fadin wrote:Hi everyone,
Unfortunately it seems someone decided to post some information which was not intended to be posted yet. This was to be discussed in a meeting tomorrow as to how we would approach this specific subject, but it seems someone jumped the gun. Those two posts should not be listed anywhere right now. I just hope the information doesn't change between now and the meeting.
We have no intention of chaining someone to a server or community with which they are so verbally and visibly unhappy. Anyone is welcome to cancel their account and move to another server if they feel it would be a different experience. Unfortunately, we cannot transfer your character or account unless it was within one week of registering your account.
Cerest breaks her back daily trying to make sure she has the correct information in a timely manner. She is not interested in posting something fast, if posting it fast means the information is wrong. She is always moving around asking questions and making sure she has the right answers. It has been shown in the past that fast reactions lead to bad results, and she has no interest in making bad results. We work on a 6 hour delay in the U.S. It doesn't excuse us from giving you information, but there may be times we are a little later than the European servers. Cerest isn't hiding information, nor is she being lazy (far from it). You are welcome to browse *all* the forums, and that is why they are there, but bringing a personal fight back isn't attractive to anyone. This isn't a competition for information, it is a team effort.
Have fun out there.
What you are seeing is the result of silence and the growing tendency to respond to direct questions with dodges that have occasionally been somewhat insulting. Almost every single patch so far since retail has had some change that was considered to be incredibly negative, or simply a massive hidden nerf. But despite the constant fear of patches that Nevrax has done a good job of cultivating, the actual changes made generally don't seem to show that there is much if any interest in listening to the community's feedback. Even little things like quests seem to be getting rolled out onto the servers in an often broken and untested state. We see changes where dev time was spent changing the tick down of a DP from 3 days to 20 days "because it was too fast", but in the thread commenting about this change being silly there were folks who hadn't even noticed it was in at all because it was so ungodly slow to begin with. There are changes to the PR where it becomes impossible to harvest due to stealth code changes that were never really tested, they "fix" that and we get nodes that deplete but never respawn until a server reboot. After months of complaints from folks annoyed at getting DP cause they were attacked by a half dozen ragus that are 150 levels below them, there are patch notes saying that we no longer get dp from mobs that don't give exp... but then it's clarified that these mobs that don't give exp are new mobs nobody has heard of that never give exp to anyone of any level.
Silence breeds negativity and hostility.
Open communication does indeed cause conflict when dates slip and features are cut, but at the same time it generates a large amount of good will that will defend and ignore little problems. Not only that, it pacifies that aggression. In AC the dev's posted a ton and participated in a great deal of threads, sometimes this caused flamewars, but generally it kept things from spiraling out of control. In AO the dev's occasionally posted and occasionally had little articles about things going on or describing game systems, Cz the "community dewd" also posted a great deal to the forums. In both games the community saw their feedback being seen and having an effect on how the game unraveled each month.
Here we see silence and say "erm... wtf?" or "ack!" on almost every patch.
The GM's and CSR folks can try as hard as they want, and file as many reports... but as long as nevrax keeps their current policy of silence and doing whatever the hell they want without changes that seem to show any interest in what the community thinks, negativity and handbiting will continue to spiral down out of control.
