Talk:Barrel Diffusion/@comment-98.224.206.84-20131015030531/@comment-98.224.206.84-20131021131249

I really do not think you get it badger. I blame myself for beating my head against the wall as long as I did. That one's on me. I blame them because the system is clearly broken and from the things I read, especially the things told to me by friends on the design council, many of hte problems are the result of the team trying to fix perceived 'problems' without really thinking out the fixes.

The drop tables are clearly broken, and it seems (again from things council people tell me) that part of it was actually the end result of attempts to prevent data mining. Now i am not saying they should ignore the data mining thing as that can end up being bad, but apparently whatever adjustments they made to 'fix' that combined with the obvious flaw in design for the table itself has made many rare mods almost impossible to get. Maybe the game isn't 'about getting every mod', and that is fine. But for people like myself the fun isn't in running randomly generated missions over and over with no real point or story progression, its about getting cool swag and upgrading/customizing your weapon. People putting in 500 hours and not getting a signle instance, while others might buy 3 dragon packs and get 2 barrel diffusions shows that there is a huge flaw in what is arguably one of the main driving factors for the game.

And yes, those are things that actually happened. A friend got two copies and then threw one into the other rather than holding on to the spare to wait for trade, but he didn't know so I can't blame him. However another friend on hearing this bought three dragon packs. Thats at least 15 bucks, the price of some other video game used at gamestop, and got almost all ability mods. That is a much bigger indicator of the same problem. Those should not be in the normal drop pool, and he basically blew 15 bucks for utterly worthless in game 'rares'.

You see me say "I am mad at them because I beat my head against the wall for X amount of time and got nothing" and assume my problem is that I just want everything right now. I don't. Without any challange a game simply isn't fun. But the space between a challagne and "needlessly impossible" is huge, and the fact that these rare mods sit in the latter space, the fact that you can dump millions in-game to transmute only to get ability mods or worse get them from things that you pay real world money for, shows a flaw in their system and more frighteningly an overall flaw in their design philosophy. If they are going to work and keep people from burning out they need to fix that ASAP, and more importanlty they need to be more attentive to these details.

My own frustrations in not getting BD is one thing, but they seem to be having a very hard time balancing effort/reward in many cases. All the work to get an energy lab for example is difficult enough, but then you need to dump a ton of resources into the different aspects of reserach, and take DAYS between each. It would be one thing if you could pay this off with plat (Maybe you can I don't know) then I could just blame it on nickle-and-dime that all FTP have to deal with to stay afloat. But as far as I know and as far as my friend the warlord said, you can't. It is needless padding and hoops to artifically streach the game, hoops that they do not pay close enough attention to while designing.

As for my 'criticlike' behavor. I work on a video game that has recently met its kickstarter, and have been working on it as a writer for the past year. I spent the better part of a decade writing a 3.5 D&D setting before 4th edition hit and am just now getting back to converting it into pathfinder. I have been doing game design in one form or another for at least twelve years in earnest, and I know many people including 'co workers' on the afformentioned game who have been at this alot longer.

DE is passionate, and they have some good ideas, and some vision. My own anger and frustration aside I will confess they have some very good aspects to their project. But they also have these problems with nobody really taking care of them. Nobody working in the gameplay department seems to have a realistic idea of proportion, and perhaps it is simply because of the team's size but I don't think they invest much time in play testing or acid testing many of these things before they put them out. Someone has to be there, someone has to act as the net to catch these things or they are going to lose quite a few new players every time they make a slip up like the one they currenlty have with drop rates. I don't want to see that.

A few poor decisions, bad concepts or missed catches shoudln't end up turning off a ton of new players or burning out vets. DE has too good a base product and from what I have seen has too much passion to let that happen. But it's going to happen if they don't straighten up and get that fixed.

Really though badger, I do think it is important htat you learn to be more objective. You can enjoy a game and still see where a problem is coming from. But while you have been far from troll-like (which is a welcomed change compared to the internet at large) you still seem to feel that these problems are on our end because of DE's passion. The best thing for the company is to accept that something is rottin in the state of denmark and perhaps ask yourself if it is a game breaker for the people you are seeing rather than assuming they are 'playing it wrong.'