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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6067017">I'm not sure why people keep making this claim, when damage numbers are a simple externality, not a "fundamental game" thing.  I mean noone has actually mentioned anything fundamentally wrong with DDN.  The entirety of the problems cited have nothing to do with the fundamental structure of the game.I hate to Rules Lawyer here, but "several" means nothing, a long-time follower of Mark Rosewater from the MTG side of Wizards, you learn that "double the number of dinosaurs" is pointless if the original number of dinosaurs is ZERO.  Furthermore, WOTC hasn't said they're several packets ahead, only several WIP's(or similar language), they don't even MAKE a playtest package until they're ready to give it to up.   This is absolutely NOT how BETA tests work.  You develop a rough framework for the game, you start adding on this and that, some of those things develop faster and easier than others.  It's not a linear progression from A to Z, sometimes F gets finished before D but after Q.  AND: if WOTC "stuck with something" until they got it "absolutely right", it would negate the whole point of the playtest!  You can't playtest Fighters without having Wizards in the game, you can't playtest 1-5 without some vague idea of where 10-20 might be. It's VERY common, almost every beta test works this way.  Even before they release the test package, the devs are already finding new bugs, errors and trying out new ideas.  So by the time we actually get to see the test package, developers are already two or three steps ahead of us, having found a great many of the problems with the system as-is already.  And yes, sometimes even things that seem to be set in stone will get changed in later test packages, and then once the game comes out, those things might not even be included at all!  This is pretty typical for bets tests.It's possible, and to be fair I wouldn't blame them if they did!  It's exactly what we asked for, we wanted more say in the development, we wanted more communication with developers, so when we ask for the moon and they deliver it to us, it certainly is our own fault when we find out it isn't made out of cheese.A base mechanic for WHAT?  I mean you all keep claiming DDN lacks these mystical "base mechanics" and "fundamental" things...but you haven't mentioned anything specifically other than damage levels, which are neither base mechanics nor fundamental, and are very easy to tune up or down with little to no impact on the game at large.Why does Wizards go a different route?  I don't know, why does anyone every bother to try anything other than the norm?  Maybe because...they want to?  Because they think it's better?  Hey it's nice that you think these other guys have the right ideas...but here's a surprise, the world of ideas aren't limited to what those guys have already done.Honestly I do not feel as badly about the playtest as you do, it doesn't feel jumbled or like a mess.  The majority of the packet is pretty clear, and oh no...there's room to abuse a 9th-level spell?  Well it's a 9th-level spell, so no surprise there(thank god for 4e and getting rid of this sort of crap entirely).I'm not sure what's wrong with the spellcasting mechanic other than it's an interesting hybrid of previous systems.  ANd I suspect that with how much we've seen martial damage dice change, it's possible they may not be a Core, fundamental element, and might simply be an interesting option WOTC is playtesting early.Fixed that for you.  I really would appreciate if you would stop  presenting your opinion as fact.  It's detrimental to the discussion.Here's an example from my betatesting past.I  tested SWTOR early on, it was a very rough game and there were  particularly glaring issues in it's development.  I was upset and felt  like we were getting yanked around by the devs when non of the "obvious"  stuff changed and lots of weird other things were made even worse.  So I  quit for about a year.  When I came back to testing I was astonished at  the game I was looking at.  Not simply because it was so much better,  but because it was so different.  Aside from still being Star Wars, it  felt like an entirely different game.  With "sometime in 2014"  as a release date, which will no doubt be moved to 2015, WOTC may  produce a product that is utterly unlike anything we are playtesting  now.You sound like you are getting burned in the way I did, so I  really suggest you take a break from it.  Kick back, take a back-seat  and just watch from a distance, or don't watch at all.  Check back at  the end of 2013 and see where WOTC is on the project.  I think you will  be pleasantly surprised.</blockquote>

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