Future of Illusions

Malayn

So the discussion on illusions and afflines made me realize that there is a considerable flaw in them. And that is the fact that using afflines you can ignore some readily, but if your system is setup to not have afflines the presence of them shows it to be an illusion.  I propose we take a new stand on illusions.  The intent is to tone down illusions while making them work more modernly with afflines. Because of how targetted they are, certain afflictions and effects cannot be faked (new scroll HELP ILLUSIONRULES?).

Main rules:
- Illusions would still be usable in combat but be required to meet standards.
- No <affliction> line will accept any cleanse or focus spirit cure (bard affs can still work). Phantomspheres, crucify, and similar skills would also be disallowed.
- Anything mimicing an affliction will check the persons config for affline.
- Listing an affliction that is incorrect with the line presented would be issuable. No web illusion with an aff of slit throat.
- Nothing unreasonable. Specifically no weaving an item to look like a huge group of things (a pair of boots cannot be glamoured to look like 130 diseased furrikin, you know who you are).

ILLUSION
*Syntax: WEAVE ILLUSION <illusion text> 
This skill becomes PURELY RP.  Remove the ability to see through this illusion and make this illusion no longer allowed in combat. This even improves the RP of the skill.

IMPROVED
Syntax: WEAVE IMPROVED [FOCUS] <delay> [COLOUR <colour>] [AFF <affliction>] <illusion text> 
Power: 0 (for 1 line illusion)
       2 (Any, for 2 line illusion)

This will work the same as current but allows you to stipulate you are imitating an affliction, which will show an affline to those who have it configured.  If you do not state you are using an affliction this is not permissible in combat and will ignore the ability to see through it.


NEW - AFFLICTION
Syntax: WEAVE AFFLICTION <target> <affliction> <line>
This would replace normal weave for combat purposes, it is targetted!  The eq on this should be higher than base weaving to avoid rapid use between channels (say 4ish seconds to put it on par with sub)

PROGRAMMED
Syntax: WEAVE PROGRAMMED [AFF <affliction>] <illusion text> 
Add the affliction syntax.


Ok, I have unloaded what was on my mind. Zzzzz

Nihta

I feel that illusions are a part of combat, and there is no reason they shouldn't be. It makes coding systems harder, but so does every affliction and combination of afflictions. The arts ability makes at least a third of all illusions fail at transcendant. They don't even actually afflict you, and have a longer or at least equal balance than throwing a hex which does afflict you.

I really don't understand all this illusion hate.

Malayn

Illusions were intended to assist with the offense of a specific class (mages).

Those classes no longer use illusions as intended, they go psionics. Psionics does not need illusions to function, so the purpose of the skill is lost. Now it is just spammed to fake cleanse cures basically. 

While removing their combat impact would simplify systems CONSIDERABLY because you can stop trying to set up for anti illusion.

Some may argue specific things like "Well telepathy needs to fake affs for XYZ reason." For those people they have access to such illusions, with limitations.

Nihta

I think illusions are hardly the most complicated aspect of combat, or even very complicated at all, and with afflines, systems can now just compare the affline to the attack line and see if they match.

I feel like you could make them unable to be used along with psi balance if you felt it was too strong with psionics.

Raezon

This seems to be very similar to the previous thread on afflines and illusions. As Iosai said there, the suggested changes to automatically include skill and aff lines is a prohibitively time-intensive change. 

We are also not going to open every use of illusions to trial by issue based on whether it is a combat use or uses the right combination of lines. As a general rule, the more complicated the set of rules (beyond IC/OOC boundaries) and the more active admin involvement is required to adjudicate its use, the less likely it is to happen.

Malayn

You dont have to check the aff and skill line match, players will. Just tell them they cant mismatch in the illusion.   Weaving works exactly the same except it would add the You are afflicted with, as appropriate.

I proposed changes to all the skills, while afflines and illusions seems to have been made almost purely to say afflines were okay. I had ideas, I posted elsewhere.

Ciaran

I'm pretty sure this is exactly the issue I had Tulemrah submit a report on.  Let me dig up the report.

Issue: With the addition of affmessages, an avenue of illusion protection is available rendering many previously functioning illusions obsolete. I believe this is an unintended consequence of a useful mechanic. What's more, we as illusionists have no way of knowing if someone is using affmessages for illusion protection, so even if we did want to circumvent this form of protection, it would be purely a guessing game.

