nipsen

It's not. Play the game how you want. What's annoying is the idea that a game with less exploitable rules is unplayable. And that a game like that can't be played "how you want to". It's one step removed from insisting that if you design a game with level progression that either is balanced consciously through story-progression or exploration. Or a game with encounters (combat and dialogue) that are specifically chosen to match a party's abilities - like you would have in a role-playing game - is broken. I mean, we're not used to seeing any innovative attempts to solve more reasonable level progression in crpgs. So it's common that if stats and abilities are used in dialogue, then you usually lack skills or suddenly have too many unused ones. Just as that certain spawns are either too high or too low level - or the automatic scaling doesn't work well (or sometimes it works too well - the combat is never challenging, but also never very easy.. happens a lot in games). So when PoE seems to at least have made a stab at solving the level progression in both dialogue skills and combat skills by having a more comprehensive design. That ensures you can overextend yourself by questing out farther in the fields, and discovering dungeons that you are perhaps not completely prepared for early (making sure that you have a real challenge where that makes narrative sense). As well as having dialogue progression keyed to the level you are, allowing writers to give specialized characters certain perks (even though they have disadvantages in combat - like what was there in Fallout, for example). And always having boss-encounters and story events more or less perfectly mapped out to fit the level of the party, since you know on beforehand what the abilities are (as you would know in a pnp session, giving you the option to create something more dynamic than a random mob-spawn, with abilities and spells that have actual counters designed to fit the level, etc. Going a bit further than just adding hit-points, or leveling up the monsters - while then shaving off the most potentially show-stopping abilities and spells to make sure the random element won't kill the party by accident.... which is what forces level-scumming). Then it's a bit annoying to see people insist that a design like that is worthless. And simply that since it's not exploitable in a well-known way, that it is not possible to play "however you want it". During testing as well, a game that is supposed to be level-balanced by an assumed amount of "average" xp-scumming also tends to end up requiring people to do some repetitive and narratively unsatisfying chores to get to a level where it's possible to get past the boss-fights. I've mentioned it before, that I've been testing in betas where that happened. And the first thing we saw after release was that people who don't binge-play the game in one sitting, etc., or just went with the game the way the story seems to encourage you to - ended up being underleveled. And you end up with the game being too difficult to complete for one kind of player, and too easy for the other. Neither group had a really good experience with it. Makes sense? I couldn't care less how much people exploit the game, or how ingeniously they do it. But to require it in the game is a different thing. I suppose people don't see it that way when they're used to playing the "genre" in a specific way, and are used to seeing the same designs over and over. But actually having level progression that both escapes xp-scumming making all of the fights too easy(so that you have to choose your fights, and have a defeat condition if you overextend yourself - and have the game explaining you this, that you weren't supposed to be able to breeze through that particular dungeon without some luck and extra potions, perhaps some reinforcements and higher level abilities). As well as the problem where all the fights somehow scale, making even the easiest mob fight a high-level epic war, to match the level, etc. That hasn't actually been done before. So the perspective of a role-playing gamer is that we accept that this is difficult to do, and work around the weaknesses of the system when playing. Ignoring the faults, enjoying the game in spite of the problems, etc. But you always want to see someone who designs a ruleset that approaches the dynamic you have in pnp, while also exploiting the advantages you have when being able to script encounters on beforehand. In short - I don't have a problem with people xp-scumming the game to death. If it makes the game enjoyable, awesome. Have fun. But requiring it in the game is the same as requiring the simplistic designs that really are not very satisfying, that force fights to be predictable and boring. If you want perfect examples of this, take a look at the level progression in some of the more successful NWN community modules.. the Aielund Saga, for example. In that module, everything you gain from sidequests and lockpicking is essentially insignificant compared to the story-progression rewards. You also get extra abilities depending on where you're at in the story. And it's done that way because some of the fights are very specifically scripted, with particular AI behaviour that wouldn't work with normal level scaling. It drops over into being almost gated, like a single-player story in an fps, in a sense, because of this, though. That you basically only get any challenge when the script allows it. And so getting something that allows questing at random to have a justification of some sort other than xp-scumming -- is a stab at solving the level progression in a more comprehensive way. So again - it's annoying to see people simply shrug it off as being broken. Along with the usual prim passive-aggressiveness towards anyone with a different view. It's not welcoming, and it's not encouraging any sort of discussion.

