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From what I have read on the patch notes they will be doing these changes based on player feedback. This will NOT be a monthly update due to quality over quantity essentially. Since Test Server will be in May for this I will stream that for you all. I don't know if it will be ON the first day of Test Server yet. Depends on how late I work. If I get out early (aka my original supposed to be 1:30 AM Eastern) then I shall. But if I get out at near 3AM then Absolutely not.....sleep is a thing after all :P
Yea, i would take the player feedback thing with a bucket of salt personally. Anyone who has tried giving player feedback or talking to game developers can testify that 99% of the time, whatever they say is ignored in favor of the devs doing what they want. How many times have you seen a game get released only to bomb because it wasnt what the fans wanted, and the devs KNEW it anyway, but insisted on doing something "different"? Im sure countless player feedback for this game has been given to derpcat over the years, most of which probably got ignored.
But at this point any improvement would be nice, even if you cant help but think "too little, too late".
Kinda hard to tell what some parts are about, but it doesnt take a genius to figure out that some parts of the game are fundamentally broken. Most of these were well known years ago, its just something that derpcat has refused to even discuss or acknowledge before because they only care about quarterly earnings and look the other way when a director does something that **** up the game (cough s2 release cough).
The new player experience is ruined by the insane fixation that derpcat/nexon has on not making information available. Things like damage multiplier tables are a closely guarded secret because nexon flips out and ban fansites who try to get the info, but new players cant figure out what skills to use because they dont know the damage multipliers for them.
Most of the dumb **** is easily fixable. Low level break offs too hard? Make them take less hits to break and make it easier to hit the breakoff. Its probably editing a text file for things like number of hits to break. s2 maps too large? Make them shorter/smaller. s2 maps drop 99% junk? Make them not drop 99% junk. Stuff that can probably be done in a couple of hours, tops. Including testing.
Its the extra stuff that will be hard to put into the game, like giving more info to new players on what their skills actually do.
Getting to the boss room will always take longer than fighting the boss unless its like a one room raid. Thats pretty much a given. Diablo style games are all about boss rushing from the nearest waypoint to the boss because there is no point fighting trash mobs for trash drops. Same concept here. They already made most of the s1 maps shorter, not sure what else they can do other than to make them all one room maps.
Im guessing that this focus on revamping the game was prompted by falling profits in Korea. But just like pretty much every revamp they do, it will be a partial fix and miss the core problem. Like how they made enhancing low level stuff have lower penalties, but not actually make it easier to enhance (in terms of rates/stones required), so most newbies still dont bother. Oh sure veterans who stockpile stones can get high enhanced weapons for their alts, thats cool and all, but it completely misses the point of helping newbies with gear.
A lot of the dumb **** that goes into the game really makes me wonder just how they came up with the idea in the first place. I mean, you dont need a crystal ball to tell that alban festival is a dumb idea and waste of development resources. Or making a second level 90 plate set, which then forces you to make a second level 90 set for the other armor types. Or the high stat requirements of Dullahan being the s2 release fiasco all over again.
As long as whoever is approving/pushing these dumb ideas stays in the company, the game wont get properly revamped.
My view of the problem of lacking new comers is actually how to make end game interesting so they can attract more people. The core of the problem is that people will only spend 2 weeks if hardcore leveling prior to lv90 at current stage, and months or years at lv 90 end game. Therefore, how to make the end game more fun, is the solution to the problems. Most people given a little skill, can solo mostly everything except raids prior to s2. Therefore, derpcat really needs to fix the end game experience when people are in a group instead of soloing. Also, how to make the battles more fun, challenging but acceptable. I would say, make more dynamic experiences, have people to be able to do different things each day, farming the same bosses over and over and over everyday, can quickly get a person bored. Maybe they can implement the idea of limited raids, but a lot higher drop rates, improving PVP experience and balance (which I think it's another core issue, i don't think many enjoy a mmo without a solid pvp system), which could also mean that introducing an actual pvp gear set, instead of the existing useless pieces other than the artifacts. Introducing ranked matches, 2v2 or 3v3 with exclusive rewards and ladder system.
so in conclusion:
1. fix all the bugs/glitches causing drop in end game experience
2. find a solution to the endless same boss farming everyday (less farming, higher drop rates, also extend the fights a bit longer with more dynamic boss mechanisms, i think neam is a really good approach here)
3. balance the pvp, introduce a more enjoyable and engaged pvp system
My view of the problem of lacking new comers is actually how to make end game interesting so they can attract more people. The core of the problem is that people will only spend 2 weeks if hardcore leveling prior to lv90 at current stage, and months or years at lv 90 end game. Therefore, how to make the end game more fun, is the solution to the problems. Most people given a little skill, can solo mostly everything except raids prior to s2. Therefore, derpcat really needs to fix the end game experience when people are in a group instead of soloing. Also, how to make the battles more fun, challenging but acceptable. I would say, make more dynamic experiences, have people to be able to do different things each day, farming the same bosses over and over and over everyday, can quickly get a person bored. Maybe they can implement the idea of limited raids, but a lot higher drop rates, improving PVP experience and balance (which I think it's another core issue, i don't think many enjoy a mmo without a solid pvp system), which could also mean that introducing an actual pvp gear set, instead of the existing useless pieces other than the artifacts. Introducing ranked matches, 2v2 or 3v3 with exclusive rewards and ladder system.