Solution 1: Add an optional syntax to the skill Illusion - WEAVE ILLUSIONAFF <affliction> <illusion text>.  - The affliction message is limited to 1 entry, and would only show the standard affmessage to those with affmessage configured to on.  This illusion (both lines together) would only check against keeneye once.

Solution 2: In addition to solution 1, add an optional syntax to the skill Improved - \affliction <afflictions> - Similar idea to above, only displaying to people with affmessages on. Allowing up to 3 afflictions to be put into the second line, separated by commas.

Note: To those who may say these illusions could be too powerful: It is currently possible for us to cast improved illusions that mimic solution 1 for 2 power.  However, we feel that this is not reasonable because we have no way to respect whether affmessages are on or off for the recipient, and a power cost is too steep for a single affliction illusion.

Rivius

Well, I've agreed with this problem for a while now. Affmessages give a distinct advantage to those who want to take advantage of them. I imagine once upon a time they were created in order to help people build some very basic systems without having to collect 2k+ trigger lines. The side effect is that now afflines make you illusion-proof against many things and what was supposed to be just an option for starting players has become a clunky system that advanced players can abuse to their advantage.

Also, while I know illusions aren't going anywhere, I'd like to say they definitely do make systems a lot harder to code than they would be otherwise.

Alban

I don't know where the statement that Mage's don't need illusions because we have psionics comes from. 

I feel like I need illusions. I use illusions. I would like to keep illusions.

I agree with Ciaran's proposed solution #1, just give us the ability to specify the affliction that the illusion is supposed to display.  Aff messages were a pretty massive nerf to illusions with no buff to support it.

If we really want to delete illusions though, I think the best way to do it is to leave free form illusions for RP purposes (have a different color or something - I'm not sure how you actually do this), and add some new abilities in that work in different ways that actually inflict afflictions or increase the effects of ones present.

Having the admin need to monitor illusion usage doesn't seem like the best or most scalable idea, though.

Lerad

I don't always advocate stealing stuff from other IRE games. But illusioning is one aspect which I feel Lusternia should take pointers about. I don't see any way of improving illusions as they stand without involving a huge amount of admin oversight, or just plain falling flat and being unable to do anything.

As it is, illusion effectiveness is nothing but a crutch. When Malarious claims that psionicists don't need illusions, he's partly right. Certain psionics setups are perfectly viable without any need for wasting a psionic balance on illusioning. It's even counterproductive. Howevver, other psionic setups can't gain the affrate they need even with illusions, partly because of how reliant illusion effectiveness is on the victim's coding skills. Mediocre players can use illusions to prop up their less-than-optimal setups, but they remain mediocre because they can't do anything to those who have a system coded to counter illusions. On the other hand, against those who don't have such systems, they just appear to be ridiculously good.

With this hard to balance mechanic, we have two camps on oppposite sides of the spectrum, who are hollering for nerfs and buffs. And both their positions are perfectly valid - if you buff the normal abilities of classes that use illusions as a crutch, you risk boosting them against certain systems into entirely unreasonable levels, while only getting them to a barely acceptable level of competitiveness against stronger systems. Illusions are blocking a more objective analysis and evaluation of the classes that rely on them, because of the vast gap in perception of how strong they actually are.

Instead of keeping illusions in their variable effectiveness, and having the problem of people issuing about inane illusion usage hanging over the precious time of our volunteers, it'd be a better idea to scrape illusion use in combat as it stands, and change it into an actual mechanical effect that can be objectively measured and subsequently balanced. A simple thing to do is to simply make an illusion knock the target off a curing balance for an unstackable amount of time. At the same time, remove the ability for players to be able to manipulate the messages the target sees (in order to not "trick" systems). You give classes that used to use illusions an actual effect that offensively helps them build their affs, and then you can buff/nerf their actual affs, affrates, balance times, other abilities without having to worry that it would make them too strong against certain people while being ineffective against others.

On the topic of using illusions for RP. The emote system can and should be expanded to make having to resort to illusions for RP no longer needed. It's ridiculous that only people with access to illusions can have the ability to do certain kinds of freeform RP, anyway. The custom emote system has had several upgrades put into it, but it could still be expanded some more. Svorai has a perfectly detailed thread in the ideas section detailing ideas and requests that would make needing illusions for RP redundant.

