Hi guys - I posted this originally over at the Diplomacy affiliate VGTact.com, but I wanted to share it with a few of the other sites I frequent so the word gets out:

"A few quick notes as I drift off to some sleeps.

There are a lot of valid concerns here. I'm willing to face the music on these issues, so do not feel like you need to pull punches. You _will_ get better response out of me if you're constructive - and so far, even the "worst trolls" have had some constructive criticism in there.

I'm working tonight on a little device we're calling the "Altar of Kaerellun" - which allows you to trade information for cards, adventuring items, prestige items, etc. this should help relieve the bank slot pressure while we expand our content.

The deck lockouts/civic dip lockouts and such went in before the patch notes. That was a simple slowdown in the patch note pipeline, and I see it's since been corrected. We're doing another change that I'll tell you about right here so you will be prepared when it happens (in case the patch notes don't update within a couple hours of the servers coming up when they get patched in):

- Starting in the next code patch for the game (I'm not allowed to reveal our patch schedule for non-content stuff), you will not be able to parley with an opponent more than 50 points greater than you in Diplomacy.

This goes with two other fixes, which are:

- You cannot gain more than one skill point in a single parley.
- The time in which you are locked out on a win with a single NPC on a single specific conversation is increased.

As we tweak the AI for our decks, we watch player response closely. When you have a group of testers who know the game inside and out, the only way we can truly understand the difficulty of the deck is 1) math, and 2) look and feel when they hit Live. We have folks doing the math, and we have folks doing the look and feel thing - and then we watch how it plays.

The level 50 deck thing is my top AI/deck priority while we work on coding in new functionality for the AI to be able to handle more situations in parley. It is not the only thing we are working on.

As we put in low-level content, we also have resources allocated to putting in some upper-mid-range stuff - the sort of thing that shows you what you can DO with Diplomacy. I'll give some hints in the next weeks, but we're saving the proof for the pudding.

In all my experience with MMO communities on both sides of the looking glass, I have never seen a more enthusiastic, inspired, and motivated team than the one I have the honor of working with. Coupled with the outstanding and the gratifying response of you, the players, this system is a diamond in the rough. If it wasn't for you guys, it would never be shaped into the amazing thing that it is becoming.

o
A"

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