality they can't take the most laborious options for every mechanic in the game to achieve their goals. It is not that Baldur's Gate or any other game fully failed in balance or that they weren't good game, but that they had optimal ways to play them which weren't always ways that designers meant to games to be played and this was because designers failed their job (according to said designers) so they don't want to those design mistakes that they did with IE games again with their new game (stated by said designers as reason why they have changed things).

That runs totally counter to what others have stated. How odd. Although he suggestion to change system is to add more objectives in the game, where one is to kill x number enemies and get xp and second is to add more exploration points in the game that give directly xp when found instead of tying them in the quest and tasks, so there isn't much change to current system.

They already have exploration XP, but it is tied to quests/tasks and rewarded you instantly if you had quest/task already activated or in that point of time when you activate the quest. Only thing that they need to do is to write function that gives you automatically those experience points when your characters come in such point where exploration xp is awarded. And of course they could after that add more those exploration points in the maps that aren't tied on quests/tasks and they of course can classify exploration points that are tied to quest/tasks such that they don't award xp reward if corresponding quest/task isn't activated.

Baldur's Gate 2 had much more people working on it and it still failed in that balancing (similarly as all IE games failed), why they want to do things differently this time. How did BG1 fail to balance the xp? By what metric did it fail? By metric that Josh uses you get most XP by doing quest first and then kill everybody after wards. And taking combat option brings more experience than sneaking past enemies. Using thief open locks and remove traps brings more experience than using knock spell or strength to open locks and using detect traps spell to find traps so that you can avoid them.

This is the real root of all otherwise baffling decisions, including the absolute need to avoid the Spectre of Quest Staggering. Although a backer (I'm not) might say "balancing Baldur's Gate 2 wasn't easy either. So?" Baldur's Gate 2 had much more people working on it and it still failed in that balancing (similarly as all IE games failed), why they want to do things differently this time.

It honestly sounds like you lack any standards for quality. Say person that wants unrealistic over the top physics, that makes things to fly all over the place without any sort rational logic in the game.

But as I said and tried to show that they didn't had decide that point when they launched their kickstarter campaign, and not even that point of time when campaign ended and as we have seen experience system is still not carved in stone. But they gave us their design goals which they aim to achieve with system that they will design with money they got, and as I already said I think that they have achieved quite well. I'm just saying, a link on their front page reading "How our vision differs (and hopefully improves upon) the Infinity Engine games", or similar would have been great. There it could have read "currently, killing enemies does not reward experience as it did in the IE games. We feel that blah blah blah." I'm certainly not saying the game (or their achievement of design goals) is a failure. And anyway, I don't want to belabor the point further. My original point with this line of discussion is that the folks who were surprised/disappointed when winning (tought) fights yielded no experience, had a valid response. But they hadn't had decided that they wouldn't have experience reward from killing during kickstarter campaign even if Josh and Tim were leaning towards that direction and after campaign ended and decision was made in some point of time after it would have been quite useless to add such disclaimer, I would say.

But as I said and tried to show that they didn't had decide that point when they launched their kickstarter campaign, and not even that point of time when campaign ended and as we have seen experience system is still not carved in stone. But they gave us their design goals which they aim to achieve with system that they will design with money they got, and as I already said I think that they have achieved quite well.

They stated following design goals in their seventh update for the project From which the last one was probably reason why they ended with current quest xp. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60578-update-7-non-combat-skills-with-tim-cain/ Although they hadn't locked xp system down when KS campaign ended, but from their messages one could determine which direction they were leaning towards http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61533-update-24-less-than-30-hours-to-go-life-and-death-and-audio-cd-soundtrack/?p=1242071 http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61533-update-24-less-than-30-hours-to-go-life-and-death-and-audio-cd-soundtrack/?p=1242085 http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61533-update-24-less-than-30-hours-to-go-life-and-death-and-audio-cd-soundtrack/?p=1242032 Feargus hold at least then same notion than some people here that XP for the kills is something that belongs to IE games and games that are reminiscent of them. http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/61543-are-you-for-or-against-gaining-experience-points-only-for-completing-objectives/?p=1244325 (in this you have to trust Infinitron and me, if you don't want go through kickstarter messages ) So it I agree that it would have nice if they could have included more detailed information about their system (which isn't even now fully carved in stone) in their pitch, but as they had only to offer their general design goal that they specified in their updates during the campaign, which they have followed quite thoroughly during development and as they gave their inclinations, I would say that they have done good job in informing backers on what they plan to do.