Neos

Lerad said:

I don't always advocate stealing stuff from other IRE games. But illusioning is one aspect which I feel Lusternia should take pointers about. I don't see any way of improving illusions as they stand without involving a huge amount of admin oversight, or just plain falling flat and being unable to do anything.

As it is, illusion effectiveness is nothing but a crutch. When Malarious claims that psionicists don't need illusions, he's partly right. Certain psionics setups are perfectly viable without any need for wasting a psionic balance on illusioning. It's even counterproductive. Howevver, other psionic setups can't gain the affrate they need even with illusions, partly because of how reliant illusion effectiveness is on the victim's coding skills. Mediocre players can use illusions to prop up their less-than-optimal setups, but they remain mediocre because they can't do anything to those who have a system coded to counter illusions. On the other hand, against those who don't have such systems, they just appear to be ridiculously good.

With this hard to balance mechanic, we have two camps on oppposite sides of the spectrum, who are hollering for nerfs and buffs. And both their positions are perfectly valid - if you buff the normal abilities of classes that use illusions as a crutch, you risk boosting them against certain systems into entirely unreasonable levels, while only getting them to a barely acceptable level of competitiveness against stronger systems. Illusions are blocking a more objective analysis and evaluation of the classes that rely on them, because of the vast gap in perception of how strong they actually are.

Instead of keeping illusions in their variable effectiveness, and having the problem of people issuing about inane illusion usage hanging over the precious time of our volunteers, it'd be a better idea to scrape illusion use in combat as it stands, and change it into an actual mechanical effect that can be objectively measured and subsequently balanced. A simple thing to do is to simply make an illusion knock the target off a curing balance for an unstackable amount of time. At the same time, remove the ability for players to be able to manipulate the messages the target sees (in order to not "trick" systems). You give classes that used to use illusions an actual effect that offensively helps them build their affs, and then you can buff/nerf their actual affs, affrates, balance times, other abilities without having to worry that it would make them too strong against certain people while being ineffective against others.

On the topic of using illusions for RP. The emote system can and should be expanded to make having to resort to illusions for RP no longer needed. It's ridiculous that only people with access to illusions can have the ability to do certain kinds of freeform RP, anyway. The custom emote system has had several upgrades put into it, but it could still be expanded some more. Svorai has a perfectly detailed thread in the ideas section detailing ideas and requests that would make needing illusions for RP redundant.

I want to both like and agree along with various other things this post.

Alban

I'm ok with those changes - making illusions have an actual mechanic that can be relied upon. 

Quick side note - illusions use regular equilibrium, not psionic balance.

The only thing that worries me is that they just sold a couple of wands of illusion to people, I wonder if that would deter them from changing this.

Synkarin

Any illusion an affmessage destroyed probably wasn't an illusion worth using in the first place

Rivius

Ectoplasm illusions are destroyed by aff messages and they're actually pretty hard to anti-illusion and a pita to ignore.

Synkarin

Rivius said:

Ectoplasm illusions are destroyed by aff messages and they're actually pretty hard to anti-illusion and a pita to ignore.

Not really, I made a really simple anti-illusion script for the programmable ones that works 100% of the time. Checking during group fights was a bit harder, but is now a ton easier with the gmcp.Room.Players addition.

Anyway, I said probably, not always, specifically thinking of ectoplasm,

Rivius

Well programmable illusions are easy to ignore, but what about the one-line illum ecto illusion? I've seen it spammed and ignoring it can get you killed, especially if said person could feasibly be in the same room with you. In fact, it's gotten me killed before for trying to ignore it

But yeah, other than cleanse cures, there's usually options nowadays I guess.

Nihta

@Lerad:

One reason I like illusions is that you can get so creative with them. Sure, they make systems harder to code around, but like I stated, so does everything else. If we want systems to be easy to code, we could reduce the amount of affs available to everyone to maybe 3, and then make everything else based on hp, mp, and ego.

For example, I can illusion things that I am doing or not doing with my own curing, like putting up a rebounding aura. Under your proposed "solution" we would throw out these little tricks in return for the one and only trick that people seem to use most, which is knocking someone off balance for a short amount of time.

Ciaran

Lerad said:

. Certain psionics setups are perfectly viable without any need for wasting a psionic balance on illusioning. It's even counterproductive.