Good grief! Really? Whence comes this new mystical lore to the earthly realms!

I'm also for irreparably ruining any semblance of reasonable level-progression pacing, to please people who get more enjoyment out of watching numbers roll by on the screen, than an immersive game. And to make sure the former group of people are given the opportunity to laugh at the latter on the forums when the game is too difficult -- since they didn't systematically unlock all the doors and crates through all the 100 optional dungeon areas in the game earlier on. Full speed ahead!

No one, ever. But I suppose that's not going to stop EA from trying. I mean, it could be that the 800th attempt at camouflaging their fake swords as magical ones, by painting them in magical glitter, and paying the youtube minstrels to sing their storied praise, etc -- will actually slay the dragon in the end. No amount of gold and time would be wasted then!

*bowing low for cooking metaphor* I remember my aunt tended to forget things before she started cooking in a hurry. But she knew she always did that, so she had this store of frozen and instant things she could use as replacements on short notice. Always was ashamed of that, and worried that people would think she deliberately switched out at least one fresh ingredient for a staler one -- but at least the cooking would be ready and hot by dinner-time.

..I'm just saying that if they are there with the current system, the way interrupts work will be either.. as we've seen.. too frequent. Or else they would need to be toned down in some way that will be very random. And that this is probably what's at the heart of the current problem with how engagements work. That if there's no reason to have them any longer.. which there isn't with the current setup... then it seems like a natural thing to remove a feature that needlessly complicates how the game is played.

The number of times that seems to happen is what is making me concerned, yes. Hello there, My first post ever here. I'm a BG fan, backed the project almost day one, although lower tier. I don't want to be involved in the Beta, don't want to be spoiler, but feel it is a good way to improve. SInce I don't post or beta test, I'm almost "neutral" if you will. I'm also a developper, professionally speaking. Not of games, but still. My input: reading these forums, not to be rude, but.... I do hope they don't take the backers feedback into account. I have no words for what I read here, it's like 75% childish feedbacks and complaints and in the middle, absolutely valid points. Lost in the other crap, sadly. You know, project management means that basically you have to have the guts to say no 99% of the time, so that you filter out those "I know better" suggestions. But the 1% of the suggestions that goes through, at least, you know will be decent and valid. I don't think the devs or the team don't respect "us" (the backers), but more than programming, I am pretty glad that they filter things. You should be too. I know this ain't going to be popular but there you go. Had to say it. Hear, hear..

On the other hand - as certain as e(k-1)t/lamda, lots of boom is always awesome anyway.

The number of times that seems to happen is what is making me concerned, yes. I know they made some of the bonuses scale, and went for something more similar to the IE games. But the impact on combat from any of the bonuses is extremely small. While, like explained, some of the abilities were removed from the attribute stats altogether. So it's a sleigh of hand - you're given more attribute points than the game really needs to drive the current system. While the class stat bonuses and stats that seem to scale when you level up are more significant in every respect. And I think it's just a very curious way to keep the system in place. Functionally, they have turned the character creation into dragon age or an mmo. While visually, the character creation system looks as complicated as before. The worst of both worlds, basically. More numbers to fiddle around with, but making them less meaningful for how the game plays. I don't know if Alpha Protocol had major changes done to the underlying system either. Or why that would have been a problem for that game even if it happened, at least with the actual gameplay mechanics. They definitely axed content. But they kept things like the recoil and aiming system that .. a lot of people hated. And the game still had a huge amount of stuff for perks and inventory that for example Mass Effect didn't have.. The way they had content and branches of content interfere as well, that went further than anyone has ever done in a game like that. So.. It's just that in a traditional party-based, class based role-playing game, what could be more significant than the way the attributes affect how you play the game? You really can't cut that out or tone it down without calling it a major change. Or, as they have done - keep the attributes in the creation screen, and remove them from combat. That is a curious thing to do.

