boomervoncannon

For a man who was married to Marilyn Monroe to overlook the stickiness of the truth in his trousers seems pretty surprising. what? I can make lowbrow jokes too.

Sorry, but I've read a lot of threads today and there are people upset about all sorts of things but one of them is definitely a lot of people upset over the wipe.

Persistency is your girlfriend always referring to whatever game you're playing as your other girlfriend (this is what my gf of 2 years does) and if it was permanent she wouldn't be your girlfriend she would be your wife.

I'm good. Civ 6 expansion Gathering Storm has me dodging floods, tornadoes and volcanic eruptions. I might give Star Citizen a look, but my gaming buddy doesn't have the RAM requirements on her rig.

Partly it's my fault because I have yet to do the Kraken but based on prior MMO experience expected it to be more of a challenge than apparently it is. ILL and other posters seem to be clear that doing the Kraken is really not all that difficult even for small companies. The greater difficulty apparently lies in gathering the stones but even that is not insurmountable. If true this means it's not really such a big problem for smaller companies, but the issue of gating new content during Early Access remains. Especially after a wipe it is reasonable to expect it would take time for any but the largest of companies to rebuild to a point to do the kraken, time during which your brand new content won't get tested. By anyone. *headdesk*

I wasn't responding to the OP, I was responding directly to Crythos, and the fact your responses fail to discern this is telling. While Crythos does state the part you quoted, he also clearly states "wiping peoples time invested efforts leaves a very bad taste and give me a sense of mistrust that will take a long time to receed." and cites his lost investment of 333 hours. In doing so he very clearly is complaining not about the advance notice, but about the wipe itself. That is what I responded to, and all you've done is try to cast shade because of your apparent lack of ability to understand who I was quoting and what I was addressing. The rest of your comments are just noise trying to cast thinly veiled insults at me.

You've read one specfic comment in his post and decided to take that as the overall point of his post. Reading his entire post it is obvious he is complaining about wipes in general and his lost time invested as well as the risk of future wipes. The wait before the wipe is not the main focus of his post and declaring it is based on what he wrote is off base.

It was an analogy and I don't live anywhere near the coast nor in my mom's basement. Stop trying to use ad hominem attacks to denigrate a perfectly valid analogy. No one was making a point about whether someone's life was in danger. That's irrelevant, so stop trying to pretend I was saying anything about that. This load of bollox you're trying to pass off as he's not complaining about the wipe but the amount of warning is completely undermined by the fact he's specfically complaining about his 333 hours. He further complains about the risk of future wipes, not future wipe warning timing. If he's complaining about the timing of a warning, neither of those things would be relevant, so it's ironic you're telling me to read and understand when it's apparent you didn't do so yourself.

That's the impression I'm getting, which makes this change less onerous than I imagined.

You mean the stuff that’s gonna disappear?

Saying “don’t give me any early Access bs” when that is entirely the appropriate response to your complaint about time invested going down the tubes is the guy on the gulf coast not wanting you to point out that he’s already rebuilt his Oceanside home twice in the last 20 years after it got leveled by hurricanes before. He wants to be able to bitch without having his unrealistic expectations pointed out to him and that’s what you’re doing here. The game was marketed as Early Access. For 2 years. It was made abundantly clear that development is ongoing. Ongoing development means wipes are a distinct possibility. Thus it is on you not to invest in the game at present if you are unwilling to lose progress. Should there perhaps be clearer standards about what EA is and isn’t and what paying customers have a right to expect? I have argued repeatedly that there should be, but no such standards currently exist. Your expectations clearly were not in line with what they should have been, given what does exist. Going forward there are no guarantees they won’t wipe again in the future and you should plan accordingly. If you mistrust a company based on your own misplaced expectations there is little anyone can do to mitigate that, but you are indeed a poster child of sorts for why I continue to argue that EA standards are needed and should be set by Steam.

I can see it. Just checked. Maybe you forgot to pay your forum bill?

But don’t you know? I’m the most important person in the world. My opinions are the opinions of all right thinking people everywhere. Those that think otherwise are knuckle dragging mouth breathing morons and should not be given a moments thought. If I’m leaving then obviously anyone with half a brain is doing likewise. Now go and fetch me some cheese to go with this whine, you uncultured peasant. If I wanted your opinion I’d have it beaten out of you.

I almost didn’t recognize you cause you finally changed your avi. Speaking as a notorious parrot racist, thanks.

