Thoughts on the current trend

Since R32 and the beginning of persistence we have seen patch after patch, and many of us are beginning to have concerns about the longevity of the game as a result of some of these decisions. This feedback forum is absolutely full of people complaining about nerfed this, reduced this, removed this, and very little praise for new exciting things that make our play experience in some way better.

I'd like to believe that everyone here wants the game to succeed, to be enjoyable, and to be viable for years to come. I understand that certain balance issues and fixes will need to happen with a long term vision in mind, sometimes causing short term inconvenience and frustration.

However I have to admit that I see a pattern recurring over and over: The crushing might of the nerf-bat.

In the two weeks since we went persistent, we've seen a lot of changes, both from R32 and from the subsequent patches & fixes. Some of these have been positive, from the player's perspective, a few skills have been improved (multishot, stat buffs duration doubled), there's some new recipes, and perhaps most importantly, the zone-crash issue seems to be almost completley eradicated.

Things that made things slower, more difficult, more inconvenient:

• Changes to combat, autoattack, targetting, etc. are causing issues for many players.
• Magic focus cost increase still a serious problem for starting mages; air/death costs still way over the top and need to be adjusted.
• Focus regen helmet masterwork nerfed into useless oblivion instead of adjusted to a reasonable value.
• Soltown NPC schedules have caused all manner of headache, denying access to essential fuels & reagents.
• New and exciting bug (at least, I hope its a bug) where you have to be in melee range to attack monsters with ranged skills or you get zero damage. Still an issue in some zones, on level terrain.
• Deco merchant items now must be crafted, remaining deco items price has skyrocketed.
• Owl's nest mine, previously a good source of copper/iron - nerfed.
• Recall/teleport scrolls from travelling merchant removed completely.
• Weapon drops value reduced in several areas (ie monsters now drop 'shoddy' bows)
• Etceter mine "dramatically" nerfed
• Hilt Fortress dramatically nerfed (and not mentioned in patch notes).

It seems every time we turn around, something's being reduced, removed, the costs are increasing, etc.
I'm not saying I disagree with all of it, I know that all of the changes have been made for a reason, and while some of them I think were completely unnecessary (if I'm honest, some of them are downright baffling), I understand that there's a balancing act at work here and a lot of factors to be considered.

So what's my point?

The net effect of all of this is that its really starting to affect player morale.
People are frustrated, particularly with the regards to resource availability and crafting, and they're starting to ask, why bother? Why spend 10 hours mining ore only to either have the item you're trying to craft break, or to have the random generator give you stats you don't want, and basically leaving you with nothing to show for your efforts? The cumulative effect of resources being harder to obtain, gold being harder to earn to fund fuels, reagents, and other essentials, has begun to take the wind out of several folks' sails.

A new patch, instead of being an exciting opportunity to see new things, or broken things being fixed, are now anticipated with dread, wondering what aspect of gameplay is now going to be hampered.

I understand that sometimes nerfs are necessary. Nobody likes a nerf, but sometimes its unavoidable. The adjustments seem to go from 1 extreme to the other, for example:

Magic costs dramatically increased - extreme
Focus regen hood added to cloth specialisation masterworking adding +30 regen - extreme
This made focus regen with the hood (which took a lot of crafting to get to) way too powerful.
Solution: Hood reduced to 0.1 regen - a 99% reduction and a completely unnoticeable effect (tested with a stopwatch!) - again, extreme.
As of yet, there's been no response to this or adjustment to bring things back into balance.

Balance - that's what all of this is about.

I know this is a massive wall of text. I'm not trying to stir things up or cause trouble, I'm genuinely concerned with the directions things are going. As a mage, it costs me more gold per hour in reagent expenditure than I actually earn selling all the loot I pick up. Forget about paying rent on a house or financing gear and completely forget about non-essential items or cosmetics. I am invested in SotA, I want to be here for years to come. But the current trend is both alarming and disheartening.

