Another area perma flagged for PVP?

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To keep the combination of the two discussions going I'll continue my example from the other thread for this situation. Now I dunno whether my friends lied to me or not, but they said that in order to level up optimally, while also having a chance to get some nice gear, we'd need to run the same dungeon multiple times. There were other ways of doing things (and I used those), but they were so damn suboptimal that I got laughed at for doing them (mainly quests and just some general mob farming outside of the dungeon).

So while the game did present you with a choice, it was kind of a false one, unless you were completely fine lagging way behind anyone who you played with.

And this was the most successful mmo in history, still on its rise (that is tbc times). Now iirc you've criticized WoW's design before, but this was mainly just an example of a game that goes against your opinion yet was super successful.

Or did I misunderstand and you meant that there should just be several ways of doing thing, no matter if they're not equally fast/lucrative/exciting?

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Well then I hope Intrepid don't fuck up. And I'm glad you'll be there to tell them not to

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Nah, he's not the only one. Mostly, the people who point it out don't do so all that often. Anyone can go look at the Intrepid "Careers" page, and see that same "Senior Systems Designer" posting that's been up since Jeff Bard left over a year ago.

Jeff was on every livestream. We haven't even heard the name of a replacement. There's been a lot of "Still hiring people! Please apply! Tell your friends to apply!", though.

There's really no insider knowledge required.

They post a job posting with highlighted positions that they are trying to fill on their twitter every month. Consistently. Sometimes twice a month. Lead Systems Designer. Lead Economic Designer among other things are always there. Always highlighted. These are two core positions that would have had a big say in the open seas change as they are directly related and would have told Steven how to present it to everyone. Without them it went about as well as it could have. The fact that he's making such decisions without these core positions feels very strange to me. But at some point you need to make decisions to go forward.

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I saw it as just Noaani's opinion on the matter. And even if I personally like the change, I was also quite shocked when Steven announced it because it is in fact a huge part of the world that has a completely different set of rules of existence now. And I definitely see how and why someone would be quite displeased with this change.

But I'd really have to see their plans for open seas content in order to really understand the reasoning behind the change. If they plan to have a ton of mobs in the water that a ship full of PKers can easily grind to remove their corruption and those mobs are in bumfuck nowhere, then, yeah, corruption at sea wouldn't really matter either way.

But if there's only a few bosses and a few fishing spots there (with maybe underwater treasures) - I see no real point in changing it to ffa pvp zone other than the "AA had it this way" one.

At which point we come to Dygz' supposition that this change came directly from Steven due to there being no Lead Designer to argue against said change. And I personally agree with Dygz' point because I remember quite a few moments during dev streams where Steven and Jeff had differing povs on things. And while Steven would often say "nah, this is how it's gonna be", the sheer fact that the povs were different would indicate to me that outside of dev streams there'd be a long discussion about that design point and Jeff might've just not wanted to undermine his boss in front of thousands of people by arguing against that point.

And now that the Lead Designer is gone we have Steven who keeps saying "this is how it's gonna be" and pretty much no one there to say no or to at least argue why it might be better to not change the design direction. Now, I agree with Steven's design for the most part, mainly because he comes from the games that I myself loved (or would've loved in case of early AA), but what I love is obviously far from what most people love so I think it's not the best situation when every design change follows my preferences

But as we all keep saying, we gotta test it all in alpha, otherwise this whole discussion is somewhat pointless, outside of the sheer fact that we show Intrepid that there's people who're dissatisfied with the change.