28/03/07 - Well, some interesting observations on nuTC.
It was, as anticipated, really quite fun to start off from a bare bones server and see so many OLD faces back on there for the forst time in, well, a heck of a long time.
There seemed to be an enhanced progression rate for entertainer, which in a way makes sense as they are needed to provide the buffs that every other profession benefits from. 2XP was switched on for a while too and that also had an effect on the general progression across the board.
It is hilarious to see lvl 6-10 fighters getting their asses handed to them by kreetles as a whole gang of knuckleduster weilding lvl90 entertainers steam past on their wat to catching a bus up to Musty or Kash. Even with 2XP the combat progression does seem a fair bit slower but of course they can't wear armour till what 25? 26? And there are not that many AS's making much yet. Still out there trying to get enough resources to grind up to a point where they can make something worthwhile.
Which leads me to another observation. When did it become paramount that we get to 90 in whatever profession before feeling we're taking part in the game? OK, on Live a crafter pretty much has to be up there, and buffed and using the better end of the best resources if they want to be competitive and get the bug bucks. But c'mon, it's a bare server. Even bog standard bone armour is going to be better than your shirt sleeves, and of course an ent buff is going to bring the resists on that up some.
Which then brings me to... armour resists. WHAT THE DICKENS??? My ent is tooling around in a set if Imp black Katie armour from Mort. Not the best armour in the game ever, but with an ent buff I'm there with 10k resists. 10k? C'mon... time was when we'd pay thru the nose for something that game us 6k... Now obviously it's not going to affect PvP that much as the serious players will still go for the best, will chose weapons and specials that do most damage to the other guy, but in PvE, well, even bitch slapping NS I'm pretty much bomb proof! Can we say "balance issue"?
Well, all in all, interesting times on TC and fun to look at the game again thru 'different' eyes. Still not sure that the past ~18 months / 2yrs turmoil has actually got us any further forward and I'm feeling there's less positive effect from all that 'polishing' than we might have expected.
OTOH, first time in a LONG time I've logged in and had **FUN**, and it even persuaded me to go play on Live a little, for comparison. Heh.
llap
almagill
yup,
been thinking about the whole nuTC thing a bit since last night. Bent
poor Yivvit's ear over it while he was tring to proper work then woke
up this morning and my poor Mrs (who used to play TC back when I first
started. (/sigh. Happy, happy memories..) got about an hour of my
monomaniacal ranting about "Why This Is A Bad Thing Really, M'Kai".
She eventually gave me a mug of coffee, a bit of toast and told me to
go take my heart meds because I was "getting scary eyes".
ANYWAY.
Here's what I see as the problem.
Somebody has finally admitted to themselves that frogging TC was a bad
thing. Even though we told them. We told them on the forums, we told
them in PMs, we told them on the beach heads, but we will nevvah,
neavvah surrendah...
Of course, we were given the royal STFU by
?Helios and ?TH back around P27 when they decided they were just going
to go right ahead with full on froggification and that TC was now a
'preview centre' for their cool new features and folks should just get
on their and have like, y'know, fun fun fun. But folk got on their
and phared the froggies for anything they could sell to get themselves
a mighty wad of cash. (Mighty wads of cash never really having been
entirely necessary on TC, you could *almost* always get what you needed
and frequently you could get what you needed at cost+a v v small %)
People
were charging around in non-standard armour, with non-standard weapons,
frequently with non-standard skills (Teras Kasi Master jedi with robot
arms and legs?? the heck?)
Now all this would have been bad
enough, but it wan't the first time we'd been given a damned hard
rogering with the rough end of a gafi stick. Whooah no.
We'd been
mothballed in the past but somebody forgot to swith off the clocks and
the traders lost the gear on their vendors. There was a bit of shifting
of blame over that. It was the traders fault somehow... /rolleyes.
We
got mothballed and they again forgot about the fact that, when they
brought the server up for internal "testing" (and left a monster chunk
of Avatar Platform lying out in the Lok desert where they'd either
been havign a LAN party or entertaining some meeja hors), the
maintainence clocks on houses and harvesters would kick in. When we
eventually got back onto the server... harvesters gone, houses with
empty maintainence, bank accounts liberally gutted of coin. But hey,
that was out fault, for, uhm.. well, whatever, it wasn't anyone
devsides fault.
We HAPPILY put up with the sometimes days of
sudden server resets while trying to track down some freaky bug. The
one I remember best was around the time the Salons were introduced and
some particle emitter was causing monster lag in cities. Well, anywhere
there was a torch or glowy light. In the time it took for your toon to
log in there was such a heavy load on the client that you'd stutter
maybe two steps and then bang, CTD. But folks were on the TC forum and
in another place, laughing about it, askig where each othe rhadn beem
what we could see, trying to identify what was common to those
experiences and eventually the bug was identified and beaten to death
with an old dancers leotard.
