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[Air]

A) Very, VERY bad game design in reguards to AV. Things in your world that your players can fight should be able to be killed.

Not necessarily true.  EQ had The Sleeper, and it was fairly popular.  There are countless examples back in the MUD days, too, but things were more chaotic in general then.

Well, the Sleeper was eventually killed... with a few expansions worth of preparation. If I recall, there was a big hullaboo when a GM despawned it after he realized that they were *actually going to be able to kill it.*

Wow, that's some fucked up shit, bro. So what happened?Did the GM get fired?

[Defenestration]

Well, you have to realize. The Sleeper was originally designed to be completely and utterly unkillable. One time server event. Basically, at the end of a specific dungeon, there were these four bosses in the same room.

If all 4 are rendered dead, The Sleeper spawns and *fucks you up.* Hit for a ludicrous amount of HP for that point of the game, OHKOed at random, and a bunch of other shit. Then he flies around the whole world and kills every major boss and some other stuff. Pretty cool event, really.

A newer server set up, however, and all the major guilds agreed to not spawn the Sleeper. Always leave one of those four bosses alive. A bunch of expansions later, they bring pretty much everyone on the server and kill it. A whole group of clerics was chain rezzing out of combat to pull it off.

But yeah, DM saw what was happening and hit the "oh shit!" button and despawned it. A bunch of crying and forum posts later, SOE agreed that it was messed up, and reset it so they actually were able to go in and kill it.

And that's the overly long and boring story of what I was told happened.

[Air]

What happened when they killed it?

[Alex]

Did you refuse to play FF7 because of Ruby Weapon?

When was Ruby Weapon unkillable?

I mean, aside from when I first played it when I was 12 after it first came out and I was terrified that the Emerald Weapon would jump me even if I was surfaced in the sub.

[A²]

B) Even worse game design as to how the breaker was handled - immediate removal of it. No. Bad. You do not punish your players for being clever. This is, in my book, wrong. No exploit was used. In WoW, a boss, Drek'Thalar, has two guards with him, who are lesser versions of him. (They have very powerful attacks). Drek is extremely, EXTREMELY difficult to kill with those two. The most common way to kill Drek? A Hunter gets Drek's attention, and then backtracks halfway across the instance with him in tow, while the rest of the party quickly kills the two guards. Once they're down, the hunter Feigns Death, causing Drek to run back to the main party, where he can be killed with relative ease. This is creativity. Creative analyzation of monster behavior, and creative use of player abilities.

And, just so I get my turn at being an insufferable cunt: The Drek'Thar kiting strategy had nothing to do with Hunters or FD and was pretty clearly intended (lol yelling flavor text).  General Drakkisath was never mechanically hard enough to need the strategy though it did make the fight easier; people are just ridiculously bad at the game (lol Holy-spec Fortinbras outDPSing Rogues)

I messed the names up. I did AV a whole bunch and loved it, and was forced to do UBRS a whole bunch and loathed every minute of it. I meant the UBRS boss, sorry.

Also: Echoing the earlier sentiment that paco is taking this shit way too seriously.
EDIT: To clarify: Please do not call me a "stupid cunt" when I would like to have an intelligent discussion about this.

And yeah, Ruby Weapon was never unkillable, Brentai.

[Brentai]

See, and I even originally did a strikeout and replaced it with "FF6 because of Guardian", but I figured I could get my point across without some jackass focusing on my choice of a more accessible metaphor.  Thanks for reminding me why I can't give you guys any credit.

[Doom]

Also: Echoing the earlier sentiment that paco is taking this shit way too seriously.

That's sort of a coward's way of not admitting that he's right.

[A²]

Also: Echoing the earlier sentiment that paco is taking this shit way too seriously.

That's sort of a coward's way of not admitting that he's right.

Well, I'd like to discuss it more, Doom - I still feel that the way Square-Enix handled AV was really fucking poor. But if I'm going to get called a "stupid cunt" for attempting to discuss it, I really don't want to discuss it.

[Detonator]

Also: Echoing the earlier sentiment that paco is taking this shit way too seriously.

That's sort of a coward's way of not admitting that he's right.

Well, I'd like to discuss it more, Doom - I still feel that the way Square-Enix handled AV was really fucking poor. But if I'm going to get called a "stupid cunt" for attempting to discuss it, I really don't want to discuss it.

Well, then say that instead of pretending to be too cool to argue about vidya games.

[Brentai]

This has been a WFE thread.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled Splash Tits.

[A²]

Also: Echoing the earlier sentiment that paco is taking this shit way too seriously.

That's sort of a coward's way of not admitting that he's right.

Well, I'd like to discuss it more, Doom - I still feel that the way Square-Enix handled AV was really fucking poor. But if I'm going to get called a "stupid cunt" for attempting to discuss it, I really don't want to discuss it.

Well, then say that instead of pretending to be too cool to argue about vidya games.

Done.

