yy48n19 wrote:Nicely put and I agree. It seems that there are a few people who have played on ATS and are unsatisfied with the changes, and so they are raising a huge stink here, bawling repeatedly about the same points and presenting their opinions as near fact. It seems to me that those few people fall into the category of power-gamers. I think that when the patch hits the general public of the game, the response will be different than we've seen so far from the elite few.
At the same time, many of us who have approached this with an open mind have been very disappointed with zero communication and more importantly, zero communication of vision. And some of us are also convinced the sky isn't falling with the patch, but have many, many other valid concerns.
If we had some idea where the game was supposed to be going - or where their ideas of what was right and what was wrong with it - many of the concerns raised by people regarding the ATS patch wouldn't have come up. But when a patch has bugs that have been reported yet not fixed, has huge balance changes, and has no real answer to the vision question besides what we can imply rightly or wrongly from the sum of changes...its not just 'powergamers' that have a problem. And its not just a few points over and over; I got tired of reading the harvest whines, and then was startled to personally discover a number of other things that just scare me that I've brought up in forums. (And by the way, since I'm not over level 100 in any skill, I don't feel I'm a powergamer or 'l33t. I play as best I can, and when I had access to ATS I actually took advantage of it and shared my opinions. Sorry if it ruined your experience. Perhaps you could bother taking the time to preview and test changes too!)
I respect Nevrax for saving money outsourcing. I also have seen how smart MMORPGs have senior dev involvement on big topics. Statesman's - the founder of CoH - work on occasionally popping in with a tidbit or major guide decision on what is right or wrong has actually saved at least a thousand accounts from cancelling. (His mea culpa on a stealth nerf got a thread devoted to how people who were going to cancel accounts didn't.)
Nevrax doesn't seem concerned about this. And that's a problem. I guess the game will survive without dev communication if that's what they want. Its just far poorer for it.
