Naijin no longer on staff

[Ramrod]

It feels silly to me to have to alter EVERY class just because some GM decided to release one overpowered skill. It's much more logical to nerf the one skill, and requires significantly less effort to accomplish the same end goal.

Except in most (all?) cases that one OP skill is something that was 15+ years old and released back when Simu had a full staff including game designers, product managers, etc versus now when they have a ragtag group of part-time employees and one FTE making 99% of the decisions. Point being, they had a full staff of full-time employees that sat down and made the decision and now a ragtag group of part-timers has decided that it's too OP 15 years later. After having something in the game for 10-20 years removing it due to being OP is like finally closing the barn door after the horse got out, had children, raised a family and died of natural causes.

Also, the thing about roundtime, is that the lower it gets, the more exponential the benefit. For example, going from 5 seconds to 4 is only a 20% increase in attack speed. But going from 2 to 1 is literally a 100% increase. Whoever thought it was a good idea to give people 1 second CT/RT was, to put it bluntly, mechanically challenged. The problem is that in this case it's been around for so long, people just accepted it as the norm. But this game has been Purestone since I started playing, so we've always known this crap is broken! It just took some GMs that finally had the balls to right some of the wrongs.

It wasn't always Purestone. It was Purestone whenever the change to spell prep RT went in 20+ years ago. Since then, they've been nerfing pures and semi's in the name of game balance instead of buffing squares. The current state of the game is that it's Squarestone and they haven't adjusted any of the pure killers they put in as obstacles over the years. They added so many creatures to hunting areas that pures just can't hunt and also maneuvers that squares and semis can shrug off or dodge. As a pure you're supposed to use disablers to avoid this, but then they've made creatures that immediately break free of the disabler so your only shot is to stun/kill outright, but then they've nerfed those spells in the name of game balance.

It's funny how they can nerf the crap out of wizards and they still outperform most classes. That's how freaking overpowered your class has been.

Warriors outperform every single class right now, hands down.

Personally? I not only agree with nerfing my own class if it's warranted, I would be one of the first in line asking for it if I felt there was imbalance. If only people would understand the value of balance, this would be a MUCH better game, and development would be able to come at a much faster pace.

If game balance meant something other than a nerf to Simu then I think more people would support it. 99% of the time though it's just meant nerf. Maybe I'm mistaken and I'm in the minority here, but I feel like most players would prefer they quit fucking with mechanics and just add content. And yeah, you can absolutely add content without "game balance" or changing the mechanics as they've shown time and time again over the last 25 years. I mean shit, the most crowded hunting areas today are the older ones, which is really telling when it comes to player sentiment towards Simu's idea of game balance.

Almost every class now feels like a slight variation of a standard template with the variation being the attack messaging. It wasn't always like that.

At the end of the day, Simu doesn't give a flying fuck what their customers actually want. It's just a bunch of GM's working on what they feel like. If Simu actually cared, they'd go back to surveying players instead of listening to the same 20 people spout their opinions on Discord.

[Realk]

Warriors outperform every single class right now, hands down.

That's an opinion statement, and one that I'd not agree with. That being said the fact that everyone has their own preference and idea of what outperform means. Tells me that it is actually fairly balanced and tinkering for the sake of tinkering is just a waste of time and get people upset.

What quantifies out perform? is there a chart to compare side by side?

[Lavastene]

Someone found one yesterday though, but I haven't heard what it was yet or who found it.

The one from yesterday is actually really dope...

LEGENDARY TREASURE: A prismatic display of color in the skies over Mist Harbor caught everyone’s attention early Thursday morning when Deza found a Legendary Treasure. The sigil-carved glowbark runestaff is a T5 Sigil Staff with special Kroderine Soul abilities, evidently. Congratulations,, Deza! What a grand find!

[Ramrod]

That's an opinion statement, and one that I'd not agree with. That being said the fact that everyone has their own preference and idea of what outperform means. Tells me that it is actually fairly balanced and tinkering for the sake of tinkering is just a waste of time and get people upset.

What quantifies out perform? is there a chart to compare side by side?

Of course it's an opinion statement as anything on the matter would be, but between the post-cap training options, a fully developed guild, the armor options, redux, spell options, etc. I would say they're the most capable. They added all these things to help out squares due to the higher RT and then they reduced RT.

[Neveragain]

Of course it's an opinion statement as anything on the matter would be, but between the post-cap training options, a fully developed guild, the armor options, redux, spell options, etc. I would say they're the most capable. They added all these things to help out squares due to the higher RT and then they reduced RT.

Encumbrance is still too great of a factor for squares. There's not even a reason to deepen containers for a square.

