Announce post #3152: Classlead Changes

Autoposter

12/18/2020 at 20:47
Tiur, the Gnosis
Everyone
Classlead Changes

In preparation for the next Classleads, here are some changes you'll want to keep in mind!

1 report per person. This is going to cause salt, I know. But being as this is the first round I'm holding, I want only what people really care about to be what gets attention. I realize some of you will ask a friend to submit for you, but that's your friend's decision, and maybe it'll encourage us all to make more friends.

I'll be making them Anonymous. People letting their personal disagreements bleed into Classleads frustrates me to no end.

After this round we'll readdress the frequency of classleads, as I'll better know what I can handle. We'll also be considering increasing report quantity for people with a history of valuable reports/comments.

Onward to the forums thread!
-T

Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 7th of Chakros, in the year 492 MA.

Tetchta

Autoposter said:

1 report per person. This is going to cause salt, I know.

Xarian

1 report per person. This is going to cause salt, I know.

What's up with the constant preemptive passive aggressive dismissal of player concerns? Maybe some of us who have been around for a bit know that having 1 report means an instant arms race where nobody will self-nerf because they only have 1 report and why waste that. But I guess I'm just salty, that must be it.

Tetchta

Yeah "only one report" is "going to cause salt" the same way someone kicking you in the nuts is going to "cause salt." Obviously people are going to have issues with a six month balance cycle that also simultaneously cuts report volume by two thirds (unless we coordinate with others which, yeah, everyone loves group projects.)

Seems bad, especially since you'll have more time than ever to read tickets and code changes.

Illikaal

In addition to what was already said, my particular frustration lies in the fact I've been playing a class that's needed a ton of changes for a long time. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could make these changes, and lot of them were contingent upon one another. The 2 biggest and easiest examples being the Feather and Ice fetish for Shamans, where one is either overpowered or literally completely useless, and the other is just overpowered in most cases. These 2 things drastically need to be changed, but because of those changes, further adjustments to things like Omen, damage across the board, and other tools will also be necessary.

I can't do any of that with 1 report. Assuming the 1 report i'm going to get after a 6 month period will even get approved, leaving us in further limbo for some unknown amount of time. I'd have to ask probably 6 or 7 people to submit reports, but they likely have 1 report of their own that they want to push, or they may have had another friend request they submit a report for them.

But as was stated, and I think this is the biggest thing, is that you're not going to see people trying to fairly balance their own stuff in this environment. I certainly wouldn't waste a report nerfing myself when there are things that I perceive as too strong for the opposing tether, or too weak for mine. I'm not sure why i'm even posting at this point because it's extremely unlikely the impassioned pleas from the PK base of the game will be heard.

Czcienn

There is no way either Ascendril route can be fixed one report at a time especially when the design space has been so limited based on past classleads, so I want to get some clarification on this point.

If we can present a genuine problem but our solutions are not desired for whatever reason, will the report be rejected outright or will there be a chance for us to work together to come up with a more suitable solution? Basically, in the past I have felt a strong tendency to take a solution implementation approach to classlead decisions rather than a problem fixing approach.

Rijetta

Perhaps with one report per person we could do classleads monthly

Borminchia

yikes

Illikaal

Czcibor said:

If we can present a genuine problem but our solutions are not desired for whatever reason, will the report be rejected outright or will there be a chance for us to work together to come up with a more suitable solution? Basically, in the past I have felt a strong tendency to take a solution implementation approach to classlead decisions rather than a problem fixing approach.

After giving it a lot of though, this is probably my single biggest fear/frustration. Many of the problems I planned on addressing this round I addressed several years ago, but at the time they were not perceived as significant enough problems. They still are MASSIVE problems by and large because every solution got rejected outright due to not being favorable and or because they were believed to not be problematic.

Getting 1 report every 6 months only to get the classic "Well it's not a problem, and if it is we don't like this solution but won't come up with one on our own." is only going to massively tilt people.

Furthermore, when Nalus got designated as the shell with the suggestion to players that we should message it with combat concerns was bogus, because plenty of players (myself included) have sent the shell plenty of messages about plenty of egregiously broken things in combat to get absolutely 0 response. I feel that players should not have to waste reports on things that are pretty unquestionably unbalanced.

Iesid

I'm not that bothered by '1 report per person' on the surface - what it means is that comprehensive fixes will require that multiple players of a class or tether team up and address the issues together with multiple reports instead of relying on their three reports to carry all the water. Considering most of our reports get rejected anyways, it just means we've got to think very hard about what we're writing and submitting.

