One Retcon per Account

roughbearmattach

Just one retcon? I have ten toons that use Int as primary super stat, and five of them significantly make use of CDR.

One retcon just isn't right, just isn't enough. The last time a stat-affected rules change was made (Dodge), retcons were given for every single toon.

Why not this time?

gaarafrednorrisp

nacito

what?

gaarafrednorrisp said:

roughbearmattach

Yes, @garrafrednorrisp, you've already posted that in another thread.

theravenforce

Not gonna lie, it is very strange for this to have been done, especially when INT was so widely used.

Nightmare, there's no need for that here.

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gaarafrednorrisp

Who the hell is this "Rand" person you continue to babble about?

Oh, and I'm using it again because it's a lot nicer than saying sh*t happens. Devs change their mind and if they're that hard set on things, you can't change it. Sorry.

squirrelloid

gaarafrednorrisp said:

Who the hell is this "Rand" person you continue to babble about?

Knowing who it is wouldn't help you, because Bluegrass apparently doesn't know the first thing about what she actually wrote, so it doesn't even make sense in this context at all.

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gaarafrednorrisp

..Wait are you talking about Ayn Rand? Oh god this explains everything. Blue, calm down. Men in black suits aren't going to murder you in the cold of night.

spinnytop

It's fine. Intelligence and Cooldown Rating still reduce your cooldowns. If it was up to me none of you land lubbers would have gotten a retcon after the dodge changes either! yarr!

jonsills

INT still helps you see stealthed enemies, which is mostly what I take it for, and also reduces cost on powers. What's the big friggin' deal?

meedacthunist

The big friggin' deal is that what works for your build is of no concern and care for anyone else. And stealthed enemies are of any problem only in PvP, where INT alone is hardly enough. Besides, PvP is completely unimportant fringe in this game.

Quite a few other builds will run into serious energy problems, unless the players can swap INT for another stat. Now, depends from their build, they may get away only with changing superstats and specs, but more likely some powers needs to be replaced as well. And altoholics have a lot of characters to change. Then comes the gear.

Another friggin' deal is that both STO and NeverGood have resets given along with serious changes and that's account wide. Meanwhile CO used to work in the same way, but now suddenly rules were changed.

That's not player's fault that this debalance lasted for that long, for years, that everyone had a full right to take it as an intended state of things. That's entirely fault of Cryptic game developers and only their responsibility. What they're trying to do now? Shift the responsibility to players and maybe monetize on retcons?

Or maybe this isn't the case. Judging from the performance, this new development team may not even know how to execute an account-wide reset, because they're still learning.​​

nepht

Cause only the first ones free....

eiledon

Things change. You can stay angry with it and rage to no effect, or get on with it and rebuild. To be brutally frank they didnt even have to give away a retcon except it was already sorta promised. They can change THEIR game at any time and for any reason or no reason. We only rent a room over the garage (or live free in Cryptic's basement depending on your sub status)​​

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eiledon

hyperbole much. the changes were published on pts. what was dishonest about it.?​​

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eiledon

it isnt insulting either. cooldown reduction was vastly overperforming. might there have been a better way to fix it? possibly. would that fix be possible with current staffing levels in the time they had allocated to fix it? seems like not. so they went with the most efficient fix for the time they had available to try and bring it back into balance.​​

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sistersilicon

2009-2014: "We've made changes to base stats. To compensate for any adverse effects on your characters, you will receive a retcon token for each character on your account."

2015: "We've made changes to base stats. To compensate for any adverse effects on your characters, you will receive only one retcon token regardless of the number of characters on your account. No, we will not explain this change in policy to you."

I don't think I'm missing something here, am I?

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meedacthunist

They may change their game as much as they want, but when NeverPlay and STO have one standard and CO suddenly switches to another one, they should not expect any better reaction.

For quite a few players this game is about altisis and squishing the most optimal combination out of their FFs. By large, this is the part of the playerbase sustaining this game by paying for FF one way or another. Now punishing them for having too many FFs is the last thing this game should be doing, because it may end with people not playing and all this temporary population hike earned by advertising on Steam will be gone very, very soon.