[Mobius1]

You are assuming, that the people volunteering to do the Dev are skilled enough to do much more than fix the code for RT's. The list of people like spiffy is pretty small one. With the idea that simu doesn't really pay out on it's own and a bonus for p2w, how are you gonna boss someone into making xxx... if the things they care about are xxx.

All the more reason to take less complex avenues to achieve better game balance, and thus making adding new content all the more easy for them as well.

[Fortybox]

A pair of boots that make you immune to all the dumb shit in the rift sold for $28,000 a year or 2 ago. That's the most notorious one so far, but there are plenty of other examples. Not sure if it's posted here somewhere, but just look at the numbers from any Duskruin auction and you'll see now ridiculous it's gotten.



This is probably also why legendary finds quickly became trash for the most part. The first few were pretty nice finds, then there was several months of garbage fluff/scripted stuff dropping instead, and some halfass decent item once in a while, but nothing I'd consider "legendary" unless I'm forgetting something.

Even though it's overrated as fuck and ultimately a situational gimmick item, that rage plate from the other thread is probably the best legendary find in a good while.

Someone found one yesterday though, but I haven't heard what it was yet or who found it.



The ironic part is how Rapid Fire is really only overpowered when other classes are using it.

"We have to nerf Rapid Fire because it's overpowered when non-wizards use it." is what Simu should really be saying, despite the fix to that being a brain dead easy fix that doesn't actually nerf wizards.

I've never been able to understand why Simu thinks that there's some holy grail of game balance that will cause the planets to align and every class will be equally powerful against everything and have no problems with sucking the fun out of things being a tradeoff for "game balance" that they will never achieve and that nobody who isn't on staff actually gives a fuck about, but they need to stop. They won't, but they still need to. They need to just focus on making sure that all classes are fun to play and don't feel weak to anyone. As much as I complain about wizard nerfs, because they're stupid, I'd die of boredom playing something like a rogue.


Anyway, remember when sorcerers could do this?

Kryblue gestures at a csetairi.
CS: +666 - TD: +489 + CvA: +25 + d100: +74 == +276
Warding failed!
A csetairi is suddenly engulfed in flames of pure essence!
... and hits for 132 points of damage!
... 55 points of damage!
Right arm shattered by an extremely well placed hit!
The csetairi is stunned!
... 55 points of damage!
Icy blast freezes the csetairi's right hand!
... 45 points of damage!
Heavy shock to chest illuminates ribcage. Cool!
... 45 points of damage!
Visible wisps of electricity shoot up left arm. Youch!
... 55 points of damage!
Left arm fractured by an icy blast!
... 50 points of damage!
... 50 points of damage!
Nasty burns to right arm. Gonna need lots of butter.
The csetairi shrieks as she falls to the ground and cradles her mangled right arm!
... 50 points of damage!
... 55 points of damage!
Flames burn hole in chest exposing ribs!
... 45 points of damage!
Burst of flames char chest a crispy black.
... 45 points of damage!
Burst of flames to left eye incinerates eyelid. Gruesome.
... 55 points of damage!
Electric blast goes right to the heart! Fibrillation can be fun.
The csetairi writhes in agony and dies.

Estild’s mangina is so dry it sucks up all the fun out of the game.

Naijin wanted to make combat take years and thought rogues were fine as is.

Whatever. Dev has no interest in listening to the playerbase.

[Fortybox]

Well, good on you for not scripting. Sorry; admittedly it's an assumption I simply make about most people anymore, since it's rare people don't these days.

As for the raw data being used out of context, how exactly? If there is discussion to be had in this regard, I don't think any GMs would be unreasonable. It's not like they have it out for wizards/bards specifically. Surely it's not perfect, and honestly Divergence was meant largely as a testing ground, so it's not exactly set in stone, if the data comes back with unsatisfactory results.

People mention raising the floor, and quite frankly they showed that they are more than willing to do so when it is reasonable. For example, they were planning on nerfing ranged RT, but quickly decided that raising the floor for melee would accomplish the same end goal but without a nerf (Granted, I think Waylay needs to be nerfed by 1 second after this change.).

Say you reduced every single classes' RT/CT by 1, except for bards and wizards? I can't even imagine the impact this would have on the way combat works in the game. Me simply having a 2 second Waylay is already overpowered, IMO, and I've been saying it should be nerfed for a while now. But 1 second Waylay?! Yeah, that would be way too crazy.

Fuck you, I’ll script if I want to. It’s funny how you lose your shit over pickpocketing but want to force people to do things your way.

Stop being a whiny little bitch.

[Mobius1]

Fuck you, I’ll script if I want to. It’s funny how you lose your shit over pickpocketing but want to force people to do things your way.

Stop being a whiny little bitch.

Lol, how did I whine? The ones whining are those who can't handle the game being balanced. I never once said anything about stopping people from scripting in this discussion. My point had nothing to do with that.

