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Originally Posted by squeek
Transparency of new ideas only goes so far, and a majority of the time (unless a lot of time/effort/care goes into it) people happen to form unfair first opinions that are hard to reverse without allowing them to play with the changes.
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Well there's two sides to this. You don't want people to make up their minds on something without having all the information and form an unfair bias. I get that, and secrecy on that can help with that. On the flipside, transparency of a bad idea is no-win scenario either way. Here's an extreme example to illustrate:
Idea: remove medic and scout class from gameplay
Secrecy method: Wait until release. People play it, many hate the change and leave or complain, a few like it and stay.
Transparency method: A lot of people hate the idea as soon as they hear it, complain about it, then once the mod is released, many hate the change and continue complaining, a few like it and stay.
In other words, transparency can prevent unfair bias, but it can't save bad ideas.
Several ideas in FF haven't been quite that extreme but just seem like a bad idea from the get-go, so transparency or not, the end result is the same. I feel this way about the O boosts without counters and D nerfs.
Other ideas are less obvious and deserve a fair chance. I feel that way about the hit slowdowns. I don't think they really fix things, but that's a concept that was nebulous enough I couldn't have made a determination on it until I had played many games with the changes in effect.
As for 2.5, a LITTLE transparency would be nice, for instance, I don't have a CLUE as to what direction the devs currently think FF needs to go at the moment (gameplay-wise).
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Originally Posted by Iggy
Is that all you can do, complain? Seriously, take a more active role in shit, or just quit bitching. You put so much energy into those page-long diatribes, that could be better spent coming up with real solutions, or learning to code to the point where you could SOLVE some of those problems.
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I don't know about all of Bridget's specific grievances, but for me personally, this is irrelevant. When the game's balance is worse than it was in 1.0, the obvious solution (to me anyway) is to ratchet things back to 1.0. It doesn't take a new coder to change sg values back to the past, change hwguy values back to what they were, remove O boosts, etc. When the "to do" list is to basically UNDO half of what's been done, no amount of skill on the individual will fix if the groupthink mentality flies against what a lot of the community (and perhaps the majority of those that left for good) want.
A good analogy to this is say you have a rickety bridge. It need some work, but it's functional. Then almost all of original builders of the bridge leave. New builders come in and take over. They blow up the bridge. Then they fence off the area so you can't lay down your own boards. And you won't be able to lay down your own boards until the majority of the new builders decide that maybe we should lay new boards down. Who makes that decision? Nobody knows, but it's not the people who stress test the bridge and say that it's broken apparently. The new builders do give the remaining pieces an excellent paint job however. That's about how I view the current development of the mod regarding balance.
So yeah, I complain, because I still care about the mod and hope like hell the devs will wake up to how the balance to it has been fucked systematically for about 2 years, but I'm also aware it's probably a lost cause.
Also I'd like to say that while I do generalize the devs, I'm sure not everyone is part of the problem, my apologies to those of you who haven't been actively screwing the gameplay balance.