Honestly people, give it a rest. The forum has been one huge pit of negativity, and if you keep focusing on it you are going to sour the game even if SE does fix it. This is nothing compared to things other MMO's went through; how'd you like server rollbacks instead? Or bugs that instantly killed your character each time you log in?
If you don't keep it in perspective, you are going to not be satisified no matter what they do. Do you honestly think if SE told us they planned to nerf enfeebling you'd take it any better? People here keep bring up nerfs that have been in the past for years.
Yeah, transparency is good, but you all were ******** when sage sundi was answering questions too. And in other mmo games like warhammer or darkfall pr people are transparent and still hated. Go look up Tasos for example.
Just give it a rest, and if it still bugs you, vote with the feet. At this rate all the playerbase is doing is setting themselves up for disappointment. Here's a commentor from brokentoys about shadowbane:
Wanderer wrote:
Shadowbane was doomed to fail, and not because of its non-vanillaness. Its fate was sealed before launch by its own developers, and the nails were hammered into its coffin by the live team.
How easily we forget, in our nostalgia, waiting for hours to get into the game because the login servers had the kind of programming error college students make in Network Programming 101. I quit several months after launch, and the problem with people being randomly teleported to 0,0,0 (the bottom of the ocean) where you drowned and lost all your stuff had not been addressed. How hard would it have been to put something there that automatically teleported anyone who arrived there straight to Khar?
There was the problem with Trees de-ranking, and the one with buildings vanishing, that they couldn’t fix because they had never written the logging and admin tools to even find out what the problem was. Their was their initial stubborn insistence (finally overcome just before I quit) that they were never going to offer any type of respec; if they changed the way things worked, you could just level up a new character, and of course the first people who leveled up, who had to figure out everything from scratch, deserved to be punished for such audacity with permanently gimped characters (why they thought people who came for hardcore PvP would be eager to spend a couple of weeks grinding a new toon to R6 every time they got nerfed eludes me).
We forget the Rolling 30’s finding a godmode switch in the #$@%# client and wreaking havoc with it, and the admins being unable to spot the problem, let alone fix it. We forget their approach to restoring normality — instead of rolling back the server 3 days, just rolling back any toon the player asked for it, so of course everyone gave their stuff to an alt or a friend and got the rollback, for a fine company-sponsored dupe. We forget the incredible cluelessness of a company that completely failed to comprehend that any game needs a supply of new players to replace those lost to attrition and churn… and Shadowbane’s new players never made it to level 21 past the gauntlet of newbie-gankers outside Khar (though there was some amusement to be had in ganking and robbing the newbie-gankers).
How long did it take the live team to fix that delightful problem where, if a pet bit a guild city guard, all of the guards in that city promptly proceeded to attack each other in an orgy of slaughter that ended only when every single guard was dead? (usually requiring the city’s owners to be frantically running around killing them as fast as they spawned)
There was the scandal about how siege engines were released, and the business of the GM’s giving one faction in a formerly balanced and fun civil war access to an indestructible demon city. Everything the live team touched turned to sludge. Hell, how many times did they change /stuck, never really succeeding in making it useless for exploiting until long after they made it useless for getting unstuck? And this in a game where walking up the stairs in one of the inns on Newbie Island was almost guaranteed to get you extremely stuck, with your body downstairs and your head upstairs.
Or the crafting NPCs … no, we don’t play to bake bread, and we also don’t play to spend an hour junking out the stuff people sell to our NPCs. A “junk all†button was just not hardcore enough, I guess. There was their decision to set the cost of repairs exorbitantly high. If you PvP, you are naturally going to get hit, and sometimes going to die, and there was at least a 4:1 ration of PvE:PvP time. That is, of course, leaving out the whole idea of paying for city maintenance. We wanted to Play to Crush, not Pay to Grind. We could have done that in EQ, and baked bread besides.
What ffxi is going through is still bad, but we really need some perspective i think, before the griping gets terminal. We really have it good compared to many MMOs.
