Ideally, there would be several developers who played enough with max-level toons to keep in touch with the general issues in the PvP world, and who could then go back and compare subjective impressions with some hard statistical data.

Still, I applaud all signs of developer interaction and interest

I don't even know where to begin, lol. Even a professional chef has to taste his food.

He didn't write "Why don't the devs just cheat a character to endgame". This is kinda what we wouldn't be suprised if they did it.

The implication is simply that we expected that some devs would have played this game to endgame regularly, so they can actually experience all the little and big things that "regular" players experience.

I am not that surprised, though. I am not sure many of the devs even got much free time to play the game. At my own company, my boss occassionally tells us that we should use our program more as well, but - we sure don't have the time in our work hours. There are features to implement and bugs to fix! And I frankly am not that hot on playing QA on my weekends (we don't get Tribbles for where I work). But at least I don't have a family that wants a small slice of my time as well, and I have reasonable work hours. I get the feeling that Cryptic's employees are doing a lot of overtime and week-end shifts. And I would't be surprised if this is ultimately also the cause of many issues and bugs we have as well. At some point, the pressure is too big, the time to short and the concentration too weakened... May Perfect World's support improve this situation.

I for once appreciate every dev putting his head out there and playing with us occassionally. I'd love to see them play regularly, so they can get a more "natural" feel of the game rather 10v10 Organized PvP PuGmades. But unless Cryptic's pays its employees for playing the game, it comes down to how much freetime the developers actually have, and how much they enjoy playing this game, and PvP specifically.

I think Cryptic should do just that. Hire someone who then gets paid for playing the game. For an 8 hour workday, say 6 hours playing, 2 hours writing reports and answering other developers' questions about game mechanics "in the wild".

This knowledge about the game from actually playing cannot be replaced by (probably incomplete) knowledge of the game's code. We all know that even the "keeper of the math" at Cryptic doesn't know how his game is actually working - otherwise we would not have gotten an explanation of Accuracy vs. Defense mechanics which is rather useless for any actual purposes because it doesn't explain why/to which extent some weapon types are inherently more accurate than others. And there are other mechanics which the developers probably don't fully understand (neither do the players, but at least they know that these mechanics exist).
And finally: it takes actual gameplay experience to notice that some abilities (most prominent example: shockwave) are only used for a part of their effect - and all too often this is the part that doesn't vary between different ranks of an ability or is not affected significantly by spec.

Short of paying them to play, which I think would be a great idea, there are the forums which have a lot of the information they need. PvPers are going to find whatever flaws are there and they are going to be vocal about it. The problem is getting these concerns heard on a regular basis with a little more informative responses from the people we are reporting to. As it is, we can have these great discussions but we have no idea if anyone is even taking notice.

Yes, there is a lot of flack on the forums too. It's going to be hard to sort through but at the very least we can put up the red flags for otherwise hardworking folks who maybe don't have the time to play the fruits of their labor. On a side note, I think that's unfortunate. Even though there is a lot of room for improvement on this issue or that, it's still a very fun game with a lot of potential that they might be missing out on while working so hard.

:/

First off...

I think a DEV should play in active PVP at least once for an hour per week to check out whats going on in pvp.

We dont even have this..

Even in the PVP match, one of the dev's didnt even have a VA to join PVP in.

This is absolutely inexcusable. How can a dev determine what is broken and what isnt without experiencing it himself?

Is this what cryptic wants to tell us?
How does cryptic expect to fix and sell a game in which their dev's dont play nor has any ideas on how to fix?

And yes i have a screen shot of the DEV saying he doesnt have a toon high enough.

Is this really acceptable to you guys?

Have you seen any other dev, like in WOW without an end game character?


Dan needs to address this issue:

You never tell your customers that you dont have an end game character in a MMO.


You guys have no idea how much backlash this caused in our fleet.

+1 this... as i said this PVP match made a a lot of people mad when one of the DEV's said oops i have no end game character and was -15 to a fleet mate.

So yes, you can tell how mad we were when we saw that screen shot.
A Dev not have an end game character??? Is cryptic being serious here?

Ok i'm just going to add my 2 pennys worth to this.

For me i wasn't bothered about the Dev not having a end game character that didn't make a lot of differance to me in the slightest.

What mattered to me was he took up my challange to a pvp match, he showed up and spent time chatting to the players which was my main aim.

I spent some time after the pvp doing a pve mission with him he answered my questions and took interest in what i had to say that means more to me then if he had a lvl 51 character or not.

I can understand where your coming from and what your saying but i feel it was more important that he showed an interest in playing with us. Isn't that what everyone wanted???

So again Beltoram thank you for taking time out to join us.

I applaud the dev who came in game & faced the lions. Bravo.
I got respect for that, whatever level he was. Thank you for your time sir.