Dark Knight Megathread

[Shurrikhan]

I highly admire your optimism

Why do you keep passing any position that doesn't think that repeatedly restated grievances, especially if given in contexts that could only make those complaints seem less reasonable, are of sufficient benefit to be worth overshadowing most other avenues of discussion as... naive optimism?

Such has very little, ultimately, to do with optimism (nor naivety, for that matter). It's not even a primary factor.

[Malthir]

Why do you keep passing any position that doesn't think that repeatedly restated grievances, especially if given in contexts that could only make those complaints seem less reasonable, are of sufficient benefit to be worth overshadowing most other avenues of discussion as... naive optimism?

Such has very little, ultimately, to do with optimism (nor naivety, for that matter). It's not even a primary factor.

Fool me once applies here.

You would totally have a point if some of these "grievances" were only from the last expac. Sadly that's not the case.

We complained about living dead immediately: no response from Dev
We complained about the removal of parry: no response from Dev
We complained about the living shadow: no response from Dev
We complained about new darkside: no response from Dev
We complained that our aoe rotation doesn't get completed till level 70: No response from Dev
We complained that they removed abunch of actually useful abilities we likes: We got a response, O we are deducing actions pressed, then they added extra moves we didn't like.
We complained that building our class around TBN was not fun especially since you didn't get it till like 70: No response from Dev
We complained, We complained and on and on.

While I agree that with new issues like how squishy we should give the devs benefit of the doubt however after a certain point you lose that benefit. They have screwed Drks in every expac and instead of addressing anything what did was; look guys we gave you a new move attached so salted earth, ruined carve and split and abyssal drain and now made that ranged move you barely use a core part of the rotation o and by the way it's still a spell suck it.

[Lyth]

...

Restating a complaint doesn't alter its merit.

While you can't expect anything of a damage balancing patch, you're just seeing the symptoms of a deeper problem of the development team that doesn't engage with player concerns. They seem happy enough to ignore many years worth of feedback about issues in Living Dead's design, for example, as long as it stays out of sight in these relatively obscure forums. But if you look at the influencer front, it's always 'Oh, Square Enix is really receptive to player feedback, their development team enjoys playing various jobs in their free time and directly talks to the playerbase to stay in the know.' That's a nice ideal to sell, especially if they're willing to put in the effort to live up to it. But sooner or later that bubble will burst.

When Warcraft was at its peak, their class balance team regularly made blue posts on their own forums. One of the things that really impressed me about Koji Fox on first impression back in ARR was seeing him take the time to make lore posts directly on the forums and interact with people. I know that nowadays that level of interaction from devs is impossible in games, with every bit of communication probably needing to be triple checked and filtered before being released. But I do see smaller game devs who have more to lose spend a lot more time answering player questions and talking about game design philosophy behind balance decisions. I hope that SE revises its communications strategy with the playerbase, because this current approach won't retain players in the long term. A revolving door approach only lasts for so long before even prospective players catch wind of trouble.