NDA Lifted

[Savil]

Vora, you have a thankless job as do the devs. Let me thank you and them for putting up with this stuff. And Savil, you know smurf well that Vora is on "our side" in all this - stop painting him as having gone over to the dark side or having been caught up in some evil plot. This is exactly the kind of crap that makes people not want to do the job at all (and it is a JOB and unpaid at that), and causes all the fragmentation and bs that causes us to be ignored in the first place while other groups get their agendas and items addressed. So you want us ignored, then by all means carry on.

Thankless job, I agree, but its a job he *asked* for, not something that was forced on him. Vora knew damned well it wouldn't be easy or he totally should have.

This started with simple questions that were dodged. Answers I'll add that still haven't been posted up. They were simple questions as I see it. Vora's stance before he became a CRT was very well known .. he agreed with most of what I've stated in this very thread. Now that hes a CRT he seems to be more interested in spin than fact.

I don't see debate and questions about DPS as a source of mage fragmentation ... far from it, I think if most of the mages got together and asked this same questions .. the questions vora should be asking as well this smurf would have already been fixed. Its the fact that every single damned time we start getting traction and are asking those same HARD questions we have 2-3 people step up and start crying about how hard the devs jobs are and how hard they work, and in general make up a TON of excuses about why our DPS has been crap for years now.

I'll ask again, why is it mage DPS has been crap from at least SoD and in truth longer and very little being done? Anybody with a brain can look over the hard facts and see that mages have been getting worse with each exp .. not better. For the last year the devs have openly admitted this fact and have privately admitted it to a few of us for even longer.

Facts are facts, and NOBODY has disputed this, we were told our DPS would be fixed for the last full year, elidroth himself told PJ and I that he would look into this fully. This was at the beginning of this year (2011). After PJ and I got the FC changes pushed, we were told that was all he could do in the middle of the exp and that "more would come during next beta"... WHERE ARE THE REST OF THE CHANGES?

This is like any other job, if you continue to make excuses for people nothing will ever be done. Instead of spin and BS I'd like to hear a REAL answer as to why the changes couldn't be done for yet another year. Common, aren't we worth real answers?

Vora: you have still failed to answer pretty much any question I've asked of you. Your the CRT, you claim to rep mages, do your job and answer. Just because you don't like the question or like being put on the spot isn't an excuse.

Savil

[Savil]

Vora, you have a thankless job as do the devs. Let me thank you and them for putting up with this stuff.

Something I'd like to say about this: The devs do NOT HAVE A THANKLESS JOB. This is pretty ... stupid. The devs are PAYED to do their job. If they did it for free it would be thankless. For that matter vora is getting something out of this as well, he has access to the devs ear (valuable) .. he gets information that none of the rest of us get, information is power.

Every single time the devs pick up their paychecks they are THANKED. They might think they need more pay .. but its not like they are doing this for free and somehow I don't believe they have 2nd jobs to make ends meet (no idea about this, just MHO).

IMHO they don't have to do everything the customers want, believe it or not I understand that some customers (mages) ask for some really stupid smurf, we have only to look at tuli to prove this. I don't expect to snap my fingers and have smurf done. I DO expect when I ask a question it to be answered with something less than spin. I would like to know what it was that kept the mage DPS issues from being worked on for yet another year in light of what was posted on this very board during the same time.

How is it that devs can miss the fact that mage DPS has / is going down over the last several exps all the while they are saying they are trying to fix it?? Did they make changes to mage DPS this exp? Yes. Was it anywhere near close enough, no. How can people / devs miss this fact when its shown to them with parses?

Savil

[svenalo]

It is thankless is the regard that they are dammed if they do and dammed if they don't no matter what issue it is in regards to. And I am not making excuses at all - I am pointing out the realities of a software development business which is understaffed for the sheer volume of things that need doing, like most every business today seems to be. You, on the other hand, want it all now. I suppose you are in the mode like those folks in New Orleans were when a day or two after the hurricane hit were complaining that FEMA etal weren't moving fast enough...or that after the bottom fell out of the housing market and such and the whole financial debacle ensued were complaining a few days/weeks/months later why wasn't it fixed yet. Stuff takes time to get f'd up, and it takes time to undo it, and there are constraints on those who are involved in the repairs. That is life. It is not an excuse - it is just the way it is.

[Savil]

It is thankless is the regard that they are dammed if they do and dammed if they don't no matter what issue it is in regards to. And I am not making excuses at all - I am pointing out the realities of a software development business which is understaffed for the sheer volume of things that need doing, like most every business today seems to be. You, on the other hand, want it all now. I suppose you are in the mode like those folks in New Orleans were when a day or two after the hurricane hit were complaining that FEMA etal weren't moving fast enough...or that after the bottom fell out of the housing market and such and the whole financial debacle ensued were complaining a few days/weeks/months later why wasn't it fixed yet. Stuff takes time to get f'd up, and it takes time to undo it, and there are constraints on those who are involved in the repairs. That is life. It is not an excuse - it is just the way it is.