Playing with my kubrow puppy. "Woaaaah! Babababa. Wooo. Yes, whoseagoodboy! Grrr! Kill Grineer! AAARRGH! Slaughter Vor and rip his throat out! Yaay, suchagoodboy!"

^yeah, they seem to have moved the variable that determines the chance to trigger an interrupt into the class skills. What happened then was that interrupts became too frequent in both directions. And it's definitely in the cards that it's not going to be replaced with a 50% chance system. So it's probably not unreasonable to guess that it might be removed altogether in the end. That's a fair point, that we've been kept in the loop and gotten to see the beta before any changes happened, and so on. It's reasonable to say that. And I'm not going to publish something I was sent in PM, because I'm not a complete bastard. But if you look at the changes that have been made, and what they actually are - as in making skills into talents, allowing you to "pick" something every level. Or when it comes to actually normalizing every combat stat, so that nothing you do on the character creation screen matters in the slightest (that's a pretty serious change, yes?). Or when it comes to removing engagement mechanics, simplifying the threat rolls, lowering defense/DT as a dynamic, lowering speed, etc. Put all of those together, and there is a tendency here that is difficult not to spot. Where the theme is: "forgiving", "handholding", and "automatic". And these specific things turned up after Josh declared that a late 2014 release date was pretty much a certainty. He said that if anything, the extra funding the kickstarter brought in had increased the development time for the game. That if they got a sum nearer to what they expected, the game would have released already. Which at this point I think might have been for the better. So no, I don't really accept the idea that all other Obsidian games actually went through the blender in this way, right before release. I mean, do you really think that any publisher are keen on throwing out fundamental designs late in the process? These are things you'd better have finalized by the time development begins. I mean, I know a few publisher spawn folks who would have stalled at the idea of releasing a game with a ruleset like what PoE had at the start of the beta. They'd have objected to that from the beginning, before the development would start. But making significant changes to the game late in the process, without even mapping clearly what the changes would affect - that is an amateur problem. It's something that isn't done when people know how it might complicate the development later.

Ok. So then express an informed and rational snark the next time someone argues that they speak for everyone, that everyone agrees with them (because reasons), and that anyone disagreeing are obviously denying clear facts (that are obvious and clear). (next time on "Rhetoric Camp!": Yvonne experiments with litotes to transform a declarative statement into what sounds like a thoughtful argument).