Balance - that's the magic word. But in order to balance something, there are two ways to go about it. You can either remove things from one side of the scale - which is what we've seen happening. However the other option, the option that doesn't seem to be being explored, is you can add things to the other side of the scale. This will also achieve balance.


Put into more concrete terms:

• Instead of nerfing one mining location because its seen as too powerful, since everyone goes there?Make other locations better and more appealing. Add silver/gold to more high level zones.

• Instead of increasing spell costs for magic users, beef up the abilities of non-magic users to be more in line. Or if costs must be increased, add the ability to make meaningful progress against this via passives (ie. inner calm- at lvl 92, reduces costs by about 11% - we need more things like this!) Most players have no problem putting in the hours, putting in the grind, if they can see their character getting better and there is a goal in sight.

• Instead of forcing crafters to grind and sell junk weapons in order to actually progress crafting, implement a system allowing fuels to be obtained via crafting-related means. Adjust NPC buy prices on crafted goods to at least let crafters break even while levelling up (crafting things nobody wants to buy).

Balance. For all the things taken away, give something back. If thing A is more powerful than thing B, consider buffing thing B, instead of nerfing thing A. I think this will help fuel more positivity and give hope to those who are starting to feel a bit disillusioned.

/soapbox

 

I hope the answer you get is that we're in development and you should expect a LOT more changes in an effort to implement and balance the game for its best chance at long term success.

What you (and others) may see as inconvenient and troublesome, may actually be one of the founding principles of what this game is...a unique and challenging world unlike other MMO's.

I'm thrilled at the direction of this game and the recent patches. I hope Portalarium continues to do exactly what they've been doing, improving the game one step at a time. That's the whole reason I'm here, and why I look forward to every patch.

 

I hope so too Drocis. I have high hopes for what this game can become, I just hope we can shape that world without constantly feeling like things are getting worse rather than better.

 

It is better for balance to reduce what is overpowering than it is to raise everything else.. which causes a circular problem of ever increasing power.

This isn't how good balance works. Things are unbalancing when there's too much of something.. if all you're doing is shifting the problem from one thing to another you're not balancing anything.

The plain and simple fact of the situation is this. The game isn't finished. You should not think of any part of the economy or game balance as the way it will be. By Portalarium's early definitions (yes I'm going to say it) the game is still pre-alpha.. All of this balancing.. the nerf-bat and all that.. happens in every game at this stage and much later through beta. The difference is most of the time we don't experience it cause we don't even know the game exists yet.

This is a natural part of development that needs to happen.

 

I played the earliest release of the game and decided to stop and wait until it was done. But we were forced to make land decisions in game and now that the final wipe is done, the game is more or less live.

I would have been fine waiting another year. But here we are with a live game and people have their land rush housing. So at this point people have a valid reason for all of their criticism because they see any changes being made as having some impact on a character them may be playing for the next ten years.

If people get a mountain of silver or some master crafting skill to easily, that can be seen as affecting the economy for years to come.

 

i would like this 10 times if i could. I love the game. i would like to stay here a long time. i do agree things need to be balanced. but even as i agree, my heart is heavy and a pretty new zone (for which i have no crafting recipes to duplicate) does not balance the negatives that must be made to achieve balance. So i guess what i am saying is please do something to give us a bit of sugar to make the medicine go down.

 

Reducing everything just causes a circular problem of ever decreasing power.

I understand the need to reduce some things that are overpowered and have said as much. But surely there are some scenarios where doing the opposite would also be appropriate? Some of each perhaps, would go a long way for player morale.

 

Balancing should become easier as players log on and play... R32 is still for the most part administrative for many of us... my sense is that R33 is where we'll really start to see the world open up and have people logging in with the numbers Portalarium needs for balancing and tuning. Any hard swings from buff to nerf right now are probably due to low player numbers... my feeling is that everything will get better.

 

My two COTO :

I implore the devs to stay their course, what I have seen so far has me quite excited for the future of this game.

