Feldon 
All In Moderation
The official support forums for any product must, by their very nature, present a good impression to potential customers. The forums should put the company’s best foot forward. The EQ2 forums have had their fair share of technical issues. But if customers criticize the product, this should be seen as an opportunity for Community Management, Developers, Designers, and Management to respond to these issues and show that customer feedback is valued. To avoid misunderstandings, Community Management can be a great liaison between developers and players.
It is also perfectly reasonable that personal attacks, cursing, and inappropriate comments are removed from official product forums. I also delete such comments when they appear here on EQ2Wire. However, when valid criticism is censored, and only glowing praise remains, then can we really trust the forums to provide a neutral, accurate view of customer opinion?
I’ve noticed a transformation in the management and moderation of the EQ2 forums in recent years. Part of this came about as the volunteer moderators who had been hand-picked from the EQ2 player community became employees of SOE. But moreso, it seems that valid player feedback is now removed if it does not shine a positive light on SOE. This is the type of thing that led to the creation of renegade sites like EQ2Flames. It also leads to a vicious cycle where feedback becomes ever more negative. Players become even more jaded knowing that their feedback will not only be ignored, but likely deleted.
Recklessness
Game Update 64 included many positive tweaks and fixes for PvP as well as the migration of Class Foci from equipment to the Character Traits window. However it also included a perplexing change — the introduction of the Recklessness stance for Fighters.
The moment Recklessness appeared on Test, players loudly voiced their opinions about how unbalanced it was. Chief amongst these concerns were how it took away player choice for Brawlers (Monks and Bruisers), did little for Warriors (Guardians and Berserkers), and disproportionately boosted Crusaders (Paladins and Shadowknights) who are already ahead of the curve. As with many Class Balance and Mechanics changes, Recklessness received minimal justification for its inclusion and almost no followup discussion about its intended purpose.
Monks and Bruisers lost their hard-won Black Widow Stance which allowed them to walk the line between superior avoidance and the increased damage necessary to sustain the enemy’s attention (agro). In its place, Brawlers received a redundant DPS stance. Three choices became two.
Guardians and Berserkers, who continue to struggle despite various tweaks, saw little benefit to the new stance.
Meanwhile, Shadowknights and Paladins found themselves in the enviable position of putting out significantly more damage with almost no drawbacks for choosing to go Reckless.
Over the last few weeks, we have seen some improvements, including the removal of Block Chance from Fighters in Reckless stance.
A Contentious Debate
The contentious introduction of Recklessness has been eclipsed by the mayhem wrought on the EQ2 Forums. No less than six threads were created on the subject, several of which were closed due to rule violations:
- In Testing: Reckless Stance
- In Testing: Can we please change Recklessness to be fairer to all tank classes?
- Since Fighter’s get Recklessness, what the point of a DPS class now?
- Reckless Stance is not solving the problem it stated it would.
- Is this what reckless stance meant to do?
- Reckless Stance
After seeing the closure of so many threads, I sent Community Manager Dexella a PM suggesting that players ought to have SOME outlet to discuss this change. Apparently she disagreed. On Monday, she put a one month moratorium on any discussion of Recklessness:
This thread has been locked.
The Recklessness Stance is a contentious topic and the continual threads on the issue have led to a significant amount of forum guideline violations, including trolling, personal attacks, and cross-posting.
Any repeated posting on the Recklessness Stance over the next month will be locked as well, and the poster may be subject to action (warning or possible suspension). Consider this a cooling off period for the debate.
Constructive comments about the perceived effectiveness/ineffectiveness of the thread have been noted and passed along to appropriate parties.
Thanks.
EQ2Wire Asks
Do you think enough has been done to adjust Recklessness to balance it between the different Fighter classes?
How big a deal is it that Brawlers have lost their “middle stance”?
Do you feel that everything that needed to be said on the subject has been said, and further threads are unnecessary?
Was Recklessness a good idea poorly implemented? Is it fine as-is? Should something different have been done?
If you’re a fighter, does Recklessness help you in group or raid situations?