Which leads to a point I have made repeatedly in other threads before any of the current uproar came up. Early Access is qualitatively different from alpha or beta because it is paid. Developers have been happy to substitute EA in place of traditional free alpha and beta testing because it is revenue positive for them, but there is an underlying problem for all sides. EA players are paying, and therefore are customers, and therefore rightly feel they should have the right to have certain expectations of the product they are paying for. Yet the product is still under development and therefore subject to a great deal of change, including wipes. The problem is that in order to balance these two potentially conflicting realities, there needs to be clear standards of what is and is not acceptable in Early Access products. Developers need these standards in order to avoid upsetting customers due to differences between development process needs and customer expectations (like oh for example, whether there will be wipes). Customers need these standards in order to make clearer, more informed decisions about whether EA products are right for them.

All of this is true. For a finished game. Gating new content behind an endgame boss during a testing/development cycle is still nonsensical. ILl’s information that the Kraken is not as difficult as I had believed (thanks for sharing that btw ILL) does mean the decision is less problematic to some degree, but that doesn’t change the fact that gating new content you want tested is just dumb. It does give me new perspective that the decision may be neutral with regard to company size. Assuming ILL has accurately described the difficulty level I’m willing to withdraw my objection in that regard. Personally in a finished product I’d actually prefer a difficulty level that did require improved ships to some degree as in pve it would provide additional purpose to farming SOD’s. But that’s in a finished product. At this point a more defeatable boss makes greater sense to me.

Interesting and creative ideas. I have no clue how practical they might be coding wise, but as concepts they sound just fine to me.

I’m fully aware large companies have that advantage, but think about what that implies in inverse. Small companies will be unable to do the kraken either at all or in anything approaching a timely manner. If you have recently stated a goal of making the game more accessible to smaller groups, this can’t be anything but contrary to that goal.

Power stones still need to be collected. Presumably higher end ship component bp’s need to be farmed in order to build ships with a good chance to win (speculation. Haven’t done the boss but basing conjecture on other MMO boss requirements). These types of bosses typically aren’t just about having bodies foe the fight, they are about acquiring the things needed to win the fight and in that respect large companies have a huge manpower resource advantage.

I am with you. As a released game design choice I actually like it if the Kraken is doable at that point by small groups, but as a testing phase choice it’s the kind of thing that makes one want to scream at the devs “I SHOULDNT EVEN HAVE TO EXPLAIN TO YOU WHY THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA!” Now excuse me while I go kick puppies. This makes me want to kick puppies, and I like puppies.

That you paid for. (Important qualitative difference)

So some of the changes announced after wipe definitely seem likely to be improvements for small groups, but the decision to gate the new underwater content behind the kraken is a head scratcher. To start with, as a development/testing decision, why in the world would you want to gate your newest content during an Early Access period behind an endgame boss? What percentage of your playerbase do you expect will ever successfully unlock said content? My personal experience of 15 years playing MMO's of this type suggests less than half. Moreover, what percentage will unlock it within 60 days of a total wipe? I'm gonna offer as a hypothesis that the percentage of the playerbase who are members of large companies focused on doing endgame content will correlate to an overwhelming degree with the unlock percentage, which is to say far less than half. Do you want a significant percentage of your playerbase to actually test your new content or not? If the answer is yes than gating that content behind a final boss is boneheaded. Period. If the answer is no, then why put it in in the first place? Beyond how nonsensical this decision is from a testing perspective, it goes completely against the idea of making your game more accessible to smaller groups. The development team has the back end data sure, but are you REALLY telling us that you looked at the data for how many and which companies completed the kraken to date and it wasn't some miniscule percentage consisting almost entirely of some of the largest companies? I do not have access to the data myself, but this notion is one I am highly skeptical of. If that is what the data shows, then this decision further puts smaller groups in a have not category.

Even if the devs felt this was how they wanted to gate the content for actual game launch, gating it this way during EA strikes me as nonsensical. What proportion of your playerbase will ever get to test the new content? How buggy will the sub and the crab and the underwater biome be long term because they were gated behind the endgame boss during EA? I find this not only personally disappointing, but irrational as a development/testing decision.

Sadly one rarely goes wrong by having very low expectations of people's behavior. The good news is that the new mechanics should make this a short term only consideration, rather than a long term underlying issue, but I think your predictions have a strong chance of becoming reality.

I wasn't sure if we would get wipes during the EA or not, but I'm not in the least surprised that we are. Old traditional betas seem like they are largely a thing of the past in the face of the new EA model, which has it's merits for small indie developers and consumers, but is definitely a questionable model in the hands of more established studios. I bring this up not to sidetrack the conversation but to say that I am of the view that expectations based on the old beta model are probably of limited value at this point and going forward with regard to things like wipes.