Borticus confirmed the chain-disable with no cooldown was intended, Geko stated in public it was NOT.
Point of order, but what Borticus actually said was "Ionic Turbulence is working as intended"- he never actually *said* that chain-disable with no cooldown was intended, but rather 'it is intended to apply a hold'
I'm guessing that in the big ionic turbulence bug thread when Frost brought it up with Bort that the latter didn't really... read the thread at all, but just got the salient points, one of which was "Ionic turbulence disables", and users misunderstanding what 'hold' means, because we've not previously seen the term used in space powers.
When he posted recently he explained what the different terms mean- hold disables your powers and renders you immobile, whereas disable just disables your powers but still lets you move.
With this in mind, it's very probable that Bort's earlier comments were of the "The power is designed to have a hold (disable powers/movement), so the complaints that it is not working as intended are irrelevant because we designed it to apply a hold and it is."
This puts the blame for the lack of attention on the actual bug of infinite chain disabling to communication and lack of followup. Bort posted once, frost posted once, and we the community took their meaning of "The power in its current functionality is intended to work like this".
When what the devs were saying, as applied to their own knowledge of the power, was: "People are complaining that the power applies a hold and saying that this doesn't match the description. It does match the description, the power is intended to apply a hold, so it's working as intended."
And then Frost said the issue was resolved, the community dropped it, and hate for the devs increased across the board.
So nobody on the dev side actually looked at the performance of the power throughout any of that.
Flash forward to now, Geko hears about this power NOT having a lockout and goes "But we apply lockouts to all our powers like that..."
Then Bort comments on it and goes "So yeah I turned the pre-existing lockout that was never enabled for this power because it was in testing mode on, and applied some other fixes we promised a couple weeks ago but never got around to."
With this understanding of miscommunication being the primary reason for the perception of the issues we've faced here, and the lack of help until this point, it really outlines how... necessary verbal communication is- text is easy to misread, and without someone actually going "no, you read that wrong, it's actually this", there's no way to hold someone's attention on an issue. While some further effort could be made on the devs parts to CONFIRM what a report or request is actually asking, or rather what a dev is taking from it, ultimately that's on them and not us.
What IS on us is a duty of care to NOT jump to such obscene conclusions, or assume people are being thrown under the bus, or apply this idea of a machiavellian competitive developer studio where everyone is scheming to get everyone else fired, blamed for their messups, or otherwise being needlessly antagonistic.
90% of all difficulties we've had with the devs boil down to communication issues, and it really shows that they would benefit from someone spending time with them and the community to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen as often. There are a lot of simple things that can be done to improve communication but someone needs to sit down with the developers and talk them through it.
Yes, they're very busy, and time spent confirming issues is time not spent on other stuff- but just think: If Bort had commented in the original ionic thread going "So what you're asking is if Ionic Turbulence is intended to apply a hold, which is a super disable, and what I'm saying is that yes it is?" and then someone went "No what we're asking is if it's intended to not have a lockout period and just super disable someone for the entire 20 second duration of the power?" and then Bort actually checks back and goes "Oh TRIBBLE we forgot to turn off testing mode whoops, fixed!"- all this could have been avoided.
But they need to take the time, and we need to spend some effort to not turn into a tin foil conspiracy theorist haven and thus not lambast them every time they interact with the community.
Now IS it Bort's fault for not following up on that issue, and by proxy saying that Ionic Turbulence was intended to chain disable? Yes. Does some of that blame lay on his boss, Geko? Sure. They should be testing ANY power on player entities so they can determine if untoward behaviour exists- they're not going to notice stuff like disables testing on mobs. But that's room for improvement that exists, and if we have any job it should be to remind them that there's room for improvement, not to assault them with their failures.
But that's just me- I still believe this game can be made better, and that the best way to do that is by working with the devs, even with all their failings.
Of course I actually do corporate communications stuff for a living, so I do have training in this.
I'm very optimistic about the latest poll tbh. Its nice to see a company asking its customers for feedback, and pvp did come third. Since new episodes were always incoming, its basically second behind exploration stuff.
Between this and news of an ionic fix, and apparently new leaderboard stuff I think there's reason to be optimistic.
At the the very least, its nice to see a poll asking what the players want. So kudos to cryptic on this one.