I've said many times in the past that bigshot put us in stage 4 cancer. To remove the tumors at this point would kill us, so I'd never suggest such a thing.

[Mobius1]

Except in most (all?) cases that one OP skill is something that was 15+ years old and released back when Simu had a full staff including game designers, product managers, etc versus now when they have a ragtag group of part-time employees and one FTE making 99% of the decisions. Point being, they had a full staff of full-time employees that sat down and made the decision and now a ragtag group of part-timers has decided that it's too OP 15 years later. After having something in the game for 10-20 years removing it due to being OP is like finally closing the barn door after the horse got out, had children, raised a family and died of natural causes.

Sorry, been too busy to respond to your post until now.

With something like this, nothing should ever be grandfathered in. There's instances where grandfathering something is the best course, but I just can't agree that this is one of them. Having a 15+ year old tumor removed is a GOOD thing, even if it might hurt a little at first. Be glad that you got to abuse an overpowered skill for so long!

Granted, as I said earlier, one could also argue that it's not even a nerf, since it only impacts Divergence areas. You can simply continue to use your overpowered skills exactly as before, if you so choose. It's only the new areas where it is different, and those areas are 100% optional.

It wasn't always Purestone. It was Purestone whenever the change to spell prep RT went in 20+ years ago. Since then, they've been nerfing pures and semi's in the name of game balance instead of buffing squares. The current state of the game is that it's Squarestone and they haven't adjusted any of the pure killers they put in as obstacles over the years. They added so many creatures to hunting areas that pures just can't hunt and also maneuvers that squares and semis can shrug off or dodge. As a pure you're supposed to use disablers to avoid this, but then they've made creatures that immediately break free of the disabler so your only shot is to stun/kill outright, but then they've nerfed those spells in the name of game balance.


Warriors outperform every single class right now, hands down.

Honestly, it's going to take a lot more evidence than this to be able to make this claim. The raw data suggests otherwise. In fact, the last data Naijin shared, pures were STILL performing better than squares in Divergence areas. Please give me real examples/evidence if you are going to make these claims. And what critters are killing pures with maneuvers, that aren't killing squares? Surely things are more balanced than they were in the past, in regards to class balance, but that has almost nothing to do with nerfs, actually, and almost everything to do with PSM and other changes which WERE buffs to squares. Yeah, there's vvrael destroyers in the Scatter which are immune to spells, but I 100% think that that is bull crap and should be changed. But critters like that are not the norm, at least.

If game balance meant something other than a nerf to Simu then I think more people would support it. 99% of the time though it's just meant nerf. Maybe I'm mistaken and I'm in the minority here, but I feel like most players would prefer they quit fucking with mechanics and just add content. And yeah, you can absolutely add content without "game balance" or changing the mechanics as they've shown time and time again over the last 25 years. I mean shit, the most crowded hunting areas today are the older ones, which is really telling when it comes to player sentiment towards Simu's idea of game balance.

What has been nerfed? If you were to count how many things have been buffed versus how many things have been nerfed, it's probably 100 to 1!!

Almost every class now feels like a slight variation of a standard template with the variation being the attack messaging. It wasn't always like that.

No balance is perfect. But if you enjoy absolutely wrecking things compared to other classes with overpowered abilities, and don't want that taken away because it made you "unique," that argument will get no sympathy from me. If you want to suggest ways to make classes more unique but NOT overpowered, by all means I am sure they would be happy for ideas. But it also makes perfect sense to make things more streamlined. The whole reason for them doing it is to make it waaaaaaaaaaaaaay simpler for them to add new content, including new abilities, new skills, new hunting grounds, and so fourth.

At the end of the day, Simu doesn't give a flying fuck what their customers actually want. It's just a bunch of GM's working on what they feel like. If Simu actually cared, they'd go back to surveying players instead of listening to the same 20 people spout their opinions on Discord.

I agree that their way of development has issues, as I said earlier in this thread. But I definitely don't think their motives are necessarily the issue. I do think they care, otherwise they wouldn't be doing so much unpaid work, dealing with toxic players who only give them headaches for all they give of themselves. I can't help but sympathize with them, especially since the way it is is largely not their fault, and is probably largely out of their control to change. I feel really bad for Naijin and all the crap he went through, after he selflessly gave so much of himself to this game. We may not have seen eye to eye on a lot of things, but I always knew his heart was in the right place, and I respected him a lot.

And polling the masses does have some value, but on the other hand it's only SO useful. For example, Wizards are the most played class, so therefore polls would likely be more favorable to them, even if they were overpowered. Also players don't necessarily have access to the same data that GMs do.

It's kind of like why we have elected representatives in our government, instead of making every last thing up to a popular vote. That would be disastrous!!