Revised my post for a more cohesive discussion.
Ultimately I think that Deca needs to fix the hackers.
I don’t think it’s the community’s responsibility to go and police the game for Deca.
If they can’t fix the duping I’m not going to try and stop the dupers.
If they can’t eliminate hacked clients I don’t think it’s my job to try and report them.
I think it’s a completely different topic when niche hacks pop up that the developers aren’t aware of.
When hacks have been around for a long time and they have made no strong attempts to remove them, that’s on them.
At any rate, the support for pet nerfs always makes me upset.
I know some people buy pets, but for lots of players it’s the long grind that actually keeps them in the game.
Pretty much the only use of fame is feeding your pet.
To take away or devalue the pet grind takes away a huge incentive for players to go out and earn fame.
I also think that the community simply does not know what it wants.
The new LOD, fungal, heroic udl, and heroic abby have all essentially been disasters.
Regarding LOD, the bosses have had a big difficulty spike with no noticeable change in loot. As a result, the dungeon is dead. You just won’t see people completing it. And who can blame them?
Fungal is also suffering from similar issues. Again, another dungeon was created that was too hard for public players to handle. The dungeon is definitely shorter than LOD, but the boss is certainly challenging and lots of high damage dealing instapop mechanics are present. The result is a dead dungeon. Worse, the miner dungeon event slows the completion of realms considerably.
Finally, heroic udl and heroic abby are dungeons that have permanent pet stasis. The dungeons have gone through countless changes, with the most recent rendition featuring only boss fights. Alas, nobody completes them.
Every single metric shows that Deca has been making the game less accessible to newer players.
Every single metric shows that when you increase the difficulty without increasing the loot, the dungeon dies.
Call me crazy, but it’s in the best interest of the game to attract new players. To be brutally honest, older players should matter less in the eyes of developers.
However Deca does not seem to understand this.
To sum it up, their current plan has been to:
- Make hard dungeons that have bad loot/effort ratio.
- Make the hard dungeon worthwhile with an event.
- Repeatedly attempt to nerf melees/pets/etc because people find the game too challenging on their own and seek to group up in discords to make the grind worthwhile.
It’s just a vicious cycle that really benefits nobody.