And reasoning like "oh, but these changes were on PTS, everyone should be prepared" is plain silly, because to this time changes of this caliber were followed by account-wide retcons so anyone had full right to believe that the same will be this time.​​

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glortor

If it was up to me, on the other hand, every gold user would get 1 retcon per month.

spinnytop

meedacthunist said:

The big friggin' deal is that what works for your build is of no concern and care for anyone else. And stealthed enemies are of any problem only in PvP, where INT alone is hardly enough. Besides, PvP is completely unimportant fringe in this game.



Quite a few other builds will run into serious energy problems, unless the players can swap INT for another stat.

Not really. If you were depending on Int for energy, that means MSA, and MSA still works just like it did before, and whatever short-cooldown powers you were using to keep it procced before are still just as effective ( I have characters like this ). The energy reduction from INT was not changed. The amount of energy that Concentration gives was not changed. As far as energy is concerned, INT still does exactly what it did. If anything, energy concerns are less intense now because if you use a lot of cooldowns with energy costs, you can't use them as often.. meaning you don't need as much energy.

Stop making things up to be outraged about. You didn't get a retcon because, ultimately, this change doesn't warrent it. The dodge change technically didn't either, but this one warrants it even less.

I've felt no need to retcon any of my characters who have cooldown abilities. Yes yes, I know that's no concern to you, but in reality it means you don't actually need to retcon them either. Maybe you want to, and you can - but you don't need to. There's a lot of hyperbole going around right now about "my characters are useless now".

spinnytop

meedacthunist said:

Now punishing them for having too many FFs is the last thing this game should be doing, because it may end with people not playing and all this temporary population hike earned by advertising on Steam will be gone very, very soon.

^ there's some hyperbole right now. Nobody's being punished, stop making things up.


and you really think you can hold the dev's hostage by mentioning the population hike? lol.

spinnytop

gradii said:

I agree with the nerf, I am insulted by their refusal to treat us like paying customers.

You got everything you paid for. Free retcons after balance fixes weren't in the contract.

avianos

I see the usual suspects who Defend the DEVs and this whole Nerf Mockery are already here​​

rtma

To push the free Tokens for all button or not to press it... hmmm, So hard.

chaelk

to sit and eat popcorn, as the usual... discussion, happens.​​

theravenforce

Note: Here I am speaking from a personal point of view, I am by NO means attempting to speak for everyone.

I've realized, post nerf that I've gotten into the mind set that my energy unlock is meant to replace my energy builder power, especially on toons who use MSA, weird right?

Whilst I am quite shocked as to why a free retcon wasn't given out to all characters, it's made me have a closer look at some of my builds and see if they really require a retcon token...or not, and after looking at my builds as a whole, none of them actually REQUIRE a retcon. Only one so far could do with one, and in most cases my toons already have free retcons anyway.

This doesn't serve as a reason as to why only one account wide retcon was granted though. I would like an explanation on that front.

On a side note, I've found that toons who have INT statted but to a lesser degree seem to benefit more from it...

meedacthunist

spinnytop wrote: »

I've felt no need to retcon any of my characters who have cooldown abilities. Yes yes, I know that's no concern to you, but in reality it means you don't actually need to retcon them either. Maybe you want to, and you can - but you don't need to. There's a lot of hyperbole going around right now about "my characters are useless now".

You felt no need. You act as if you were some kind of objective baseline of which everything else should be measured.

Should I remind you how concerned you were about even the slightest perspective of paying for new powersets?

You can't account for how everyone in this game is building or playing.

spinnytop wrote: »

You got everything you paid for. Free retcons after balance fixes weren't in the contract.

It's Cryptic who did create this expectation for account-wide retcons up to this patch, not players. Also by having it in STO and NW.

glortor wrote: »

If it was up to me, on the other hand, every gold user would get 1 retcon per month.