Brawlers over time have not had any buffs for the group that are just up. In DoV we got the option to get Combat Mastery, but if we need to be defensive then there are other options we need to be taking. So thus we still do not have a group buff. the reasoning that we don’t have a group buff was that we had the Middle Stance. now we don’t have the Middle Stance or the Group Buff.
As a raiding brawler I don’t find myself missing the Middle Stance, but I still wish we had something to replace it, since most brawlers spent time and Plat getting it Mastered.
I think that the no talking to the player base is going a lot further than just with Reckless, but this highlights the problem very well. I think that if the Dev’s don’t start having an open dialog with the player base, then WE the PLAYERS need to go on Strike. I am not sure how we can organize it, but something needs to be done.
since one of the posts mentioned is mine all i have to say iis this the damge output is still way too high imho and as tanks get higher end gear and going into the next expansion it is only gonna get owrse since reckless is percent based so as tanks get mot potency there damage will go though the roof.
I feel as though Recklessness is well balanced for what it is. Alot of people who don’t play a tank as a main complain about the dps boost. What they fail to understand is that most tanks take a huge hit to incoming damage for that dps boost. Also more dps is better dps for raids and other grps that once they have a tank in the grp will not want another tank in it. This new stance allows us tanks to fill a dps roll in a grp situation or even a 3rd or 4th tank spot in a raid.
As a healer, I can attest that Reckless is still broken when it comes to the balance between increased damage and decreased survivablity, at least for SKs. While my tank spikes occassion if the get ALL the adds while in reckless, it is not significantly more work to heal the tank and still put out 140k+ dps on my healer.. while the tank is competing with the t1.5/t1 dps
My monk is my main, while he raided religiously through SF and for a while in early DoV, he’s back to mostly solo; just as he spent most of his in game life prior to SF. Black Window was the first T9 and the first T10 CA I researched on him. He tanked many an SF raid in Black Widow; it was a comfortable balance for the healers and for aggro. That went out the window with DoV but it was still what my monk ran in groups and solo, nearly exclusively. Now while most monks wouldn’t have run it raiding, Black Widow as the “go to” stance for many a solo and grouping Monk. What rationale there could’ve been for deleting it no one ever said. Figures.
Completly useless on my guard. All it does is get me to die faster with little increase in DPS.
On my SK I run it all the time now, doubles my DPS and no side effects.
On my Monk almost doubles my DPS and puts at t1 dps on many fights with little to no side effect.
Heck I tank in recklessness most of the time and only ever notice it if someone is taking more agro that they should. DPS agro is king.
Overall I love doing more dps on my monk and sk, but irritates me for my dps classes. 🙁 A monk with the reckless stance is easily a match for swashys, brigs etc on dps and keeps up with many t1 dps classes as well.
On a side note, I don’t post on EQ2 forums due to the heavy handed banning over even the slightest perceived insult to anyone at SOE. They need to get teh sand out because there is nothing on there that I care about. It is not even a useful palce to go anymore.
Valid and awesome post! GJ Feldon!
As a zerk, the dps of recklessness is almost non-existent because our CA’s are very low damage wise. I only go reckless when we’re clearing trash mobs, but again, dps isn’t much of a large boost. I def would not consider a reckless tank for a replacement of DPS unless its an SK though.
So yeah, once again, SK is the prized golden goose of EQ2’s fighters.
I play a paladin as my main and recklessness barely helps. I can kill trash mobs a few seconds faster, but I need my Inquisitor merc to keep me alive. I can solo those same mobs in my defense stance. Recklessness isn’t useful or wanted.
I love the DPS boost on my bruiser. When I raid my DPS is t1 for sure. There are still some classes like assin and Beastlord that will top me on long fights. I noticably take more damage in this stance which is a good trade off. Now the thing I dont like. Why take away our middle stance? Now I have an extra DPS stance that will never get used. Not like is was really ever used anyways.
