Orodina

I would imagine that any dev who has been on the team for a while, and Locke certainly qualifies for that, knows beforehand how much revealing how a game mechanic works will stir things up. If he didn't want it to be known, he would never have mentioned it in the PM. I imagine that he will do so again in the future if it suits his purposes. As far as being buried by PMs, I'm sure he is quite capable of ignoring them until things calm down again.

Illuminator

This is what I have to say about that.

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Oh shit I just had a memwipe, why is retarded uncle Roger still designing raids for this game again?
Some players might bot against encounters but it seems like he bots the encounter design!

Orodina

Apples and oranges. The devs probably feel that figuring out how some mechanics of the game work is part of the puzzle of the game. Football is more like an RTS than an RPG.

Illuminator

Football is closer to turn-based strategy if you want to get picky, but it doesn't matter. We're addressing battle mechanics here.

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Oh shit I just had a memwipe, why is retarded uncle Roger still designing raids for this game again?
Some players might bot against encounters but it seems like he bots the encounter design!

Slippery

And no matter how much testing you do it is impossible for players to figure out mechanics. They can speculate and have as many hypothesis' as they want, but some mechanics can't be figured out and verified.

tracheaspider

I suppose that would be why there are a good number of posts on this forum and the official forums about broken or unbalanced mechanics and responses from devs saying they're fixing or adjusting them. (Oh, but you covered your ass with that "some," didn't you?) /eyeroll

Did you have a point to make or are you here to up your post count? Seriously.

tracheaspider

Oh, and thanks to the OP for getting and sharing this info!

Pinski

Yah you should really try to realize that he's talking about hate. And the fact that we'll have no idea how it all works out in the end just because there's no way for anybody on the outside to look at how much threat a person has and what position they're in. Unless you can somehow manage to get that information, there is no way to conclude exactly how hate works.

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Calaglin, Former Illusionist/Guild Leader of Dissolution on Nektulos
Calaglin, Former Illusionist/Guild Leader of Confirmed on Unrest

Slippery

Let me know when you exactly how hate generation works. How much agro heals generate, how transfers between different classes stack, how much agro debuffs draw, if just simply going over the tanks current draws agro (bet it doesn't, but prove it? heh). How does a transfer work with a deagro?

kthxbye

tracheaspider

It was a response to how generalized his statement was. He seems hostile to the idea of asking and skeptical that we can figure things out otherwise.

And, while it's true that we have no reliable way to measure hate as players or conclude things "exactly," that doesn't justify him saying that "no matter how much testing you do it is impossible for players to figure out mechanics." Even without the ultimate details, we "figure out" a lot, to the point where we can often find and determine when things are broken.

It's certainly not impossible, for instance, to gather where you are on the hate list in a zone like FTH. If I'm stunned and dying under Shredder's feet, I'm at the bottom. (My pride would like me to point out this has never happened on either of my raiding toons.) If I'm repeatedly bounced halfway across Treyloth's room with a trauma effect on me, I know I'm very near the top. If I'm dead and the raid leader is yelling at me, I know I hit the number one slot and I'll be in slot 24 as soon as I get scraped off the floor. I might not know "exactly" if I was number two or three just before that, but I'm not operating in the dark, either.

For one, we don't need to figure out "exactly" how things work to gain a functional understanding or get a quite detailed picture. (If that was a provision of your previous post, you failed to state it.) Two, of course there will be specific areas harder to nail down than others, but at the same time, we're meant to understand the mechanics on some level or why even have things like hate transfers or increasers or decreasers or deaggroes? I'm sure SOE doesn't intend us to use these things at random. Particularly when they go and design zones like the abovementioned FTH.

I'm curious, though, what would satisfy you in the realm of knowing. Nobody knowing anything or trying to figure it out? Devs explaining it all? People testing hypotheses? Your position so far has been hostility towards or doubt about everything. So again, what's your point?