Funny, but STO has it that way for gold account. Which is kinda in reverse, because periodic free resets are only a minor boon in STO mechanics, but they could be a really nifty subscriber reward in CO.​​

nepht

I don't think this one recton per account thing is PWE's doing. The more success Cryptic has with Neverwinter the more Perfect World lets them do their own thing. Doing their own thing at the moment retcon wise is being a utter %$£* .

guyhumual

There is also an element of bait and switch, now I didn't buy into the game because I loved how dodge worked, how INT and some gear reduced CDR, how vehicles weapons and mods worked, I bought into the game because of the costume designing element. Now suppose that weren't true, suppose the thing that hooked me on the game were the aforementioned elements that have been changed since I became a lifetime subscriber, Cryptic should be able to update and change their game, but they also should have an obligation to try to appease their customers. Seems like giving recons to the folks that are affected by this change would be the standard way of making it up to their customers. Most MMOs I play don't even have a cost for changing your character's skills and powers, if CO didn't I wouldn't care if they re-tweak their powers or attributes on a weekly basis even.

Gear and vehicles are another matter completely. In those cases I'd say refunds should be offered but seeing as Crypic or really any other MMO doesn't have a precedent of giving refunds for bait and switch tactics on digital items that's not something that's likely to happen. Besides, the changes to vehicles and gear aren't drastic in the sense that they're not changing how these things work, the effectiveness is being altered, and indeed the main reason that these items were so sought after has been changed, but the item itself hasn't been completely altered. Plasma beam still deals damage, not as well as before, but it still deals damage. CDR gear will still speed up the cool down of powers but not as effective as before. These changes really anger people, more so then the attribute/power thing, as people invest real money to buy these items in the game's free market, and while Cryptic has no direct say in how much people are willing to spend, their alterations can destroy the value of an item overnight. If you pay 1000G for an item over at the AH there's not a lot Cryptic can do, but if you bought a vehicle from the C-store because it had a Plasma beam or AA missiles, then offering a refund or trade should have been standard practice. There's not a lot they can do about gear though.

That's my two cents on the matter.

spinnytop

meedacthunist said:

You felt no need. You act as if you were some kind of objective baseline of which everything else should be measured.



Should I remind you how concerned you were about even the slightest perspective of paying for new powersets?



You can't account for how everyone in this game is building or playing.

Well as it turned out, paying for new powersets wasn't a big deal after all, so that's kind of a bad example for you to use if you want to raise my concern-o-meter.

Should I remind you that I purposely make builds that are difficult to play? If my purposely-gimped builds are fine, then why am I seeing self-professed pro-builders claim that their godly builds are suddenly trashed? Something's not adding up here. And yes, I have several builds that make heavy use of cooldown powers, such as my glass-cannon telepathy character, or even my namesake Kagami.

Sometimes I'm tempted to think that people consider a build having gaps of time where it's not completely invincible while spamming attacks to mean that build is worthless.... sometimes.

spinnytop

guyhumual said:

There is also an element of bait and switch, now I didn't buy into the game because I loved how dodge worked, how INT and some gear reduced CDR, how vehicles weapons and mods worked, I bought into the game because of the costume designing element. Now suppose that weren't true, suppose the thing that hooked me on the game were the aforementioned elements that have been changed since I became a lifetime subscriber, Cryptic should be able to update and change their game, but they also should have an obligation to try to appease their customers. Seems like giving recons to the folks that are affected by this change would be the standard way of making it up to their customers. Most MMOs I play don't even have a cost for changing your character's skills and powers, if CO didn't I wouldn't care if they re-tweak their powers or attributes on a weekly basis even.

"We're sorry we made balance fixes to the game that people have been asking us to do for years, how can we make it up to you?"

There's only bait and switch if the reason you started playing this game was because you heard you could lower cooldowns to half their intended duration. "Yo dawg, I heard there dis MMO where you could lower cooldowns yo! Yo I gotta get in on dis gangsta polio final fantasy hubba bubba action yo! In tha hood!"

chaelk

BINGO.
Now where was it,I said someone was going to start calling the changes Bait & switch.​​

crypticbuxom

When players pay for gear to suit a specific and vital mechanic that got nerfed, then they ought to get compensation equal to that pay. It won't effect the game's income negatively unless they choose to screw over that player. In which they won't want to spend money on the game anymore.​​

gaarafrednorrisp

crypticbuxom said:

When players pay for gear to suit a specific and vital mechanic that got nerfed, then they ought to get compensation equal to that pay. It won't effect the game's income negatively unless they choose to screw over that player. In which they won't want to spend money on the game anymore.​​

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT.

Oh man.. this is just too good.

