Stratics HoC Chat

[Diani]

And in a perfect world, we would get everything done so that there would be new questions... but well... the world is not perfect!

OMG...if there ever was an opertunity to use my favorite quote...

Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it. ( From Contact (the movie from 1997), said by dr Arrowway to Dr Drumlin)

[Xulan]

No offense to Maddoc, but these sound like copy/paste answers from what he's posted before. Several of the answers are identical to posts he's made in the past. Having said that, there's some new nuggets in there too. Certainly some material in there to chew over...

Though if I was a dev and was doing chats regularly, I'd probably have an open text editor with stuff I can just copy and paste as well =) Can't blame him for that.

[Verdandi]

And people wonder why the devs "don't communicate enough".

[Quseio]

One way would there to be special npcs in every City or area were there is more than one merchant, add a special "Trader"npc that only buys tradeskill tagged items, maybe another for quest items,

They would maybe only have bags and food/water for sale or nothing at all. Maybe pay slightly better for trade skill items than other merchs. Probably have to have a few of them at least

[KyrosKrane]

Out of curiosity, who decided which questions went through? In other words, does Brannoc work for Sony or for Stratics?

[Sharrien]

Actually, they can probably anticipate what many of the questions would be because the devs do read these boards. I'm sure they did some homework ahead of time and had answers ready. Some of those answers have not changed since the last time for whatever reason, so their responses are bound ot be similar to what we heard before.

I was glad to see so many tradeskill questions asked, even if there wasn't a ton of concrete info in the answers. (except my question about researching ldon spells wasn't voiced :cry)

Here's hoping "coming soon" means it gets rolled into the new expansion.

[KyrosKrane]

And people wonder why the devs "don't communicate enough".

Dandi, I think you misunderstood what I meant by my comment.

The whole point of a live chat is to get a chance to interact with the devs, to ask them new questions that require a back-and-forth discussion, and to get some idea of how the dev team itself interacts. One of the things that I love best about the chats is when the developers relax a little and start bantering with each other. This is also the reason that I enjoy meeting the devs at Fan Faires; they tend to be more relaxed than in the strict formality of a forum that's being carefully scrutinized. The chats are also a great opportunity to get some feedback from the devs regarding new issues that may not yet have a set response.

The selection of questions for this dev chat has me puzzled, though. Almost all of the questions that were posed to the devs were ones to which I had already read the answers on some forum or other. In fact, if you look at the questions and answers Nolrog posted, I think all of them are taken directly from the Top Ten list. (As an aside, the answer Maddoc gave to the question about rotating vendor stock is outdated; Tanker himself gave a more recent update that's in the top ten list.)

Given a grand opportunity to get new info from the devs, the MC instead chose to select "safe" questions with known answers. This may well be because no innovative or controvertial questions were asked, but I find that hard to believe. I guess I would have wished for some livelier questions or some debate.

[Verdandi]

I wasn't referring to you, or anyone in particular, Kyros. As I was reading it just hit me that if I were the one who had done the chat and then came to read this selection of comments, I'd wonder why I'd bothered.

Constructive criticism is good, but even the most hard-shelled soul needs an occasional thanks in the midst of the requests, especially when extra effort is taken to go out of their way.

Ngreth is in no way obligated to stay in touch with us like he has. I just want people to remember that we're dealing with real human beings who are doing their best.

[Xulan]

If one wants different answers, they should ask different questions. More specific, less broad questions.

[Ngreth Thergn]

I think the questions were just given in order they were received. Brannoc did not even pose the questions to us, there was another mod there that just spit out 2 questions when they were told to. We would get 2 questions.. decide who answers or if we skip them. Then I am assuming brannoc cut and paste the question and one of the dev's answered.

We got presented with 24 questions, and answered 22 (so only totally skipped 2 of them, and one of those was a question we had already answered in that very chat. Becuase of the format... it is posible they were both sent in before the first one was answered)

As for the back and forth... while that might be nice... it does not work. The dev cannot get a word in edge wise with "free chat"

[Maddoc-the-Wayfarer]

No offense to Maddoc, but these sound like copy/paste answers from what he's posted before. Several of the answers are identical to posts he's made in the past. Having said that, there's some new nuggets in there too. Certainly some material in there to chew over...

This wasn't an intentional copy-paste routine, believe it or not -- Most of the questions that were asked had been answered relatively recently and by me, so the answers were still pretty fresh in my mind.

Tanker's response was just from the last thing I remember being posted, so if there was newer information, then I apologize for that, I must have missed it somewhere along the lines.

Ngreth is right, with some of those specific answers being given so recently, they've not had a lot of time to change just yet.

The whole point of a live chat is to get a chance to interact with the devs, to ask them new questions that require a back-and-forth discussion, and to get some idea of how the dev team itself interacts.

Ideally, a back-and-forth type chat would be a great way to go about hosting the chats, however... When you've got literally hundreds of players, all with their own ideas, agendas, and lists of questions... It's generally not the most conducive discussion-oriented environment.

With these chats, we try and get as many questions as we can from the players, field them as quickly as possible with very solid answers, and then let the discussion disseminate out to all of the various forums that we read on a daily basis.

Given a grand opportunity to get new info from the devs, the MC instead chose to select "safe" questions with known answers.

The fantastic people over at Stratics don't choose the questions -- They receive them from the players, and then post them in a secondary channel for us to discuss / review / choose to answer.

As Ngreth mentioned, 22 of the 24 questions posed to us were answered, one of which went unanswered due to being a duplicate question.

If one wants different answers, they should ask different questions. More specific, less broad questions.

I guess I would have wished for some livelier questions or some debate.

Livelier, more specific questions are always welcome -- The debate / discussion tends to go on outside of the chats (Like the EQForums, EQTC Forums, etc), due to the reasons I mentioned above.

All in all, I'd say the chat went well, there was some good information presented, and... I think there were more tradeskill questions asked in this one that in any one previous to it, even if they weren't as specific as you may have liked.

-- Maddoc

[KyrosKrane]

The fantastic people over at Stratics don't choose the questions -- They receive them from the players, and then post them in a secondary channel for us to discuss / review / choose to answer.

Then I guess it's my fault for missing the chat. I had some RL stuff at that time, and there was no way I could make it.

Having said that, in retrospect, I'm not sure what questions I would have asked...

[Nolrog]

OMG...if there ever was an opertunity to use my favorite quote...

Funny, I've always believed that the world is what we make of it. ( From Contact (the movie from 1997), said by dr Arrowway to Dr Drumlin)

The world is what you make of it friend, if it doesn't fit, make adjustments. said by the bar wench in Silverado.

[Nolrog]

As Ngreth mentioned, 22 of the 24 questions posed to us were answered, one of which went unanswered due to being a duplicate question.

Both of them my questions. I had one about LDoN re-envisionment that Loral asked in the beginning, and one about whether we will see bear shaped cookie cutters, that I'm still waiting for an answer on.

[KyrosKrane]

Nolrog, you're going to make the SoE halflings mad -- they keep insisting that we should get halfling pie recipes, and you keep refusing to put them into the top ten list. You didn't even ask about them at the dev chat! /grin