What's up with the silence already?

[Remag Div]

So now after the first big patch fiasco it seems like Trion has gone MIA. We had those nice daily sticky threads detailing the process of launching and what they are fixing and whatnot but now I feel like we're in limbo here.

The known issues for the patch is up to 530 replies. When is the next patch? are you fixing everything in one large patch (bad idea, will just end up getting 100 new bugs probably) or little by little? Are you guys going to address the client side hacking? The massive PvP issues? What's the plan for Episode 3 content?

I'm just going to assume the entire team is hard at work trying to fix and add all these things but throw us a bone here!

[Khufu]

Add to this that the PS3 has still not been patched at all with no word of if or when that will happen.

[jnt]

Go talk about it on Reddit

[Fiancee]

Last Executive Producer post was posted just a few days ago.. http://community.defiance.com/en/

[bobinsen]

there was an article on destructoid a day or so ago, basicly there playing possum.
they dont wanna deal with the flak so there keeping tight liped so we all get bored and leave them alone.

[Cutlass Jack]

there was an article on destructoid a day or so ago, basicly there playing possum.
they dont wanna deal with the flak so there keeping tight liped so we all get bored and leave them alone.

Sounds Legit.

[hardy83]

there was an article on destructoid a day or so ago, basicly there playing possum.
they dont wanna deal with the flak so there keeping tight liped so we all get bored and leave them alone.

Please provide a link, because the only article you mention that sounds familiar is Jim Sterling just talking about the industry in general and uses EA and Sega/Gearbox as examples.

[MacDeath]

Well, Sledge has been out sick. He was working from home but his boss (a wise lady) made him stop it so he could recover. I'm guessing he'll be back today and we'll see more Trion activity.

Mathew Everett ‏@sledgehammer70 23 Apr
My boss had to call and e-mail me to stop working...

[EdgeTW]

Last Executive Producer post was posted just a few days ago.. http://community.defiance.com/en/

Do you mean the one that basically says "I rushed out the last patch before it was ready. We're excited about the show launching. We're working very hard." ?

I think maybe players are looking for a little more than that as far as developer interaction goes. Here's some samples of how Blizzard engages their MMO community on the forums (rather than a weekly-ish blog pep-talk) :

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...1159?page=2#32

Lead Encounter Designer Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas noticed this thread last night and has these thoughts to share:

Yes, Oondasta's maximum health has been reduced by 50%. The design intent behind this boss was for the primary audience to be guilds rather than pickup groups. That is why we placed Oondasta on a relatively remote island, surrounded by powerful elite dinosaurs that make solo travel in the area a dicey proposition. It's why he has mechanics that will outright kill you without the coordinated use of cooldowns, and careful positioning. It's a very different philosophy than our approach to designing bosses like Sha of Anger or Nalak. Of course, things didn't exactly play out as we envisioned -- as we all know, it was possible to overwhelm Oondasta with sheer numbers. While not intended, that was not entirely negative. There have been some pretty epic experiences on the Isle of Giants in the last couple of weeks. There's something to be said for the sight of a hundred spells and missiles flying through the air at a huge dinosaur.

We could have made a number of changes that would have made this approach entirely impossible: Consider a version of Oondasta with a Spiritfire Beam that could hop to 99 targets instead of 20, and a Doomwalker-style debuff that prevented players who had died during the encounter from re-engaging. Definitely not zergable. But that doesn't mean that people would stop trying, and the result would likely be a boss that no one could kill, and a frustrating experience for most participants. So we didn't do that.

Ultimately, while our server hardware is much, much more powerful than what we had in place during the days of events like the Opening of Ahn'Qiraj years ago, it still has limits. And what we have increasingly been observing was players massing around Oondasta in such great numbers that it brought servers to their knees. As word spreads that Oondasta has spawned, more and more people flock to the Isle of Giants for a piece of the action. Many people have been in Oondasta fights where spells took multiple seconds to cast, and the dinosaur perhaps stopped using its abilities entirely. Players with anything but the very best computers saw nothing but a slideshow. And in extreme cases, the entire continent of Pandaria crashed. That simply isn't an acceptable experience for our players, and so we reduced Oondasta's health, so that smaller groups are more likely to be successful, and he'll likely die before so many players arrive that it degrades the experience for everyone present. If server capacity were limitless, we wouldn't have made any of these changes, but alas that is not the case.