So what you're saying is that if your gear suddenly gets worse for you because of a balance change, you are entitled to having whatever you spent on it returned? Man, if that was the case then so many MMO's economies would get problematic even faster.

spinnytop

crypticbuxom said:

When players pay for gear to suit a specific and vital mechanic that got nerfed, then they ought to get compensation equal to that pay. It won't effect the game's income negatively unless they choose to screw over that player. In which they won't want to spend money on the game anymore.​​

Gear that lowers cooldowns, still lowers cooldowns.

This has been explained before. Before you actually got more than you were supposed to, so the only thing being taken away from you is the extra you got for free. You don't get a refund for that.

crypticbuxom

Except for builds that relied on the higher cooldown to be effective. Your logic would suggest that we didn't need the retcons for the dodge nerf because it still dodges, just not as much.​​

avianos

You two are arguing for the sake of arguing, it's a waste of time trying to discuss stuff with you​​

biffsmackwell

This guy sees it. ^​​

jennymachx

Might have been fairer to give retcons to characters that have INT as a superstat, instead of just one for the entire account.

guyhumual

chaelk said:

BINGO.

Now where was it,I said someone was going to start calling the changes Bait & switch.​​

I don't think it's exactly bait and switch, I mean the idea that someone would buy into the game for elements that have been changed is probably very unlikely, but if you bought into the game based on a free form character, or even a couple months with a gold subscription, and you really liked the characters you built with these elements, then yes, you're going to feel that you were baited into the game and what you liked has been switched to something not quite as good. It's not really bait and switch, those aspects of the game aren't the selling points, but it has that kind of feel to it.

guyhumual

spinnytop said:

guyhumual said:

There is also an element of bait and switch, now I didn't buy into the game because I loved how dodge worked, how INT and some gear reduced CDR, how vehicles weapons and mods worked, I bought into the game because of the costume designing element. Now suppose that weren't true, suppose the thing that hooked me on the game were the aforementioned elements that have been changed since I became a lifetime subscriber, Cryptic should be able to update and change their game, but they also should have an obligation to try to appease their customers. Seems like giving recons to the folks that are affected by this change would be the standard way of making it up to their customers. Most MMOs I play don't even have a cost for changing your character's skills and powers, if CO didn't I wouldn't care if they re-tweak their powers or attributes on a weekly basis even.

"We're sorry we made balance fixes to the game that people have been asking us to do for years, how can we make it up to you?"

There's only bait and switch if the reason you started playing this game was because you heard you could lower cooldowns to half their intended duration. "Yo dawg, I heard there dis MMO where you could lower cooldowns yo! Yo I gotta get in on dis gangsta polio final fantasy hubba bubba action yo! In tha hood!"

Again, not really sure I'd call it bait and switch, but it has the feeling of it, an element is what I said in my original post on the subject. I also think it unlikely that someone would get hooked on the game based on the old CDR mechanics, but there's a possibility that someone bought a FF character, used these mechanics to build a survivable and fun character, and based on that one FF bought a lifetime subscription, again, highly unlikely, but in this person's case bait and switch probably would be an apt description for what they experienced. This is why giving recons to all affected characters is just the right thing to do to avoid pissing people off.

Also, to be fair, I don't think there's been a large community that's been asking for changes to the CDR system, maybe in the PvP community, but PvP has never been particularly interesting to me or (I suspect) the CO community as a whole. I've queued to try out PvP about a dozen times in my four years playing the game, never once getting an instance to pop, and while the majority of those attempts came after On Alert, with On Alert there's less and less reason for players to try it out. Changing CO to appease the PvP community would be like Heinz changing their ketchup recipe to appease the turkey burger community.

lafury001200

While not a fan of the changes calling this bait and switch seems a tad specious at this point. Done it before, done it again. Everyone seems to adapt sufficiently. I'd fight if this was a new trend, but this started a while back. Why would Cryptic reverse course?

crypticbuxom

So what new content were they balancing this for that needed it?​​

spinnytop

crypticbuxom said:

So what new content were they balancing this for that needed it?​​

"I don't see it, so it doesn't exist!"

spinnytop

avianos said:

You two are arguing for the sake of arguing, it's a waste of time trying to discuss stuff with you​​

Clearly we feel differently.