Fine work.

 

So any Idea what the current trend is or will be for PvP? That is the only thing I really am concerned about.

 

regarding Hilt and silver mining that has been nerfed greatly. i ask you this. you sent a message stating that to use a tamed animal (ferocious red spider) in the future you will need to have skills in taming in order to have a pet at a good level. OK so what happens ??? everyone goes to hilt to get silver to level there taming. so what do you do? lower hilt because to many people are mining there. you made that happen and nurf it because people are going there? come on... this just doesn't make sense.

 

A designer knows he's reached perfection not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

You can only take away so much before there's nothing left. So the problem of ever decreasing power is much easier to solve.. and you need to take away less and less. Where as with increasing power.. there is no upper limit and it can easily spiral out of control.

Yes there are times when increasing power is the better option but not in general principle. As for player morale.. I hate to sound cold but in this situation we're talking about player perception and expectations within an incomplete environment. The "player" in this case either does not understand or appreciate the need which is their problem. When the time comes and the dust has settled.. the game will be better and this will all be but forgotten and we'll occasionally reminisce.. "yeah you remember way back in pre-release where everything was still in weightless gold coin?"

 

It makes perfect sense, but the developers probably haven't had the kind of time they would like to spell it all out for people. They're busy. We're in development. This is what happens when you're in development early access.

 

Actually it makes perfect sense.. it showed the devs that Hilt has way too much silver and it's far to easy to get it there. Which is supposed to be difficult. It's not a question of whether of nor the devs created the demand so much as there's one great overpowering supply which is itself an issue for the economy.

 

I don't exactly mind any of the nerfs so far, as I think it was all stuff that needed to be adjusted, but I think a lot of it could have been handled better. Most of this stuff could be seen coming from a million miles away. Like, what did you think would happen in ECM with hundreds of ore nodes being guarded by a handful of 1 skull mobs?

Also, I think the adjustments themselves could be much better. If people are pulling too many resources from a particular zone, you can always make the zone more challenging instead of just reducing resource spawns. Reducing spawns is just the lazy fix for poor zone design.

 

Ive been in the dumpers in R32 also. Mostly relating to performance. I have probably the best PC you can have right now and my R31 experience was awesome, 60 fps, zoning in 10 seconds, and now its almost unplayable and extremely annoying. It takes me 3 minutes to zone into brit and I have pretty much <10 fps and massive stunning and massive problems just dragging things with the mouse. All changed in the one hour it took to patch the game from R31 to R32

 

What it shows me is how fast the devs have to work on maintaining balance. Seems like everyone is about gaming the system instead of just gaming.

 

`

I don't disagree with this in principal. As you've said though, most of this that's happening now would usually happen in an invisible alpha or beta state and none of us would see it until things were finalised.
However, SotA does not have this luxury. Its a crowdfunded game. People have invested, people are playing now. People have been playing for months, rolling with the changes. Changes that affect gameplay in negative ways are going to cause dissent in the ranks. This has resulted in a large amount of highly negative posts and arguments which also does not help with the general morale and player mindset. While many of us have complete faith in the end result, playing through the constant strip-down and nerfage is starting to taint things and it seems I see more complaining than anything else these days. If the audience is watching the dress rehearsal and doesn't like what they see, they're not going to stay for the play.

I'm just suggesting that, Devs, when evaluating how best to rectify the situation, have a moment of pause, consider if there isn't a way to bring balance to the situation by tweaking something else in the the playor's favor rather than nerfbatting something into the floor. Even if that is only appropriate in one scenario out of 10.

 

May sound good on paper but what happens when the player level up? The extra challenge is no longer a deterrent and you're back to the same problem?

Yes there may be some poor design involved but sometimes you just don't know until people get in there and find the flaws.

 

A sad reality of human/player nature. Everyone wants what they want and they follow the law of least effort to get it. (speaking in very broad general terms of course).