Five on Friday - April 14, 2006
1. I have seen things on my server, where a specific pair of guilds cheat without ANY interruption from GM's. I have a friend that used to be in the one guild, and he said that a couple of the members were GM's. My question is this: Is there any internal audit system for GM's??
GM Silvani: Yes, all Game Masters are actively monitored, and we hold our employees to the highest professional and ethical standards. Everything that a Game Master does is logged. We encourage players to report any misconduct by an EA employee to GM Reviews. GM Reviews are answered by our senior staff; we take each and every email sent in very seriously and each report is fully investigated.
On top of our GM reviews process, we have a quality audit that is done weekly. This audit includes our senior staff as well. If anything is found through the GM Reviews or through the Quality Audit it is addressed quickly, to insure quality and fair customer support.
If you have a complaint about a particular member of our Game Master staff, please fill out a GM Review here.
2. Will a Non-Bushido Melee Character ever be a viable choice again?
MrTact: Consider this 6-slot melee template: weapon skill, tactics, anat, healing, parry, resist. Using that 7th slot for Bushido (or Chiv, or Ninjitsu) offers abilities that enhance your melee damage; NOT taking one of those abilities means you are giving up that extra damage. So will a melee character that doesn’t take one of those skills be competitive with one who does, based solely on damage output? Probably not. We’d have to resort to some extreme game design gymnastics to make that possible (e.g. items that give a damage bonus but cannot be used if you possess one of those skills).
There are some other axes we could balance on, such as how much damage you can absorb. That was the rationale behind tying armor to a skill, but people REALLY didn’t like that idea.
The basic problem is, not every skill has equal usefulness. That’s been true for a long time, and it would take a lot of effort to fix it (and would probably tick off quite a few people).
3. Any plans to make hunger/eating work correctly and be useful again?
MrTact: Yes! This is part of the reason Remove Curse apples are overly useful - because you don’t get full quickly enough.
4. I thought the scroll stacking issue was being fixed in Pub40, but I don't see it in the list. What gives?
Wilki: The change list we posted earlier in the week is not a complete list of everything that is in Pub40, rather it's a list of what's currently on the test shard. We're still planning to have a fix for scroll stacking in Pub40.
5. Division Rules Sosaria?
Inu the Crone: That's what it says, doesn't it? You people are dense!