I’ll give a simple answer:
1 - They can attract LOTS of players who quit cause of pets or are waiting for In-Combat, and new players looking for a different type of experience, it will make some people quit but most will adapt and overall it attracts more players;
2 - They can take realm in their design philosophy direction with it;
3 - Won’t singlehandedly kill steamrolling, but will be a major step in lowering the possibility of it.
Producer's Letter: Part 2
Megayeah
#64
Backpedal
#65
They can attract LOTS of players who quit
Uh no. Those dodos don’t know what they want.
For the thousandth time, hard in rotmg means hard grind. You can’t play poker if you don’t put up the chips.
These people will say how much they want the hard content, but when they’re sent back to see Limon for the 50th time they’ll capitulate and move on.
I heard an RL cracking some jokes about Sebchoof and I have to say he was absolutely right. Take away his limitless supply of gear donations and see how boring his content would get.
I challenge you to make an 8/8 woland speedrun. Show me the fastest time it takes to get a character “wonderland” ready for halls.
They can take realm in their design philosophy direction with it;
They never had a cohesive design philosophy.
Their philosophy was that they wanted people to die more.
Which is dumb because this game in fact has a casual community.
Almost everything Kiddforce and his cronies touched turned to ash.
They ruined LOD. They ruined Shaitan. They didn’t fix Halls. They messed up RIFTS.
Their biggest success was adding loot chests.
And as textbook said in his previous post, loot chests have been a huge source of income for the game. They also attracted a casual crowd with a love for gambling.
But now that they attracted a crowd of casual gamers they want to tear them down and rebuild the game with a hardcore playerbase? Lol
Won’t singlehandedly kill steamrolling, but will be a major step in lowering the possibility of it.
Nope. There’s a discord server for everything now. It will just get worse the more they try to squeeze.
Pets were always a solo promoting item. Honestly, go into some halls runs and you won’t even notice if your pet is missing (done this by accident before).
Megayeah
#66
No that just means wasting tons of hours of your life on boredom you only enjoy in the rare occasion a white drops, not “hard”
lol implying this will make Limon hard, they’ll just raise the drop rates of hard things as they have said
Yeah, they ruined those if you’re only in for max loot
Halls is the epitome of the casual grind just for the grind currently, why do you call making it harder “fixing” it then?
Financial decisions are not design decisions
There is alot between fully casual and fully hardcore, most people who play or have played don’t lean into the extreme that thinks things are perfectly fine and would quit if In-Combat is implemented
Easy to say now that discords will always stay this way but the mindless and efficient grind in discords themselves starts becoming less and less appealing to alot of people the less mindless and efficient it becomes, they’ve only implemented 1 thing (lower player cap) yet, do you know how much impact everything they plan combined will really have in practice?
Mainly because of the pets of other people
Backpedal
#67
Just to clear this up, the mindless and efficient grind is Limon.
There’s a boss like O3. He kills your super uber character and puts you back at square one.
You have to then start back at level one and grind Limon.
It is the mundane grind that causes players to quit.
I’ll be honest and say I’m tired of making new chars. If had had to make a new character every single day I’m sure I would have left long ago.
You say pets have caused people to quit, but I believe they have caused people to stay.
You can argue that people can stockpile potions to avoid having to grind Limon. But let me tell you this. I have played for over four years now. I haven’t bought any vaults. I was never ever able to hold a significant amount of potions in my vault.
Thus, pushing the game towards constant death actually makes the game more pay 2 win because the people with all 120 vaults can weather any storm with ease while the little dude with only 2 vaults loses it all when he dies.
And as many people have stated many times before, pushing death just redefines the meta and undermines the purpose of the game.
Why should I spend hours and hours grinding an omni if my characters only live 2 days?
If I don’t care about getting omni, why am I doing so many halls?
The game starts to implode on itself with this destructive logic.
Again, I don’t think their dumb combat changes will mean every single person dies 24/7. However, it shows that their philosophy is flawed because they don’t understand what people want.
I challenge you to make an 8/8 woland speedrun. Show me the fastest time it takes to get a character “wonderland” ready for halls. Tell me if this is fun.
Megayeah
#68
Except it doesn’t because you have multiple characters, your vault and your mules
It’s moreso the fact content like Limon sucks, which is an individual issue and not a systematic one
In-Combat is nowhere near that deadly tho
Harder to argue for than the vast amount of veterans who left for… similar games
Me neither but i have mules with them.
Except the “little dude” has it easier after In-Combat and exponential HP scaling since he’ll kill things faster and have double vit and wis with a barely weaker pet.
So the sole purpose of the game is to mindlessly farm because that’s been optimal for like 2 years? Why have it be permadeath and bullet hell at that point?
Except your argument relies on people dropping like flies which won’t be the case, it’ll just be a healthy death rate. Sort of like what it used to be. They also plan to buff drop rates to match deaths.
???
Wonderland isn’t the entirety of RotMG, the whole point of these changes is to make it less consumed by that playstyle.
JimdaFish
#69
Optimistic fish noises
Okay, so for those who might not remember what In-Combat/Out-of-Combat is, here is a link to a public testing session thread from last October which lays out the general premises behind it. Certain details have been changed (as previously mentioned in this thread, the community’s response to the changes were mixed, so DECA has done some revisions), but the overall idea is the same.
