Asura Engineer- Aelara Fole
Commentary in Class Forums
Flame on is indeed a poor choice, but just throwing this out there, that last post for engi is actually even older than that. What the devs said are actually cut-and-paste from older post on either an AMA or previous interview, can’t remember, but the silence on all of the forums is a bit suprising.
I gave up on engineer around Christmas. I’m a somewhat competitive and I will only put up with a handicap for so long. Started playing an ele and they are much stronger with that d/d build, but I don’t like it as much as my engineer. Actually I’ve been playing tera online again since its going f2p the pvp servers are jumping again
I can’t remember the last time I heard anything about the engineer from any dev on any medium anywhere. Maybe BWE2?
My turret is so much better at this game than I am.
I just clicked one of the threads of where developer had dared to comment. It was about P/P pistol and the Anet developer said that it offered great utility, but was low on damage. Compared to what? Other thief weapons? If P/P is low on damage, what are the engineer weapon damage or kits? Pathetic in damage? I seriously start to get an impression the developers are all themselves running thieves. I have never seen a developer post an intelligent message on such topic e.g. comparison with actual numbers. I will give you numbers: thief’s vital shot, range 900, 1/2 second attack speed, base damage 134 + bleed 170. Engineer’s hip shot, range 1000, 3/4 second attack speed, base damage 251. Notice that the thief’s attack speed is greater, able to do more auto attacks in same amount of time. Things get more interesting with stealth. Under stealth Pistol attack #1 becomes sneak attack, doing 5×405+850 bleed damage. And with a very common setup e.g. P/D, abusing Cloak & Dagger, you get nice stack of vulnerability, stealth + damage using mere 4 initiative cost with infusion of shadow adept trait, making it pretty much spammable. So much for low damage. Yes, I know engineers have static discharge, but I am afraid it will be nerfed in the next skill balance update, along with 100nades etc. Leaving engineers with… ?
I understand the reasons why the developers are not commenting on these threads, but the way Arenanet currently communicates is not good. Their way of communication is giving a loud clear message to the community: We don’t care about you.
I know the pressures related to public profession. I am myself working in such field where my work is constantly evaluated and I get tons of anonymous and non-anonymous feedback, some of it being negative, most being positive or neutral. Still I ask for more feedback, trying to improve my work. You need to have a thick skin to handle comments like: What is wrong about XXX? – Everything What is good about XXX? – Nothing How to improve XXX? – (left empty)
Deniara
Deniara / Ayna – I want the original WvWvW maps back – Desolation [EU]
(edited by Deniara Devious.3948)
OP: "The reason why I bothered doing this. There is no reason to rage. "
Cool, thanks for collecting and posting this : – )
Just call me Lunar
So, the standing joke around here seems to be anet has forgotten engineers exist. While this is certainly false, I did think it would be interesting to compare the various classes forums in terms of most recent admin post.
Yup.
It doesn’t stop there either. Several here on the engineer forums like to make claims based on how they feel, with no actual facts.
They are not communicating any better or worse with us then the other professions, but several here love to falsely claim otherwise.
Poor craftsman blame their tools. Poor players blame their Engineer.
For the most part, it seems devs/admins don’t post any major information in these sub-forums, for reasons which intelligent players could likely guess.
The devs have my sympathy when it comes to posting on an MMO forum, however there are a couple of things other games do better and which does in fact reduce some of the dev relevant “raging”.
For instance in LOTRO (which probably had the best community / least terrible forum in any MMO), one of the things they did was post dev diaries when they made changes to class balance, explaining the reasoning why they nerfed skill X or buffed skill Y.
unlike certain other mmos, you are not paying monthly. You paid for a full game, and the majority of it was finished, polished, and ready to go.
I don’t pay a sub for my car, if it had arrived in state this game did, I’d have my money back and the company would go out of business.
Now GW2 is not alone in the games industry in this respect, the industry as a whole is sloppy and it now seems regular practice to release half finsihed products.
That it does not have a monthly fee is irrelevant, it is a full price game (at the expensive end at that), that I assume will release paid expansions and it also has a cash shop, some games (DDO, LOTRO, etc) increased their revenue several times over when they switched to a cash shop model.
