Amentep

The number of people who we know have access to the backer beta (from the Kickstarter numbers) is 7615. The 109 people who've voted only represent 1.4% of the backers. Ignoring the self-selction angle, my memory of statistics is that to draw conclusions to the greater population you'd want about 10% of the population voting (762 or so) at the bare minimum. You'd also want those 762 randomly sampled (ie not self selecting) to hope for any kind of validity to the results. My hope with quest/Objective XP was that it would give value to differing play styles (diplomatic, stealth) without devaluing killing things. That would be an improvement (IMO- I know many differ on this) to how the IE games did it. But I also acknowledge that if we're talking about spiritual successors to the IE games, combat in those games is required and is rewarded and (in the end) kill XP isn't inherently "bad" in and of itself. Player level almost only affects combat. Why would dialogue give XP that rewards the player by making him or her stronger in battle? Doesn't make sense. It would make sense if the player level didn't just indicate how strong a character is combat wise. It makes as much sense as XP does in general. Its an abstraction, looking for sense in it is (IMO) going down the garden path. If you're going to look at things from an overly realistic lens, what does turning over an ogre's head to a farmer give a person from an experience perspective? How to pack a severed head? How to travel so it doesn't rot? Best handling techniques? Realistically turning over an item at the conclusion of a quest like this would net you nothing but money (and a piglet). But XP is an abstraction, you get the quest reward for everything you do in the quest and it makes you better at whatever you want. Same thing as kill xp. The ideal, to me, is that the player is rewarded for the play styles available in the game; if killing is the primary (or only viable) path all XP should be primarily focused on killing or supporting killing. If other play styles are viable, the rewards should be such that the player is able to further that play style.

The number of people who we know have access to the backer beta (from the Kickstarter numbers) is 7615. The 109 people who've voted only represent 1.4% of the backers. Ignoring the self-selction angle, my memory of statistics is that to draw conclusions to the greater population you'd want about 10% of the population voting (762 or so) at the bare minimum. You'd also want those 762 randomly sampled (ie not self selecting) to hope for any kind of validity to the results. My hope with quest/Objective XP was that it would give value to differing play styles (diplomatic, stealth) without devaluing killing things. That would be an improvement (IMO- I know many differ on this) to how the IE games did it. But I also acknowledge that if we're talking about spiritual successors to the IE games, combat in those games is required and is rewarded and (in the end) kill XP isn't inherently "bad" in and of itself.

I would hope - this being the beta and all - that people will be honest about the flaws. Otherwise it won't get fixed because Obsidian will think its okay. Fully agree. 1) Nobody is saying you should not be addressing the games flaws. What we're saying is that if you expected it to be "more done", then you were fooling yourself. I'm sorry that you are now facing the realities of making a complex product, but these are the realities. 2) The idea that Obsidian won't do **** if we don't report it is complete bull. This is their job. There's things that are broken, and there are things that are subjective. Something that is broken is obviously broken - losing equipment, for example a bug existing in the demo. The subjective stuff, though, is important too, because you can have a mechanically excellent game that is no fun to play. So my reference to observations is more on the subjective stuff. The idea that people should give the beta "slack" because its a beta would mean the beta in itself is meaningless. If the systems are ultimately unfun, people should express that (mind you, constructive criticism is always best). Do I expect Obsidian to scrap everything and start over? Not necessarily but it can help Obsidian filter all of the feedback and try to make fixes to improve the experience for everyone. Otherwise, there is a risk that Obsidian will assume that people are fine with subjective areas; there's an old saying when making policies that I think is valid here - don't make a policy you can live with today that you can't live with a year from now. If Obsidian doesn't know people aren't enjoying something today, how can they anticipate how people will react to it when its still the same when the game is released? Now vitrol and all isn't really helping anything, but yeah constructive criticism seems to be as much a point of a public beta as bug squashing.

Not to be "that" guy, but a poll with around 100 votes dosnt really mean anything.... I'll be that guy, anonymous self-selecting internet polls are worthless. Your population is so limited (and again, self-selecting) that any attempt to draw the conclusion of such a poll to the larger society would carry a huge margin of error rendering it meaningless. They can be fun, but certainly not definitive.

