From reddit:
Hey there guys and gals,
There’s been quite some time since our last official communication, hasn’t it? I think it’s a good time to explain my role in the team a little more. I’m the Live Operations Producer, a.k.a. “The guy that makes sure the game goes well on a day-to-day basis”. For instance, I make sure Realm stays green in terms of revenue for the short and long term, that we have a content pipeline properly scheduled and that we at DECA remain in touch with the community (that last part is more of a Community Manager role, but I’ll be doing that with great pleasure).
Alright, enough of me. I’m here today to tackle some of the issues that are often discussed by you
inferior organic meatbagsmost esteemed players. Being an avid redditor myself, I’ve often stumbled upon quite a fewshitpostsdisgruntled comments about the lack of new content these last days - which is why I wanted to clarify a bit better what’s happening in the backstage. Now follow me carefully, else you’ll end up rotting in Oryx’s Cellar.
First, let’s talk lag as you can see here with our
brand new lineup of potatoes. Jokes aside, many of you are wondering how come there is so much lag in RotMG. Is DECA truly running the game on fresh and delicious starchy carbohydrates? Now this is going to sound strange coming from me, but I can only say I wished this was the case. If servers were the only problem, changing to a more powerful setup wouldn’t necessarily be the hardest thing to do - in fact, we beefed them up quite a bit after taking over from Kabam.
But what about the fact that there was less lag during the Kabam era? A good few reasons actually. The increase in players and activity also brings an increase in botting, and fixing the most obvious exploits led hackers to take bolder actions (and often more detrimental to the stability of the servers). Also, keep in mind that Flash isn’t necessarily the flashiest (huehuehue) and most optimal programming language out there for a game that has grown this large. We can’t scale up the number of players/actions indefinitely simply by upgrading servers. Lag mostly comes from code architecture, progressive memory issues (server and client) and limitations in concurrent actions, which unfortunately isn’t easy to fix for a game that’s already 6 years old with tons of legacy code.
To sum up the lag issue: We’re looking into it, but do not expect a short term solution like simply upgrading the servers (which wouldn’t solve as much as you think). It is an important topic to us, so don’t worry we aren’t going to just leave it on the stove.
Second, let’s tackle the discussion around skins and reskins. If you currently have a pair of decently functioning eyes, you’ve already noticed that it’s the most regular new stuff to hit the block every time a patch comes around. But why cosmetics? Why is DECA wasting their time on
questionablepretty sprites instead of working on, let’s say, the next level of endgame?
You likely have already noticed that all the new cosmetic items have credits on them, which means we’re actually relying on a few people to help us with that. Which in turns means that… Yes, we are actually working on actual content in the meantime! That being said, we don’t just want to rush some super lame new endgame by just slapping stats all over the place and calling it a day. To give you an example: Love it or hate it, most of you will admit that pets are very very powerful which makes it a real challenge to balance around both pet-users and non pet-users. We would like to avoid such a thing happening again.
However, that doesn’t give us the reason as to why we’re still putting skins out there. Making you able to customize your character is one side of the coin - the other is, and most of you will have already guessed: money. While it’d be great to be able to run a game on passion and goodwill alone, it’s unfortunately not the case. I for one need to
buy fresh potatoes off the market every morning to keep the servers runningplan carefully how to keep a certain level of money coming in, because without that we’d be running into real life issues real quick - the team would get smaller, updates would get more sparse and slower, you get the gist.
Now I’m not saying that to guilt tripping everyone into buying gold
(GIVE ME YOUR MONEY REEEEEEEE), but you should now understand the need for us to keep on producing cosmetic content on a regular basis to keep it fresh for people who buy gold and support the game. To look at it from another angle: If there is something everyone out there hates, it’s Pay2Win. Cosmetics are a great way to keep the game running without starting to nickel and dime every player.
On this note, shout out to all our content creators and testers out there.
So now that we have that out of the way, shall we talk a bit about the upcoming new content? The biggest issue with touching that topic is that we can never be sure about when, unless something is already finished and ready to go. We have quite a few dungeons in the work, a lot of time goes into testing balance changes, and designing the next level of end-game.
Before you get all excited, be aware that you will not likely see any of that in February. Why is that? We all know about Christmas and New Year festivities bringing a halt to most work-related activities. Any significant content drop that would happen in February would need to be finished about a month in advance - and that means January, a.k.a. now. Thing is, once something is finished, there’s still a lot of time that will go into testing, discussing and rebalancing it before releasing it to the public, so we can’t just push it onto the servers as soon as the guy working on it goes “Done!”.
Lots of excuses, I know. Doesn’t do lots of good, does it? What I’m trying to say right now is please be patient, some really good stuff is in the works. I’m pretty sure most of you hate to hear that, because you never really know if anything’s gonna come out in the end. But you know what? Right now I can’t really say much more than that, because we simply don’t have anything ready to go except for cosmetics, dungeon events and such.
So yea, that’s it for the moment. I’ll be answering questions that get upvoted here in the next few days, so if you think something’s not clear or you want to know about some other topics I haven’t touched, leave a word here!
On a totally unrelated side-note: Please don’t gamble items on stream using stuff like dices, blackjack, roulette and the like. You’ll get banned. We get reports of people getting scammed from these gambling games, and we don’t want this in our game. And if you promote your stream in-game, please don’t spam like a monkey. Everyone’s got a fair share already with the bots.