^you came to the beta just a few weeks after me. But if you had played the first version, and then seen the changes afterwards, I'm guessing you would probably be more than just worried as well. See, the impact of the attributes was already very small. There were the area bonus vs. strength... intellect vs. might.. that was to at least me almost pointless. Same with the maxed perception vs. maxed resistance. They had some impact, but they were insignificant enough that people got by even in the difficult fights with a might-maxed, res/per dropped build. In other words, it was at once too significant and complicated, but at the same time not significant enough. And the feedback here reflected "both sides" of that. So yeah, I'm genuinely curious about what prompted the decision to drop this from the design. I mean, I'm open to the idea that you could make your perception-based and int-based fighter, not have that make any impact on the combat, and just role-play the character as what you wanted. And that this means the combat stats being disconnected from the character creation doesn't matter. I'm sure you could play the game all the way through and not have any issues with that. But like I said (and gave a few examples of ^up there), they did remove some character types from the game by normalizing.. removing the attribute choices from affecting the combat. That's what happens when no matter what you choose, the combat stats stay the same. The end result is that you will favor certain weapons, and at best hobble your characters to role-play them. As.. we are used to doing from the IE games.. So why does my opinion about that matter? If I change my opinion 180 degrees, it's not going to change anything. If one random guy on the intertron says something untrue - it's not going to change reality. So why does me "admitting" the community had nothing to do with the changes so important? Besides, what I've said is that it's extremely likely that the people in the "community", that Josh talks about as if they were trusted friends: "we know these people, they've been with us from the beginning", has had a certain degree of impact on the decision making. Specially when the argument has been that the system is so broken it is not salvageable. That it's an "internal joke" that only Josh understands. That the system is one that no human mind that isn't tainted with madness can fathom. Etc. And I can not see another reason why Obsidian would throw their fairly obvious and clearly targeted designs out the window, than that they have read the feedback here, put it together with selected feedback from their internal testers, found a "tendency", and acted on that. Well, you could make priests that fought on the front with that system. You could create a single-minded fanatic that no one could stop from praying if he put his mind to it. And that would be a maxed resolve character. Who would also have specific bonuses and options in dialogue. See how it fits together? How a variable makes sense both in combat and in other role-playing aspects? A Paladin, for example, could follow largely the same build if you wanted to make sure that the abilities would go off, no matter how pressured the situation was. So you would choose to focus on aspects of combat, that in turn would suggest certain things about what the character would be like. Or you would design a character out of the personality traits, and get a combat type out of that that would match it. And you could make rangers that were designed to traverse the battlefield and be very dynamic and fast fighters, both on range and in close combat. He or she would have higher than normal resolve to compensate for the increased chance of getting attacks of opportunity, even from low perception critters. That was what the system allowed for. But when there's been literally not one person who has been playing the beta who actually made use of that system. And the general opinion is that it is unfathomable that anyone (who isn't mad) would see any value in it. In "Josh's internal joke that no one understands". Then it's probably not unreasonable to start wondering if it might be an idea to drop that part of the game altogether. When the design very clearly does complicate the game too much for people, to such an extent that they can't complete the game. ..

^I don't understand. That's not going to stop me from reading your posts and disapproving sarcastically, is it? Then why even bother posting on their forum about this failure? (I'm not telling you to leave, but I will use myself as an example: I had enough of BioWare, and their games did not compare to their games of old. What I did then was to stop visiting their forum because their past few games showed me that they were not the studio I used to like.) ..because I'm fascinated by people around here who can take everything you say literally, but at the same time somehow don't seem to have the same definition of a specific word from one day to the next. No, seriously, though.. Not that I see how this would interest anyone. But since you ask.. I wrote a preview of the beta, and I've promised to write a follow-up. Where it seems I'm likely going to have to reverse everything I said about the PoE beta (which is embarrassing enough). And dropping by is a way to keep my attention on PoE in the meantime. And I'm genuinely curious about how this will turn out. It would be the first time Obsidian has ended up with a game that didn't keep the design and the threads woven from that into the gameplay elements, even if the visual representation was in tatters because of it. Which is.. what I like about Obsidian's games. Arguably, it's what led to Obsidian using kickstarter to fund their project, instead of getting in with a publisher. So since the opposite approach to the importance of design and mechanics is not something I normally see from Obsidian, and the explanations I got on PM were.. very strange, to put it mildly.. I'm interested in seeing what happens towards release. Which is relatively soon.

