No, you should think about why what you just did was childish. You are obviously aware of that you have power, and that you can force me to shut up if you want to. So when you choose an approach to debating someone that solely consists of "my opinion is better than your opinion", and add your moderator credentials on top as extra leverage - then you don't get to say "I don't want to stop people from discussing this" afterwards.Zombra wrote:It's not intended as an argument, or to shut down the conversation. It's a reminder that the forum has rules you should keep in mind. Calling a moderator names to his face is not going to end well. Take a few deep breaths and think it over.
What you get then is the right to keep quiet and change your approach.
You know I'm not asking for that, and the HP bar has been questioned regularly since it was mentioned on the forum. And what I want to hear is that the crisis encounter design wasn't separated out of the rulesystem with it's own buffer for balancing purposes. I want to hear that inXile doesn't think that is a satisfying way to design a game.Zombra wrote: You seem to think that the context was a handful of forum posts. I am inclined to believe that the context was months of internal and external testing and full time development work. I guess we'll never know unless they decide to spend the man-hours to research, format, and publicly post full details of their development process in deference to one complainer's sense of entitlement. Hold your breath.
I don't go around compiling sourced lists of internet comments, but it is from the same thread on this forum. Other than that, I chatted with someone here when the beta first came out, they felt the first encounter may have been a bit difficult. They went on to do the encounter again, cleared it, thought it was fine. My interpretation of the chatter elsewhere, and some people I spoke with privately, was that the presentation of the system seemed a bit weird, that the AI was a bit too good at seeing your weaknesses. But that it fundamentally made sense.Zombra wrote: Still waiting for those citations.
Later, my impression was that the testers who still post here, as well as inxile "balancing" folks have decided that the crisis system is fundamentally broken, cannot be balanced, and needed a new variable so they could be scaled properly in a linear fashion.
That surprised me, because this is the identical approach Obsidian chose when they scrapped Josh Sawyer's absolutely brilliant rule-system fro PoE, and spent 6 months at replacing it with a linear and incredibly boring system.
And the reason I thought of that was because they also cited "balancing issues". So, just so it's been said - I've been beta-testing "professionally", I've been handling focus-groups for an IT project in person. I know what "balancing" really means. So when I say I suspect that InXile is dumbing down the rule-system and replacing it with something that can be incrementally completed and documented easily as having been "objectively" balanced to perfection, with math, etc. Then the reason for that is that I recognise the approach from projects I've been part of, where instead of choosing the clever option, we end up deliberately choosing the dumb option - because both users and managers are able to see the progress and milestones specifically as we work.
It is of course still the dumb option, and it's never going to be anything else than that. And we would never have went that route in our project if we didn't have to answer to people who don't understand programming, logic, or anything but a bright folder with snappy slides in it.
So consider that there may be more people than me who will be surprised to learn that inXile - without being pressured by a large an evil corporation or publisher, or something like that - still chose the dumb option here. This reflects incredibly badly on you.
Really. So why has inXile become more and more skittish about saying they want an intelligent game for clever players. Where is the emphasis on long dialogues, deep character development, slow and thoughtful puzzle-like combat, and huge discussions on the way the tides interfere in different parts of the game's design?Zombra wrote: The impression I get is that they are not in the habit of exhaustively explaining, or groveling for approval for, every decision they make - nor should they be.
You can't have it both ways, Zombra. Either they emphasize and drive the sell of the game on being complex underneath, but satisfying and narratively unexhausting on top. Or else they keep their mouths shut and suddenly go mum about the decisions that go completely against that design-philosophy - that we were sold on the kickstarter with.
And frankly this kind of pointless and public deference to inxile is beneath you. Really, "they probably have control". "I believe this out of being a community moderator on their public forums, where they do not post any more, because they are so confident in all their decisions now". It's pathetic.