If you're referring to Wireknight's post, his comments don't come anywhere near abuse. He made a cogent, well-reasoned, logical argument. he refrained from attacking the personal motives or proclivities of the FAQ authors, and was quite rational in the whole thing.

Rules lawyers? The closest DS seems to have are bookninjas. But most posters don't come near what I'd consider a Rules Lawyer so much as highly opinionated partisans.

Because not all of us have the benefit of playing this game for years, and those people should be able to expect a well-reasoned, logical response to a FAQ--since they did go and bother to make one.

You called for a bookninja?

Boy, am I glad that the FAQ ain't canon. You know, somethings they should leave well alone, like Invis.

Seconded.

As you can see in the last sentance - they make changes. Point things out politely, give them page references/examples, or why something is "broken" or affects Game Balance, and give them a chance to change it.

Simply jumping in, calling them names (i.e. "What were they smoking?") isn't going to endear them to this community.

So if you don't like the FAQ - write to Rob Boyle, line developer, and (politely), explain why, offer alternatives, list page numbers, examples. And please, try to write professionally, and to the point (i.e. leave the leetspeak behind, use proper grammar, break up sentances into proper paragraphs etc.)

The easier you make it to read your email, and the clarity of your explanations etc. will go a long way to getting things changed.

I have written to Rob - I haven't heard back yet, but it's still way early from what I've seen of response times.

When I hear back from him, I'll let you know.

I'd guess that nine times out of ten that this actually gives the best results - most of the problems with the FAQ rulings are that people think about it too much. If you don't think about it the problems just go away

About that... is the above ruling the changed one, or the one that is later changed? I never ran into that rule before; I always assumed that all eyes no matter the grade held .5 Essense of mods for "free." That always seemed to make more sense to me; it's not like you multiply the reaction boost of alphaware Wired Reflexes by .8 or anything. In the same way the .5 Essence thing always seemed like a flat feature to me, rather than something that got worse depending on the grade. If that's not how it is I'd sure like to know; I'll have to change a couple of characters I wrote up.

(Edit): Of course, I also thought it was really dumb that alpha and better obvious cyberlimbs were worse at holding things than regular cyberlimbs, citing that the non-alpha ones were less streamlined and thus had bulkier internals that... got in the way with the peripherals less, somehow. Or something.

You say that as if it were easy/possible. Can you come up with a ruling on how invisibility works that makes any degree of logical sense and at the same time doesn't provide huge loopholes for an aspiring PC munchkin to exploit? I know I don't do it that well.

I strongly disagree with some of the things that have shown up in the FAQ, but I do appreciate that the developers care enough to have one, and recognize that they're not going to get it quite right on the first try sometimes.

SIMPLE. If something is impossible to call, then don't call. A "this question is nearly impossible to answer in a way that will make everyone happy, so it is left up to the GM's discretion" would go a long way.

That being said, even for how messy Invis is a godawful job has been done with it.

~J

I think you mean "makes you unable to be seen by sensors (including eyes) that utilize the visbile and infrared (thermographic vision) range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The electromagnetic spectrum is comprised of everything from Gamma radiation to radio waves, and everything in between, including the visible light spectrum.