A Reasonable Discussion of Recent Stat Fixes.

[Hoodoo]

I try to be a staunch supporter of the unpaid immortal and their hard, valiant work on this mud.   I get that nobody pays you, you do it for some odd and masochistic urge to help people who mostly just insult you. I try not to be one of those guys. That's why I deleted the first two posts about this topic before posting them.  Too angry.


Still... by 'fixing' the stat system after 2 days playtime, you've just invalidated a full weekend's play (commonly, actually a full weekend, with 4-8 hours sleep total) by your hardest-playing constituents.  You've created an underclass of the uselessly statted who have a choice to either a. stick it out knowing they're missing 2-4 points in stats on their *primary stats* they would otherwise have had you not bapted the dog originally, or b. re-roll and consider the wasted 48+hours online as a sunk cost.

There needs to be a third option, whereupon you admit that you bapted the dog, and that your players shouldn't have to give up time and work because of your failure. Right now, I, most of my clan, and I imagine a *lot* of other players are so angry they could chew cars and shit nails.

Jason

[Gramm]

I think yes it sucks that it happened, and its a new system in place. Knowing that obviously changes will be made I reckon. But thanks for trying to keep it fresh guys! Not everything is gonna be perfect right away, but im sure we can all tell some changes are in order lolol. For me personally its been failing almost every spell we load, which is like 6 out of 8 so far. and I have 16 int nat roll druid. which is apparently a good one lol

[Hoodoo]

A reasonable suggestion requiring little work:  Offer 1 reroll at 30 to any character with a creation date between wipe and the stat fix.  You get a character with 16 max stats to 30, we'll give you *one* chance to make that better (or possibly worse), with no take-backs.   Don't have to use it: petition to an imm when/if needed.

This is doable.  This should be done.  There is no reason *not* to implement this as a way to help your players not have to suffer for your mistakes/problems in alpha testing that made us buy into a flawed beta.

There is a fix here other than "You're all bapted.  *callous laughter*"  Choose to use it.

Jason

[blackmagus]

That's a pretty inflammatory post Jason and whether you intended or not, you come across as a spoiled child whose just been told his friend got a bigger piece of cake.

But guess what, they didn't release a range stating the amount of difference between system v1.0 and v2.0, but even with randomness, chances are your increase will be marginal at best, or a reduction at worst.

So suck it up, roll another character and take the six hours of game play to get back up to 30. You can still transfer your  gear and not come across as an ungrateful brat.

[Hoodoo]

Odd... I toned this post down quite a bit. :)  Your opinion, though.  My tone is likely off the intended, no doubt, though I dispute your characterization of 'spoiled'.  However, when a game designer makes a mistake, he shouldn't make his players pay for it without offering a common-sense 'my bad' token.  That's a given on almost any game.  Not a hard concept.

The only confusing thing is your defending the lack of this common sense approach.  The only reason not to take this approach, which would require minimal investment of time/effort given that most will just reroll anyway rather than take these characters to 30, would be apathy towards the time investment made by said players, which translates into apathy towards one's players.

I am usually far more optimistic than that about our imms.  Hell, I love the new stat system: nice seeing some challenge come back.  But.. this is really an easy and obvious way of saying "My bad!" to those few people who would choose to take advantage of it.

Just common sense, boss.  If my tone obscured my message, my apologies.  I actually edited out a lot of anger before posting. :)

Jason

[gnua]

You've created an underclass of the uselessly statted who have a choice to either a. stick it out knowing they're missing 2-4 points in stats on their *primary stats* they would otherwise have had you not bapted the dog originally, or b. re-roll and consider the wasted 48+hours online as a sunk cost.

I know you must be very upset, but most of the grief may come from the unexpected nature of this.  For example, suppose we were told before the wipe, that every character made in the first 72 hours would have -2 penalty to each and every stat compared to characters after this 'race window'.  Would you have decided not to race and wait or would you have raced then rerolled and transferred gear?  In the past, it was standard practice to create trash stat characters for racing to get the juicy eq, then after the gear had been deeprented, people rolled 'permanent' characters and transferred the gear to them.  I dont think the racing time is wasted because the racers got gear that would have been hard to load had they started playing only today.