I find it bit ironic that 4chan got burned by somebody else's hoax, as their community seems to be source to many hoax news/photos/etc in internet. But Rantic should get fined from false and unethical marketing which was aimed to slander another company's product and it users. Wikipedia manipulation is sadly so everyday thing that one can't use Wikipedia as reliable source anything that falls outside of defining meaning of things (as these are subjective matters anyway so one subjective meaning isn't any worse than other if everybody uses same definition), because Wikipedia is used to slander politician, harsh people and other wise spread false information by people that are paid to do so. University credits for writing Wikipedia articles or fixing existing articles so that they correspond with University's teaching has been typical thing for at least ten years in here Finland and I don't think that Finnish universities (and) have been any sort pioneers in this sort of activity. I am not fond such credit programs even though they are well meaning ones, but in my opinion (as I haven't researched subject) such programs have high change to produce biased articles, because they are written by people that are learning scientific principalities, who probably lack knowledge about subject and their main motivation is probably to get credit points not to spread information about subject. So I agree with you that giving credits for writing feminist, social justice or any Wikipedia articles is problematic thing to do, because if nothing else it can give students conception that Wikipedia is reliable source for information, which it sadly isn't.

We should collect offering to them so they can hire community manager whose job is to answer our question all day long every workday at least for next couple months <- regardless this you can take this as serious proposition.

The title says "the PoE beta xp system" for a reason. And even if it's the follow up of the "Do you want combat xp?" thread, well, you'll be amazed that the reply to such question can be "no". Or "not necessarily". So even in the original thread, not bothering to read the posts and just assuming that anybody who posts there wants combat xp is a poor excuse. Even more so in the follow up thread that clearly states "the PoE beta xp system". But be my guest, keep assuming and don't bother reading. And yes, I offered some insight (maybe awful or insignificant, that's up for debate). And no, I won't point it out for you. Read. It says it for because people want to change current xp system by adding combat xp, that is the reason why this thread and previous threads were created. I find quite pointless to think that there is any other intent for these topics (this is I think at least twentieth thread about this topic in past two years). I don't really care enough as your points what I have read seem to be off their mark (in my opinion) that I don't feel that seeking your particular insights afterwards would be worth of my time when they didn't arouse my attention first time I read them (I have read all post in this topic, but sometimes I just don't remember individual points that specific individual has presented for various reason, but I would guess that usually it is because I haven't think that particular point to be interesting at first place).

Argh. So who would ever find that fighting those lions and losing resources, health, fatigue and companions would be a good choice? In that case, why bother with balancing at all? Let's stick to the few classes/builds/powers/gear that are viable, ignore all the rest that doesn't work, and be happy that the devs provided the options, even though they are not viable, or just plain stupid. And for the last time, I am not saying xp combat is the solution. If you claim that I want combat to be the optimal choice, well, feel free to take your time, read the rest of the thread, get a faint idea of what you are replying to, and then reply. The problem is, right now combat against non quest mobs (should I repeat it for the uptenth time? Non-quest mobs. That means, uh, mobs that are not tied to a quest in any way) is the suboptimal choice, and stealth is the no-brainer choice. You prefer stealth? You happy with stealth having a distinct advantage (or none of the penalties, which boils down to the same thing)? Fine. But don't call it balanced, or good design. I fight those lions as you can just overrun them with certain tactics and it makes it faster and easier to move on the map as you don't need to try avoid them. Also you don't lose any resources permanently even if you fail with your tactics it only takes time same way as sneaking past them does. Balancing is done to give players more options You are arguing in topic which is for asking combat XP, instead of one of topics that speak about combat mechanics one just assumes that adding combat xp is at least part of your solution to problems that you have with backer beta. I find stealth less optimal choice in backer beta than combat, because using stealth drops more overall time from me than combat. I have also pointed previously (not necessary in this thread) that I think that there is too much encounters in bb's maps and they should be more compelling to engage. But I have also said (not in this thread) that backer beta is meant to test mechanics and it is maps made for prototype version of the game so its encounter design probably don't represent encounter design that rest of the game has and people probably should take these things in account when they judge it. If you can overrun those lions that simply means that kiting is still a problem (damn!) and/or engagement mechanics are poorly implemented. Try and overrun the beetles. And it means that stealthing and occasionally overrunning are no-brainers, while fighting remains a stupid choice. Besides, "I only read the title of the post so I assumed..." is a poor excuse. Should I move to the mechanics thread, only to have someone like you say "I assumed you didn't have any truck with xp because I read the title and the title doesn't mention that", or "Hey! You just mentioned xp, you should move to the xp thread, it's a mechanics thread here."? In any case, I am arguing in the thread that says "xp system", where you'll see (if you can bothered with reading at least some of it) that some people ask for combat xp, some other for no combat xp, some for xp for traps and locks, and some (like me) for better balancing of risks and rewards, no false choices and no pointless, time and resource consuming, annoying padding. In current build you can overrun any enemy with certain tactics, although kiting isn't one of them or at least I don't know how kite enemies effectively. You haven't offered any other insight in this thread that you thing that combat isn't rewarding enough to do it instead of the stealth, and as topic is about getting combat xp in the game, it is only natural to one to assume that you want combat xp, especially when you haven't even pointed out single mechanic in combat that you think need change (or at least I haven't notice that such mention). This thread is follow-up for thread "Do you want xp from combat?" like it mentions as first thing in OP, so you can argue as much you want that this isn't we want combat xp thread as you want, but it will not probably change my mind about subject.