about how this games numbers work.   I find this so facinating.   Normally the players are on top of this stuff even moreso then the developers...and yet the players are so confused nobody knows how this stuff works.    I reeally wonder if Funcom knows.

Excerpt.

"No one is quite sure of how this works. Each spell/ability has its own coefficient so there is no universal formula for types of spells or abilities. This is a main source of discontent amongst the playerbase. You might have +5 Magic Damage and it might add the full 5 to one spell, cut it in half for another, add it over the course of a dot, or completely not even apply. Which of those it is no one can tell. The amount of parsing and testing to figure out every single ability and spell would be astronomical. It wouldn't kill them to release definitive data so we can figure their game out better. It's sort of like trying to find a light switch in the dark right now, when all Funcom has to do is turn the light on for us."

Read me! Post from Offical Boards about how Magic damge is determined.

Uhh...

Yeah an aquaintance of mine who is not resubbing mentioned this as one of his big pet peeves.

He is a software developer and mentioned that stuff like made it clear to him they had no idea what they were doing from a programming standpoint.   I just laughed.  But he was kind of amazed.  He is a bit less of a skeptical person than i am.

Knowing Funcom, they will release a new 'to do' list with updated magical balancing yada yada where they will redo all the magic systems and then give an explanation of how it 'always' worked to make players look stupid.

You know they won't release data, they don't know themselves how anything works, I get the impression there confused as we are.

Well ... this is what you get when you either have a lazy (or incompetent) QA Team and/or a crappy Beta period.  The same thing happened in SWG; too many variables to deal with. 

not quite the same thing

but a dev did explain combat mechanics a week ago

www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/186498

Originally posted by gestalt11

Yeah an aquaintance of mine who is not resubbing mentioned this as one of his big pet peeves.

 

He is a software developer and mentioned that stuff like made it clear to him they had no idea what they were doing from a programming standpoint.   I just laughed.  But he was kind of amazed.  He is a bit less of a skeptical person than i am.

That's not a programming problem but a game design one.

It is quite obvious their underlying RPG system is not well thought out... if it exists as a system at all. Most probably it is a fine spider's web of mutually incompatible arbitrary "hot-fix" mechanics that cannot be easily repaired without critically endangering the whole structure.

Meh... did they have anyone to design the system at all? This is an incredibly complex area of game design and there are pen-and-paper systems out there that have been evolving through trial-and-error for DECADES and yet are pretty far from perfection. Can't believe they thought it unimportant enough to leave its implementation to AFTER the release when it would probably "fix itself".

For an old time gamer like me it is really irritating to see those new "RPG"s use primitive and broken systems wrapped in shiny graphics and "content"... however Funcom is going a bit too far - RELEASING a "RPG" game with the very defining feature of a RPG - its RPG system - almost completely missing.

*shakes head and heads back into the forest, muttering uninteligible curses under his breath*

Originally posted by markoraos

Originally posted by gestalt11

Yeah an aquaintance of mine who is not resubbing mentioned this as one of his big pet peeves.

 

He is a software developer and mentioned that stuff like made it clear to him they had no idea what they were doing from a programming standpoint.   I just laughed.  But he was kind of amazed.  He is a bit less of a skeptical person than i am.

 

That's not a programming problem but a game design one.

It is quite obvious their underlying RPG system is not well thought out... if it exists as a system at all. Most probably it is a fine spider's web of mutually incompatible arbitrary "hot-fix" mechanics that cannot be easily repaired without critically endangering the whole structure.

Meh... did they have anyone to design the system at all? This is an incredibly complex area of game design and there are pen-and-paper systems out there that have been evolving through trial-and-error for DECADES and yet are pretty far from perfection. Can't believe they thought it unimportant enough to leave its implementation to AFTER the release when it would probably "fix itself".

For an old time gamer like me it is really irritating to see those new "RPG"s use primitive and broken systems wrapped in shiny graphics and "content"... however Funcom is going a bit too far - RELEASING a "RPG" game with the very defining feature of a RPG - its RPG system - almost completely missing.

*shakes head and heads back into the forest, muttering uninteligible curses under his breath*

 

Um well in a technical sense they are not the same, but from a design standpoint they actually are essentially the same thing.  Software engineering or RPG design, the design aspects share the same principles and not following good practices causes the same problems.

In the end you could call them all subsets of Systems Engineering if you like.  But either way the important part is designing a system is designing a system.  If you want to separate say DB design from RPG design that is fine but they really share the same underlying principles even if they have different goals.

Basically it was clear to him that they are not following good practices and the gigangtic conceptual ball of tangled wires they inevitably occurrs from such things will bite them in the ass very quickly.  Having played AO a bit he simply couldn't believe they would be so stupid.  Of course he did not know that AO had possibly the worst launch of any MMORPG so I informed him of that and he didn't really know what to say. 

I guess because he is a bit idealistic and doesn't really believe there are a lot of hacks out there.  And good design is really the exception not the rule.

Well, sometimes a little mystery in a game doesn't hurt. Think AoC took it way beyond mystery though

In a way I find it good that TheoryCrafting has failed for once - but the reason it has failed ruins the enjoyment.  It's hard to model incompetence

Originally posted by Teala

about how this games numbers work.   I find this so facinating.   Normally the players are on top of this stuff even moreso then the developers...and yet the players are so confused nobody knows how this stuff works.    I reeally wonder if Funcom knows.

Excerpt.

"No one is quite sure of how this works. Each spell/ability has its own coefficient so there is no universal formula for types of spells or abilities. This is a main source of discontent amongst the playerbase. You might have +5 Magic Damage and it might add the full 5 to one spell, cut it in half for another, add it over the course of a dot, or completely not even apply. Which of those it is no one can tell. The amount of parsing and testing to figure out every single ability and spell would be astronomical. It wouldn't kill them to release definitive data so we can figure their game out better. It's sort of like trying to find a light switch in the dark right now, when all Funcom has to do is turn the light on for us."

Read me! Post from Offical Boards about how Magic damge is determined.

Thats why i consider myself a niche player, i do not want predictible, for that i play single player games, with MMORPG i want that feeling of not knowing excactly all my skills, using different type of skills to try and figure out my true ingame strenght, i would become bored with MMORPG's if i knew excactly what each and every skill/strenght would be. And you see tons of times on forums when a game is pretty well balanced that many will get bored, but then these peole again will blame the game for it. That is why it keeps amazing me how people seem to depend on balance, where a GAMER could try and find his own balance, and yes i know that is a niche way, but hey i like that, this might also have been the case why i did enjoy Pre-cu SWG cause the game was totaly unbalanced, which made player really THINK before entering a battle. Today's gen. of players WANT or i should say NEED pre-chewed food, they need to know excactly what each spell or abilty would do, cause in my view they to lazy to figure this one out them selfs. I'm still waiting for a game that really has unbalanced classes but making groups of different classes could make up for the balance, to bad most new type of players want every class to make a stand against what ever other class.

I agree,  I think its silly to want all the data and stats. I've always found it gets in the way of the RPG element of mmoRPG's. I think its always been laziness on the part of game developers that we see a magical colored number come up out a monster when we hit them, why can't we just have approximations in the form of different animations based on different thresholds of damage. I've never understood the fascination with the statistics; If people really want games that put such an emphasis on statistics the game should go full tilt and include a graphing calculator and a colleg