Um, what? I don't think you understand how illusions work.  You can use all 3 psionics balances + an illusion.

Synkarin said:

Any illusion an affmessage destroyed probably wasn't an illusion worth using in the first place

This I disagree with.  Other than being a really broad statement, there are plenty of times when I would love to be able to have someone think they have stupidity, impatience, anorexia, etc.. There are times when a wasted herb balance is really valuable.  Our option to do these illusions just simply vanished once people decided to proof their system by using affmessages.  This nerf to illusions was never justified or balanced, and was unintentional.

Illusions are very cool because they do foster creativity.  It's just a pain that so much potential creativity got taken off the table with no compensation.

My fix should be quite simple to code.  The optional syntax would just check if each person seeing it had affmessages on, and if they did, it would print a second line with the selected affmsg.

Synkarin

Feel free to give examples of times where making someone think they have stupidity/impatience/anorexia whatever is really valuable. I don't really think it is. Making me think I have an affliction that's cured on multiple, short balances isn't really going to accomplish much. 

Rivius

You can use symptoms to test for impatience and anorexia for the very least.

Enyalida

Synkarin said:

Feel free to give examples of times where making someone think they have stupidity/impatience/anorexia whatever is really valuable. I don't really think it is. Making me think I have an affliction that's cured on multiple, short balances isn't really going to accomplish much. 

Amusingly, when talking about the woodchemantics backlash attacks on envoys with admins, this sort of thing is what they told us: They eat a cure balance, therefore they are inherently useful for offense... even though the cure balances they eat are non-vital and are very quick. 

Anyways, I agree with Lerad. The problem I have with illusions as a means for combat is that they add an... illusory level of competence that is entirely based on system sophistication. It comes and goes, and isn't really predictable.  

Ciaran

Rivius said:

You can use symptoms to test for impatience and anorexia for the very least.

Not if the target is aeoned.

Even on the lowest levels of illusioning, forcing focus minds adds mana drain over the course of a fight, and is valuable towards a TK's mana attrition.  Psionics isn't about stacking affs, it's about timing them, so tricking someone to cure a clot 2s later can be quite significant, as it can allow a round of sparkle/sip to be ineffectual.

[edit: was putting words in your mouth]

I've had this discussion with you before Sidd, and I'm not especially interested in going over it again.  To me it's irrelevant that you think 'affline illusions' would be useless.  It has no bearing on whether or not we desire the option to use them.  If you thought they would be overpowered, that's one thing, but since you don't, there seems to be no problem here.

To people complaining about illusions requiring more system sophistication:

As things currently stand, the more sophisticated systems are able to ignore 'affline illusions' whereas basic ones are not.  My proposed solution would put both systems on a level playing ground, as neither would be able to inherently protect against all illusions that are suffixed by an affliction line.

Edit: P.S. The illusions that would break most basic systems have nothing to do with afflines anyway.  This is I think where Sidd's disconnect is.  Just because an affliction illusion doesn't break someone's curing doesn't mean that it isn't useful.

Malayn

I am partly okay with having illusions give their own measured effects.  I would avoid things like being able to take herb balance because of setups like burst / clot / sweat with an herb steal. But there are other things illusions could be given to do while moving illusions themselves toward an RP factor.

I also agree Emotes should be more RP savvy, maybe adding ^ to the start of an emote would tell it not to add your name or something?

If a skill RELIES on illusions (telepathy?) then the skill itself should be fixed.  Things like ectoplasm or other cures listed above should not be illusionable, if they are intended to help with offense they should contribute to offense, not aim for something out of left field like ectoplasm.


tl;dr
Remove illusion use for new specific effects.  Upgrade emotes.

Acrune

Just a list of thoughts from reading this thread:

You shouldn't be able to take your name out of emotes, because then everyone gets free illusions that don't consume balance. I think you can do triggers based off of text color, which I guess could prevent this, but I dunno, still not a fan. Why should everyone be able to make anything happen (or appear to happen)? It doesn't make rp sense. (Now, maybe if there was an OOC role where some people were granted privs that allowed for more in-depth rp while still having their characters, that might be neat... but not related to illusions)

I like the idea of being able to add the affline based on whether or not the target has it configured to do so, it seems like a good solution to the problem. 