The problem with recklessness is that it gives too much flexibility to the fighters that it works for. My #2 is a Shadowknight, so I’ve had a chance to use it quite a bit. He gets a substantial boost in DPS and retains better survivability than any DPS class. If fighters are going to be gifted with the ability to go into a high DPS mode, then all of the other classes need to be given the ability to go either into high DPS (healers) or high survivability (scouts and mages) with a similarly small loss to their primary function.
I can’t comment on Recklessness as,although I have several characters of the affected classes, I ceased playing the game in January when the PSS1 deal was announced.
I can, however, commment on SOE’s current moderation policy and it stinks. Someone can make a comment on one board and it is accepted and responded to by a red name, but make the same comment on another board and its deletion is accompanied by a ban for forum rules violation. While you may be free to make a critical comment on a major topic only the “pie or pizza?” part of your post will get an official response and the major point will be disregarded totally.
SOE have learnt nothing about community management since Brad McQuaid first posted on the early EQ board that he realised they needed to up their communication skills. That was followed by the Ubisoft debacle with EQ’s European players (which mistake they’re making all over again with PSS1). A few years later we had John Smedley crying crocodile tears over their mishandling of the community with SWG:NGE, and now they’re at it again with the PSS1 deal and any other critically received issues like Recklessness.
What SGW:NGE showed is that the only language that SOE understands is the language of the cancellation button, nothing else matters to them and they carry on their own sweet way regardless of what the people who pay their bills happen to think, despite all the “we’re listening”, ” we value your feedback” baloney.
Rather than being concerned about people making disparaging remarks about the product, no matter what it is; SoE should take notice to the lack of any, or diminishing number, or comments regarding changes/fixes/additions, etc.
If customers lack the passion to even post about the game, it will drive the final nail in the coffin faster than having people who are upset.
Obviously, the Beserkers who are complaining do not know how to play their class. I’ve seen Beserkers in Recklessmess Stance put up 300+K on some fights, so this notion they didn’t receive a boost is completely wrong
I’m wondering that, for SKs at least, if making their heals & heal procs not be affected by potency (which, admittedly, would probably over-nerf them) would go a long way to balance out reckless stance. I say this without logging into my SK to check how much the potency difference helps on heals. Maybe it needs to also include a ~20% mitigation debuff.
if tanks need a treat to justify their existence during trash…they should have gotten either group utility or something to boost the MTs dps so he could handle aggro better and dpsers could pull out all the stops.
the idea that quicker dead trash justifies reckless is idiotic. boosting any classes dps (fighter or not) will give this result.
you know something is wrong when they are talking out of both sides of their mouth to justify it. (both sides = 1) offtanks need purpose on trash without adds 2) trash needs to die quicker)<—those are not the same problem. assuming they are gives 1 single archtype a boost for bragging rights on parse.
i wouldnt care if the mt was outparsing the warlock from ot buffage, because it would be a multiple person job to get that number, and it would only work for weak hitting single targets. but instead of just the mt blowing up the parse, reckless gives any nontanking crusader t1 dps.
I can’t believe you could possibly for any reason what so ever say no you can’t talk about this game mechanic. That is as ridiculous as it gets.
I honestly don’t think there is a problem with Recklessness, and I think most of the perceived problems are just that, perception. /shrug.
Brawlers loosing their Strikethrough immunity was a much bigger hit then loosing the mid stance.
exactly..
szah the major imbalance is not about the heals, but you bring up an excellent point.
crusaders have crazy dps potential now, as well as a massive jump in their ability to heal themselves.
lol @ szah thinking keeping heals the same is “over-nerf”.
Feldon,
Your posting hit home considering they perma-banned me this past week 😉
Weird moment when the graphic used for this post is also my desktop image…
I am sure feldon will get perma banned for posting this 😛
Come in the water is fine although a storm is coming (http://stormlegion.riftgame.com/en/).
Seriously though Rift gets better all the time, the developers talk to the community through the forums. Oh and guess what Customer Support actually supports customers (promptly and fairly too). Forums are lightly moderated and the community comes together to group and raid.
I just cant understand why you all do not move on and put your money in something that is growing instead of persisting throwing money at a game and a company that is failing.
