Another practice in futility (in General)

This is just getting insane... Where is this game headed? It's impossible to have a discussion that even borders on an argument, cuz as soon as people step out of line, rather than punishing offenders, threads are locked. I raise a legitimate point about something that is wrong with the game, and am told by a dev that it's not important because it doesn't affect many people for very long... And someone is taking advantage of a crap game mechanic for the sole purpose of sabotaging my character growth, and that's just fine... Sooo... Really? No, really?

+1

I agree about thread locking but....

"And someone is taking advantage of a crap game mechanic for the sole purpose of sabotaging my character growth, and that's just fine"

???

http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002s4q

Hatch, what specifically are you talking about?

You raised some point some time ago about thread hijacking, and I remember posting that I received your message. I followed it up with something on the admin forum to get admins to be more proactive in fostering good communication.

Now, for the past while, comcast has felt it neccessary to bounce me offline for all but a few minutes at a clip. So, I haven't been online much. I get the feeling that I missed something. Or a lot of somethings.

Care to bring me up to speed?

I'll let Hatch speaks for himself, but the problem seems kind of simple to me.

Instead of punishing people ruining the conversations with flaming/insults and just being silly, admins are locking entire threads to end it.

As in, instead of dealing with the people causing issues, they just remove the place in which the trouble is occuring, whether or not the topic itself was valid.


Remember in school when a kid broke something, the teacher punished the class by not letting anyone use it again? Same thing here. Instead of punishing the kid who broke it, we all lose it.

what exact threads are you talking about? The one TP posted isn't locked, if that is the one Hatch even is alluding to?

it's a 3-part whine...

Part one, GW summed up pretty well.

Part two was here where I brought up the issue that tattoos were not growing where the only thing stopping them was being named. Rather than debating my point, I was told that it didn't affect many people for very long and shouldn't be a big deal. Meanwhile Zenai lost 4m worth of potential tat growth from this recently, and I've missed out on about 2.5m (Really rough guess, could be off by as much as 1.5m in either direction, but i think that's about where it is) for the same reason.

Part 3 is in the thread linked by TP earlier

I can see what you mean by #2 and #3, but when you say GW sums it up on #1, Hatch, neither of those threads are locked? (unless they were previously and someone unlocked them?)

Kevlar, I think this is what he's referring to:
http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002rlA

Hatch,

About your 3 parts.

1) I too was shocked that thread became locked. The party(ies) that were getting heated were spoken with by an admin via CM about toning their rhetoric down. Except for a couple of heated comments, I thought the thread was fairly amusing.

2) If the developers believe the naming on the tattoo is not a problem or a "feature as desired" one can become upset, even mad. But it is a feature the developers want, even if their reason is not what you want to hear. I have been in that situation multiple times myself.

3) The score dropping has been made to Jon and NSs attention. Obviously they feel there is no pressing urgency to fix it. I can see their point of view as one can drop ones score in a few other manners if one really wants. So they fix this "bug". Then that person can drop his/her score in another manner. So you get upset and try to get that way fixed, and so on.

I know how you feel bud. I utterly hate the drop system and yet others believe it is the best thing since the wheel was discovered. I despise the exbow and yet others believe it has a place in CB.

Unfortunately we all cannot agree on everything. However, I do see where your coming from and hope at least the Tattoo Naming issue can be fixed, as your reasons for getting it fixed are quite lucent and understandable. And in the right.

I don't know of any other method to drop score as effectively as this.

The only thing remotely capable of reproducing this would be someone with a Decay Decay Decay Decay w/RoBF team down low hitting an AMFless weaponless tank over and over and over, and that would take many many fights to achieve the same result.

Gimping your own character with a MgS and making a thread about it works pretty well.

I think the problem is that it takes the same amount of score from you no matter how much you untrain. Of course, since it's purely a malicious act(in no way advantageous to yourself), adding more of a cost may not stop people.

You're incorrect, untraining a token attribute does not lower the score to near 0.

Gimping a char with an MgS still requires many fights to get a score down to near 0, often over the course of days.

If we add more of a cost to untrain, that hurts the entire community.

Other ways to drop ones score is just disequip your weapon from your tank, unequip any tattoo and attack someone with decay and a RBF. Or even a mage.

Or as Cube stated, equip a MgS and ask people to suck score from you.

While this is a cheap way to lower ones score, it is not the only way.

Unless we close all "loopholes", things like this will keep occurring.

Do we punish 3/4ths for equipping a MgS and hosing over the entire score system for a few days? Of course not.

Neither of those have the same effect this does, the score actually goes somewhere in those cases, in this instance it's simply gone as a result of the exploitation of a known (and reported) bug

Very true,

Did not think of it that way. Complete score loss to the entire system.

Is it a bug? Or just a current 'feature' we don't like?

bug... I've not seen anyone claiming seriously that this was a "feature"

It's actually listed on the Known Issues page and hasn't been removed by Jon or NS, that suggests to me it's just waiting to be fixed and exploitation of it should not be allowed.

As I reread this thread, I agree more and more with Novice.

What happens in this "feature" or "bug" is a complete loss of score to the entire system.

With other methods of lowering ones score, other people gain score so it is a Zero-Sum event.

The best solution to keep it a Zero-Sum event is to have the program keep a track of your score just before a retrain and adjust it by the exact percentage of VPR you lose.

I have no idea if that is possible with my limited programming knowledge.