Reintroductions and reflections.

[Bits]

A formal welcome back!

[anarchypark]

so many banned ppl and their friends act like innocent.

well, i trust RoR devs decisions.
whoever get granted unban, I hope they've learned lessons and true meaning of constructive criticism.

Yes, like Gravord who argued politely and with no offense to none in general? Or maybe like the guy who asked pig as mounts? Your post makes sense.

you call it polite? fancy words are not polite, read beyond the words.
if serial killer write note with polite words, is it civilized note?
but who am i lecturing english reading skills.

[Chaoself]

so many banned ppl and their friends act like innocent.

well, i trust RoR devs decisions.
whoever get granted unban, I hope they've learned lessons and true meaning of constructive criticism.

Yes, like Gravord who argued politely and with no offense to none in general? Or maybe like the guy who asked pig as mounts? Your post makes sense.

you call it polite? fancy words are not polite, read beyond the words.
if serial killer write note with polite words, is it civilized note?
but who am i lecturing english reading skills.

Whatever.

[dur3al]

I can only speak for myself, but I don't believe that I know better. The main problem has always been that players fall along a continuum of ability, and at the low end, this generally results in inexperienced posts which don't solve issues. However, at the high end, this results in ego and bias. It's not a coincidence, I feel, that the better players are the ones most likely to defend 1.4.8 and all the choices that were made simply based on it being an established game state that they know, despite the fact that it is itself broken. It would also be disingenuous not to point out that higher ability players are sometimes guilty of exactly what you mention in your post - dismissing the opinions of other people based not on what they are saying, but based on their performance at the game itself.

I believe, and I'm speaking for myself here, that its not the fact that I prefer the state of the game closer to 1.4.8 in terms of balance because its something I'm more accustomed with in terms of my personal performance, but because when we're talking in terms of balance, its a monster that we know and understand it better and will be able to know how to deal with it easier forward in terms of making improvements in the game play... I hope that makes sense to everyone?

It is the period where we played the most, and where the game was supposedly more 'advanced' then ever, and so we have the most experience and understanding on how mainstream over-performing classes/groups/synergies/rotations/procs worked but also some of its counters and its flaws. In terms of balance it seems to be the logical foundation of the game because its where the issues are most known, and from there you work forward into fixing these issues.

If you completely change the scenario to drastically, we simply have no data (as in time) to compare and fully understand how deep the changes affected the game as a whole. An example of this is to me was when you did the engineer/magus changes and for a long period of time people just noticed small improvements here and there with the people who had played that class the longest, but it wasn't until a group of good players started picking them up and showing how some changes were definitely over-performing and in a sense, making balance and the game-play even worse for everybody else.

I've addressed most of this above, in that no one in the community can be trusted. Every single person posting on these forums has an agenda and their own bias, including you and me. The question then becomes, is it a good agenda? Is it a good bias? Is this person's agenda making the game the best it can be, or is it more selfish than that?

In the end, I have to make the choice, and my choices will not always be what any one person wants, as there was discord among the better players even within the QE thread. This doesn't mean that I don't listen or that I never listened.

I agree with you there but also let me highlight something else, which to me, is just as important regarding balance and links up to most of my points and arguments.

Its important to establish how we want a 'balanced' game-play to be - which is why I said that a vision has to be settled before getting down to work & do changes and leadership is also required to keep the vision in check and going into the path you want. Let me explain this still using the QE example and how tricky it can be.

Let me quote Telen here, and m8 I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything with you, just using as an example.
When he says, and it seems to be in the general opinion of the player-base, that:

Renown abilities like QE ruin balance as they give advantages or cover weaknesses classes were designed to have. Balance by class not give abilities to all. Shaman have access to QE because its part of their class design. BG IB get it from disrupt. Just tales away uniqueness.