So what you're saying is that Joshua Sawyer from days of yonder is in a kind of disagreement with Josh of the present? That Josh of the present is starting to wonder about how wise and powerful Joshua of the past really were? That he was kind of a curious anachronistic idealist, maybe, that thought people were supporting the game because they wanted something interesting and engaging - that took advantage of not having to obey the ad&d conventions better suited to pen and paper? *sigh* Look. There's been a steady stream of complaints about the combat flow from the lot of you. It ranges from how it's not similar enough to the IE games, to that specific game-mechanics are "difficult" to intuitively understand. I said from the beginning that it was a presentation issue, and that the system is actually easier to grasp than what the IE games are based on. That removing elements of the rulesystem, like was instantly recommended by the backseat designers, would probably make it worse. And that it inevitably ends in cutting everything and only having the empty shell left. But Obsidian are responding to your concerns, and their internal testers' concerns, about the "fact" that the game-flow isn't sexy enough. You do understand that, surely? That the disagreement between Joshua of the past, who wanted an early release of the game. And between Josh of the glorious future, who is experimenting with the design to a fault. That that doesn't pop out of nowhere? It's just like with the 50 page manifest. You and Matt proved that you didn't understand the way the game worked, and that you would rather write a 50- page, tear-inducing bore-fest about mathematical formulas and stochastic distribution, rather than spend one braincell on figuring out something new. And Obsidian can't ignore that. That their fans, their die-hard fans, are physically incapable of understanding a ruleset that they internally have very likely figured was extremely easy to figure out. I mean, this is just anecdotal. But when I gave a friend the draft of that bootleg pen and paper "adaptation" of the PoE ruleset I'm trying to nail down, along with an example character - do you know what he said? "You're going to describe all that with just these variables?". Ten minutes later, he'd made his own character variation, and it was something I didn't spot on beforehand. That still is possible to map effortlessly for the game-master. This ruleset is brilliant. And you're succeeding at making Obsidian remove from the game in an attempt to make the cooldown meters and engagement mechanics seem more sensible. Like I've said, you are arguing for making an MMO. A boring MMO that has no evolution of anything throughout the game - on character skill, or on combat tactics and strategy. But that's what "gamers want", right now, I guess? Dragon Age without the painfully badly written dialogue? Anything more than that, and only someone like.. that damned Joshua Sawyer guy from the past could possibly enjoy it, yeah?

So, both him and archangel are trolling. ... yes, Gairnulf. I'm desperately trying to find a person on here able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time -- and I'm completely failing at it. Which is really the whole plan all along. To troll people on the forum with reasonable arguments, to prove that pilfering suggestions off here is about as clever as panning for gold in a toilet. That's how insidious I really am. Well done. You've completely figured me out here. Look. In this world, it is possible to buy PoE in the store when the game comes out. I will do that and then review the game when i want. Makes sense? I wanted a refund, and I got the refund processed - because I was not comfortable with sponsoring Obsidian to make a community-designed game. I paid to the kickstarter to have Obsidian make the game, not for random weirdness to be inserted by fan request, and not for entire designs to be thrown out because some obtuse jackass on the internet doesn't intuitively spot the reason for having "interrupts". I also wanted a refund and to have the beta-codes revoked and the kickstarter privilege removed - because as it was I don't want to be on the credits, or even be known to have been part of the beta or even sponsoring the project. Which is going to go down in the short history of games-development as one of the most incredible community-developed failures we've ever seen. Does that fill a small part of the void in your minds, so we can avoid being distracted - and go back to discussing the designs again? Let's find out!

