"The devs don't play the same game as us!"

[McCheese]

A pretty humorous situation is going down over on the CoH forums. The test server has currently been testing some rough nerfs for the /regeneration powerset. There's been lots of back-and-forth about it between players and devs in this thread. Statesman and Positron even did several specific internal tests which they said proved that regen was SO overpowered and needed these nerfs.

Unfortunatly for the devs, some players pointed out (after finally seeing the demo footage of these internal tests) that their internal test server was fucked up. It seems the level-based to-hit percentages are out of whack, cause the test character was killing +7 mobs in 3 or 4 hits, whereas in the real game (i.e not Cryptic's internal testing server) you can BARELY hit a +5 or more mob, while it can hit you very reliably.

Statesman was forced to take his foot out of his mouth and post an apology:

All I can say is: thank goodness for the boards. Thank goodness our players care.

Combat Modifiers affect the damage, duration and to hit chances of mobs +/- a hero's level. A bug disabled the damage combat modifiers in one of our testing branches.

Result? Scrappers (and all Archetypes) were doing more damage to higher level mobs than they should have. I should note that this is on our internal Testing Server only - not the Training Room.

If we hadn't posted the video capture, and you guys hadn't noticed the damage issue, we might have moved forward with the changes.

So what are going to do? First, APOLOGIZE. Yeesh what a mistake. Thank you all for putting me to task. Second, I've put a hold on pushing I4 live until we retest the Scrapper defensive sets (and we'll post the results again). If the changes are too much, we'll roll them back as we've done before. But under NO circumstances will the current Regen changes go live until we own up to our mistake and retest. And I'll continue to interact with the community on the results!

Now the question is: When did their server get screwed up? This could really be a monumental fuck up, depending on how long their server has been like this (and how the hell did they not notice?). I can see a lot of people questioning recent nerfs if there's a chance they were based on faulty data.

I just think it's funny that for once the saying, "the devs must not play the same game as us!" is actually true.

It's worth glancing over the thread to see the dev posts, Statesman and Positron really make themselves look rediculous. (If you want the relevant dev posts without the 150 page thread, just go to the Dev Digest and check out the posts titled "Official Regen Nerf Thread."

[Iannis]

EVERYTHING IS WORKING AS INTENDED!

Some people use the test server to test things, instead of releasing a clusterfuck patch too fast due to being so fucking slow with the first one. Although they had a history of not taking into account some factors (power pools, wtg.), I doubt it's something that slack they disregarded. Who knows how they fucked things up, they tweak around so much shit at once in those updates. Smaller fixes in between content patches would be so much smarter, but Cryptic has to have its weird way of doing things...

I resubscribed to CoH because it's damn fun in short stints, so watching this /Regen bitching is interesting to me as well to a certain extent I think it's just a bunch of flavor of the month tools complaining so much...with great power, comes great numbers of poseurs. The good ones look at their build, figure out how to adapt, and then are as uber as ever they were.

har, someone even recognized Sedna from my old FoH screenshots. I should've asked Equinox to dump all spare HO's onto me back then :P

[Jait]

Shaman Alchemy works fine we tested it in-house!!


Magician Pets do duel-wield Jait, we've been through this before...your logs are wrong.



Gotta miss the old SOE days.

[Cybsled]

The COH devs have always been pretty open to player input though and will usually defer to large amounts of factual data.

[Sylas]

heh COH dev's being completely clueless is standard operating procedure for that game. I'd guess they've been playing with a fucked up build since launch.

[Cybsled]

I'm guessing their build got fucked up right around the time they messed with the player's ability to hit certain level badguys.

[KianwanCT]

So, for once you have a dev team that seems to be open about mistakes and who actually listens to their player base just like what everyones been wanting for years, and what does everyone do?

They bitch about it, because they now show that they are infact humans too and can make mistakes.

[FuckYou]

pretty astounding to see a company own up to its mistakes in plain english and openly communicate with its players. blizzard would never, ever do that.

