PrimeJunta

I like both Namutree's and Sarex's answers. The trouble is that 'fun' is subjective. Clearly some people like farming, for example, whereas others feel that it cheapens the game. I do not believe in design by committee. While we absolutely should voice our preferences, it's ultimately they designer's job to decide what goes in and what stays out. I.e., it is up to the designer to use his judgment to decide what he thinks his users are likely to consider 'fun' or not. Sometimes there will be bad calls, with something fun removed intentionally, just like sometimes there will be design lacunae that remove fun or put in un-fun by mistake. That's just the way things work.

That doesn't really answer the question, Stun. It just states your personal preferences. Again: what criteria should designers use when deciding which degenerate strategies to stamp out and which to leave in? If they decide to leave a degenerate strategy in, does that make it not-degenerate by definition?

Nope, no chanter. I don't recall exactly which priest spells I used in the combat with the not-shambling-mounds, but they were nothing too unusual. Suppress Affliction I think, probably that badass boost to all defenses, mmmmaybe Pillar of Faith. Perhaps the code treats Piglet the same way as a chanter's summons, though, so it could still be the same bug manifesting.

If damage was a function of base damage and accuracy with a to-hit roll, there would still be a random element. Your skill (specifically, attack vs defense) would just matter more. I don't really see the point of having randomized weapon damage on top of that. Edit: that said, this figures roughly around the 11,334 spot on my current prioritized list of Things That Need Fixing. I.e. not particularly worth discussing. Therefore, consider my proposal withdrawn.

Great. The main thing is it's being worked on. If clumps and spell effects are making things more difficult, why not do something to those features as well? Clumps aren't good in any case, and while spell effects are obviously a crucial part of the experience, perhaps they don't need to be that dramatic -- at least other than the momentaneous ones.

@leninghola Bringing realism into the argument where damage is represented by hit points that get restored with a good night's sleep is a bit of a nonstarter IMO.

I guess I just don't understand humans very well. Curious creatures.

Consider Soul Ignition in the first BB. That let you cheese through the entire beta because you could fire it off at insane range, it did not trigger aggro, and it made absurd amounts of damage. Using it that way was a classic degenerate strategy: it posed no challenge, was repetitive, and was boring, and was clearly not what the designers intended the spell to do. Should the devs just have left it as it is, because we players are of course free not to do that? I don't think so. And I'm quite sure neither do you. So where then do you draw the line? What kind of degenerate strategies should the devs try to prevent, and what should they allow? Who makes the call and with what criteria? I think they should do their damnedest to stamp them all out. That they most likely will never be able to catch them all does not change the importance of the objective. Not trying leaves a Swiss cheese of a system that's no fun at all.

They seem to be trying; there are already lots of different outcomes for many of the quests even in the BB. There's no way they're going to account for every possible motivation (class-based or otherwise) everywhere, but the more, the better. I won't get into an argument about this either, but I do disagree with both of you in re the applicability of 'degenerate strategy' in this case.

But why do we need two random numbers that go into it? We already have Accuracy. Why not just make that + weapon base damage the sole determinant of how much damage gets done? If you want it more fine-grained, it could easily be a line that goes from 0 to double base damage instead of in discrete steps. (Edit: I agree btw that it would be boring if combat action outcomes were completely deterministic.)

@Hiro: No, I wouldn't, because it does not arise from systemic features. It is not a strategy. This is different from the example you quoted, which does arise directly from systemic features (kill XP in this case). I would consider it a design lacuna, though: they put in a class with a role of 'protector of nature' and failed to script in outcomes that would support this role. There should have been another possibility open to a druid in the scripted interaction, e.g. "summon a spirit of nature to watch over the egg and hide it from others who would want to steal it." There, closure, and an alternative ending.

Why d'you think?

Ooh, may I? It's not poorly defined. It means "any strategy which exploits a design flaw in the mechanics to gain an advantage." The only point of contention is whether something constitutes a design flaw, and since we have the designers here to answer that, there should be zero contention about the term. It's frequently abused, for sure, but so then which term isn't? Again, completely wrong. Degenerate strategy is one of the very, very few terms in games that are almost not subjective at all. See the definition above. Subjectivity does come into the equation because some people appear to enjoy degenerate strategies. They want mechanics that are breakable and exploitable so they can score easy wins, even if the way to score them is boring, mechanical, or repetitive. The designer, parbleu! How did he intend the crafting system to be used? Are you using it against his intent and thereby making the rest of the game easier than he intended? If yes, then it's degenerate. If not, then it's not. Wait, are you actually saying that 'bad design' -- or, basically, 'design' itself -- is a useless or inane phrase? That's weird. Every game, from Rock-Paper-Scissors to the most sweeping of cRPG's is a designed artifact. They did not just miraculously appear. Somebody decided what the rules are, what's in the game, and what's not. Every single of those decisions was a design decision, and the way they fit together is a design. Sometimes those designs evolved over time and we don't know who the original designer was, but they're still designs. Some of those designs are really good (e.g. chess), and some are really bad (e.g. every piece of shovelware anyone only downloads by mistake and immediately forgets about). Of course it won't, if all you do is slap on the label. It can be, however, a useful diagnosis. Slapping on a label "Diabetes" won't help anything, unless you've first ascertained that the patient does, in fact, suffer from a syndrome that matches the diagnostic definition of "diabetes." Same with degenerate strategy. Who does it insult? The player clever enough to find the flaw in the mechanics, or the designer who made the mistakes that left the hole in? Surely not the player? No, we don't. 'Degenerate strategy' is not the same thing as 'bad design.' Not all bad design leads to degenerate strategies. Some games are boring without having degenerate strategies. That's bad design too. --- Absolutely not. It is an extremely useful concept, and the term describes it well. If you're not interested in discussing it, then by all means don't, of course.