Yeah.. well, I can only guess, but I'd say it probably was a combination of three things: 1. Forum feedback washed through OE's and Paradox' Q&A folks. It's common in betas that community managers conflate different concerns from different contexts into a single sentence, for example. 2. Specific forum people who create extremely elaborate explanations for why such and such is a correct and common point of view, creating a certain amount of pressure to respond to it from a pure PR perspective, even if the substance is bonk. 3. Developers making a compromise between the existing solution they presented, and an arbitrary simplistic "press X to roleplay" approach. Because it's been established that if no compromise between ..what was initially proposed, and something else, no matter what it is.. is made - then the developer has no concern for the community, and does not respect their audience. Which is always bad for some weird reason. So yes, of course Josh and Obsidian made the changes. But Josh in particular and Obsidian otherwise have been very open about how seriously they take feedback, as well as what the intention with the beta was. Paradox on their end had a statement where they declared the feedback - whatever it was - massively important. And it seems reasonable to assume that the proposed changes from the feedback prompted the delay of the game as well, even as that was something we did not expect would happen, and Josh had signaled was unlikely. Basically, I expected (like I suspect a lot of backers who just followed the kickstarter updates did) the game to launch in the state it was in the first beta, with the worst bugs ironed out. I don't think that was an unreasonable guess either. The system was solid, the mechanics were deep and satisfying without being extremely convoluted. There were, as always, presentation issues and some coding crash - we know Obsidian by now. And I would have preferred Obsidian to make some improvements to the animation, and add a few tweaks to the combat resolution. And some of the visual feedback ...particularly the interrupts and "crisis resolutions" - I wasn't the only one who said that it's not clear that it's actually an interrupt that happens, instead of that the action simply doesn't trigger, or the queued event simply disappeared, for example. Same with the speed of the game - some of the fights were basically decided after the first second in real time, and without nudging players to pause at the right time, this would simply not make any sense. They'd get wasted, in spite of having a good opportunity to win, because they missed the opportunities that were right there (that a similar situation in BG would look similar but resolve completely different of course did not help). I obviously don't know if it would work, but some sort of slow-down pause, and a factor pause depending on how much is actually happening might have worked. There were some suggestions about that early on, but I guess... possibly too complicated (although possible, with the 3d models and effects generated in real time), and not really much payoff anyway. Therefore - expected release: minor improvements, and the game would launch as was, with some added feats and talents. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would work just fine. Perhaps it would be improved via patch? Visual overhaul might be a side-project for the add-on perhaps. Then again, it wasn't difficult to see how people would reason when figuring out the system was broken either. A player would start to figure out tricks to win the battles (double fireball+might builds, backstab frenzy, rush with barbarian in every fight, etc.), and simply rely on that to win. And worry, genuinely, that casual players would get stomped. Because they didn't spot the opportunities the system actually gave the player. That perspective is easy to see, even though it's built on basically not understanding how the ruleset actually works in both cases. So instead of taking a creative approach to the presentation issues - which is what this really is about - Obsidian ended up choosing to streamline the ruleset, add arrows and very obvious UI cues that.. frankly weren't needed, streamline the stats (every character is essentially determined by class), and spend an awful lot of time tweaking the rules and the foundation. Which, as I predicted, and others predicted as well, ended with not solving the actual problems after all. And that is what is prompting people to suggest removing engagements, remove interrupts, remove range, remove combat rolls, etc. Soon comes the suggestions to remove OP classes, OP weapons, OP monsters. And i suppose by the time the game launches, there's a guy with a stick waving it at monsters until they die from boredom, like in an MMO. But that's the problem. And I don't really mind telling you, over and over :D, that I'm disappointed when grown up, intelligent people start to abuse their fairly exclusive presence on the forums here, to promote their own ego at the exclusion of everything else. I don't care how much you believe reverse-compiled code is identical to the high-level code - it's not how it works. You don't sit on either the code or the design-documents, so how in the world can you say something authoritative about the specifics of either? I don't care how much people want generic experience boosts that screw the level-balance from grinding lock-picking skills in a side-area before moving on with the "main quest" - you don't know the reasoning for why a chapter-progression was picked, or how the scalable encounters as well as the dialogue engagements (that presumably do not scale) are put together. So I don't want to hear some unpleasant moron insist over and over that "this design is so broken it could only have been something Josh came up with during lunch". You can't possibly know what you're talking about, and frankly all of you around here are old enough to be able to respect that and say: "I am guessing at this, but this is what I think". You know.. "It appears to me from looking at such and such that this is what happens. I don't know if that's intentional!". Is that really so hard? And is it so freaking hard for Obsidian to hire a community manager who isn't some super-fan that makes the people on the bioware forums look like reasonable, pleasant folks you'd randomly chat with over a beer? Someone who can at least entertain the idea that a fan may, occasionally, have certain unprompted outbursts on forums that may, perhaps, not always need to be taken as the total undisputed truth of everything? Meanwhile, you know how significant this game will be for Obsidian, whether it does well or not. And you know how sensitive Obsidian will be to suggestions from the community because of that. Perhaps it would be even worse than normal because of the public fund-raising aspect - if they do not respond to community feedback, is that going to be a serious problem for them when the release comes? Is there a higher demand for engagement with the community than otherwise? Etc. So when it's simply too much to ask (like I actually did ahead of the public beta) that people treat the beta-access as a privilege, and work with Obsidian, on their terms, to produce as useful feedback as possible. And when it's too much to ask of Obsidian's community manager folks to create structured ways that feedback can be collected, to avoid having them run around composing coherent retellings of fractured whining from completely different contexts on the forums. No doubt contributing to Obsidian making very bad decisions from this dolled up version of incoherent forum-rants. Then that put together is a huge disappointment. Because it led, like it has before (with much larger and almost as experienced developers as Obsidian), to a bunch of useless changes that didn't achieve what people imagined the changes would, while it also took away effort from areas that actually could have been improved. I mean, sorry about being long-winded, but that's basically the entire fairy-tale in a nutshell. The end.

