43 replies to this topic

[Cy Mitchell]

For everyone that says the Devs never play their own game.......yeah they do.

Edited by Rampage, 31 October 2017 - 04:23 PM.

[El Bandito]

Hah, I'd have more respect for them if they do more than 10 matches per season. Or even play FP.

And lol at Paul for doing 77 damage total in a K2, and surviving the match.

Edited by El Bandito, 01 November 2017 - 12:33 AM.

[Cy Mitchell]

El Bandito, on 31 October 2017 - 04:43 PM, said:

Hah, I'd have more respect for them if they do that more often than 10 matches per season.

Yeah, but they got you on that one. Nice game by the way.

[UnofficialOperator]

77 damage

[Valdarion Silarius]

Rampage, on 31 October 2017 - 04:23 PM, said:

For everyone that says the Devs never play their own game.......yeah they do.

It's a shame that they never want to fix it though.

[Stonefalcon]

El Bandito, on 31 October 2017 - 04:43 PM, said:

Hah, I'd have more respect for them if they do that more often than 10 matches per season.

And lol at Paul for doing 77 damage total in a K2, and surviving the match.

He can't play without his hax mods

[El Bandito]

Rampage, on 31 October 2017 - 04:45 PM, said:

Yeah, but they got you on that one. Nice game by the way.

The devs? No. It was all Sean.

[Sjorpha]

It's a funny meme, but I honestly don't care if they are playing their own game or not.

I only care about whether they understand it or not, especially if they understand high level play.

Most developers are bad at their games, in general the type of person who develops games isn't the same type that gets really good at games, if nothing else because both of these things require a lot of time invested and it's hard to do both.

Actually, since they aren't very good players, playing the game too much could affect their judgement negatively, because they might become too marinated in low level meta and balance from that.

There are however deveopers that understand their own game and it's balance very well without playing much or being good at it, and who takes the time to consult those who know better when they don't know themselves. It's ultimately about evaluation skills, doing the work to find things out and knowing what you know and don't know.

A very good example is the recent Mortal Emires patch for Warhammer total war 2, the list of changes is immense and most competitive players and most others too agree that the balancing changes in that patch are for the most part very spot on. This is because the developers doing the balancing do it on competent analysis of tournament and online play and have a very interactive discussion about balance in their own forums and probably also with a competitive focus group.

Basically it's absolutely possible to be good at balancing a game, or games in general, without being very good at them or playing very much yourself.

It just isn't the case here, and so the cheap joke is that they don't play.

[Cy Mitchell]

Just for the record, they went undefeated, I believe and Paul had a game with 2 kills and 238 damage in the K2. Chris does OK.

I am just pointing out that they do, in fact, play the game so anyone that continues to post that they do not is just spreading "fake news".

[Sjorpha]

Rampage, on 31 October 2017 - 05:20 PM, said:

Just for the record, they went undefeated, I believe and Paul had a game with 2 kills and 238 damage in the K2. Chris does OK.

I am just pointing out that they do, in fact, play the game so anyone that continues to post that they do not is just spreading "fake news".

That's a bit sematical and hair splitting, I don't think there is anyone claiming that they literally never play the game.

What the meme "they don't play their game" means is that PGI staff don't play enough to be visible in the queues, you don't log on and see dev accounts every now and then in the teams which should be expected in a game under development with a small population. A lot of people also thinks this the problem behind the terrible balancing, which I don't agree with as I explain in the previous post.

[Scout Derek]

Sjorpha, on 31 October 2017 - 05:26 PM, said:

That's a bit sematical and hair splitting, I don't think there is anyone claiming that they literally never play the game.

What the meme "they don't play their game" means is that PGI staff don't play enough to be visible in the queues, you don't log on and see dev accounts every now and then in the teams which should be expected in a game under development with a small population. A lot of people also thinks this the problem behind the terrible balancing, which I don't agree with as I explain in the previous post.

^^ So much this.

[Trissila]

El Bandito, on 31 October 2017 - 04:43 PM, said:

Hah, I'd have more respect for them if they do that more often than 10 matches per season. Or even play FP.

And lol at Paul for doing 77 damage total in a K2, and surviving the match.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing that drives the "devs don't play their own game" talk.

