Producer's Letter: Part 2

[CandyShi]

. it wouldn’t change much in the big picture to let whale #283 keep their jugg after multiple deaths since they can’t keep the character it was attached to or the mercy’s bane and crown they paired it with.

I actually disagree here, and for the main point that event whites are the one things that whales can’t buy keys for

If a whale could save their event white for gold on death, then it’s as if they can just buy another jugg or something.

[Seelpit]

not all sphinxes drop tombs

(Hello yes pedantic me here to tell you that this was changed in X.31.9.3 where they made all encounter dungeons guaranteed to be dropped)

[Megayeah]

Those bosses were designed for a player base without pet abilities. A playerbase that worked together to take down bosses, and not greed to do the most DPS.

Ok, dodgeable boss = designed for a playerbase that greeds to do the most DPS?

Bullshit.

lol, show me one video of a melee dodging a Tomb rage or O2 rage then. I’ll show you a melee dodging MBC:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JCTm72zLcmE

It’s as if no company, in the entire history of the game, fixed duping. It’s as if Kabam, when they promised to tackle the issue, decided to just keep the then promised temporary soulbound, as a permanent solution for the problem. The economy back then, was far healthier than the current bot ridden nexuses of today. Countless websites and organizations exist in the modern day to sell duped items. You cannot attribute the failures of all three game companies, on the actions of the first. Both Kabam and Deca had the game ownership well longer than Alex, Rob, and Amit.

Look, i’m not here to praise Deca (You might call parts of this post “praising” them but that’s not what just pointing out things they did or plan to do in an objective, to the point way is) and especially not Kabam, just pointing out that duping was the result of faulty code and lack of foresight to begin with.

Were balanced items and part of the core gameplay loop. They costed 11,500 fame after build 118.7, and were an item that you had to really save up for. Back in those days, fame was an actual currency, that meant something. You couldn’t just spend money to buy amulets or weapons, or armor in the nexus, unlike one company’s philosophy .

It not being p2w doesn’t make it good or balanced, 11.5k fame to resurrect is not “balanced” or “part of the core gameplay loop”, infact, what did happen was the meta revolved around getting ammies in the most riskless ways (especially fame training) to become immortal. Fame has always been a bad currency because the mere fact the best ways to get it are to mindlessly fame train mean it has little to nothing to do with skill or experience.

And pray tell, where is this data?

I mean less utility, not used by less people. Being able to land a couple hundred damage every few dozen seconds once your really low capacity for MP pots ran out does not make for very good crowd control. Landing SB slightly easier than a wand class is not a good niche to specialize in either.

The updates to the game were frequent and plentiful. Wild Shadow would often interact with the forums and ideas were common to make it into the game. To say that, what, class abilities were limited, is an understatement. Entire sections of the game you take for granted were being written into existence. Obviously, comparing the current list of ability items to then, is a different story, and an unfair rationale to support. The UTs in the game were balanced and meaningful. Please, explain to me what classes were limited?

I don’t “take them for granted” because i was there as they were made. Also, items like tomes, berserk and damaging were already ticking time bombs as even if it wasn’t for pets, eventually if the game got popular a high player concentration would make them broken anyways. Many classes either had no UTs or had only an event white, which were and still are insultingly rare, UT forge is coming so you’ll be able to exchange endgame items for them, but until then, these things were and are downright spitting in the face of people without either no life or just no getting extremely lucky, atleast they were that way til they got duped massively.

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/ditto

Staves had no viable alternatives at all as an example, yeah, they had less time to develop everything but still, as pointed out before, too many gaps in options for classes.

Hahahaha, you’re preaching to the bloody choir here. I’ve run thousands and thousands of snake pits, and I haven’t gotten a single bulwark…

EXCEPT UT TRADING WAS PART OF THE ORIGINAL DESIGN PHILOSOPHY. THE GAME WAS NOT DESIGNED BE A DECADE LONG GRINDFEST FOR THAT ONE ITEM. ITEMS WERE MEANT TO BE TRADED.

Look, UT trading was nice and all before mass duping but even then it just made the items go from absurd luck required to absurd tiered item, pots and fame farming time required for anything good which even if the drop rates aren’t necessarily good nowadays is still evidently not the case.

Back in my day, our skill was based on dodging, and not how much money we burned to max our divine pets.