The idea of moderating how someone uses illusions with the issue system is terrible. If you want to change the illusion skill to be rp-only, my first thought was to make it non-forceable, able to do it off bal and eq, and take 30s of eq. That way you can rp to your heart's content, but using it in combat isn't going to be too helpful.

Kio

Acrune said:

Just a list of thoughts from reading this thread:

You shouldn't be able to take your name out of emotes, because then everyone gets free illusions that don't consume balance. I think you can do triggers based off of text color, which I guess could prevent this, but I dunno, still not a fan. Why should everyone be able to make anything happen (or appear to happen)? It doesn't make rp sense. (Now, maybe if there was an OOC role where some people were granted privs that allowed for more in-depth rp while still having their characters, that might be neat... but not related to illusions)

I like the idea of being able to add the affline based on whether or not the target has it configured to do so, it seems like a good solution to the problem. 

The idea of moderating how someone uses illusions with the issue system is terrible. If you want to change the illusion skill to be rp-only, my first thought was to make it non-forceable, able to do it off bal and eq, and take 30s of eq. That way you can rp to your heart's content, but using it in combat isn't going to be too helpful.

Emoting requires and consumes equilibrium, by the way.

Also, I just want to be able to preface my emotes, instead of them always having to start with my name.  

Acrune

Oh, hmm, didn't remember that. My mistake  :-B

Lerad

@Nihta: Illusions give a creative edge to combat, and it can be fun for those who have it as a perk, like as an illusion wand.

However, trying to balance around illusions is extremely difficult because of its variable effectiveness. This is a fact. If Lusternia had a server-side curing system that is competitive, it would be 0% effective. If Lusternia was manuable, it would be 0% effective. When you have classes that have illusions as perks, that's fine, they don't need the illusion to be viable, but when you give illusions its own skillset and make classes have it as part of their core, how are you going to come to an agreement about whether such classes need buffs or not?

The answer is you don't. You will never get the agreement needed to put certain buffs into the class.

On the other hand, not only does illusioning frustrate those who rely on them (while letting those who don't have creative fun), it also frustrates system makers. The argument that "anything increases system making difficulty" is a valid one, but illusions is by far the worst culprit. There is literally nothing else in the game that sucks up more time and coding effort than an attempt to create a comprehensive illusion proof system. This is the number one reason that such systems have very, very rarely existed in the entire history of IRE games, across all of them. This is the reason illusions are even viable in the first place, because it is near to impossible to make a system completely illusion proof. Why should such a burden be placed on the coding abilities of the opponent? This isn't on the same level as remembering which affs are more dangerous. That's skill and experience. This isn't even on the same level as tracking warrior wounds and priortizing regneration affs - that's coding based, but still takes less effort than illusions. Not only do illusions confound amateur system builders, they eat up so much coding time for even top-tier system builders that not many even bother.

When I first came to Lusternia, I saw this game had an entire skillset called "Illusions" and I facepalmed so hard I almost broke my keyboard after smashing my face and my hand onto it (note: exaggeration). But then I read further and I saw that they were actual, mechanical effects, aff-over-time skills and abilities. And I jumped so high I broke a hole in my ceiling (note: exaggeration). For a second there, I was so elated that there was finally an IRE game that was smart enough to ditch the pointless coding barrier-to-entry of coding while actually keeping the flavour and RP of "illusion" in IRE combat. Then I finally found out that vanilla illusions still existed, and still had the very same problems that plagued vanilla illusions in all other IRE games.

This is the most confusing part for me. Lusternia has, from the get go, demonstrated that it knows how to make illusions workable  and balancable without the problems of normal illusions. But despite that, and despite having a working skillset on that, not only do illusions still exist, dramaturgy, was introduced. I remain confused to this day.

P.S. I appear to have been wrong about psionicists needing to use a psi bal for illusions. Whoopee doo. So in truth, it appears that the psionic setups which are already viable actually have illusions as something entirely extra and those that can't get their affrate even with illusions are already working at their maximum capacity, and clearly need help, but can't get it because of the existence of illusions.

Yay.

Nihta

@Lerad I disagree that illusions wouldn't be effective if lusternia were manuable. If you saw someone cast an illusion at you which doesn't have an easy to register symptom, and which was plausible, then how could you know if you had it unless you diagnosed or just cured it anyway? There would be more decision making possible if lusternia were manuable, but ultimately, there would be a decision to either ignore it or not, and you could force such decisions to have concenquences either way.