THings that would have had
players on Live writing to their lawyers and threatening to hunt down
and maim people were brushed off as 'just one of those things' by TC
testers. House Pack Up was introduced, and Seani (a QA) had a few folk
dropping, packing, replacing and repacking different houses to see how
things went. One of my houses buried itself up to the roof in the
desert (helping to identify a bug that's still not been fixed afaics,
relating to how structures set their local z-axis and terraform or
not). Ops, buried house, can you dig it out? Sure, I'll get to you in
a few... well, some other stuff came up that had priority but I'd catch
her next time we were on together. I'd a toon IN the house anyway who
could get my gear out. No biggy.
Yeah, nearly 18 months
later I finally got the house back out after one of the newer
QA/Devtastic lads hauled it out with a tractor for me. But hey, it was
just one of those things that wa sent to try us. "You shouldn't play on
TC if you don't gots a sense of humour".
Point of this
long and rambly bit is that we put up with all manner of sh&t in
the name of trying to help make the game better. Long, long before
anyone needed to be incentivised to come play on TC with frogs and
stuff. There was a GOOD commnity. In fact there were several good and
complementary communities. Whole bunch of crafting minded folk made
towns like New Unity and Skyhaven real homes from home. Tombstone was
the place for PvP. Heck, I even PvP'd there, something I avoided like
the plague on Live but it was helping the devs get stats they needed
for something.
Then came the regular slappings in the face. The
almost routine ignoring of bug reports, the really nasty bitchy
comments from some devs, the mighty ego-fest taht seemed to go with the
mothballing "It's OUR server and WE will do what we want, you TCers are
mere pawns and carebears to boot" and, funnily enough, people started
wandering off to other servers. People who hadn't played Live since
launch started building toons there as TC was down or mothballed or
frogged more often than not. Morale was NOT good. People were more and
more disincentivised to test. The "oh we're not getting the
information we need from TC' comments just pissed everyone else off
and, well, from there it's been a downward slope.
Now, here's a thing that gets trailed out every once ina while
and I want to just stop for a sec to beat it to death. "It's a TEST
centre, it's for TESTING. Not for making your home on... you've got to
expect wipes".
OK, testing, Yes, thats exactly what we did. And documented, and fed back on, and followed up.
Adjusting your toons template to see how much more uber you can
make it so you know what to do with it on Live is *not* testign, it's
previewing and using TC as an oveglorified character calculator.
Not
for making our home on? Uh, right sure, so without people 'living
there' how are you going to test cities, crafting, long story arcs,
character progression (oh yeah, ask me about THAT one sometime. Level
caps that are way below the min for the next level up? oops. Not
something frogs see.)
Expect wipes. Well, I played TC since 03
and I saw exactly NO wipes. Mothballing, yes. But scarping the server
back to a null state, no. Temporary fresh servers, yes, but clearing
out the whole server, no. And, just before you get too comfortable
"expect wipes" is something that applies just as much to the Live
servers and, statistically speaking, as there are more of them is more
likely to happen to one eventually.
And not having a proper,
permanent test centre that accurately mimics a LIVE server in terms of
the way it's run, the way it's population grows, the way it's equipped,
then the more likely it is that something REAL nasty is going to get
through and one of the Live servers will end up taking a bad hit.
Better hope somebody has got a backup copy of your server, jic that does
happen sometime.
Now, there's the key point.
To be viable as a TEST centre, where the devs can test new code in an alpha+1 envirnment (ie, in the same state as Live with some additions) it HAS to be exactly like a Live server.
With old preCU, PreNGE characters. With pre Ch9 jedi. With stockpiles of weird'n'bizarre resources. With items that no longer drop in the game but have been looted or created or crafted and folk have on LIVE. With character databases that reflect the mix of old and new toons that exist on Live. Think how amused we'd all be if somebodies preCU profession title tag, which is just a placeholder in a database, somwhow caused a problem on Live that'd have been picked up on TC *if* we'd still had preCU characters...
If you aren't going to have a TC that's an accurate analogue of Live, then you might as well not bother.
To further compound the madness, they are talking about mothballing the current froggedTC and only bringing it out for publish testing. Possibly alongside nuTC, possibly mothballing nuTC and... oh yeah, pissing off the folk trying to grind their toons up, keep houses and towns and harvesters working...
but why in hells name would you want to bring up the current CORRUPT database? You've just identified that as being part of the problem!
"Hey, Bubba, the brakes on my truck ain't workin..."
"Well you just come over here and we'll take a run down to the creek in mah tractor..."
"Hey, the brakes on this tractor work just fine and dandy!"
"There y'go then, you can take your truck out and go racin' on the freeway 'acause your breaks'll be workin' fine and dandy too, cousin Enos!"
Later... "Hey, these fricking brakes don't work! Damn you Bubba! Damnyou and your tractor!!
To then throw inthe sop of "hey, but that means you'll have access to your lvl90 toons for publish testing" really just makes me think that, despite all tehir good intentions, the new devs have as little a clue about why there was a TC in the first place and just why it all went wrong.
Like I said just recently, I think it's time to call in Erin Brokovitch. Cos I'm seriously afraid there's heavy metals leaking into the water at Dev Central.