1641

mail should be instant, but there are times when I lose my items in the mail and that’s permanent.

1642

aww but my gatling pistol…

When i was waiting at the mail console thing, someone did warn others around to be careful because the mail system was acting funny.

1643

I have lost and bugged three completely full mails of stuff (15 items). Now, it wasn’t anything other than twink or research material but still. Ticketed and updated each time, no response. If the mail is going to work, it goes fast; if it isn’t, it will hang in the “sending message…” but never complete.

I think the limited beta wasn’t a bad idea as a specific test tool in order to work on certain things. By the time you are just a few months away, though, these things need to be coalescing together. In this case, it just appears that what was designed for wasn’t acceptable to people with the power to say no, so no you are trying to shoe horn a different game into the same box. Reminds me more and more of what I heard about SWG’s development.

1644

if be nice if there is a credit for champion online, so we can actually see if they have any internal QA team at all.

1645

Yeah when i sent it to hanged on sending message. bah and i looked for that gun for so long.

1646

Yeah, that’s what’s kind of dumb about not being able to get into instances if you’ve completed the quest (or can’t find or don’t want to find a group after doing it).

1647

Sounds like a real winner. :pSee you all in Cataclysm in a while. ;)

1648

That’s still what, a year away?

1649

Dude, you’ve bitched about WoW more than everyone in this thread combined have bitched about CO. And you’ll bitch about Cataclysm, too.

1650

I just realized something. That dev chat said 1 level would ideally let you respec back 5 steps, not choices. If i remember right, a power choice is 3 steps and a trait choice is 2. So if you never respec or buy anything and only spend money keeping your crafting skill updated, you will ideally be able to respec your character once during its lifetime.

Fuck you cryptic.

1651

I’m done with WoW for now.
In Cataclysm I will level to 85 to get the lore + probably level a Worgen and mess with the Goblins then stop again.

I bitched because of the easy-mode in WoW but I accepted that this is the road Blizzard has taken and most people incl. QT3 seem to prefer.
So why bother any longer? Time to tend to my enormous backlog.

I’m only wondering how other companies think they can compete with the 5.000 pound gorilla in the room by screwing up their launches etc. Either make it right or stop wasting development money in something that has no chance.
Or go a different road like APB or maybe “The Secret World” want to try.

1652

Are you citing Funcom as a company with good launches?

1653

Wait, what? Where are you getting that a power choice is 3 steps? If you take Power A right now and then go immediately into the Retcon screen, you can undo that power. The only problem is the order in which you take things. So if you happen to want to retcon a specific power or trait, you’re stuck also having to pay to undo everything you’ve chosen since then.

1654

It is how cryptic determines how expensive respecs are. You still respec one choice at a time, but the cost is based on their step system so (if i remember right) characteristic focuses are most expensive with advantages being least.

What they were saying in the dev chat basically comes down to ideally people being able to respec 2 choices each level more or less. i’m 75% sure powers were rated at 3 steps (it is listed somewhere on their forum), but this is semi useless information unless you care a lot about how the cost of respeccing one type of character upgrade relates to another.

1655

Their step-cost respec system is determined by character development system with its framework power prereqs.

Unfortunately, you may just want to undo a single old choice, and that’s just as expensive in this system as undoing all your choices from that old choice forward, which is extremely annoying.

Assuming you can get behind Cryptic’s desire to encourage alts and not repeated remakes of a single character, within the current character development system, it’s not easy to avoid the respec approach they wound up with.

On the other hand, this just points out how bad the base character development prereq system is.

Seeing as many of their powers already work together with other powers in the same framework and are gimped or not as effective when chosen independently, they could have just junked the power prereqs and gone with simple level restrictions instead. In that scenario, respecing individual powers could be done independently of a full respec. The lower level powers might then be cheaper to undo, not more expensive, since they are after all less powerful.

1656

I gotcha, but let’s say I undo a power that’s a pre-req, couldn’t the game do the math and warn me, showing me the true cost? It’d still be pretty complicated from the end users perspective though.

They should really have a way (beyond funds or microtransactions) to earn a respec in game. They also say that the general amount of money is way too low right now, which if they fix might resolve some of the respeccing complaints.

1657

Yeah they could do that, but again, they probably tossed that respec UI and logic together 6 months ago just to get something working, put an item in the schedule for “do a proper respec system” and it’s still there somewhere, with 10 other priorities ahead of it just for the UI guy…

At present, it seems like the only thing most players can actually do with game resource money is to buy respecs. Despite the item system, I still don’t see much evidence that Cryptic has a clue about in-game economies.

1658

Not being able to preview weapon designs is an effective money sink as you need to pay each time to look at different weapons and if you want to change the color… well, you will be paying quite a few times.

1659

Yeah, giving everyone bags and consumables, and the focus on stat heavy items anyone can wear, with plentiful crafting components, shows that. It’s really designed like a single player game in that regard. There’s really no reason to trade with someone unless they have a rare costume piece (or you picked the wrong crafting specialty for your character) and even then there doesn’t seem to be many of those and you really can’t “farm” them like you can in other games. Plus, the way items are designed there really aren’t that many trade offs. You basically focus on your primary stats or shore up some secondary (which is what I usually do).

1660

On a related note, this free respec was wonderful. My power armor-clad toad is now 40% more awesome with the proper superstat choices.