This is just wrong on so many levels... I was a professional programmer for 7 years, I know what deadlines are like. I know what its like to have stupid managers up your ass during it as well. What the devs do is NOT programming, anybody that says it is ... is well clueless. There is only 1-2 actual programmers working on EQ atm. and the main one doesn't do a bad job at all. I have zero issues with him. If you want to say somebody has a smurf job it sure as hell is HIM, not the other "devs". He got a load of smurf legacy code that was written by a moron.

Where did I request things to be fixed in "a day or two" anywhere in this thread? I've stated several times that I was upset over the multi YEAR long wait. One year != 1 day. 3 years is enough time to fix most things unless your a screw up.

Savil

[Piemastaj]

I did not say you were out for yourself or personally attack you. I said you have a way of looking at things only your way, not doing things only for yourself. Those are 2 completely different things.

As to your mind-set. Your complacency with Fire pet being only buffed with FBO out-DPSing a fully buffed Water. Your claiming to be good at ADPS and you could not figure out how we were losing out with the new Strike change vs the old Clash nuke, even after I spent I want to say over an hour explaining it to you in an IRC chat room with another mage there (Possibly Sven, not 100% sure though). The fact that your dismissing what Savil is saying simply because he is not in-game currently, when in all reality there are enough formulas out there that we would not need to log 1 ounce of game-time to see what a mage's maximum potential is for VoA. The fact that you accused me and other beta mages of not complaining enough in beta about EM 14 earring not being in-game. When I personally was too busy parsing among other things to make sure the game worked properly, and you knew about it from week 2 of beta and failed to tell any1 or even post about it in our class threads so we could voice our opinions on the fact that lower-end guilds got screwed on it. Your whole mind-set comes off strongly as 'well we did not get what we asked for in X, but we got increases in Y so be happy', and to me that is a bad attitude/mind-set. We should not just be happy we got thrown a bone, we should be upset we got ignored again about a crucial issue.

As to the thank-less job, I call BS to an extent. I am fully aware I do not know what goes on behind the CRT closed doors, but I am also fully aware that about 95% of our December AAs were all my ideas or creations. Do I expect to get praised for them? No. Do I expect to be thanked for improving a game that I and my friends play? No. Do I spend count-less hours parsing and PMing devs to get things fixed for my health? No. I do it because it will help out a game that I enjoy playing, and possibly make it last a little bit longer. If you want a thank-less thing, go serve food to home-less people. That is truely thank-less. Providing feedback or ideas on a game that YOU play is not thank-less, you will eventually see the fruits of your labor in action. While I do agree some of it is probably 'thank-less', it is hard to have a hand in developing a game and not smile or laugh or something of that sort when one of your ideas or creations helps another person out. That is the 'thanking'. And as Savil pointed out, you should not sign up for something that you know full and well will not be a 'good' job (not that I am saying Vora did, it is merely a statement for anyone involved in things like that).

As to the mana regen. I asked for it in HoT. We asked for it again in the summer when Elidroth came here. We then asked for it again in Beta. And finally again when VoA was launched. You can not honestly say it takes a year to find out how f*cked our mana regen is. While I do realize it can not possibly get done over-night, we still should have had something done by now for it. It is not a new concept that we need mana regen to do what we are made to do. It is also not a new concept that we have the lowest mana regen out of the 4 int casters either. It was quite comical to me when Elidroth scoffed at us asking for more mana regen on our Elemental Form lines, that was the easiest possible way to give us more mana regen and it is still not done. Granted talks have started to bring our Elemental Forms up to par now, but still you can not tell me changing Water Elemental form to say 75% of what lich form does for necros is OP. That fix was so easy it boggled my mind why it was not done (instead you can buy Plaguebringer illusion and get more mana regen then water elemental form).

The whole rogue thing is very simple. No they are not a caster, but they got a roughly 25k DPS increase by just leveling up and buying AAs. They also got that increase w/o the December AA patch, and w/o any new weapons or focuses. It is a prime example that is is perfectly fine and able to be done to fix our DPS. The only thing is we would need about a 35k increase on expansion launch, then another 10k in December. This got done in ONE expansion, is it really that hard to do the same for us? With what Rogues got done it would seem a lot less likely that its hard to do, it would seem it is more of a 'we don't want to do it'. Keep in mind this was a class who was already above average in both sustained and Burst. Did they settle for being fine? No, they bitched about it and got probably the greatest increase a class has seen in 1 expansion. They will be the front-runners this expansion w/o a doubt about it.

To me it is unacceptable to be #1 for about 4months in SoD, then drop all the way to dead last or second to last when UF hit. That type of drop is just unheard of. I am not saying we should be #1, but no way in hell should we have dropped so far so fast. Now we are begging for scraps to be thrown at us while we climb out of the gutter. And frankly it is smurf that we have to do so. We have been hurting for 2 years now, and not just middle of the pack I want to flex my epeen hurting. We have been hurting at the bottom of the totem pole, fighting alt berserkers for DPS spots because an auto-attacking Berserker will do more DPS then us.