That’s a major strawman, yes, there were no pets, but the countless sources of unavoidable damage (highlands swarms, O2 rage, tomb rages for most classes, just general massive swarms in the realm, Cube God, Skull Shrine, Septavius brown phase, etc.) made that not such a good thing often, you say this like i spend money or have a divine but it’s the opposite, f2p, only go for either mheal only or petless (for healing classes), and play alot of bullet hells, but a bullet hell where reliably dodging half the time is impossible due to shotgun spam or massive swarms is not a good one. You say your days but i’ve been playing for over 9 years (on and off, but i was active in Wildshadow era) too.

It’s almost like the addition of pet abilities, without changing anything else in the game, affected the entire balancing of the game :poggers:

Are you seriously implying setpiece bosses like Liches and Ents used to be challenging, seriously?

The game HAD to make money somehow. What in this non-Newtonian era of gravity run physics of a world, do you think was an alternative for an indie game company with a Free to Play model? And how are these keys so evil, but the Golden Archer Pack is just absolute sheer brilliance in your mind? Or selling bloody old tops in the nexus? For $10!?!?!

Just making a strawman again, Kabam is even worse but that doesn’t mean i can’t criticize Wshadow in any way. An alternative that didn’t ruin the gameplay loop would unironically be selling untradeable gear like now because atleast then only the p2w people are skipping the loop instead of everyone which is fine for PvE, and everything doesn’t revolve into a nexus pop steamrollfiesta where they have to balance the drop rates around keys.

Gee willikers, it’s like the game was actively being created. Go to the patch notes for 2010, 2011, and the TiGSource forums. I dare you. I double dare you. Tell me that there was no QoL patches.

There was QoL, but it was lacking many essential ones that should have always been there like turning off all particles, HP bars and a realm checklist so you don’t get cheated out of event bosses, the latter still persists today.

The game was created originally for a timed game contest. The developers then used, cutting edge, actionscript 2, which was brand new at the time. Even in 2011, flash was just starting to become popular online. Of course the spaghetti code runs terribly in today’s standards, especially as Kabam and later Deca tacked on to the size of the game, without optimizing the source code.

Claiming Deca isn’t optimizing or improving the source code is blatantly wrong. The only thing Exalt didn’t improve on was it DCs more but they said explicitly that 1.0 won’t come until that’s fixed.

Are you daft, or just trolling? Priest could not unlimited heal until Kabam fucking introduced fucking pet fucking abilities that fucking let fucking priests fucking heal fucking forever.

Again, no limit to how many players healed/buffed = ticking time bomb, and recent leaks show Deca is finally making Priest’s heals split over groups so this issue isn’t going to remain unaddressed for long.

[Twitchystr]

Why’d you reply to me when all your points are directed at kali?

[Megayeah]

Oops

[Twitchystr]

Reply to mine! Kinda bored.

[Megayeah]

What issues? Tomb is one of the best designed dungeons in the game, and O2 has aged pretty well (though they did add extra phases)

It’s with dodging, dodging is supposed to be the most skill demanding part of realm and if now it’s negated alot of the time by mass healing and mseal, back then it was negated alot of the time by the inherent design of things, alot of classes, especially melees just straight up couldn’t dodge O2 and tomb late phases, but: https://youtube.com/watch?v=JCTm72zLcmE
Bosses being more dodgeable overall, discords not being universal and especially upcoming steamrolling nerf changes put dodging in a better place.

That has always been true of realm, as long as the server code is spotty, it’ll keep on happening. One thing I have to say, is that wasn’t WS’s fault, it was merely the greed of the playerbase. (If you look at the early patch notes, duping fixes came up every few)

Just pointing out it was worse when it made every UT and ammy basically worthless.

Are you sure about that? Back then, assassin was the king of getting sb. In fact, I’d argue that they became less used over time because of the constrictive spaces that is a trademark of DECA dungeons .

Getting SB slightly easier than a wand class, who already have and had it easy, is just not a good niche to occupy, their crowd control was just bad when you had to wait 20-30 seconds to use an ability and there was less room for MP pots too.

Tell me. Isn’t that also true of modern RotMG? You’re encouraged to use DPS gear most of the time to optimise efficiency, in fact I’d say we have fewer options that before.

But that’s a reduction in variety caused by discord steamroll meta specifically and not a lack of options simply by some classes having little to no options, it’s less universal and even disregarding defensive options it’s still an improvement over Sorc, Wizard, Assassin and Necro having only tiered abilities, while many other classes had only event whites which were and still are insultingly rare, the only sign they might not be that way in the future is UT forge if it’s a reasonable rate of exchange between endgame and event whites.