[Iannis]

That's the good thing. They are pretty noobish, but they do apologize their fuckups are proved beyond a reasonable doubt. I think you basically just have to keep testing and flooding Statesman's PM box with loads of tests until he realizes...

So basically it's up to the players to tell them to stfu. Which we do to all devs!

[Surlok TP]

They bitch about it, because they now show that they are infact humans too and can make mistakes.

They are mistakes that would be caught by any one of those Devs that actually played a character on a real server,or at least took the time to read the various FaQ's and Builds players post on the boards.

It's a team that feeds players bullshit about how they read everything and create the illusion of such by randomly picking threads to comment on.

While it's interesting to see the above post ,if you have been following the game and the errors by the Devs over the last year you would see that while it seems like this team communicates with their players they simply do not.

Every Issue some sweeping change has been made to the game that the players recognize as a problem and the Devs told them they were wrong.Every Issue the players get an apology.

Smoke grenade,posted about for months,almost 6 months on a Daily basis before a dev finally comes in and says yeah its a bug.The I2 Status changes that turned into a Clusterfuck for a ton of classes that had no Status Protection because it wasn't previously required.The 90% Damage resistance cap that Scrappers couldn't possibly obtain(This one was an awesome fuck up; Hi Tough!)The unstoppable Changes.

Not to Mention Statesman coming to the boards time and time again with an explanation of why a Mission was nerfed.

"I encourage Fun Gameplay,Killing 100 mobs at one time in a massive crazy battle is not fun,Killing 3 enemies is!"

I love how he tells players what is and isn't Boring gameplay and time and time again makes changes to the game based on what his opinion of fun is.

[Sylas]

So, for once you have a dev team that seems to be open about mistakes and who actually listens to their player base just like what everyones been wanting for years, and what does everyone do?

They bitch about it, because they now show that they are infact humans too and can make mistakes.

my sentiments have already been echoed by previous posters, but owning up to your mistakes is one thing. Not knowing what the fuck you are doing and relying on your players to tell you whats broke and what isn't is another. I don't want developers who "listen to the player base," the player base is fucking retarded. I want developers who know the mechanics of their own game and have specific, detailed insight and direction for it, dev's who tell you how it is, and if you are lucky, they'll tell you why, not one who has to ask if its ok since they don't actually know. Basically I want a Verant minus using the "vision" as a scapegoat when shit is legitimately broken.

[Haalen]

I think its pretty kool that they admitted it and continue to release so much data to the players. Mistakes have been made, but if you continue to work with the playerbase openly then it can potentially be good for everyone.

[Old Man Potter]

Blizzard would never do such a thing. To admit they made a mistake would be lowering themselves to our level. Instead they continue to hide behind the skirts of paid spin doctors. Blizzard employees think they are gods and that their shit doesn't stink.

I have nothing but fierce contempt for know-it-all arrogant devs like Kalgan who put themselves beyond the reach of us mere mortals. Obviously management at Blizzard has issued some kind of edict that prohibts them from enaging the playerbase. Either that or they are too cowardly to face the music on their own forums.

Where the hell is Metzen and Pardo these days? Don't worry in a few months when WoW goes down the toilet most of us won't be caring anyways. Enjoy your fame while it lasts Blizzard.

[Cybsled]

I don't want developers who "listen to the player base

Boards like this = playerbase. It's not like they listen to shmucks who say "OMGZ I WANT TO HAVE SILVER SURFER POWERRZZZSFS".

The playerbase plays the game MORE then developers do. Why? Because their job is to work on the shit. Does that excuse devs from not knowing their own game? No. But every MMO in existance has shown that certain segments of the gaming population is very devoted and figures out things the developers might not have forseen.

Not listening to your playerbase = Abashi era EQ.

[Tuco]

To admit they made a mistake would be lowering themselves to our level. Instead they continue to hide behind the skirts of paid spin doctors.

Blizzard has apologized multiple times since the release of WoW... even where it hurts them the most, by extending their player bases' subscriptions.