As SK, when i first saw Recklessness. I have think some colored thing about how it’s unbalanced and really not need. For me the SK is a cheated class from long, i leaved my Guardian for guild group for SK, because the SK dont need healer at all and tank as good as Guardian. But now he can dps as good as ranger and assassin. Sure it’s balanced.
I m SK so, i took the gift on the good side, but i really dislike to see tank use this for … tank, sometime they die one shoted, that force healer to dps less for allow the tank to dps more, bit unfair for healer and for everyone.
We have a word here :
In Democratie it’s you can always talk we dont listen
In Dictature you dont have right to talk …
SOE is more and more a dictature.
And it highlight something else (again)
The aggro issue “DPS agro is king.” the threat component are less and less inline with the dps, so his removal for pay the extra dps is not balanced.
And threat should be % like heal are. Taunt are useless beside positional one.
For sk instead of remove taunt, remove heal from it… SK will cry lol.
@Atan
They’ve really perma-banned you from the forums? Damn.
This is a frustrating issue. About 4 months ago I placed a post on the forums about being trade scammed during a trade Plat for SC. The EULA (EQ2 Play Nice) states “You may not defraud other players. Fraud is defined as falsely representing one’s intentions to make a gain at another’s expense. Examples of this activity include, but are not limited to, using deception to deprive another player of items or coin” I placed this in a post alerting other players to report when they had been “trade scammed”, as SOE defines it.
It was up for two days, then SOE locked it and shortly after it was gone completely. The post simply had a few replies from others saying they had also been trade scammed and some thanked me for the EQ2 Play Nice URL that showed it was a violation to be defrauded by another player in this fashion.
The thing is, game department heads (managers) are adjust official SOE policies and since such activity goes unknown by those in a higher position, they make their departments look more efficient by passing over tickets that would otherwise require a GM to invest anything more than “15 minutes”. Since the department managers all know each other and work closely, it doesn’t take much for them to assist each other when their integrity is being questioned.
In short, anytime you create waves of any type, whether justified or even in conjunction with SOE official policy, your post will be edited/locked/deleted so that a department can maintain their impression that they’re doing their job within SOEs strict performance guidelines. This of course ends up hurting their paying customers, but keeps their department (game) managers and game CSRs (GMs) looking good to the higher ups.
Also our SK parse out most, and Sometime all DDer on Trash/Nameds, if he dont Tank. So i think Reckless is Overpowered, the T1 DPS part Should be A DD-Class based Feature.
i was last night in a Pickup Sky4 X4 raid, raidsetup was..
MT Group: SK/Dirge/Coercer/Swash/Defiler/Inquisitor
OT: SK/Dirge/Coercer/Warden/Inquisitor
and both DPS Groups was: SK/Fury/Troubadour/Illu/SK/SK.
Also we had 8 SKs on the Raid. Surprise Surprise the DPS parse was domanited by SKs, the big Surprise The SKs are doing much more DPS then some DDer on my RF.
Sorry for my Grammatic, English is not my native language
As a guardian I see minimal benefit from Recklessness. The monks and Shadowknights win out on this one easily. In Skyshrine raid content my monk with HM Drunder and PoW gear in Recklessness parses 600k depending on the number of times Dragon Fire refreshes in an encounter. My guardian doesn’t touch that and the guardian is my main and really geared. The raiding Shadowknights with the same level of gear as my monk/guardian in an encounter fight should and will parse higher than my monk does every time.
The stance was never going to be balanced across the tanks. 600 potency for my guardian does a minimal boost compared to the Shadowknight. My guardian has two abilities that are dots and they are very small. Its CA/Spell dot that really gets amplified in Recklessness in my opinion.
If the developers wanted to make trash clearing go quicker, they should lower the mob hp.
Two comments:
First, You better better archive those SOE forum threads .. they are going to he deleted and lost forever.
Second: Reckless is not the current problem with EQ2, the Moderation and community stifling is a much (MUCH) bigger problem than a cruasder posting big trash parses.
In raids on my zerker, i can parse about 20% more in recklessness than in offensive stance and only 20% if it’s an aoe fight where partisan cleave gets the big boost from the potency. I’ll parse about 10% higher versus single target mobs.
