Civility
I don't know why I always let this happen, but it seems like whenever I get into the game again, I invariably find myself on the forums, then sucked into some steaming pile in GD. Then I feel guilt and shame. I didn't come out of a blissful retirement to not have fun, and GD isn't really fun, so I'm not going to go there anymore for a while. If you're interested in having a civil, mature discussion about the game, I'm down with that, and I guess Gameplay is the place for it. (But after this post, I'm going to try really hard to spend my limited time online, building and randomly RPing with unsuspecting victims, which is reliably fun.)
Transparency
I'm sympathetic to calls for transparency, and I wouldn't mind seeing the small group of diehards we have left rewarded for their immense investment of time over the years by being consulted about the direction of the game and generally kept in the loop. But D, whose game this has always been, does not really support this idea. He's been very clear that this is not a democracy, and none of the players are entitled to know how exactly how everything works, nor must they be privy to every change, nor must they even be consulted. So it's a fine line. You have ideas, and some of them are good. Many of your good ideas have been implemented or put on the road map or at least discussed on the IMM distro. Otherwise good ideas may not line up with D's vision and are dismissed out of hand. Heck, D dismisses my ideas all the time. The point the staff keeps making in various ways is that if you want your good ideas to receive serious consideration, make a compelling case in a respectful, constructive way. And if they're rejected, take it in stride. For my part, I'm all for improving communication, but when there's a huge QQfest any time any aspect of the game changes, however tiny, well, I become a little more sympathetic to D's point of view.
End Game
So here's what I can tell you about the comprehensive efforts to audit all gear across the mud. There are 3 primary goals:
1) Enforce a more consistent and steeper risk/reward system for gear strength.
2) Reevaluate the utility of gear in light of the enchantment changes. (Way overdue.)
3) Create real challenges for PvE end gamers, with real rewards.
The goal is NOT to implement an "easy" button. The goal is NOT for every player to be able to obtain any piece of gear with a minimum of inconvenience. Casual players will have access to solid, not great, gear with a minimum of fuss. Elite players will be rewarded for their eliteness. You can whine about how hard it is to put together the sort of group you need to fetch some of the absolute best stuff in the game now, but for many players, challenge is fun and challenge is memorable. If that's not for you? Fine.
Here are some details:
1) We've codified the risk/reward numerically. I can't tell you what the algorithm is, but I can say that fort/ref/will/ap are weighted heavily, as are the levels of spells cast by object scripts. We have a pretty good idea of the kind of gear players like the best, and we think you should have to put in more effort to get the best gear.
2) D doesn't want there to be an abundance of fort/ref/will/ap gear in the game. It's as simple as that. There will still be some awesome fort/ref/will/ap gear, but it'll be rare and hard to get. At the same time, we're going through the huge pile of mp gear and varying it. Some of it is ending up with ap, particularly in places where, thematically, it would make sense to have smiths who know how to embue gear with ap. (HINT.) If this means that chars with "I win" spells will become overpowered, start a new thread to discuss that. I can tell you now that the solution will not be to reintroduce tons of easy to acquire fort/ref/will gear.
3) Mundufisen has a point. I haven't run any groups in end-game areas for ages. I'm a fossil, after all. But the staff has sat in on many of these trips, and we're making tweaks to end game areas with these first-hand observations in mind. The portable portal objects allow a level of circumvention of challenges in end-game areas which was never intended when the portal creators thought to themselves "ooh, what if we made a door objects with a wear_take flag? that'd be neat!" So these objects are being nerfed. (As an aside, if your decision to return to the game or not is dependent on one piece of kit, I have to say, I think you're doing it wrong. But that's just my opinion.) At the same time, a huge pile of gear has already been buffed in just the last week or two, and efforts are ongoing. We also noticed that most of the coolest gear in the game is evil-only, so we're rectifying that by adding even more cool good-only gear via an end-game area expansion. Already in the game, but it may be a while before a typically-newb lightie party figures out how to get it. That's ok.
So this is the direction we're going with the gear audit. The audit was needed, but I wish we'd been able to effect these changes uniformly instead of piecemeal. Now we're making up for lost time, and the promised buffs are happening, rapidly.
As with every change, we'll see how things shake out for a while, then make adjustments as necessary. I'm sure you've already noticed that I re-buffed some of the gear I nerfed in Taslamar, buffed a few things and added some new stuff, too. It's a fluid process, but by the time the mud dies, we'll have it right where we want it.
