Yeah, throughout reading the entire thing (especially the beginning, “Hey it’s me again” WHO?!) it’d be nice to know who this was coming from.
Ok, as I promised, useful things that Myzzrym posted:
*Disclaimer: What I counted as ‘useful’ was anything that didn’t consist of potato memes and you’re welcome / thank you’s.
**Disclaimer2: Some of them aren’t really questions / answers but rather just a general response, but I still try to put in a “Q:” to give some context.
Yeah... this is gonna be long so it's hidden
Q:
A: Other topics that I’ll tackle next time: Pay2Win, Cash Shop and more information on what’s coming up.
Q: probably the boss will keep most of it to himself. I mean, it’s HIS company, right? And thats how money works
A: I know you say that jokingly, but most if not all of us took a pay-cut to work at DECA - smaller companies need to money to:
- Recuperate what they invested (for the boss), Realm wasn’t given for free from Kabam.
- Build a bit of safety net so we don’t have to fire everyone just because we had a bad month in terms of revenue
- Re-invest the extra money into more people, better technology or new games.
Not a lot of money left for the boss in this case, it’s much of a passion project for him. He didn’t make DECA to roll in dough, that’s for sure.
Q: Thanks for the update, also love your humor at Deca Games haha
We already waited 2 years with kabam (almost) without content, I think we can handle a few more months, not to mention you already implemented interesting dungeons like Sewers and Puppet Master Encore
I would find it hard to make content as difficult for players with maxed divine pets and the ones without pets, although you made an excellent job on this with the Encore
What about an endgame dungeon based on pet stasis?
A: The biggest issue we have is to make a dungeon challenging without necessarily making the pets useless. While we all agree that the pets are way too strong, we also don’t want to alienate the players who did level up their pets by just saying “lol jk no pets in all new dungeons, git gud scrub”.
That being said, we do want to make dungeons without having to worry all the time about pets healing all the damage. We’re thinking about different debuffs allowing pets to remain, but not necessarily always working at full efficiency!
Q: Or watch x minutes of ads for y amount of gold.
I don’t know how much money Deca would make per ad view, but I think watching some number of ads for 5 gold would be good.
A: I actually [worked] at a company before that let you do that. The answer is - it’s not worth it - these systems are easily abusable, and not the cleanest thing around. Also was into Youtube / Twitch before, pay per view ads give very little in the grand scheme of things.
Q: I love how you’re keeping up with the memes and the humor is on point. Unfortunately I see you have a money problem so let me leave you with some word of advice… clears throat
AMPLE PACK
A: Don’t worry, we don’t have a money problem. It’s just to explain why we need to keep churning new skins - to avoid money problems
Q: Question:
Would you guys add april fool jokes? Like re(skinning)naming the trickster to hipster for a day? Rogue for rouge? I like April fools.
A: I would love to have quite a few changes for April’s Fool, though I have to see what we can / can’t do without slowing down too much our progress on our projects
Q: Are there going to be some vault/character/both packs coming soon? Its been a long time since there were any
The ample space pack comes to mind :3
A: Seems like the Character / Vault packs are in high demand! I’ll think about it, in the meantime we have added Character Slots and Vault Chests in Mystery Boxes rewards for those who like to gamble.
Q: A bit too much of a gamble for my liking. I, for one, would prefer some straight up sales. Gotta mind the terminology, most players are minors and most states/countries prohibit gambling by minors.
A: Aye, and on an ethical sense I do agree with you. Gambling isn’t the greatest thing when it comes down to gaming, very often young players or people who don’t understand probabilities (a.k.a. those who fall to the Sunken Cost fallacy) don’t truly know what they’re buying.
However, that’s often what’s keeping F2P games alive, especially when you don’t have the massive army of League of Legends or World of Warcraft. There’s a reason why Mystery Boxes are so popular, and that’s because they are very profitable.
Q: I don’t know if anyone’s asked about this yet but, is there anything on UTs being tradeable? I’m just wondering about this because I know there are many people that want it back and the same amount wanting it the way it is, I personally don’t care either way (: but I’d still like to know if this is even up for discussion with you guys at deca.
A: Tradeable UTs / Cosmetics is actually something I wish to go in more details on a later post.
Long story short (again, I’ll go more in details another time): Duping and Real world trading sites (UTs for $$$)
Q: thank you.with that most part of the community will finaly calm down and we wont have to see each day ‘‘WTF? ANOTHER RESKIN? ARE KIDDING ME?’’ posts
A: Well they do have a point on reskins, it does clutter the game - however we’d like to see them as merely bonuses, the exact same item with same stat. Of course, collectors are gonna collect, but the goal was always for people to go “oh cool, a limited edition of X item”
Q: If we miss out on one of the reskins, will there be opportunities in the future to get them again?