Please don't call me salty, by the way. It's like a restaurant telling me I have bad taste before I look at the menu. Please don't do that. Some of the players who submit reports are rational human beings that don't want to express rage in written format. Thanks.

My issue is with something else entirely: frequency. Six months is too long to wait for us to solve issues we found in month two of six or even one of six. At this very moment, issues exist on both sides and we have been putting up with them for twice as long as we usually do. I know people who are refusing to participate because it seems pointless. As others illustrate above, we have concerns that we're going to be dealing with these problems for another six months because we don't want to flood the board with reports on the same issue - especially combined with the problem of only getting one shot. If we submit exactly one report on an issue to make sure we cover more ground elsewhere, we might not get a serious issue fixed. If we spend more reports trying different solutions or explanations, we sacrifice multiple people's eloquence, experience, and the employment of their credibility on other issues just because we feel so strongly about XYZ.

You are putting us in a bad position from Day Zero with these changes and the next problem only exacerbates it.

We have absolutely no indication or guidance on how to address these inconsistencies and nor do we have any reading on the pulse of the admin's opinion because Nalus is still ignoring people's messages (see: @Stine sent a request multiple months ago and Nalus has STILL not answered him - @Tiur was even asked about this on the Questions Thread and we still didn't get a response) and thus we're taking shots in the dark. In previous cycles, Keroc would have at least provided a tacit opinion like 'nah I think this is ok and here is why' if I messaged him something - so long as I kept the salt to a minimum.

Please rethink the report amount and the frequency. The combat environment cannot grow or flourish like this. Things get stale too fast to only revisit every half year. Things become sore points and having to deal with them twice as long is going to take away from one of the greatest mechanical draws Aetolia had as an IRE: consistent and timely attention to their PK balance.

Bulrok

Are you going to take a different approach to class leads than Keroc has, then? Keroc sort of had a philosophy that if a problem wasn't relevant in the meta, then it wasn't a problem. But with class leads being /6/ months in between and us being limited to /1/ report, then I think all the problems presented need to be treated with the proper relevancy (assuming they're actually a problem). When I scroll back through logs of myself or my friends, I see people doing things like eating depressant to cure berserking over asthma, or ignoring confusion while disrupt locked, and bad prioritizing like these are leading to wins. So looking at win rates and ignoring problems that don't exist because the current roster of active fighters aren't experienced, and then dismissing the problem, is just going to generate even more frustration with the system.

Nisavi

I'm going to second @Bulrok's opinion that win rate is not a good indication of class strength since there is a fair amount within Aetolia's combatant population that are not fighting optimally. Read: their system has no mechanics in place for certain classes, using default prios for every class, has no custom prios for certain classes, prios are completely out of whack. Additionally, there are combatants that are just talented enough to make the most out of any class because of the aforementioned reason, but that can be used as logic against buffing their class because of the flimsy reasoning of: "Well, they're winning, right? Do they really need buffs?". Mjoll is a good example of someone who is going to win regardless of Carnifex's status, but that doesn't mean Carnifex is in a good state at all. In fact, I'd say that it suffers immensely at the highest end right now.

I'm of the opinion that we should bring the Liaison Arena back, for one, and that Aetolia needs a combat council for data feeding and testing. I get that people hate the idea of a "combat council" because it sounds like liaisons/classleads/etc. again but I'm not saying they're the only ones who can submit reports. I'm saying that there should be a group of established combatants who are feeding data to the administration to help them make more informed balance decisions and offering their opinion on reports. Right now, when I'm trying to test for mechanics, I'm doing the equivalent of black box testing trying to figure out/guesstimate how certain abilities are coded or what the damage formula is for certain abilities. Liaison Arena and a combat council can help mitigate that.

In essence: I'd like to see an Aetolian Combat Council akin to Achaea while everyone retains the ability to submit reports. I'm also fairly sure Tiur is going to take feedback from Keroc, Razmael, and any other Celani that might've been combatants prior to being in the Pools. My hope is that he will also solicit feedback from established combatants on some classes as well.

My greatest fear is classleads becoming an arm's race out of pettiness or spite, because after seeing one report where comments were made un-anonymous and revealed to be pretty nasty, I have a feeling that is where we're heading.

Bulrok

Does the most recent change mean that deleting skills is an option again? >:)

Illikaal

My concern is that the deletion/nerf of barrel was not enough, and that if any further reports get submitted suggesting further tuning down will be dismissed with "Well we already nerfed it so lets see what happens for the next 6 months."