The fact is the game was released half finished, really I lost count of how many DE were bugged, or the sheer number of class bugs at release (especially on things like necro & engi), then there were the missing features, if you are going to talk your game up pre-release as an esport, then expect discontentment when you release a game lacking even the basic features needed for. This was all made worse of course by Anet repeating “when it’s ready” for years, it clearly was not ready.
To be fair to Anet it may not have been their choice to release then.
Then on top of that you have the speed at which things have been fixed, which is very slow comapared to other games, last MMO I played was Rift, they would at times put out 3 or 4 pathes in a week to fix bugs, yet 6 months in to GW2 and there are still many bugs in core things like class skills / traits and even basic class features missing, for eample that engineers have been playing without the weapon stats counting in WvW or PvE when you use a kit, is an absolute joke.
This is why you have “QQing”, if you prefer to make excuses for an unfinished product, that is your choice.
(edited by Sylosi.6503)
If you look at the dungeons forum section, you’ll see a dev who actually talks to players and explains his choices about dungeon design.
So developers do communicate with players. Just not with engineer playerbase.
Kinda poitless thread =\
EU Aurora Glade
There is however a flaw. Where are the most posts? That’s what I’ll be looking at. Necros and Engis have the worst time in game because of bugs, design flaws, and traits not being equal to their counterparts. If devs haven’t posted in necros and engis forums THE most out of all the classes to help us and let us know they are taking seriously the problems at hand then there is a serious problem here because we aren’t getting the answers we need, such as have they allocated more resources in the repairing of these two classes then they do with the rest since there’s a larger number of problems causing these classes to be quite unplayable in many a situation? Have they setup teams to re-evaluate the huge gap that makes the engineer class nowhere as powerful or easily playable as his adventurer brothers? (which I and others like me have brought up in multiple posts about the trait system and how it’s nowhere near the same type of traits as the thief and ranger which is part of the problem of both the weakness and lack of variety in builds with the engineer right now, as well as the inability for there to be any margine of error for the engineer [ie thiefs can build themselves to be defensive and healy and not suffer a tremendous dps loss like engineers do]) so there are many reasons to be enraged about the lack of concern. Just because they posted something recently doesn’t mean they are showing enough concern for the two most broken classes in this title or that they are allocating relevant resources to fix these issues.
Balance Team: Please Fix Mine Toolbelt Positioning!
If you look at the dungeons forum section, you’ll see a dev who actually talks to players and explains his choices about dungeon design.
So developers do communicate with players. Just not with engineer playerbase.
Kinda poitless thread =\
Kinda pointless post =\
The dungeon devs are not the same as the professional balancing devs. Your comparing apples to oranges.
If you look at the dungeons forum section, you’ll see a dev who actually talks to players and explains his choices about dungeon design.
So developers do communicate with players. Just not with engineer playerbase.
Kinda poitless thread =\
And here is the problem. The OP very specifically pointed out it is reasonably comparative in all of the profession threads. He even post evidence. Yet unreasonable people still make post like this, falsely exclaiming the engineer profession is unique in this issue.
Poor craftsman blame their tools. Poor players blame their Engineer.
(edited by coglin.1496)
It’s neither unreasonable nor extreme to expect them to fix the issues on the two weakest classes of the game over a 5 month period, to allocate resources appropriate to the task (ie more then two interns), or to expect more communications from their liaisons about what exactly they are looking at next.
Balance Team: Please Fix Mine Toolbelt Positioning!
OP said that devs don’t communicate with players at all and that it is expected of them to be silent.
And this is actually untrue, since we have a dungeon designer who is very open and tries to be in touch with community. So there’s no company policy restricitng forum communication.
And that rises the question of why don’t the class designers do the same amount of communication on forums. Players are right to be frustrated by abandonment.
And since engi is one the few professions that have outstanding issues in some game aspects it is only understandable why people want dev attention to our class.
But you can continue to pretend that “everything is fine”. Duck and cover.
EU Aurora Glade
Thanks to the OP for posting reasonable, non-alarmist stuff. There are certainly understandable reasons why so many engineer players are frustrated, but the correct approach is to calmly analyze the situation and enjoy playing a fun profession that is admittedly weaker in some areas of the game than some other professions.
Thank you also for not swinging to the other side and insisting that engies need to “l2p” or “stop whining.”