About what? How a tiny group of internet noisers managed to push Obsidian to blunt a really good system, for no other reason than that they had decided the existing one needed to be tweaked? That was what wasn't explained - what was wrong with the original system. The best attempt at explaining it was, like me and other people have pointed out, based on sound mathematics, but unfortunately flawed reasoning. You do not get gameplay balance by giving each party member a 50% chance to hit, as any Gamemaster can tell you instantly. And now that you know the existing combat flow has the same flaws that prompted the original insistence that the ruleset had to be changed - now that you know how slowing down the combat units and tweaking the way the interrupts work makes the combat playable, in a way that normalizing the stats did not. Then you also know why I dislike Obsidian pandering to internet noise. Because the result of it here is that the same gameplay problems exist as before to some degree. While now the rulset is also boring and normalized. Or said in a different way: not only is the combat not that fantastic, but the ruleset is also not interesting enough to bother with working around the flaws. If you think that's going to be a great sell when the game launches, then prepare to be disappointed, I guess. But outside of that - I don't get why you guys make yourselves so dumb that you sabotage something in front of you like this. Something you helped launch with the kickstarter, that you're invested in. Something immediately in front of you that you have the opportunity to affect. That you're encouraged to take part in shaping to some degree. And you're still doing your very best to: 1. Make the forums unfriendly to anyone without the same opinion as you. 2. Ensure that in the end, an argument only is convincing if it's dittoed enough, because market and sales and things. and 3. Insist, on a daily basis, that anything that smacks of cleverness and originality is probably a bad idea. I don't get it. When the kickstarter launched, did it say: "Help us make a game that is exactly like all the other games out there, that publishers fall over themselves to finance! Pay us money, and we will make sure that we're going to make the most derivative mush you have ever seen in the history of videogames! Also, we're going to mindlessly pander to the Baldur's Gate and old Bioware community, because these guys know their romances from their flying tentacle beasts!". Did the kickstarter page say that?

That the extremely subjective and superficial impressions about the game-flow changed, when the game mimicked a few things from the old and familiar system, you mean? Even though nothing changed mechanically with the actual combat rounds, outside of the fact that all characters were made pretty much identical, regardless of the stats, and the stamina drain can be timed with a watch? I suppose you could have foreseen that. And I'm sure that is the reason why they did it in the first place. So no, it's not as if it's a done deal here. Will Obsidian make something creative and interesting, and take advantage of the fact that their customers traditionally have appreciated that approach - or will they continue to pander to shrill fans even to the exclusion of their own designs, in an attempt to make EA look daring and innovative in comparison? I wouldn't know! It's completely up in the air.