Yes, it helps zerk dps, if you aren’t parsing at least 10% to 20% more with ease i suspect a CA reuse/auto attack timing issue.
It’s amazing for blowing up large trash pulls of 5 or more I can do 500k ish if 5 mobs, 800k to 1.2 million dps on netherwing pulls in UD zone/raid. It’s really just a toy for trash mobs for me.
On bosses it’s near useless though because you cannot tank a raid boss in reckless. (how it should be in my opinion). I will sometimes start in reckless but switch to other stance partway through if i have to tank something but it’s really not worth the risk or the hassle.
Survivability in it is very low, how it should be.
My only issue with it is the unequal bonus different fighters get from it. Potency helps me very little with a big drawback. Why it’s not crit bonus for example instead of potency i don’t know, all tanks would benefit from the cb increase.
That being said, i can tank UD regular zone in reckless with good healers and outparse most everyone, but then again those are aoe fights and we shine there.
@Mermut – yeap perma ban confirmed by SoE management, not just the 3rd party mods 😉 I’ll no longer be sharing all the exploits and dupes I find with them any longer.
As far as reckless, I think its a dumb idea to begin with, but if its going to be in the game it should do something measurable for any fighter not tanking. Currently warriors only see about 10-15% increase and that isn’t noticeable to anyone but ourselves. (I’m excluding silly large trash encounters that really don’t matter).
Introducing it didn’t solve anything, and it only further upset players and pit them against one another. They’re not commenting on it I suspect cause they see it the same way as well. Any comment will only fuel the fire, and they have no intentions of changing it to affect all fighters in a significant way.
The only thing that irritated me about the whole thing is they were not open and honest about their goal, what they were doing, and what they wanted to achieve. They comment publicly stating one thing when they know their executing something different.
While off-tanking last week’s raid I noticed what I thought was a new Beastlord in out ranks, parsing 2nd on the entire zone. It cam quite a shock when he rolled on a fighter only item and I saw he was in reality a SK.
My groups assassin wasn’t pleased to say the least… his comment was “First Beastlords and now Crusaders, I might as well quit.”
I hate the idea. I play a Pally and am happy enough in defensive stance doing 80 – 100K + zone wide. I don’t think Crusaders should be allowed to dps better than tier 1 dps classes.
And I just read Atan’s post above.
Just another sign that the game is almost dead.
As a Guardian, I barely see an increase in DPS with recklessness stance, the only thing i do notice is that it takes away the only real benefit of being a Guardian… The defense. I feel like a paper tank that can get in a few more hits before my hp’s start spiking the wrong way… SK’s & Monks win big time with Recklessness. Tanks outparsing Assassins & Casters just seems a bit unbalanced to me… but i know the SK’s & Monks are loving it, so i don’t want to rain on their parade 🙂
As a Brig, the only real thing i can say is bleh… I’m just totally disenfranchised playing him now. There really is no advantage to my pointy sticks and my DiZpAtCh. My DPS is now trivialized with tank recklessness. Can you tell i’m a bit jealous? yeh, i guess I am, but it’s hard playing a game for 6 years, tweaking this, tweaking that, and then an update of game dynamics makes other classes just blow by you with a press of a button. It pretty much wiped me out
I guess i’ll go roll a Monk
I quit posting in the official forums. I got tired of trying to bang my head against the wall until it was bloody trying to reason with folks about things, only to get warning and then some for being and I quote “too negative”
SOE does not want the truth from their player base, the want us to yes man up.
Reckless is broken we have 3 tanks in our raids sometimes, I will not give his name but he goes reckless the entire time and guess who dies quicker than I can put a heal on him, personally he is the worst tank in the game, and why we raid with more than 2 tanks is crazy. I was glad the last time we raided he was not in my group I was in the off tank group.
The problem is there is no such thing is T1 t2 t3 t4 dps any more for the most part. =p
there is DPS and Templars =p
they just made it into some kind of e peen contest with dps and took out everything else. When was the last time you actually had to mez an add. or when simply MORE DPS did not solve everything. (if skyshrine is any view of the future =p)
Since SOE Live/Fan Faire is more than a month off and the moratorium will be over I wonder if you can mention it there. Would they just have security remove you from the premises?