The point I am trying to make, is even with a human factor involved, illusions would still force hard decisions. We just let these hard decisions be handled by code rather than by a human mind. This hard decision is no different than if someone casted omen on you. Do you focus spirit? Do you take the double damage? Can you run from the situation? The decision is there for every aff, we just choose the option that usually makes the most sense for most situations to code into a system. This option exists with or without the inclusion of illusions, the only difference with illusions is it forces these decisions when there is no actual decision to make. It seems to me people just don't like to compromise when it is theoretically possible that no compromise has to be made.

Neos

Nihta said:

@Lerad I disagree that illusions wouldn't be effective if lusternia were manuable. If you saw someone cast an illusion at you which doesn't have an easy to register symptom, and which was plausible, then how could you know if you had it unless you diagnosed or just cured it anyway? There would be more decision making possible if lusternia were manuable, but ultimately, there would be a decision to either ignore it or not, and you could force such decisions to have concenquences either way.

The point I am trying to make, is even with a human factor involved, illusions would still force hard decisions. We just let these hard decisions be handled by code rather than by a human mind. This hard decision is no different than if someone casted omen on you. Do you focus spirit? Do you take the double damage? Can you run from the situation? The decision is there for every aff, we just choose the option that usually makes the most sense for most situations to code into a system. This option exists with or without the inclusion of illusions, the only difference with illusions is it forces these decisions when there is no actual decision to make. It seems to me people just don't like to compromise when it is theoretically possible that no compromise has to be made.

If you're manually curing, unless it's in a group context, it'd be 1v1 and someone illusioning a skill that they don't have is easily checked really. If I see Viynain using omen, then I know I can easily ignore that.

Malayn

I like how this discussion has evolved, and as a note I no longer stand by post 1.

I would prefer removing illusions from combat and creating illusions with the purpose of benefits.  We could also very easily make them non-com for psionicists, simply treat psionics as using equilibrium and then balance accordingly. If illusions did not work off eq/bal they wouldnt be used in combat, so that seems the easiest way to fix them.  As I said I would be in support of illusions with a defined purpose (such as messing with cure balances) but I think such things WOULD have to go the way of being on their own balance times. Because if you can use the of herb bal illusion every 2s with a setup of sweat, burst, and clot you would be stacking far too easily in some melds.  Same for having an illusion against focus (body or mind).

Really illusions are usable by psionic mages and runists presently.

What would good effects be for a new version of illusions?  That is the hard part to balance, because more affs with TP/TK could make them too easy, but effects like stealing herb balance can be abused.  Do we stick with eating balances and similar level effects but with 8s timers or such?


EDIT: As for dramaturgy, have a line before it to show its dramaturgy:

Malarious steps forward to begin his performance.
Malarious slaps you in the back of the head.
You are afflicted with stupidity.
You are afflicted with anorexia.
You are afflicted with impatience.
You are pretty much hosed.

I would love if we added afflicting as a GMCP message (which can be done purely because we get rid of illusions, wouldnt that be lovely?), props to Nihta for making me realize removing illusions makes this work!  But if illusions dont exist you dont HAVE to code for GMCP, because You are afflicted would work!

EDIT2:  Also possible is making illusions require being on channel balance too. But then only runists, acrobatics users (for bards), and wand users would be able to weave combat illusions. Which might be simpler, but still means some people can fake it (though wand users can use it with offense, runists and acrobats probably arent benefitting much from em).

Synkarin

Ciaran said:

Edit: P.S. The illusions that would break most basic systems have nothing to do with afflines anyway.  This is I think where Sidd's disconnect is.  Just because an affliction illusion doesn't break someone's curing doesn't mean that it isn't useful.

I never mentioned anything about illusions breaking a system, this is putting words in my mouth, which you put an edit to avoid it seems. 

That being said, just because I don't think it's overpowered, doesn't mean that I shouldn't voice my opinion that it's an unneeded change. As you so aptly put it in the affliction revamp thread, I'd prefer the admin spend their time on different things, rather than reworking illusions for the people that whine about stuff a lot, even if you think it'd be easy to code. I don't even use afflines and nobody's really gotten me with illusions since Morbo illusioned the illusion detection line. 

BTW - we never had this discussion, you had me look at the report, I told you my opinion and you said you didn't want to argue about it and left it at that. That's very different than having a discussion.