Champion's 3rd level Feature "Blade Ally / Blessed Armament" Errata?

[thenobledrake]

Squiggit wrote:

... Which is why nonspecific defenses and "no one can really agree" arguemnts feel kind of toxic. They rely on abstracting reality away to present a position that can't be argued against because it's grounded in nothing.

The problem here is that you're doing the very thing that you're pointing at as being the problem with what I said.

In order for it to matter that someone has been waiting "six years" we have to in a non-subjective manner determine that the question you frame as being important is actually one of genuine importance... which I have to say doesn't seem like is likely in the case you're talking about because your framing suggests that it wouldn't be plausible that the vast majority of groups have already plugged in what they believe the thing "should" work if they even experienced an issue in the first place and have been playing the game just fine for the entire six year time period mentioned.

What you have done in your response is illustrated exactly what I was talking about; the issue, whatever it is, that you're talking about you are willing to frame as a thing the company is screwing up because they didn't answer the question you wanted answered with the kind of answer you wanted (lack of response, including lack of acknowledging the question has been asked, is it's own kind of answer) within what you felt was the reasonable time frame to give such an answer.

Companies that make games are basically damned if they do and damned if they don't on this kind of thing. If they stay out of the situation they get negative reactions for lack of communication. If they communicate they invariably get negative reactions to that communication. Fanbases suck at self-recognizing this kind of thing too, so people genuinely don't realize how/when they are being unreasonable with stuff like "they said X and it hasn't happened in Y time, so clearly they were lying" or even just "I asked a question and didn't get a response" and acknowledging that a reason besides the company sucking at what they do exists for that case. Y'know, like asking a question that puts the team in the position of having to carefully consider how to answer so as to provide understanding to a customer that doesn't have it yet isn't insulting to that customer's intelligence in the way that answering with a page reference for the location of the relevant rule that isn't even uncleanly written that the customer is misunderstanding (or even understanding, but not liking and asking about to try and get it changed) or saying the question doesn't need a response would be.

[thenobledrake]

Gorgo Primus wrote:

As has been demonstrated a billion times over across the internet, people are always way more welcoming and thankful for a “nothing to report, but we’re working on it/have seen it” report than silence.

That's not even remotely true.

The initial response to that kind of reply might seem favorable, but the attitude quickly turns when the time that passes before a response happens exceeds some random person's personal idea of what has been enough time, or when enough of those sort of responses have been made to go past some random person's personal idea of how many is a reasonable number.

You will literally see people complaining about someone taking the time to come say "nothing to report" instead of spending that time working on making something worth reporting if you go look for it. You'll also see any reasonable and transparent explanation of a delay being picked apart by people that were going to be pissed no matter what - but because of the communication now they have something to latch onto instead of just a vague, angry, "why won't they tell us what's going on?"

That's what has happened over and over throughout the entirety of this and many similar hobbies.

That's why so many companies try to keep communication down to specific forms at specific times or in specific ways and even the ones that do try to be open and constant with communication change that aspect over time. So it is better to hold communication until there is something with some meat to it to say or some dire circumstance that is necessitating what would otherwise be premature communication, because even though that too will have fans being unreasonable about it it at least minimizes the exposure and thus the fatigue that comes from dealing with agitated people.

[Tridus]

thenobledrake wrote:

And in that experience I've seen that if you can directly ask the team behind a game questions that the questions are going to be heavily laden with pointless ones where someone asks what is obvious to most readers or is asking the same question that has already been answered because they are hoping for a different answer. When doing what all it would take to actually prevent that misuse it basically just turns the system back into what we fundamentally already have; we can talk about what we think is wrong and the devs will eventually clarify or correct what they pick up on as important enough issues to be worth the effort.

This is soomething the community itself can help with, really. If we have a thread per question or some other mechanism of tracking them, the community can vote up questions that are actually relevant.

Like there's some things that really need an official answer because the rules can be interpreted multiple ways by reasonable people and we're just guessing. "instances of damage" and IWR is one of those.

Then there's the case where there's a pretty broad consensus on how something works and one person insisting that "well because they didn't repeat an existing rule in this one paragraph, that means it doesn't apply here", and if we can vote on questions we can pretty quickly dismiss that for the waste of time it is.

That would at least let us tell Paizo which questions are the ones that we think are important so they don't waste their time on stuff that isn't. This forum has limited options for that, but if we have one question per thread and folks use the favorite button on those, its something. Some other setup may work better, but thats basically what Maya told us to do to try and help them out when it comes to answering questions.

