Sandpit, on 08 August 2014 - 10:15 PM, said:
I understand that, I'm not referring to "suggestions" like "this sucks, fix it!" or "this sucks remove it!"
There are several well thought out ideas with plenty of support that WOULD work. They were expressed in very detailed posts in that feedback thread. They were good ideas that WOULD fix the FLD and PPD issues. They WERE ignored. They've been ignored for 3 years.
Homeless Bill's idea
Mine
Iraqi's
and a few others (sorry can't remember specific names)
My convergence idea WOULD solve the FLD and PPD without removing PPD and FLD and without adding in a bunch of complicated and disliked nerfs and mechanics
I could come up with excuses for why they were not taken -
all of which would be completely assumptive.
Also, in the end, irrelevant.
The question then starts to become 'Does PGI owe us an explanation for why they make the choices they do?'
That's a particularly difficult one to answer. The instinctual one for the consumer is 'Oh hell yes they do. You want my money you give me the reasons why you do X' while the business is universally going to respond 'oh hell no I don't. Don't like it? Don't buy it. I answer to every complaint like this I'll never get any work done, I have to justify myself to my existing manager already. Oh, and F**K YOU for being such an entitled S.O.B'.
Both are wrong is the problem. A business needs to give justification in an overall sense for the directions its going if it wants to build trust. The Clan Packages were a great example; almost no information was given about the Clan mechs in any useful sense prior to the PTS stuff - at which point people went 'A-HA! You're going with "they should be fun to play" this time instead of the "everything should be, at best, mediocre" approach you took with the last bundle. HERE'S MY MONEY'.
However you can't open up a debate on why you decide to do what you do as a business. You're in it to make money; that generally means getting the most possible money for the least possible work. That's no lazy that's conservation of energy. The idea being that you do A and D and skip B and C because, well, D can work well enough to get sold with just A and B and C just don't add a lot of value for the time invested (true or not, that's what the decision in the meeting was, right?) You can't just tell your consumers though 'Look, that's a lot of work and, bluntly, we just don't give that much of a **** about it. You got your robots and they're pretty and they go PEW and BOOM and KA-WOOSH. Everything past that is icing. Expensive icing'.
You want to say that but you can't. So you say 'in order to better focus on
looking busy while cruising for nekkid pictures on the interwebs critical game features we just don't have the resources to put into that now but it's certainly something we're looking at.' Then you show them something shiny to distract them.
The thing is though, convergence + PPFLD will never go away. It's inescapable. It's a pain to code a fix for I'm sure, it's a lot of zots spent of development/coding time and that's the most precious commodity a gaming company has. You can't stand in line for a latte without pushing past a dozen starving would-be digital artists but a legit coder who actually, you know, codes. Consistently. Every day they come to work - which should be 5 days a week. Those are rare and hard fought over. It's not hard to get a half-a$$ed coder who will make a lot of promises, tell you everything you want to do is impossible then only spend 4 out of every 40 hours coding something that's nothing like the specs before throwing a tantrum in a meeting because he's about as well socialized as a coked up Lindsy Lohan or Justin Beiber.
I don't know what the people who work for PGI are like. Regardless of my opinions of the balance decisions themselves at least they've taken to regularly completing customer-facing content. That I like a *lot*. I'd just about rather take bad changes than nothing at all.
PPFLD though.... it's inevitable. It's like Global Warming for MW:O. Nobody wants to deal with it, suggestions about it get put off or excuses made but sooner or later your ocean front property is now a home for some really freaked out fish and 'Canadian wine' isn't the punchline of some hipster joke.
The question is, when that hammer finally drops (and it will, inevitably) what is it going to look like?
My opinion? You keep posting links from time to time, I say screw that. Copy-pasta the whole thing in, the whole suggestion itself. Condense it down to less than 3 paragraphs and 3 bullet points, max. Not even every thread but periodically drop that ****, in full, into threads like this.
Did you ever read Terry Pratchett? Love his stuff. He once said that ideas are actually particles, like neutrinos. Suddenly out of nowhere one hits you, you get the idea and hopefully do something with it. In reality it's more like you run into an idea that fits a solution you're working on right now. This means getting a good idea into the right hands and in the right conversations is more about persistence than passion, more quantity than quality. It's an odds game. When that moment hits when someone who actually CAN take the idea onto the road to fruition is looking for an idea in that vein you want them to run into your idea (or an idea you like).
So you keep that **** recycling here periodically. Within forum ToS of course but still. Threads like this don't need a link to 'someone had this idea once'. They need a solid, concise and easy to grasp copy of the idea here. That's the odds game you want to play. You also do NOT want that idea associated with 'hey you dumba$$es, do this so you don't suck so much' or 'this is better than what Johnny Smallberries put in that last patch'. Cuz... ya know. All that stuff I said before.
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