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A piece of advice from experience
mojorat
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild Users Posts: 90
Hello, So for those who pay attention to the forums, just before Testing started I posted some advice on how to calmly deal with the changes we would be experiencing. Some people took it to heart.. at least two people accused me of being a troll.
However, as people are now dealing with "post mod 5" fallout, I thought i would attempt a second piece of advice. Or perhaps more on the level of information explaining how the wide world of MMO programming is really freaking complicated. For the record, I am 40 years old, have played a wide assortment of both tabletop and on and offline video games. to a large extent ive seen it all.
This is relevant to explain that nothing going on in NWO right now is new, every MMO i have ever played has undergone what NWO is experiencing now, Rogues on wow? during the time i played until witch king they experienced alot of the same issues. Class being OP? again with a wow reference during buring crusade Paladins at one point had it all. Lots of bugs post patch? every MMO i have ever played, from Anarchy online to Eve online to wow.
Secondly, An important thing to remember is the Dev's no matter how much you think they have a bias they do not do not. NWO is a game run by a company that wants happy players, it is in the company's best interest that all the classses are as fun as they could be.
However, You may have noticed that actual class blanace seems to escape them.
First, some of this is more perception than reality. the number on Paingiver provide a strong bias towards AOE damage. If you do not have it i recomend a program class ACt (advanced combat tracker) or a similar program. It helps you parse damage. This basically told me that in Mod 3 when i came 3rd or 4rth on paingiver i was often #1 on all of the majority of the bosses.
second, AOE Ranged classes in a blanced game should /always/ be #1 in damage, followed by any other Aoe. At least as far as mass damage numbers.
This i simportant because, TR in NWO are primary single target powers, with a subset of AOE powers that are often secondary. This basically means that if as a TR you out damage people on paingiver your not just doing more damage than them your doing ALOT more damage than them.
For the record this doesnt mean i think CW are balanced, just i understand why they are in the #1 damage spot on paingiver.
Anyhow we'll move on to bugs.
MMO are horribly complicated games with lots of complex interworking parts. while i am not a coder and not familiar with anything specific on NWO i have had aspects of older games explained to me and NWO is likely alot more complex.
Years ago I played on a DIKU mud called MUME (multi user middle earth) It is a game that if it is still around may be one of the longest running games on the internet. Alot of games have an initial code base they are given (so for a modern game this might be the unreal engine) and then everything else is coded on top of that. Unless you want to re-work large parts of code your often stuck with the frameworks of the origonal code base. In Mume's case the DIKU system was done about 40 years ago. Older code often forced math functions to use 2 4 6 8 16 etc (probably for the same reason Ram is listed as 256 512 1024 etc) In Mumes case at one point it had a problem, really heavy creatures the numbers for their weight would hit 256 and roll back to 1 or 2. So players could pick up a dragon corpse. So they fixed the bug no big deal right? the entire shop system broke down. I actually have no idea how the weights of dragons was connected to my ability to buy torches but it was.
what it basically means though is, code A can work because code B which is not working appears to be giving Code A the right infor. but code B also prevents code C D E from working properly.
How this effects NWO is a power like SoD is making alot of numerical checks every time you activate it and some of those checks were never intended to interact with SoD. Things like Stealth are making scores of interactive checks as they interface witht he rest of the game and it gets horribly complicated when you change how stuff works.
I want to stress though, i think the Dev team under demand for release date releasede code that they were told was broken for a week and it shouldnt have happened.
Anyhow, I have to go to class now I was going to explain how project management works
but If anyone else wants to chip in and feel free. I actually think its the reason combined with time constraints that so many bugs go unfixed or left until later.
On a final node if anyone else actually has heard of Mume or played it YAY... and i feel really old :P
However, as people are now dealing with "post mod 5" fallout, I thought i would attempt a second piece of advice. Or perhaps more on the level of information explaining how the wide world of MMO programming is really freaking complicated. For the record, I am 40 years old, have played a wide assortment of both tabletop and on and offline video games. to a large extent ive seen it all.
This is relevant to explain that nothing going on in NWO right now is new, every MMO i have ever played has undergone what NWO is experiencing now, Rogues on wow? during the time i played until witch king they experienced alot of the same issues. Class being OP? again with a wow reference during buring crusade Paladins at one point had it all. Lots of bugs post patch? every MMO i have ever played, from Anarchy online to Eve online to wow.
Secondly, An important thing to remember is the Dev's no matter how much you think they have a bias they do not do not. NWO is a game run by a company that wants happy players, it is in the company's best interest that all the classses are as fun as they could be.
However, You may have noticed that actual class blanace seems to escape them.
First, some of this is more perception than reality. the number on Paingiver provide a strong bias towards AOE damage. If you do not have it i recomend a program class ACt (advanced combat tracker) or a similar program. It helps you parse damage. This basically told me that in Mod 3 when i came 3rd or 4rth on paingiver i was often #1 on all of the majority of the bosses.
second, AOE Ranged classes in a blanced game should /always/ be #1 in damage, followed by any other Aoe. At least as far as mass damage numbers.
This i simportant because, TR in NWO are primary single target powers, with a subset of AOE powers that are often secondary. This basically means that if as a TR you out damage people on paingiver your not just doing more damage than them your doing ALOT more damage than them.
For the record this doesnt mean i think CW are balanced, just i understand why they are in the #1 damage spot on paingiver.
Anyhow we'll move on to bugs.
MMO are horribly complicated games with lots of complex interworking parts. while i am not a coder and not familiar with anything specific on NWO i have had aspects of older games explained to me and NWO is likely alot more complex.
Years ago I played on a DIKU mud called MUME (multi user middle earth) It is a game that if it is still around may be one of the longest running games on the internet. Alot of games have an initial code base they are given (so for a modern game this might be the unreal engine) and then everything else is coded on top of that. Unless you want to re-work large parts of code your often stuck with the frameworks of the origonal code base. In Mume's case the DIKU system was done about 40 years ago. Older code often forced math functions to use 2 4 6 8 16 etc (probably for the same reason Ram is listed as 256 512 1024 etc) In Mumes case at one point it had a problem, really heavy creatures the numbers for their weight would hit 256 and roll back to 1 or 2. So players could pick up a dragon corpse. So they fixed the bug no big deal right? the entire shop system broke down. I actually have no idea how the weights of dragons was connected to my ability to buy torches but it was.
what it basically means though is, code A can work because code B which is not working appears to be giving Code A the right infor. but code B also prevents code C D E from working properly.
How this effects NWO is a power like SoD is making alot of numerical checks every time you activate it and some of those checks were never intended to interact with SoD. Things like Stealth are making scores of interactive checks as they interface witht he rest of the game and it gets horribly complicated when you change how stuff works.
I want to stress though, i think the Dev team under demand for release date releasede code that they were told was broken for a week and it shouldnt have happened.
Anyhow, I have to go to class now I was going to explain how project management works
but If anyone else wants to chip in and feel free. I actually think its the reason combined with time constraints that so many bugs go unfixed or left until later.On a final node if anyone else actually has heard of Mume or played it YAY... and i feel really old :P
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