Got a cat? Have 10 minutes to help someone make the best degree dissertation of all time?
Then please fill out my dissertation survey on feline attachment, it'd be a massive help (-:
Comments
Point of order, but what Borticus actually said was "Ionic Turbulence is working as intended"- he never actually *said* that chain-disable with no cooldown was intended, but rather 'it is intended to apply a hold'
I'm guessing that in the big ionic turbulence bug thread when Frost brought it up with Bort that the latter didn't really... read the thread at all, but just got the salient points, one of which was "Ionic turbulence disables", and users misunderstanding what 'hold' means, because we've not previously seen the term used in space powers.
When he posted recently he explained what the different terms mean- hold disables your powers and renders you immobile, whereas disable just disables your powers but still lets you move.
With this in mind, it's very probable that Bort's earlier comments were of the "The power is designed to have a hold (disable powers/movement), so the complaints that it is not working as intended are irrelevant because we designed it to apply a hold and it is."
This puts the blame for the lack of attention on the actual bug of infinite chain disabling to communication and lack of followup. Bort posted once, frost posted once, and we the community took their meaning of "The power in its current functionality is intended to work like this".
When what the devs were saying, as applied to their own knowledge of the power, was: "People are complaining that the power applies a hold and saying that this doesn't match the description. It does match the description, the power is intended to apply a hold, so it's working as intended."
And then Frost said the issue was resolved, the community dropped it, and hate for the devs increased across the board.
So nobody on the dev side actually looked at the performance of the power throughout any of that.
Flash forward to now, Geko hears about this power NOT having a lockout and goes "But we apply lockouts to all our powers like that..."
Then Bort comments on it and goes "So yeah I turned the pre-existing lockout that was never enabled for this power because it was in testing mode on, and applied some other fixes we promised a couple weeks ago but never got around to."
With this understanding of miscommunication being the primary reason for the perception of the issues we've faced here, and the lack of help until this point, it really outlines how... necessary verbal communication is- text is easy to misread, and without someone actually going "no, you read that wrong, it's actually this", there's no way to hold someone's attention on an issue. While some further effort could be made on the devs parts to CONFIRM what a report or request is actually asking, or rather what a dev is taking from it, ultimately that's on them and not us.
What IS on us is a duty of care to NOT jump to such obscene conclusions, or assume people are being thrown under the bus, or apply this idea of a machiavellian competitive developer studio where everyone is scheming to get everyone else fired, blamed for their messups, or otherwise being needlessly antagonistic.
90% of all difficulties we've had with the devs boil down to communication issues, and it really shows that they would benefit from someone spending time with them and the community to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen as often. There are a lot of simple things that can be done to improve communication but someone needs to sit down with the developers and talk them through it.
Yes, they're very busy, and time spent confirming issues is time not spent on other stuff- but just think: If Bort had commented in the original ionic thread going "So what you're asking is if Ionic Turbulence is intended to apply a hold, which is a super disable, and what I'm saying is that yes it is?" and then someone went "No what we're asking is if it's intended to not have a lockout period and just super disable someone for the entire 20 second duration of the power?" and then Bort actually checks back and goes "Oh TRIBBLE we forgot to turn off testing mode whoops, fixed!"- all this could have been avoided.
But they need to take the time, and we need to spend some effort to not turn into a tin foil conspiracy theorist haven and thus not lambast them every time they interact with the community.
Now IS it Bort's fault for not following up on that issue, and by proxy saying that Ionic Turbulence was intended to chain disable? Yes. Does some of that blame lay on his boss, Geko? Sure. They should be testing ANY power on player entities so they can determine if untoward behaviour exists- they're not going to notice stuff like disables testing on mobs. But that's room for improvement that exists, and if we have any job it should be to remind them that there's room for improvement, not to assault them with their failures.
But that's just me- I still believe this game can be made better, and that the best way to do that is by working with the devs, even with all their failings.
Of course I actually do corporate communications stuff for a living, so I do have training in this.
Krenim...and we got dinos with laser beams on their frikken heads.
RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
Between this and news of an ionic fix, and apparently new leaderboard stuff I think there's reason to be optimistic.
At the the very least, its nice to see a poll asking what the players want. So kudos to cryptic on this one.
Then please fill out my dissertation survey on feline attachment, it'd be a massive help (-:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/87XKSGH