[Hoss]

You are missing at most +1 attribute point (from the bug). We looked at what it would take to adjust all the previous characters that "might" have been affected. It was not plausible without a full player wipe. We understand that you are upset, however stating that it is an easy fix that requires minimal time/effort isn't accurate.

[gnua]

You are missing at most +1 attribute point (from the bug). We looked at what it would take to adjust all the previous characters that "might" have been affected. It was not plausible without a full player wipe. We understand that you are upset, however stating that it is an easy fix that requires minimal time/effort isn't accurate.

if the bug causes at most one attribute point, that doesnt sound that big of a deal. i thought it was more like 4 or 5 based on the new characters i rolled.

[kilians]

I re-rolled, and my personal opinions is it was well worth it based on what i rolled and what i rolled before this *bug* i was able to get 2 more con 1 more strength and 2 Dex on a kagonesti that that being said my prior character was horrid compared to new one....

[kmark101]

Wipe characters suck traditionally anyway, so I don't understand what's the big deal. Not like its hard or anything, besides you still won't be able to wield that sword with 16 or 17 str...

HOWEVER what I see is a problem is the new group limit change - I already feel it's pretty bad. It's mostly tight, old friend groups are playing together, now you just remove 2 friends from the main group who log off and lose interest in the game. It won't change any difficulty, buff chars will remain powerful anyway. As for key fights, like Cyan, you could make a change instead: make their lair a 8 person instance or something along this line. It would make them challenging on the same level, without cutting 20% of a group of friends for the game.

[Jorquin]

The attribute bug was a clever plot devised by the village of Brog. They are conspiring with the one known as "Hoss" and planning their rise to power. Weakening you all was the first step, soon phase 2 begins...

Be afraid.

[lurker]

I re-rolled, and my personal opinions is it was well worth it based on what i rolled and what i rolled before this *bug* i was able to get 2 more con 1 more strength and 2 Dex on a kagonesti that that being said my prior character was horrid compared to new one....

There was something weird going on with kagonesti stats. I was rolling them this morning, I like the chance for extra attack racial ability, so I was trying to figure them out. Seemed they had a really nice dex bonus and no con bonus.  Then oddly enough after lunch while rolling, I suddenly started rolling them with higher con than ever before, and yet couldn't even roll nearly as good of a dex score as before.

I'm wondering if a cat hit the keyboard and messed up wild elf stats or something, because they certainly changed a lot after the FOOM today.

[Gramm]

Best idea yet for new stats! Go back to OLD stats, I agree at wipe start its hard yes, but this is so  noticeably bad. At least can you make it easier to learn spells.. I feel bad for all the druids that are going to fail stoneskin. To fail barrier enlarge icestorm feast all on day 2 is a little bit beyond disheartening when you have 7 friends wasting their time loading you tablets that you know you are going to just fail anyways. I understand this might seem like whining to some hardcore people who will "deal" with getting nerfed differently. But at this point im sure I am not the only one who considered throwing their laptop like a Frisbee at these "awesome" nerfs of stats. Isnt making group max only 8 a large enough change to add a challenge? Now you have given druids down syndrome to boot.

[Ezio]

Maybe they did make it easier on spells, and you aren't giving yourself the best opportunity to pass!

BOOM roasted

[Valenore]

The stat lowering seems unnecessary unless a lot more +stat gear was added.  I haven't noticed that thus far.  It will limit the number of alts I roll (no thrill of rolling the "perfect" class) which will decrease my overall longevity through the wipe.   

Spell learn does seem to be an issue.  I can deal with the overall stat lowering, but that effecting learn rate is silly.  Casters are already harder to legendary due to the required spells. Adversely lowering the learn rate only compounds that issue.  My 16 int cleric (rolled about 10 qualinesti and was as high as I got) failed dispel evil, cure crit, and harm 3x each.  Maybe I could have rolled and rolled to get a 17 or 18 int (now that the initial bug is fixed), but that seems like it would be a marginal difference.  If I do end up failing a few high end books, which outside of mage help seems very likely at this point, that will severely dampen my desire to play.