Q:
(edited by TheBravery.9615)
Balance Revisited / Re-opening CDI
Some of those topics are totally different topics.
Plus sometimes imbalance is the best balance.
“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik
The CDI sub-forum is ‘locked’ because Chris is gone, and no Dev has yet volunteered to give so much time to the project. It’s not something initiated nor overseen by a forum-user.
Likely, each of those topics would be a CDI unto itself; it would take either years to get through them all, or many Devs giving up spending most of their time creating content.
The CDI sub-forum is ‘locked’ because Chris is gone, and no Dev has yet volunteered to give so much time to the project. It’s not something initiated nor overseen by a forum-user.
Likely, each of those topics would be a CDI unto itself; it would take either years to get through them all, or many Devs giving up spending most of their time creating content.
Honestly I wish they opened that forum back up. Yes, it will take a lot of time, but developing a plan using feedback from multiple individuals and reaching a consensus will allow ArenaNet to develop higher quality content and balance patches, and less time wasted with the low quality (e.g. arbitrary number fixing) balance patches created out of group-think.
I also want to reiterate the importance of designing proper game balance, if developers have any interest in making the game popular in the E-Sports scene. In order for a game to become a successful E-Sport, the game must be easy to pick up and difficult to master, and not change so frequently so that the “masters” have to relearn the game all the time. Gw2’s e-sport scene so far is unsuccessful because the game keeps doing these “meta-changes”, forcing professional players to keep adapting rather than letting the players become masters at their art. This also ruins it for spectators, because now spectators need to keep up with the changes in order to follow what’s going on.
I’m not looking forward to initiate a CDI project, it’s not my responsibility and no one asked me to do it. I made a CDI for warrior because the CDI sub forum is closed and ArenaNet has failed to take the initiative to make a CDI. I did it because I’m passionate about the game and want to see it going in the right direction.
Anyways, I’m assuming your answer is: “Don’t waste your time?”
(edited by TheBravery.9615)
You do remember that the feedback of a vocal minority who participated in the CDI was responsible for some of the bad decisions we had with the Hot expac which have to be polished and reworked the coming year?
You do remember that the feedback of a vocal minority who participated in the CDI was responsible for some of the bad decisions we had with the Hot expac which have to be polished and reworked the coming year?
Yes, collaboration and consensus is not perfect, but I’d argue it’s better than having 1 – 3 people who don’t seem to really play or understand the game to design balance.
I’d also argue that the original layout of the CDI wasn’t perfect either. 200 words per section? and on top of that, people couldn’t criticize each other’s ideas.
You do remember that the feedback of a vocal minority who participated in the CDI was responsible for some of the bad decisions we had with the Hot expac which have to be polished and reworked the coming year?
Yes, collaboration and consensus is not perfect, but I’d argue it’s better than having 1 – 3 people who don’t seem to really play or understand the game to design balance.
I’d also argue that the original layout of the CDI wasn’t perfect either. 200 words per section? and on top of that, people couldn’t criticize each other’s ideas.
If you want any CDI to be taken seriously, you don’t take the stance that the developers are in any way incompetent. That is never going to work. It’s like watching over someone’s shoulder while they work providing criticizing remarks at every step knowing that you don’t trust the man at work.
Just imagine yourself in that position and then you might understand why it doesn’t work or why not every developer wants to come here to comment on every step they take or want to take.
When you say that developers don’t know their own game, then a CDI is far off the table and there must be some sort of mutual respect or understanding of the direction the developers want to go to.
It’s not noticable because there isn’t (m)any responses, but it has been pointed out by communication officials that they do read the forums. As such the forums are in a way their own CDI.
That said, with a few hundred people with different opinions, there’s no way you will ever going to “fix” the game to your personal ideals. That’s just not realistic to expect. Your ideal is a niche amongst the sea of many different other opinions.
“It isn’t working!” CL4P-TP
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik
Ingame Name: Guardian Erik
You do remember that the feedback of a vocal minority who participated in the CDI was responsible for some of the bad decisions we had with the Hot expac which have to be polished and reworked the coming year?
Yes, collaboration and consensus is not perfect, but I’d argue it’s better than having 1 – 3 people who don’t seem to really play or understand the game to design balance.
I’d also argue that the original layout of the CDI wasn’t perfect either. 200 words per section? and on top of that, people couldn’t criticize each other’s ideas.
If you want any CDI to be taken seriously, you don’t take the stance that the developers are in any way incompetent. That is never going to work. It’s like watching over someone’s shoulder while they work providing criticizing remarks at every step knowing that you don’t trust the man at work.