You'd be surprised. ..at what? That the politician is as ramblomatic and unintelligent as before, but that people nevertheless seem to connect with the moron? See, here's what really happens. The target demography - in this case, people who like Lego... Who, as you might imagine make out a broad demographic slice in terms of age, while at the same time being more specific in terms of the "stronger" gender, but without being exclusive - something which makes Lego a sort of Holy Grail in terms of appeal in for example a certain specific country on the planet with lots of stars and stripes in their flag. Incidentally, this is how political action committees choose which issues to focus on: which issue can be addressed in a superficial way and engage the most significant people, without also alienating a too large group of other people. ..anyway. So the target demography, people who like Lego -- they already know what Lego is all about. So when the ignorant oaf of a PR-creature starts talking about it, the demography starts to think that he's making sense. Finally, they say, a politician who cares about Lego! I've never heard a single sensible thing fall out of this soul-less husk they hatched out of a tank last election season -- and yet, now I'm somehow starting to believe he understands me! Clearly, this creature understands building things from the bottom up! It never fails. And I say that from own experience. See, people who fall for this are very often neither unintelligent or uneducated. But it's so easy to adopt the idea that a sense of familiarity is better than an explanation that actually makes sense. So are you, or are you not, going to rewind the changes to the stats, now that you know you would have to remove might/per/int/ altogether to make the system "easier"? I mean, it seems like an easy choice if you take the feedback seriously. Either you replace the stats with something one-dimensional and boring - something so familiar and homely you can practically feel the bark in your arse, and no presentation is necessary. Or you simply accept that since the stats-system itself is not the source of the difficulty, that you would take the presentation of it to the player seriously (and expect it to be possible to present it well), and put the old system back.

Yeah.. not actually the case, even though people often seem curiously confident about the random second option they never get to actually try in practice. Also, I hate to say it - but I did actually tell you on beforehand. Multiple times. There were a few other people on the beta-forum early on who said the same thing as well. That the system underneath the visual representation may very well make sense, and that the objections people had to it were dumb as f***. I mean, not extremely well informed, since we didn't completely know what the system was in the first place. I really wish you had tried that first, before normalizing the combat stats of all the classes. In all fairness it is probably considerably easier to tweak a stat than it is to change combat speed. ..there's a speed factor function in the game already. And I think "we" probably expected from the beginning that the combat flow and speed of the "crisis" resolutions would be tweaked first. Things like making the interrupt and engagement actions artificially last longer than the ruleset technically dictated, things like that. Anyway. If making the attribute system (parts of the ruleset) completely stop influencing combat in any meaningful way - if that didn't actually make the combat any easier to grasp. Because - get this - the actual visual representation of the mechanics governing the game is a bit irregular. And since the fundamental abstractions of the ruleset still govern the game anyway. Then that does hang together in a semi-reasonable fashion, yes? The idea that no matter how simplistic a design is made, you can still make the game mechanics difficult by making the visualisation of it complex. I mean.. This makes a tiny bit of logical sense, yes? Sort of intuitive? That you can make anything you do seem extremely complex if you fidget around enough and complicate every little bit of it with great ceremony? Specially over the idea that if you gradually simplify the foundation of the rules until it stops having ANY FUNCTION AT ALL, that the UI somehow will automatically become perfect and easy to grasp? Like, I guess, expecting a rambling politician to suddenly start making sense if you task them with explaining how Lego pieces work. *sigh*

I really wish you had tried that first, before normalizing the combat stats of all the classes.

..which was: random assumptions and opinion stated as fact? What about not doing that, and at least attempting to show that this is not a gossip-forum for internet-princesses (in spite of the moderators encouraging that idea).

Well, are you absolutely sure? Two people on the internet seem to be agreeing on having that impression, so perhaps it must be objectively true! One of them is lying... The most important thing to remember is that if it doesn't go your way you should whine for weeks on end, even if you don't own the product or plan to use it. Mm. Demonstrating to the producer at Obsidian that it might not be a grand idea for the company to throw away their designs to please internet majorities - in spite of superfans usually threatening with hordes of fans abandoning ship if they don't have their personal suggestions taken directly into the game, etc. That was such a failure, wasn't it, Gift3d. Or maybe you're referring to when I said you have a tendency to make some curious assumptions for your moderating? And that if Obsidian don't want to annoy any half-reasonable person off the board - including from the beta-test area, which we sort of might care a little bit about during the beta-test - with your public popularity contest moderating sprees, then they might want to let you do something else for them? Such as.. sharpening their pens at the office, maybe? I clearly didn't get my way there either. But I wouldn't know what you're referring to, Gift3d1, since I don't have your amazing and remarkable skills at reading people's minds (and summing up everything in one sentence).

Well, are you absolutely sure? Two people on the internet seem to be agreeing on having that impression, so perhaps it must be objectively true!