He is actually absolutely correct, it does cover some uniqueness that only some classes have it, and also can be a skill that if those 5% proc, can completely change the outcome of a fight if used properly. But when we are talking about a game without exact class mirrors (which in itself creates unbalance & exploitation) you sometimes do really need these cheese skills in order to even the playing field, and they should generally come at a high cost (& this can be tweaked). But you need such skills to avoid the battlefield become only a numbers game, such as:

Both groups have the same skill ceiling, but group A has x class combination, and group B that has y class combination, without "panic buttons" or "renown abilities that ruin balance" the outcome is that group A will most likely win simply because of a mathematical outcome, it becomes a game that nobody wants to play. And starting now with my own personal view of what I enjoy RvR (which relates to your "everyone has their own bias"), is the random factor that can kick in and break this equation.. be the pugging engineer who drops in a bunch of turrets close to your premade drawing the attention of the zerg you're trying to fight against to himself, making it possible for you to keep harassing the zerg's back-line to build morals. Also why I absolutely love the concept of moral abilities themselves, which can be quite overpowered at times and turn in the tables in favor of the outnumbered/less equipped/less skilled side, same concept as ulti skills in various other games also.

I suppose the theory is that sometimes you create a "balanced" battlefield by introduction of small imbalanced skills which should be available to everyone, but will only really be in a "broken state" - as in QE proccing repeatedly giving you inhuman speed - once you're being attacked by 10 different people at the same time but these very same 10 people not having the coordination to completely finish you off in a damage spike (which any proper group would do), which translates exactly as when you're fighting multiple enemies in the lake. And that was the whole point of argument.. how to "balance" the playing field of small numbers vs high numbers, which is bound to happen in a game with only 2 sides.

I hope this can make sense to everyone, including the people who disagree with me defending such skills & just generally think I'm a **** who wants the game to keep broken like it was before yadayada, and can actually see & understand a little bit my reasoning behind what I'm defending.

[peterthepan3]

Aside: Curious as to when changes pertaining to Magus/Engineer rendered the classes overperforming, as I feel that's incorrect. The changes made an underperforming class somewhat more viable and functional as a ST DPS...but to do so requires being stationary in a mobile game.

[Azarael]

Sound points, though I would mention that 1.4.8. is the devil you know, but once you get to changing 1.4.8 itself, you will find that the new state will become the devil you don't know, regardless of where the changes are placed. Your approach would seem to preclude the buffing of underpowered specs as well, because this would (as you mention of RoR) change the state, too.

(You can log your actual account, btw.)

[freedur3al]

Curious as to when changes pertaining to Magus/Engineer rendered the classes overperforming, as I feel that's incorrect.

The changes made an underperforming class somewhat more viable and functional as a ST DPS...but to do so requires being stationary in a mobile game.

I never said that the class is overperforming, but some aspects of it were:

An example of this is to me was when you did the engineer/magus changes and for a long period of time people just noticed small improvements here and there with the people who had played that class the longest, but it wasn't until a group of good players started picking them up and showing how some changes were definitely over-performing and in a sense, making balance and the game-play even worse for everybody else.

And what I mean by "game-play even worse for everybody else", is the fact of you being able to nuked so fast and by such range when in keep fights for example. Especially without a dedicated healer in your group.

Sound points, though I would mention that 1.4.8. is the devil you know, but once you get to changing 1.4.8 itself, you will find that the new state will become the devil you don't know, regardless of where the changes are placed. Your approach would seem to preclude the buffing of underpowered specs as well, because this would (as you mention of RoR) change the state, too.

(You can log your actual account, btw.)

Absolutely! But at the very least we have something to compare with, to find out if improvements were made/achieved or not. But if you use as base what is mostly still unknown, how can you compare as you further the changes?

[tazdingo]

i don't rly know what's going on i'm just glad we're all friends again

[Sparrer]

Definitely good news. But I think that instead of manual ban removals there should be a server wide unban for everyone who ever got the hammer.

It might sound sick but some hand picked notorious ban removals look quite unfair to a lot of other people and resemble a PR move.

[dur3al]

Btw sorry for posting with the newer account, I didn't notice in time!