You are being deprived of any character progression for a days worth of playing a game, as to why that is bad, well it railroads you in to doing quest to have character progression at all, ie. it removes choice from you. Everything is pretty much explained and discussed in this thread already: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/67140-experience-point-system-in-the-beta-and-onwards/ How on earth is kill-XP any different from your complain. You have to slaughter anything that moves, otherwise you are denied character progression. It forces you to be murderhobo, instead of playing quests and adventures. All XP is an abstraction of some kind. You don't have to kill even if kill XP is granted; but if the game railroads you into combat then your characters have to be able to kill. This is a fine distinction but an important one, since the IE games did railroad you into combat, so combat ended up being their primary focus. There are a few different arguments going around but what I get from them is that Kill XP can encourage combat as the primary solution to problems. Objective XP does not, but it does inherit a couple of new problems: potentially giving a dis-incentive to killing (as the risk is greatest in combat but the reward is theoretically equivalent to other solutions) and in having a player play the game for a significant amount of time with potentially no reward. The ultimate factor really is implementation (IMO) since as I started, all XP is an abstraction.

I would hope - this being the beta and all - that people will be honest about the flaws. Otherwise it won't get fixed because Obsidian will think its okay.

Poorly executed Objective XP could so greatly unbalance the risk/reward in combat that the player only risks combat because there's no other way (which was, I believe, one of the complaints of the anti-Objective XP side, that if you can stealth by most enemies and still get enough experience to level up and beat the fights you have to do, then there's no real incentive to fight given the risks undertaken). My hope, of course, would be that kind of implementation of Objective XP wouldn't pan out, but I can't say that it couldn't happen anymore than killXP certainly encourages combat as the superior option (particularly in the IE games where stealth and diplomatic XP were relatively sparse).

lol, You'll have to stand in line behind my wife and mother- in-law They also use the same avatar?

While I understand the intention of trying not to introduce systems that actively encourage abuse, to be honest I don't think Objective XP naturally creates the least amount of degenerate game play. As Stun, Helm and others have pointed out, poorly executed Objective XP will unnaturally encourage players away from combat in the same way that poorly executed Kill Xp encourages sociopathy. The obvious hope is that whatever way XP is implemented that the game is still fun and rewarding, which seems a bit of a toss up still.

Pretty sure they said that there would be appearance related issues for godlikes in the game.

I thought at one point these kind of perks were on the table (but I may be misremembering). To me for an XP system to work, people should be rewarded for their play style, so in essence someone whose good at killing things should become better at killing things (whether it be XP, loot, perks, a combination of them)

Stupid question - do you have to manually level the adventurer (ie buying a level 4 adventurer gives you a level 1 adventurer who can be leveled to level 4, or do they start with no experience?)

Wouldn't the dropped loot from the bodies be the reward? No, because Obsidian doesn't want to deprive the pacifists of good loot. Some of it is helpful (for crafting), but it is more the exception than the rule. That need not be mutually exclusive concept, IMO.

Wouldn't the dropped loot from the bodies be the reward? Unfortunately not - it's not even close, I'm afraid. See the appropriate thread where the discussion is alive and kicking right now. I've been a part of that discussion; I do not think Prince87x has AND since the Beta is now live I was hoping testers could comment on the game directly with regards to whether the loot seems adequate. I've said repeatedly that - at least for me - whether QuestXP works in lieu of kill XP is going to depend on whether the combat is fun and whether loot drops make the player feel rewarded such that they don't miss the KillXP.

In a perfect world, I'd have a Cord 812 (although preferably without the vapor lock problem)

Wouldn't the dropped loot from the bodies be the reward?

Oh yeah? Well Obsidian turned me into a newt!* *I got better...

Right now, officially, the only things considered canon in Star Wars are the films and the upcoming products, IIRC.

IIRC some admin types don't have the edit function show up, but yeah I think both were because of that. But I could be wrong, we're talking stuff a decade or more ago.

Camp Pendleton, I'd assume - http://www.pendleton.marines.mil/

I'm more joking than anything at this point. That said it once WAS a problem (but then I think at that point that software didn't indicated if anything had ever been edited.)

I could be wrong of course, those are my memories of dimly lit things from 2004 (at the latest, I think thats when the Obs forum started). That said, I think you radically underestimate the abilities of some of our illustrious membership (myself included) in firing off angry responses.

I seem to recall back in the BIS days that there were people who'd post one thing, trollingly, get an angry response and then edit their post in the appropriate edit window so it looked like the guy replying had just went off on them. As I recall (again) it was this that caused them to make it so regular users could not edit without getting an "edited" test and that it was a policy carried over to Obsidian's boards.

So, don't leave us hanging... ...did you get to the peak by 11 o'clock?

Infinity Stones and stuff from Thanos is what I chalk it up to. Well the net holds the Dark Astor until Ronan uses his Universal Weapon to break it. The big gaffe on the Xandarian side was not really having a counterplan against the smaller ships since their smaller ships were caught up using the net.