A: Can’t be sure yet on that one.
Q: Talking about bots… here a little question Is something currently in the works to counter them and their infamous spam wall ? Thanks in advance !
A: Unfortunate as it is, bots exist in basically all MMOs (that aren’t dead or dying). I would even go so far as to say - if there are bots, it means the game is very much alive (because there is no profit in a dead game).
That also means no one has found the miracle solution. Let me give you some theoretical examples:
- We implement a level limit (let’s say 10) under which you can’t speak => Bot creators will just create a script for bots to farm safe zones in mass to get to the level needed to speak. Not to mention legit new players won’t be able to speak / ask questions.
- We put a message limit of, let’s say, 5 per minute => Bot creators simply generate more bots, so instead of 2 bots spamming at the same time you’ll have 20 bots to avoid hitting the limit. It screws our servers even more because that increases the number of bots.
- We put words restrictions => They add spaces in their words, etc etc.
So yea. Fighting against bots without some heavy lifting is almost a lost cause I would say, not something a small DECA team can do without severely slowing down progress on all other things (fixing code lag, creating new content, etc etc).
Q: After stalking you a bit, it seems you have a youtube channel, why not upload Realm there? (even if you haven’t posted in 2 years)
A: Nah, that youtube channel is just for Dota.
Q: You said in a previous post that there will be a weekly dungeon event like the one in the UDL. Is it still in your mind to do an other one?
A: Weekly Dungeon Events were for the festivities period. That being said, Dungeon Events will definitively come back, so keep your eyes peeled.
Q: I’m sure most dev’s hate leaks, but what do you think about it?
Even the newest dungeon has been somewhat “leaked” (won’t show or tell anyone i swar)
A: Overall, my biggest problem with leaks is trust. We have very strict rules on confidentiality for our testers and content creators. Testers and content creators have access to a lot of stuff based on us trusting them - if they leak stuff without our consent, I’m not so happy about it.
That doesn’t mean that no one can say anything - as long as we approve the tease / info, it’s fine. It’s good to have people excited about their work and what’s coming up.
Q:
You likely have already noticed that all the new cosmetic items have credits on them,
Both Rosen Blade and Mini Rosen skins were made by community members, but none of them have credits on them. Why?
A: Hmmm I don’t believe I was part of the team when those skins went out. There are several possibilities:
- Skin was made by an artist that we couldn’t identify (through the Draw Tool for instance)
- Artist wanted to stay anonymous (sometimes feedback from the community is quite harsh)
- Team at that time forgot to put credits and artist didn’t contact them to fix it
In any case, if you do know who made those skins please tell the artist to PM me.
Q: A note on the architecture problems.
I am very familiar with C and C++ coding, as it is a large part of my current studies at Uni, so I have a bit of experience with memory management with actions from a program. I’ve only briefly looked into the capabilities of Flash (with curiosity in certain Physics simulations, another part of what I’m studying… lol I have no life) and can say that whoever thought of creating an MMO… well they are either a sadist or just an arse.
A: Less that and more a game that grew bigger than they first anticipated (which is great!), and therefore became a little wonky to support such a large community (which is less great).
Q: Oh ya, i reported a glitch a while ago, and it never got responded to, but on steam, the achievements are mixed up on when you’re getting a new star. they’re a few stars off, so if you could fix that… edit= screenshot http://prntscr.com/e0sj34
A: For glitches if you send them to customer support even if they don’t answer (which they should) it will be listed in our docs
Q: Hello Myzzrym,
Can you tell something about clearing of legends? DECA going to remove exploiters from legends list? Some people talking that you just can’t do it, is that true?
A: It’s on our todo list, but it’s not necessarily the priority that we have at the moment.
Q: Could we get more info on how skins are going to be released?
A: Skins are usually going to be in Mystery Boxes, but there is no saying that there won’t be new skins exclusive to dungeons, in packs or in direct sales.
Q: Have you taken a look at the
there are amazing ideas for the game there and the community would appreciate if deca takes a look at them
A: We do know about Realmeye, and that’s a fantastic community-based site (I use it every day to look at wiki pages and all).
That being said, we don’t have a dedicated Community Manager (I’m already doing that on top of my actual responsibilities), so checking Reddit is already taking enough time from me. I wouldn’t mind seeing good suggestions brought here and upvoted though!
Q: I wish I could leave a comment that I and a few other guys agree with me, I do not know all of you, about the new skins, there is no other way to get them without being with money? also I wanted to know if the alchemist is coming back.
A: That’s in the works!