Good I hope those pesky customers learned their lesson, if you complain about a negative change you get more negative changes.
I’ve been banned from the official forums 4 times now, two of those times I was threatened to be permanently banned, I no longer even visit that site, it’s not worth the time, if your post isn’t “I LOVE SOE SO MUCH” then have fun with your 3 day ban and nearly ALL of your posts being deleted for virtually no reason.
Oh have fun reading the lulzy “Please post constructively” PM with a post full of constructive feedback linked below.
@lempo Nah they would take you to the basement and beat the crap out of you then take you out to the desert and dump you.
Yeah I got several temp bans from the forums the last few weeks one was calling holly out on when the hell they would bother to fix classes broken mechanics and the absolute garbage gear itemization…I was banned for trolling…another was for a discussion in the pvp thread on DG being an exploit…I give up really doesnt matter if the topic is reckless (which still doesnt make much f*cking sense why they wasted dev time on this) or state of the game….it seems they intend to go the pay to win route and fluff aka SOEmote (I mean really 5% of the total population will even try this let alone use it constantly yet lets waste precious dev time on it) the mods and Dexella can all get bent bunch of tools as for polesmoker, holly and the dev team they can get f*cked.
@Daalilama “….it seems they intend to go the pay to win route and fluff aka SOEmote (I mean really 5% of the total population will even try this let alone use it constantly yet lets waste precious dev time on it)”
Recognise today’s EQ2 for what it is – namely, a testing ground for EQNext.
I imagine they wouldn’t have you escorted out, Lempo, but they would flatout ignore your question even if you were given sole spotlight during a Q&A to ask one. They’d say something a politician would say, “That’s a non-issue,” for example and move on.
I’ve been banned around 30 times on the forums now. They threaten to ban my actual game account for posting on the forums. They don’t want truth on the forums, they want a collection of sycophants to praise their wisdom. Christ.
F*ck SoE forum mods. They locked the server merge thread because it was a “one month necro post”
My question is, when the players ask about Recklessness at Fan Fa . . . err “SOE Live”, are they going to have security drag us out, are they just going to avoid the questions, or are they going to get our badge name and ban us from the game? Yes, extreme examples, but I can’t wait for the shit storm that’s gonna happen when this question is asked at the discussions panels . . . and it WILL be asked.
It will be asked and they will say “we will take a look at it” or something like that.
I doubt they will do anything more than that. unless they actually say something. Last thing they want to do is start a fight at fan faire lol
The forums have been complete and utter crap for many years now, run by a bunch of adults that can’t take healthy criticism. It’s pathetic.
I can save people the fare to SOE Live. Here’s an exclusive preview of the answer to a question about Recklessness:-
“It’s working as intended. Next question?”
I guess I know that the EQ2 Lead Dev’s will never respond to these comments and problems expressed by the Player Community. I just think that they must…. because it’s the right thing to do as the leaders of the game.
First I quit posting there. Then I quit reading there. I just come to this site for important info now.
I agree the forums have been mush and overmoderated for a long time. However, I’ve had moderate success on getting things in the game changed by a combination of championing causes, shining a light where problems lay, and most commonly simply shaming them into it.
Most of my posts that upset them were designed by me to be an opportunity for them to speak up. There is nothing I liked more than to be proven wrong, as that meant they were taking care and fixing things or at least paying attention.
I had intended to do a player run panel on Guild Management at SOE Live, but I simply can’t be inspired to put the work into that when they feel my presence on the forums is too negative.
The fact that you’re even going to SOE live with Sony being as bad as they are baffles me, Atan.
Bleh, comp’d room and rewards airfare, and honestly even then I’m considering canceling.
The primary reason I’m still going is to meet up with some friends I’ve not seen in a while.
Ah, the sense of community that derives from SOE’s games. I understand that fully, Atan, how sad that SOE don’t understand that at all.