[Arc]

I've gotten way too old to take arguing about video games on the internet seriously enough to worry about how I look doing it.

No shit.

[Pacobird]

Alright, then.  You're getting on to a larger issue of players using unintended game mechanics to trivialize content.  My stance is that it doesn't bother personally me because my priority when raiding is to get out of there as fast as possible but at the same time I do not begrudge developers for fixing those mechanics, because that's what they are: fixes.  I base this opinion on the fact that my general apathy has not completely eclipsed my sense of reason and rationality. 

My response to you saying "everything about AV is handled poorly" is "k".  Once again: nobody cares about AV and was happy to just ignore it completely until the Pandemonium Warden drama happened and for five minutes FFXI caught public attention.

[Alex]

See, and I even originally did a strikeout and replaced it with "FF6 because of Guardian", but I figured I could get my point across without some jackass focusing on my choice of a more accessible metaphor.  Thanks for reminding me why I can't give you guys any credit.

  But all of us have played FF6, so it'd have been totally accessible!

And less likely for Lyrai and I to be 

[A²]

The fact that no one cares about AV because of how it was designed, to me, is a problem in of itself. It speaks of a severe disconnect between developer and player, and is in every way a bad thing to have.

My thing here, with Absolute Virtue, is that I see a company fixing a badly designed boss with an even worse designed fix. Couldn't they have just made Absolute Virtue immune to HP Drain? I'm to understand that Square-Enix has fully intended this boss to be beatable - apparently videos are floating around of the dev team fighting and beating it, except with the actual strategy parts missing or blurred out. If it's fully intended to be beatable, and yet no one's beating it without gamebreakers in 4 years, there is something very wrong there, and it turns a lot of people off. The whole Pandemonium Warden thing was very much bad press, in the terms that several dozen potential customers went "Wait, this game has bosses like THAT? No way, I don't want to play that"

Now, sooner or later, someone's going to bring up WoW and it's balance issues, so I'll state my opinion on that now.

WoW (Vanilla, to the latest patch before Burning Crusade:) A mess. The head designer is a man who goes by "Tigole", if memory serves. He headed one of the super uber hardcore guilds in Everquest. Every time new content would come out, they'd rip through it in seconds, and demand anything harder - and the developers would comply. 0.1% of the playerbase was being catered to, at the severe expense of the other 99.9%. He heads (headed?) design for WoW, and in turn, the best, brightest, flashy most hurty stuff was for that 1%, leaving the other 99% of us wondering what we were doing
Burning Crusade (up to the latest patch): Now we're getting somewhere. Someone internally realized that catering to 1% meant that 99% of the people are thinking about not giving you money. There are still hard things to do, but it doesn't require hours upon hours upon HOURS of raiding, discarding all that's fun about the game to make your numbers higher, and watching the clusterfuck of 40 people listening to a 12 year old with a Napoleon complex.

Wrath of the Lich King (Beta): The hard stuff is still there, but it's very clear Blizzard realizes they made a mistake basing the game off of Everquest (Cater to TEH HARDCOERS ONLEY) and are very much working to keep the actual large playerbase (Those who play it for 2-3 hours a night)

Full disclosure: 70 Mage, Played Beta, quit halfway into Burning Crusade. Did PvP up until Knight rank, did Blacksmithing/Engineering, raided Molten Core & Onyxia.

So yeah, I guess at the core of my argument is that I have a severe problem with too much content designed for a fraction of a fraction of the player base. Nothing against hard challenges, but some of it is just God damned ludicrous.

[Defenestration]

But... Naxxaramas was the best WoW raid ever. Right?

[A²]

But... Naxxaramas was the best WoW raid ever. Right?

No.
No. No. No. No no no no no no.

As a Level 70 Deep Fire Mage, I walked into Naxx and unloaded everything on the first trash mob I saw, doing well in excess of 10k damage, and it's lifebar did not BUDGE.
This was a TRASH MOB, and there are at least a few hundred of those fuckers in there.

[Air]

AV would be a cool esper though.

[Doom]

As a Level 70 Deep Fire Mage, I walked into Naxx and unloaded everything on the first trash mob I saw, doing well in excess of 10k damage, and it's lifebar did not BUDGE.
This was a TRASH MOB, and there are at least a few hundred of those fuckers in there.

... Do you even know what raiding is.

[A²]

As a Level 70 Deep Fire Mage, I walked into Naxx and unloaded everything on the first trash mob I saw, doing well in excess of 10k damage, and it's lifebar did not BUDGE.
This was a TRASH MOB, and there are at least a few hundred of those fuckers in there.

... Do you even know what raiding is.

Yes, I do. Like I said, I've been in Molten Core and Onyxia. 10,000 damage would take a noticeable amount off of ANY of the mobs in there, barring the bosses. The fact that it didn't even budge what was the lowest of the low in that instance screamed "Gigantic Waste of Time" to me.