As to Sven. Savil and myself are not upset that Vora is doing CRT. We are both happy that a mage got in there. What is upsetting is seeing a person change their attitude and their vision on issues in such a quick period of time. It is making me think that the kool-aid had something done to it.

[Savil]

Agree.

Savil

[Voragath]

Vora, where are your parses to prove my estimated numbers wrong? Yeah, that works completely the other way also. Please produce it. It is perfectly fine to guesstimate and make educated guesses on what our DPS will look like. It is even more fine when you know wtf your talking about aswell.

I never said they were wrong.

Vora, thats kinda goofy.

Savil

What's goofy is you telling everyone to provide proof to back up their claims. Then, when called out to provide data to back up your claims, you don't provide it.

[Savil]

I answered that Vora, I haven't parsed this out personally. I also said I trusted PJ's numbers. I know HE knows HOW to parse DPS. Do you dispute his numbers? Otherwise do you dispute anything else? I can't help but notice you still haven't answered any of my questions.

Savil

[Voragath]

I did not say you were out for yourself or personally attack you. I said you have a way of looking at things only your way, not doing things only for yourself. Those are 2 completely different things.

Well, if you think of the two as separate, then sorry. I have the two married. My apologies.

As to your mind-set. Your complacency with Fire pet being only buffed with FBO out-DPSing a fully buffed Water. Your claiming to be good at ADPS and you could not figure out how we were losing out with the new Strike change vs the old Clash nuke, even after I spent I want to say over an hour explaining it to you in an IRC chat room with another mage there (Possibly Sven, not 100% sure though). The fact that your dismissing what Savil is saying simply because he is not in-game currently, when in all reality there are enough formulas out there that we would not need to log 1 ounce of game-time to see what a mage's maximum potential is for VoA. The fact that you accused me and other beta mages of not complaining enough in beta about EM 14 earring not being in-game. When I personally was too busy parsing among other things to make sure the game worked properly, and you knew about it from week 2 of beta and failed to tell any1 or even post about it in our class threads so we could voice our opinions on the fact that lower-end guilds got screwed on it. Your whole mind-set comes off strongly as 'well we did not get what we asked for in X, but we got increases in Y so be happy', and to me that is a bad attitude/mind-set. We should not just be happy we got thrown a bone, we should be upset we got ignored again about a crucial issue.

I never accused anyone of anything. I simply asked where was all the foul crying when I made it known that EM 14 was missing.

The fire pet was asked for by the community for a long, long, long time. It's still not a great pet for raids and raid mages will still be using water pet. In groups, sure, it's better than water. Air pet is great solo or off-tank for anything 95 and lower. Earth is a great tank everywhere (and still needs his freaking aggro looked at, grr). So, before fire pet was only good because he did ok dps and didn't need to be buffed and this was in raids. Any other time it was water. Before HoT, it was air-pet all the time unless you had a tank and some cc and then it was water pet all the time. We had TWO useful pets. We now have 4. Earth: tanking nameds and trash greater than 95; Water: raid dps and group dps with lots of great melee buffing; Fire: great group dps and even better to plop out in middle of raid when water pet dies; Air: Great solo pet for mobs 95 or lower. And I still hold that the pets need dps and I will always say that even if they make the pets yank out 100k dps with /pet attack. My stance was that Fire is fine but using him as a benchmark was not going to win Aristo over; and he was not impressed, btw.

I understood where the loss on Strike was. Without taking in crit chance, it's only a modest 2k damage increase over the old and that's an extremely conservative number as I erred on the side of caution with SD and used only flat chance procs. And I am still trying to get Aristo to fix the spell to be like it was. What you didn't understand was that if Aristo flat out refuses to add them back, there needs to be another way to try and recoup the lost damage.

As to Sven. Savil and myself are not upset that Vora is doing CRT. We are both happy that a mage got in there. What is upsetting is seeing a person change their attitude and their vision on issues in such a quick period of time. It is making me think that the kool-aid had something done to it.

My mindset has not changed one bit. And this is funny because everyone who knows me in real life calls me the most bull-headed person they ever met. The only thing that has changed is my approach and my view on the community as a whole. There were things I wasn't aware of going on that has changed how some things have to get done. The reason why sometimes we don't get x but got y is good is because the community doesn't realize how close they came to making sure they got zero. A good example is when the dev says something isn't possible by code. The community pushing for a code fix is just silly because the end result of the idea is implicitly ok'd and we have to find another route; if we don't find another route, we get nothing.

The difference here is I'm willing to adapt to get what we want. Some aren't so willing and want that one approach to work come hell or high water. It won't happen, ever.

[deadman1204]

Hey Vorgath, maybe it would help if you made clear when your stating a dev's opinion on a matter.
I get the impression you say "XYZ says no just because..." and in all consecutive posts you just say "we cant/shouldn't ask for this" and people either forget or didn't read your post saying "a dev wants this, or refuses to budge on that..."
Repeating yourself can be a pain, but it makes it clear the difference between what you think and want, and what the devs have told you.