It doesn't really matter if there's no interest on their end in doing so, of course, which is how we got into this conversation in the first place. But that's the best guidance we have from them in terms of how we can help them to accomplish this.

[Tridus]

thenobledrake wrote:

Gorgo Primus wrote:

As has been demonstrated a billion times over across the internet, people are always way more welcoming and thankful for a “nothing to report, but we’re working on it/have seen it” report than silence.

That's not even remotely true.

The initial response to that kind of reply might seem favorable, but the attitude quickly turns when the time that passes before a response happens exceeds some random person's personal idea of what has been enough time, or when enough of those sort of responses have been made to go past some random person's personal idea of how many is a reasonable number.

You will literally see people complaining about someone taking the time to come say "nothing to report" instead of spending that time working on making something worth reporting if you go look for it. You'll also see any reasonable and transparent explanation of a delay being picked apart by people that were going to be pissed no matter what - but because of the communication now they have something to latch onto instead of just a vague, angry, "why won't they tell us what's going on?"

That's what has happened over and over throughout the entirety of this and many similar hobbies.

That's why so many companies try to keep communication down to specific forms at specific times or in specific ways and even the ones that do try to be open and constant with communication change that aspect over time. So it is better to hold communication until there is something with some meat to it to say or some dire circumstance that is necessitating what would otherwise be premature communication, because even though that too will have fans being unreasonable about it it at least minimizes the exposure and thus the fatigue that comes from dealing with agitated people.

It is true, but only in communities where there's trust that they really well get back to us. In communities that don't have that trust: then I agree, it's not helpful.

But you see wildly different tones in different communities because of how well open communication is done. The ones that do it well tend to be much nicer places to be. If it's done badly, it can be worse than not attempting it at all.

[Red Griffyn]

Its a false equivalency to compare engagement vs. no engagement.

They made a product. People can't use the product effectively/consistently without clarification and help. Would you feel the same way about a video game that brought out an expansion that is buggy and crashes all the time? Would you feel the same way about an ikea desk with 400 parts that is missing 2 pages of assembly instructions (or worse those instructions are wrong)? Would you feel the same way about a board game that has a whole deck of cards with no clear instructions of how to ever draw them in game? Would you feel the same way about a traffic light that added a new 4th colour to it that no one on the road understands the meaning of?

User guides/customer service/FAQs are intended to fill the gap for what is inherently going to be a imperfect product produced by imperfect humans.

A 'bury your head in the sand approach' isn't really defensible customer service approach. It is devoid of any kind of 'managing expectations' that lets people and the community spin out over things.

It feels like a pretty easy take to provide RAI without RAW and leave RAW to periodic errata cycles:
- Identify who authored/reviewed a section in question.
- Invite them with an appropriate number of design leads to meet quorum into a 30-60 min meeting.
- Decide by committee RAI going forward to communicate.
- Spend 10 minutes writing up that email for Maya.
- Tell Maya to come copy paste it into the relevant forum thread OR do it yourself.

They're already DOING these things, except they just aren't communicating them. They have a list of errata items that they have already 'decided the RAI' and will later decide the RAW that provides that for an errata. All we're asking if for a subset of those things to be communicated earlier (especially ones upvoted by the community, that really are unusable, or in the case of this thread change the intent without the errata/remaster providing any justification for the change or forewarning in the many previews of remaster classes where they had the opportunity to say something).

Hyper niche design element RAI clarification with no extent of condition impact are easy to communicate about.
- YES/NO rogue save progression is intended.
- YES/NO blade ally/blessed armaments can give you one additional rune.

Lets not pretend we're asking for something dramatic here by implying that any community engagement is a slippery slope to the community sharpening pitch forks, lighting torches, and dragging designers out into the streets.

[ElementalofCuteness]

Sad truth of the matter is that it WAS confirmed Rogue's Resilience is suppose to work like this. Let's assume that everything written clearly is suppose to work like that. You have an answer which is not fun but the answer would be.

Rogue's Resilience is worded correct (According to an Email response...) so why would Blessed Armament not be worded correct?

I know this is not fun but we aren't get any communication around these parts from the people who should be answering us. The more you sit here and think the more depressing the situation is. I am not wsayinfg they need to be active 24 hours a day but like some replies in these threads would go a long, long way for Public Relations. This is just how I feel about it.