77 damage is two shots from any halfway-decent 'mech. If all you do is slap 6 MPLAS on it, that's 42 damage per shot, so two shots inside effective range is 84 damage and outdoes that piddly 77. On a K2... take something like 4 MPLAS and 2 LBX-5. Pretty bad build, but even that's got an alpha of 34. Two shots is 68 damage, a third puts it WAY over 77.

How do you only do 77 while still being alive at the end? How? Did he just... not ever fire his weapons?

[FireStoat]

For the longest time (over a year at least?) NGNG Daeron was the only person you could kill to get a Dev Kill Medallion. Sean Lang has access to it but is too lazy to distribute them. So kudos to good guy Daeron. I got mine months back and figured it was one of the most rare items in the game due to none of the rest of the staff even rarely playing it.

Edited by FireStoat, 31 October 2017 - 06:23 PM.

[arcana75]

It's the NGNG anniversary 12 hour stream with giveaways right?

[LordNothing]

i saw russ on my team in an fp game once, resisted urge to core his mech from behind. though if there is a way to get an instant permaban, thats probibly it.

its not so much that they dont play their game, but they dont understand what goes on at the top levels or in all the various niches that exist. they mostly play casually, at least all the times ive encountered the pgi staff in game. and all the ones ive seen with their teir displayed on the forum were t5-t3. this is not what i call a good sampling.

i think the bulk of the problems arent that they dont know what the problems are, but they dont have any means to fix them. thier mwo staff is dwindling, the backlog of things to do grows faster than their ability to do them, mechpack sales do poorly and they cant keep the engine turning at full rpm, and they are constantly hemoraging players while not bringing in enough fresh blood to take up the slack. all signs point to doom. its like building ship while its sinking. rather than go down with it, they are putting efforts into building a lifeboat called mw5mercs.

Edited by LordNothing, 31 October 2017 - 10:27 PM.

[Randall Flagg]

I hope they both used Clan Small Pulse.

[Y E O N N E]

SKINLESS, on 31 October 2017 - 10:26 PM, said:

I hope they both used Clan Small Pulse.

You think that's punishment? Try using any of the IS Small lasers. Or the ER Micro lasers.

Edited by Yeonne Greene, 31 October 2017 - 10:40 PM.

[Tiewolf]

77dmg happens. But why are devs only sighted in a public stream? I guess they really do not play their own game so this smells like a political move for the player base. Good thing is they take the "devs don't know their own game" accusations seriously. The bad thing is this move shows that the accusations are kind of true.
I totally disagree that they do not know the "good end game players". They do not know the players that left the game!

Edited by Tiewolf, 01 November 2017 - 12:55 AM.

[Bud Crue]

Any screen shots of interest from this little festival of dev interest?
Any notable commentary like "wow,77 points of damage! Guess the K2 is an over performer. Add that one to the nerf list!")?
Any hints of the future?

I can't stand the ingratiating pseudo worship that the NGNG guys exhibit when they interact with the devs so I no longer watch these things (I don't think they do it on purpose but its there and it makes such streams really hard to watch), but if there was anything of interest from it...please share.

[Paigan]

El Bandito, on 31 October 2017 - 04:43 PM, said:

Hah, I'd have more respect for them if they do more than 10 matches per season. Or even play FP.

And lol at Paul for doing 77 damage total in a K2, and surviving the match.

Sounds amusing, but I think we should be fair:
A single match doesn't say much about the skill of a player.
Yesterday, I had a match von Caustic Valley where we wanted to gank a single Annihilator left at the enemy base.
I came around the corner, another enemy assault gaussed me twice from the distance (must have been a headshot, didn't check) and my Mech fell over in like the first 30 seconds of combat. 56 total damage dealt. Bummer. Happens.
No one cared because I'm not famous (thank god), but if one of the devs had been at my place, they would all have laughed about it.

Also:
They don't necessarily have to play with their prominent PGI accounts to have playing experience.

And:
Doing a proper job at running the game (features, balance, etc.) doesn't necessarily mean that they have to invest thousands of hours of training to have all the micromanaging dexterity and combat awareness details skilled up. A general understanding of the game and then doing their job is better than a dev ranking first in the leader board but not doing much else.

Edited by Paigan, 01 November 2017 - 03:14 AM.