Which is one argument for eliminating the randomness from damage altogether. Make it a flat number, with only Accuracy with miss/graze/hit/crit adjusting damage. It would be a good deal more transparent.

FWIW when we're in beta (or the testing leading up to it), we usually iterate every day, sometimes more frequently. The faster we can make the turnaround on reported issues, the happier and more productive our testers get. Admittedly our betas are never remotely this broad in scope. Once a week still sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

Not enough. I need to see at a glance what's going on. Same applies in general to the mouseover-based combat info. It is there, yes, but it's murky and clunky to access.

I've quite grown to like the ability list as well, mechanical problems aside. As to the DnD stats, I never liked Charisma. It's way too one-dimensional. Picture an intimidating person. Now, picture a charming person. Then, picture a persuasive person. Then, a consummate liar. Then, a natural leader -- someone who gains and retains loyalty. At least I get rather fundamentally different types of persons in ecah case. The consummate liar or the charmer would likely not be very intimidating, the intimidating one would probably not be particularly charming, and so on. It never made sense to me that one stat governed all these, and more. I much prefer P:E's approach of breaking these up between different abilities.

Yeh, I'm not thrilled about voice acting either. For one thing it's usually really bad. Even in games where it's better than average. Try playing one of the Mass Effects some time, and close your eyes during a dialog. A few exceptions aside, they sound wooden, exactly like a highly professional but bored actor reading lines into a mike in a studio. Actors are only human; they get bored too, and when they do, you hear it. Having only very partial voice can actually be better, because there are fewer lines to read. As much as I detest most of the writing in BG2 and especially Minsc, I gotta hand it to whoever voiced him -- he sounds lively and funny. Even more so with Planescape: Torment, and I do not want to imagine how dull and droning those voices had gotten if they had had to read every line of their dialog. So yeah, partial voice FTW. More is not always better.

Funnily enough, there's plenty of precedent for going into battle naked, and not just among 'primitive tribes.'

More second impressions. I managed to play almost to the end with a druid until I got bored and quit. (I don't save games because of the... risks involved.) The druid is one of the cool and interesting classes to play, although the Wild Shape thing doesn't work ATM. As in, when I apply it, I turn into a completely useless pile of meat. I don't attack anything, instead I just twitch, and eventually get beat down. I look forward to that working like it should. But the spells are cool. There are lots of possible synergies with the wizard; use one spell to depress a defense and another to attack it. The DoT's are pretty lethal too. The spell selection also feels more imaginative and varied than the wizard's basic repertoire of (damage type) in (point/cone/line/circle). The effects are pretty neat too. So yay for the druid, up there in the "want to plays" with the cipher, chanter, barbarian, and paladin. I've gone on enough about the lack of combat feedback that I'll complain about something else. By now I'm fairly confident that I'm not playing the game completely wrong although I'm sure I can get a lot better. I'm thinking about which defense to attack, using debuffs where applicable to lower that defense, and attacking. I'm also winning most fights fairly easily. This at Normal difficulty. And... those fights do drag on. Some of the enemy DoT effects seem overpowered (Deep Wounds, stacking spider poison), but other than that I get the feeling that hit points could be slashed in half all around (or, if you prefer, damage doubled), and the game would get a good deal more enjoyable. Or speed up the rhythm so we attack and cast about a quarter faster, and only nerf hit points by a quarter. The combat lacks dynamism simply because it takes so long to bring down a target, even if you're doing it mostly right. For the bigger fights, that makes crowd control and area effects king; at least they can whittle down several targets at once. The overall rhythm also feels wrong because of the movement speed. Combat is a combination of frantic and tedious, as the characters scoot all over the place, then proceed to stab each other to death with what appear to be toothpicks for all the damage they do. So, as this second impression: nerf the hit points, attack faster, and move slower. And make sure those DoT effects are in line with the regular attacks. I believe this, plus better combat feedback, in particular engagement indicators, will go a long way to making the combat not feel like a chore.

I got this too. I tried with boar, bear, wolf, and stag forms as well, and all of them behave identically: they just stand there and twitch until beat down.

Observed: after fighting the forest shamblers in Dyrford Crossing, combat did not deactivate when it should have, but only after wandering off some of the way. Thereafter it periodically re-activated in a variety of areas, including Dyrford, the Dracogen Inn, and Trygil's workshop, despite no enemies being on the map. I attacked Trygil with A. After defeating him + assistant, combat still did not deactivate. I noticed Piglet's action bar recycling. When I entered the tower, combat mode deactivated, allowing me to pick up Piglet and put her in the inventory. After that, combat stopped randomly reactivating, leading me to suspect that the problem is related to Piglet.

They were, but I do not think a successor ought to replicate their flaws. "Liked them as they were" to me implies something like "don't change anything." I vehemently disagree with that.

I didn't.

If it doesn't impose a movement speed penalty, under what circumstances would you ever want to switch it off? None. And so what? Then why not just make it passive (=always-on) like, say, the barbarian's Raw Strength? The IE games did impose a movement penalty when you had search mode on though. That's why it was a mode. If it had no penalties, it'd just be a passive ability. I would just make it a passive ability, with, say, one check per second tied to your Perception. Searching in scouting mode would still be more effective because you're moving more slowly and therefore get more checks per area.