While DECA did not lay out solutions to every problem the game has, they did address a good number, and I am very happy to see the IC/OoC changes being pushed. Maybe soon we will get a healthy balance of players living, dying and remaxing again, so we don’t just have people farming the same dungeon over and over again for all eternity and can instead return to an overall improved game flow (improved, of course, in my own opinion).
I am also interested in the changed fame bonus system, so that I don’t have to spend my entire playtime trying not to mess up bonuses which reward you for not playing certain parts of the game. I also see this as an awesome way to give bonuses to people for doing things beyond just running in circles or farming the exact same dungeon over and over again.
The item forge idea certainly sounds interesting, and while I do tend to be a purist when it comes to UTs (I prefer to get them directly from their drop sources), this idea at least shouldn’t pose as much harm to the economy and game play as UT trading coupled with dupers, so I am overall in favor of it.
And while others have expressed dismay at certain aspects of the Exaltation system, I do like the idea of being able to level up certain classes by doing specific things. It gives veteran players something more to shoot for, and isn’t something that will be too quick for a player to achieve, all the while without completely leaving the less experienced players in the dust.
The vault option looks awesome, and as a f2p player, I look forward to being able to save many of the items currently on mules, on my main account without having to manage alternative accounts. Space will likely be reduced, but I’m fine with that.
Overall, while this letter may lack in a couple of regards, I found that it was generally very informative and had a number of well thought-out ideas. I think that it’s important that people remember that many of these ideas are still very much in process, and can change; DECA has generally been responsive to community feedback in the past.
As a result I am confident that they will not make potentially game-breaking changes without testing them with the players, and the future should be bright.
Backpedal
#70
Every time this happens both parties are upset.
The dudes on the forum will just cry cry cry that pets weren’t nerfed hard enough, while the others will still be upset at the fact that they were nerfed in the first place.
It’s a lose lose.
It’s exactly what happened with bard. Everyone was somewhat disappointed with the end result because the geniuses on the forum just couldn’t get over a class providing a slight miniscule mana regeneration and had to cry cry cry the class was too good. Then Deca ended up making a change they didn’t like.
I know you won’t appease these forum people regardless of what changes you make to the pet. Like I said before, they literally will not be satisfied until dreadstump can ohko you.
This is exactly why you should never try to give into the demands of an angry mob.
Also wanted to add that a new kind of Wonderland will emerge with the changes.
So, if 20 man groups are the most efficient way to complete X dungeon, then they will start doing runs with only 20 people. These 20 people will include their friends, guildmates, and player they know are competent.
What happens to the noobs? Well, they get left out. They can’t get in the raids and they don’t want to kill limon for the ten thousandth time, so they log off. The game population shrinks due to this exclusivity.
Platformz
#71
Me thinks Exaltation (the way it looks like right now) is gonna result in raid discords for the end-game dungeons in for that sweet, sweet 100% completion.
Backpedal
#74
Yes. From a market standpoint it was a huge success.
They’s used it a little too liberally but it was honestly a good idea to get people into spending more money and playing the game.
They confirmed that there was always a big spike in activity during events (which were mostly chest events).
Megayeah
#76
Yes, making money and high player count all that matters, quality of game does not, Kabam very gud.
Nameness
#78
I mean it was a little rude, i guess
He’s actually contributing to the conversation and being on topic, and the guy making fun of Backpedal right below him didn’t get flagged.
I guess some people just think the word “ooga booga” is far too offensive, but when literally anyone else spams their comment with f-words and absolutely logicless baby tantrums because Deca did anything that changed anything, that’s an acceptable, civil way to argue
Jam can be annoying sometimes, but that doesn’t excuse targeting his legitimate comments with flags when people would let way worse remain anywhere else
Shadowfax
#80
No, they are flagged because they break forum rules with many of their posts - including this one.
Nameness
#81
Ad hominem attacks are littered all over these forums and unflagged, he didn’t technically call him a name, he responded to something it said rather than its tone, and this wasn’t a knee-jerk contradiction
Laserquest
#83
overall, i like the new changes.
motmg to september — lol rip my hopes of playing, i guess
item forge — pretty curious to see what those tokens are, would seem very nice if you earned like 10 or something for completing a dungeon boss or something
IC/OOC — i like this idea, it would make pets less busted which in the long run i think is great for the game
exaltation — seems like an good idea, but i would prefer character-based rather class-based. also, this sort of thing would be good if released in conjunction with something like elder realms, instead of it being a mindless grind-fest that farming 30 shatts would be. and yes i doubt an idea like elder realms will be coming out soon.
new fame bonus — yessss, its great to remove the thirsty/accuracy/friend of the cubes abilities so now i dont have to worry about accidentally losing them.
XBookwyrmX
#84
I’d expect this game to die (
) before anything like the Elder Realms (oh glorious concept! Rai-hah) came to be, as that sounds like a multi year project while managing everything everything rise DECA does, but man, I’m generally happy for the changes happening right now. There were only a couple of minor things I mildly frowned at, but I’ll take some kind of progress. I know they’re royally ticking off some of the OG’s especially, but a agree that it’s at least a step in the right direction! I’m not afraid of change, as Realm has had a weird game structure from the beginning.