Sanya's Hard Work
Let me tell you...you want to know about the Spellcrafting? Read this Grab Bag, link within! Oh yeah, and quit asking for white dye, it AIN'T gonna happen. =)
Bring it on:
Q: So, rumor has it the spellcrafting and alchemy design document is ready for public viewing. Can I see it?
A: Sure. We’re still on track for getting spellcrafting into the game in the first half of August, so you might as well see all the details: Go here, or click the link on the sidebar.
Q: (Insert comment about exploiting here)
A: I am not sure how this idea took root, but judging from the number of appeals we’ve had on the subject, I thought I’d best clarify. No, I did not say it was okay to sit in the world geometry and exploit. Please stop telling our CSRs that I told you it was okay. I didn’t. It’s not. If you can let me know where my choice of words was confusing, I will be happy to clarify - none of us here saw anything ambiguous, but that doesn't mean much.
Also, if you are a melee, and standing on the ground, it does not follow that the guy on the roof is exploiting because you cannot hit him. The guy on the roof is exploiting if he cannot be hit by more than one damage type – such as arrows, nukes, PBAOE, etc. Melee doesn’t count in determining whether or not our little roofer is cheating.
Now, people on the same z-axis as you are cheating if you cannot hit them with melee damage (such as bridge sitters). By the way, just because someone is cheating from the same z-axis level as you, does not grant you immunity if you ALSO cheat to kill him. That just makes you both cheaters. Please /appeal the cheater, without resorting to cheating yourself.
Thanks much!
Q: Why is there no white dye in the game?
A: I have answered this before, but I am going to shamelessly steal an answer from the wonderful website DAOC Tradeskills, or rather, their forums. A poster named CapnBry explained it thusly, and hit the ball out of the park:
“Think of it this way. Take any item, your desk for instance (I'm assuming you have a brown wood desk). Turn off all the lights, and your computer monitor, and carry the desk into a dark closet. What color is the desk now? Black. Now get one of those cool Navy Seal red flashlights and shine it on the desk, what color is it? Mostly red. Now grab one of those annoying blue laser pointers all the damn kids have at the movie theaters. Shine that on the desk, what color is it now? Mostly blue. Now get a flashlight out and shine it on, what color is it? Brown again. Get a stronger flashlight. Still brown. Try to think what color light you'd have to shine on a brown desk to get it to turn white. When you figure that out, we can pass that to Mythic, and probably the Nobel Prize people because it's impossible.
That's how materials work in any D3D or OpenGL environment, you light a material to tint a texture.”
CapnBry, I salute you. That’s the best and clearest explanation of the problem, EVER.
Q: (Insert comment about the proposed armor damage tables from 1.52D)
A: We aren’t completely satisfied with the way our proposed changes are working in practice. We’d gotten as far as we could go with theory, and needed to put the basic idea onto the test server to get some real world feedback on it. Please, rest assured that things on the test server are not finished products, and we do pay close attention to your feedback. Some changes are definitely incoming soon.
One thing though – some armor types are worn by so many classes that a small change to that type has a disproportionate effect on the overall game. Just keep that in mind as you evaluate the system.
Q: I am confused about how the full respec will work with autotraining. Can you clarify?
A: Let’s start with some background. Autotraining is a feature of the game for some classes, but not all of them. One class that has autotrain is the paladin – they have slash and chants as skills that autotrain up (extremely slowly) IF they do not choose to train those skills of their own accord. If a paladin never puts a single point into slash, by the time he is level 30, he will have a spec of 7 in slash. If he gets to 50 without ever training in slash, he will have autotrained up to 12. This feature went into the game a long time ago, and was intended to prevent a player from entirely gimping himself.
When we first introduced autotrain, the game would use your spec points FOR you, to make sure you never fell below a certain level. The public outcry was great, and to cut to the chase, we fixed autotrain so that it did not take your points. Instead, if autotrain kicks in, it creates the points and adds them to your total.
The free points thing sounds like a much bigger deal than it actually is. For instance, going back to our paladin example, a pally has two lines with the autotrain option – chants and slash. I do not think there is a single paladin that would try and level without putting any points at all into chants.
Now, on to the respec thing. When you activate your respec, the game will check your character to see if you have any autotrain lines that have a minimum attached to them. If our paladin is level 50, the game will automatically assign points to the autotrain lines until they are both at 12, before our paladin does anything else. (The game calculates what the minimum level should be depending on your level.)
Why? Well, if a player autotrained, the points he had were “free” – and to prevent abuse of the system, those free points must be assigned to the line from which they came. However, code is an if/then, either/or kind of thing, and the game cannot tell if the training you did at level whatever was the result of an autotrain or a choice on your part. So the points are automatically deducted.
A player who autotrained, and accepted the fact that he was going to be gimped just to get that handful of extra points, has more points total than a player who did not autotrain. It’s a severe tradeoff for very little reward, but the reward does exist.
This is why some people on the test server have a few more points than others of the same class.
I know there’s some objection to minimum spec levels post-respec in the community right now, and I have passed on your feedback thus far and will continue to do so. It is still on the test server, after all! But hear me out: The reason we’ve done it this way is because we had a choice between this way, and basically throwing all the points into the pool without taking autotrain into account at all. Had we chosen the latter option, classes with more than one autotrain line (some classes have three), you would have seen a situation where some classes had significantly more points than others, and used their “free” points to bring one spec to full, and still have enough points left over to bring other lines to powerful levels. This struck us as bad. So, we put in the restriction. Since it’s a sure bet that at least one of the lines the points automatically go to is one that the player will want to pour points into, the number of points the player isn’t controlling is very small.
I am following threads on the topic. If you want to comment, please be specific in terms of the number of points involved, and your level (and spec spread before respec). “That’s not fair” is not good feedback – you need to tell me why it’s not fair in order to have the best chance of being heard.
I hope that helps, and I look forward to the feedback that is sure to result. Y’all have a great weekend, and thanks for being a part of this community.
Tags: DarkAgeofCamelot, News