You say that, then say

Is something that is a challenge to dodge, boring
to you?

No, but something that is impossible to dodge (Cube God and Skull Shrine being prime examples) because there aren’t even large enough gaps in the shots at your range ontop of coming from too many directions at once and/or being too fast, is.

Yes. I agree that keys are the most inherently p2w thing in rotmg, but removal would cause an uproar in the whale portion of the playerbase.

Yes, but enabling anyone around a whale to just skip the entire gameplay loop was a bad monetization method from the start.

A serious lack of QOL = implementing anti lag features, loot preview, even pressing “i” and getting to spray bullets?

The only one of these things that was in back in those days is autofire tho. While some QoL is being added it’s still lacking and many things like HP bars should have been there from the getgo.

Priest just doesnt work with pets.

This applies to every buffing class and priest since they not only made their abilities insanely strong but able to affect unlimited players, even without pets you could just put alot of them in one place to have basically the same effect, if the popularity of the game got high that would have been a ticking time bomb, only in the next few months with In-Combat balance changes including the leaked tome split healing is this going to be addressed.

[Xaklor]

let me try that again sans understatement:

you two should try to keep your temper in check. this is not a suggestion.

[PiiNeS]

God damn this producer letter turned into an big ass argument.

[Nevov]

Many of your points are reasoned but have to pick one up:

a realm checklist so you don’t get cheated out of event bosses, the latter still persists today.

You say it cheats players out of events, not knowing what has and hasn’t spawned, though the flip side is making this wholly transparent would see realms get abandoned after “everything good” has already spawned. Keeping this information hidden dissuades us from just swarming from realm to realm like locusts looking for somewhere to feast.

Maybe a better way would be undo the cap of 1 per realm for the major encounters? When the game had this in previous times it was a pain to clear multiple Sphinxes for example, but the way the game’s gone I don’t think that would be the reaction nowadays to seeing a third or fourth Sphinx or Lotll! Maybe fix Rock Dragon encounter to be less horrible first though, eh! Don’t fancy seeing Oryx brag about his 4 Remaining Rock Dragons…

[Megayeah]

But some people would still stay for Oryx regardless.

[CandyShi]

O2 rage

which one?

Since we’re talking about wildshadow dungeons, you obviously mean the original final phase… which is too easy to dodge.

[Nevov]

But some people would still stay for Oryx regardless.

True for a realm with the events spaced out evenly through its heroes, so by the time they’ve gone it’s 10 heroes or something until close.

But I’m picturing the realm where all the “good things” spawn early, such as the 6/85 realm where it’s something like 39 heroes, on Cyc Gods, and if the interface tells us it has already gone through Hermit, Lotll, Ship, Avatar and Sphinx. These ones few players would bother playing in, preferring to seek out a plumper target rather than spend effort clearing a “known dead” realm. Then 2x “dead realms” in a server = “dead server” and players get trammelled into the busier servers, a bit like what we’ve seen in this current event, and how ‘key pop’ servers are, or how all the Rifts seasons went, and the public fame train. The instinct is to want to be in the best place, and if a realm tells you outright “this is a bad realm” people will abandon it.

I’m not saying for certain it would be a negative to the game, because it would let casual farmers target realms that they know their desired thing is still available in, saving them from feeling pushed into joining Discords. Just sounding a note of caution of unintended consequences if we had perfect information about event spawns.

[Equalistic]

But I’m picturing the realm where all the “good things” spawn early, such as the 6/85 realm where it’s something like 39 heroes, on Cyc Gods, and if the interface tells us it has already gone through Hermit, Lotll, Ship, Avatar and Sphinx. These ones few players would bother playing in, preferring to seek out a plumper target rather than spend effort clearing a “known dead” realm.

One way around this might be to separate events into early/mid/late encounters, like x can only spawn when the realm has >30 heroes, y can spawn between 20 and 30, and z can spawn with <20 heroes. There would need to be a higher encounter rate/guaranteed encounter to make sure events don’t become more rare, but it might incentivize people to stay to the end

At that point however, I feel like it’d be too many changes just to solve one minor annoyance/QoL issue. Besides, I think it’s fun to sometimes see a bunch of big events spawn one after the other.

[PrimeGrind]

There would definitely be notifiers(or even regular people) hopping from realm to realm looking for exactly x<y<z heroes to get their preferred white bag chance.

[Backpedal]

But we know with Oryx 3 raiding groups will swoop in at the end of a realm regardless.

[system]

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