Just imagine yourself in that position and then you might understand why it doesn’t work or why not every developer wants to come here to comment on every step they take or want to take.
When you say that developers don’t know their own game, then a CDI is far off the table and there must be some sort of mutual respect or understanding of the direction the developers want to go to.
It’s not noticable because there isn’t (m)any responses, but it has been pointed out by communication officials that they do read the forums. As such the forums are in a way their own CDI.
That said, with a few hundred people with different opinions, there’s no way you will ever going to “fix” the game to your personal ideals. That’s just not realistic to expect. Your ideal is a niche amongst the sea of many different other opinions.
The thing is, ideas generally become more polished and refined when you work with people providing criticism. An following is an example (controvertial if you’re into politics), but it provides contrast on teams that have opposing views instead of working in teams with group-think.
If the launch of a team is as critical as Professor J. Richard Hackman says, then Barack Obama has done pretty well. He appointed his administration’s top officials much faster than most presidents do. Given the monumental crises that faced him the moment he was elected, he had to move quickly. The downside of speed was that some of his choices didn’t work out—notably Bill Richardson and Tom Daschle. Obama has certainly brought onto his team people of strong temperaments and contrasting views, starting with Hillary Clinton at the State Department and Jim Jones at the National Security Council. This suggests that we have a president who is unusually sure of his own ability to absorb differing opinions. Appointing people like Clinton also shows his eagerness to harness the talent of his former opponents. Compare that with the record of George W. Bush; his people told many job seekers who had supported John McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries, “Sorry, you backed the wrong horse!”
Of course, Obama is taking a risk by hiring so many strong and contentious personalities. He will inevitably have to spend a lot of time and energy serving as referee. This is what happened with Franklin Roosevelt, who also brought strong-minded figures into his government. One difference with Obama, however, is that FDR temperamentally loved the infighting. He liked to pit people against one another, believing that competition evoked the best performance from everyone. At times FDR actually enjoyed making his underlings suffer. I don’t think Obama does.
Most presidents prefer a happy ship, and in some cases their definition of loyalty includes not rocking the boat on major administration programs. Richard Nixon fired his interior secretary, Walter Hickel, for opposing his Vietnam War policies. There was a dissenter (what Hackman calls a deviant) on Lyndon Johnson’s team—Undersecretary of State George Ball, who strongly opposed the Vietnam War. Johnson would cite Ball when people complained that he surrounded himself with yes-men, but in fact Ball had little influence when LBJ met with top officials on Vietnam. Everyone in the group knew that Johnson didn’t take Ball’s antiwar arguments very seriously. If you really want dissenting views, better to use the Roosevelt-Obama model, where they can come from almost any member of the team—and not just from one designated rabble-rouser.
The reappointment of Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, also reveals Obama’s self-confidence. He’s clearly willing to concede that there are things he doesn’t know, so he appointed someone with more than three decades of national security experience. This decision has the historical echo of John Kennedy’s near-reappointment in 1961 of Dwight Eisenhower’s defense secretary, who coincidentally was named Thomas Gates. Like Obama, Kennedy was a young president with little national security background and thought it might reassure people to have the previous defense secretary stay on at the Pentagon. Like Obama, JFK also suspected that a number of things might go wrong with national security during his first year as president. He felt that Americans might be less likely to blame the Democratic president if a Republican secretary of defense was there at his side. In the end Kennedy did not have the stomach for the risk of keeping a Republican appointee at the Pentagon. Obama did.
Obama’s first months in office prove the importance of having a president who can convey his view of the country and the world and why he thinks his plans will work. One of Hillary Clinton’s biggest criticisms a year ago was that Obama gave great speeches but that it didn’t have all that much to do with being a strong president. Obama argued that it did, and he was right. Like Roosevelt’s addresses in 1933 and Reagan’s in 1981, his public utterances—especially his speech to Congress in February—have done a lot to gain acceptance for his programs from skeptical Americans. However jaded they may be about government, Americans—even those who didn’t vote for him—are still inclined to turn to their president to explain foreign and domestic crises. Imagine how much more anxious they might feel now if Obama did not do this so effectively. Unfortunately for us all, it’s likely that he’ll have to call more on that skill as the crisis mounts in the months ahead.
Michael Beschloss has written nine books about presidential leadership, most recentlyPresidential Courage (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
also to clarify, I don’t mean in my original post that the ArenaNet balance team is “incompetent”. It’s just that they don’t actively engage in taking feedback.
(edited by TheBravery.9615)