Oondasta clearly did not deliver on our original expectations. We'll apply the lessons learned from this experience to any future world bosses we add.


And another one..

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/8197590653#1

Lead Systems Designer Greg Street (Ghostcrawler) wanted to give notice of several class hotfixes that went live last night along with the reasoning behind those changes.

Hotfixes:

• Mage: Nether Tempest, and Living Bomb have their damage increased by 40%. Both spells now deals 70% of its damage when used against other players, down from 100%.
• Mage: Frost Bomb damage have been increased by 40%. Frost Bomb now deals 60% of its damage when used against other players, down from 80%.

We’re happy with the relative power of Arcane, Fire and Frost mages in PvE to each other, but all three specs are below where we want them. We were hoping that once groups got past the first few 5.2 raid encounters that benefit a lot from multi-dotting that we’d see mage DPS climb, but it’s not there yet. We don’t want to change rotations or force players to change specs, so we wanted a relatively passive change.

We decided to buff the bombs because it affects all three specs relatively similarly and is as close to a passive form of damage as mages have. Had we buffed the cast-time nukes, the risk is that mages would lose even more DPS on high movement or high multi-dot fights, which wasn’t our intent. If these buffs aren’t sufficient, we will happily make more, but we’d rather make a few buffs a few times in a row rather than over buff then have to nerf it back down.

• Warlock: Corruption damage -25%.
• Warlock: Doom damage -25%.
• Priest: Shadow Word: Pain damage -25%.

We want the dot specs to do well in multi-dot scenarios, but Affliction, Demonology and Shadow were doing too well on multi-dot fights and are still quite competitive on non-multi-dot fights. Balance druids, so far, are where we want them to be.

• Death Knight: Howling Blast secondary target damage to 50% of primary target (down from 65%)
• Death Knight: Rune Strike damage +25%.
• Warrior: Shield Slam damage +25%.
• Warrior: Deep Wounds damage for Protection only, +50%.

We’re keeping a close eye on death knights. Frost and Unholy are both performing really well, but Frost was higher than we wanted during cleave-type scenarios. They will still be quite good at cleaving even with this change.

Tank DPS is a difficult metric to measure because some tanks care a lot about their DPS, and work to maximize it, while others are content to fill the more traditional tank role of worrying about survivability and boss control, and pay less attention to their DPS. Therefore, it’s challenging to analyze logs and determine whether you’re seeing the full potential of tank DPS or not. For now, we think warrior and DK tank DPS was a little low, so we took steps to adjust it.

Remember, it’s not a goal that every spec do exactly equally well in every possible encounter, and in fact we think that would be boring. We just don’t want things to get so extreme that certain specs feel like they aren’t meaningfully contributing to the group’s efforts. All of this means that raid performance is a somewhat subjective call and we’d like to ask that you keep that in mind as you offer your feedback.

Now, those are just run of the mill forum postings over at Blizzard. I've had my fill of WoW and am all too happy to never play it again. But one of the things that helped keep me playing that game for years was that they took the time to engage their audience. And I know some developers like to use the excuse that if they're posting on the forums they're not developing the game, and that players need to choose which they'd rather have.. but Blizzard manages to juggle both and I don't think anyone has ever accused their game of being short on content. So, enough with that excuse.

I've said this before, but it's an MMO. Engaging your players is part of the job. And I'm not trying to pile this on Sledgehammer (who I hope gets well soon). The other developers have fingers and keyboards too.

[Pyth]

How many times should they have to respond to the same exact questions being asked over and over?

Generally speaking, a person feels like they've resolved any kind of inquiry when they've answered it once. If they have to do it twice, it's fine. Maybe not everyone understood the first time. But when you get to the point where you have to answer a question a dozen times or more, you just say "**** it."