Quote:
Originally Posted by Bumamgar
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No changes were made without full discussion with the rest of the dev team including Nilbog. The p99 dev team work and communicate as one unit quite well, thank you.
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If this is truly the case, you should have been more clear about this in your testimony about the change. It really read like you said "My wife and I discovered I was outleveling her, so I told the dev team and they gave me carte blanche to do what I wanted to XP. I found the code mistake, fixed it, but found something else that I knew was classic and changed it too."
Further is the problem with the feeling that "I went in to fix something with the blessing of the staff, but I found something else I wasn't actually looking for, changed it, and then got the blessing of the dev team after the fact."
Maybe that's how it went down, maybe it's not. Maybe you had a conference call and discussed repercussions of this change, maybe you just did it and everyone else said "yeah that was in classic."
All I want to say is that the reason you specifically are getting so much flak from the community is due to the whole under-the-table, undocumented feel this change (I can't in good faith call it a fix anymore) has. We were all around when Verant pulled these tricks, we all got mad and complained because we all felt cheated. Sometimes it was an innocent mistake (Martin in customer service had strep and didn't write the patch notes), but the vast majority of the time it was either totally under the radar or expressed so vaguely in order to delay the firestorm that the developers knew the change would cause.
They weren't stupid. You're not stupid. It's Friday afternoon, you can either write patch notes that are going to result in you getting bombarded with hate mail or you can just
do it and deal with it after your weekend. After crossing your fingers that no one notices, of course -- which is a complete joke as any software developer can tell you. Your users will *always* know your software better than you do.
Please don't take this as an insult as I'd rather not get banned, but it also doesn't help the situation that you've gotten so defensive, arguably smug, about what has become "your" change. I don't blame you for it -- stubbornly sticking to your guns is a common and effective thing to do. But it also leaves you stubborn and unwilling to reconsider the wisdom of your decision.
No matter how many times you say it, this isn't a binary choice. This isn't "This was classic, get frustrated and lash out and you're banned, end of story." You're implementing what the producers would come to admit as a design flaw.
There are plenty more of those you could implement. If you'd like, I'd be happy to dig through patch notes and break things that the patch ahead of where we are in the timeline fixed. I'm good with C++ and Java and dabble in several other languages. I would be happy to implement bugs and exploits, because bugs and exploits are classic and can be fun. They added the broken zaniness that caused many of us to have a sick love/hate relationship with the game, that, 10 years later, those famous rose goggles have changed into just love, kind of like the old girlfriend we've all had that was on that lovely border of gorgeous and plain, flawed and perfect, and was prone to outbursts of batshit insanity. We miss her more than the one or two barbies we got lucky (or so we thought at the time) with, the intellectuals, the emotionally dependents, or even are (hopefully) well-balanced, loving wives.
I don't know. Do what you want. Just try not to delude yourself or the rest of the staff into thinking this change is anything but actively harmful to this server and its community. Even the great stubborn Verant knew that was true when it was discovered -- that is, when Verant was reminded they'd implemented it.