so in conclusion:
1. fix all the bugs/glitches causing drop in end game experience
2. find a solution to the endless same boss farming everyday (less farming, higher drop rates, also extend the fights a bit longer with more dynamic boss mechanisms, i think neam is a really good approach here)
3. balance the pvp, introduce a more enjoyable and engaged pvp system
IMHO, the problem is more about getting new players to reach end game in the first place. Most newbies give up before they get anywhere near it. Best record so far : A guy who got to level 6 playing Delia then quit because he didn't want to solo. Newbies who do get to level 80 often get stuck because they have a +0 level 80 weapon, finished the s2 storyline, and can't do s3.
Most of the players who do get to end game quit not because they are bored of the game itself, but they are bored with the inability to progress. Brynn/Ferghus being the main culprits here.
Sure, material synthesis is guaranteed progression, but the costs are so high that most people refuse to touch it. Good idea, flawed execution.
Personally, I think when people say they get bored of "farming the same bosses over and over", what they REALLY mean is that they get bored of having no decent drops. Most people only do dailies once and raids once, or certain raids twice with VIP. They dont do 10 BCE runs in a row, which will make almost everyone get bored. Doing a raid once or twice a day is unlikely to make people bored, given the Vindi style of combat. Usually when I ask further, people admit that they are actually bored of no drops or don't want to talk to people to find a party.
Pretty much every end game player (the kind with full OJ enchanted gear, etc) whom I have seen quit because they are "bored" is doing it because they have nothing easy left to do. Material synthesis costs too much, so they wont do it. Most of them have two star gear because upgrading 3 star to OJ costs too much. These are the type of players that only show up at end of quarter events (the big kind, where nexon gives out good stuff), get whatever easy event rewards they can, and dissapear till the next content update. When the next content update rolls around, they come back, play for a month max, do the easy stuff, then quit again.
Not sure what can be done to keep those players playing for long, because if you do make things easy enough for them to consider doing it, they will finish it in a month or less and quit again.
2. find a solution to the endless same boss farming everyday (less farming, higher drop rates, also extend the fights a bit longer with more dynamic boss mechanisms, i think neam is a really good approach here)
Neam is not a good example. The kind of players that I mentioned above all hate Neam and only did it a few times to complete the quest or to help their friends complete the quest and proceeded to quit again right after. Anything hard is strictly out of the question for these players. A 30 minute + boss fight is considered unacceptable for them because they are used to doing s3 raids in 5 minutes with a party full of +15s.
Incentivize gearing alts through less punishing enchantment/enhancement system & higher drop rate of S1 scrolls? Orange mats are easy enough to get nowadays and you can easily hit the stat cap with WB+Enthu combo. If I had real possibility of gearing several characters to sensible level instead of focusing on one I'd certainly play out of event periods.
But I don't since S1 farming is almost non existent because of abysmal drop rates resulting in scarcity of scrolls. Add Brynn to the mix and you've gotten yourself a finely brewed poison.
From what I have read on the patch notes they will be doing these changes based on player feedback. This will NOT be a monthly update due to quality over quantity essentially. Since Test Server will be in May for this I will stream that for you all. I don't know if it will be ON the first day of Test Server yet. Depends on how late I work. If I get out early (aka my original supposed to be 1:30 AM Eastern) then I shall. But if I get out at near 3AM then Absolutely not.....sleep is a thing after all :P
Yea, i would take the player feedback thing with a bucket of salt personally. Anyone who has tried giving player feedback or talking to game developers can testify that 99% of the time, whatever they say is ignored in favor of the devs doing what they want. How many times have you seen a game get released only to bomb because it wasnt what the fans wanted, and the devs KNEW it anyway, but insisted on doing something "different"? Im sure countless player feedback for this game has been given to derpcat over the years, most of which probably got ignored.
But at this point any improvement would be nice, even if you cant help but think "too little, too late".
I agree. The one thing I have been paying attention to is the small rumor of a possible engine overhaul in the future. Though Im not holding my breath but at the same time It may be possible.
From what I have read on the patch notes they will be doing these changes based on player feedback. This will NOT be a monthly update due to quality over quantity essentially. Since Test Server will be in May for this I will stream that for you all. I don't know if it will be ON the first day of Test Server yet. Depends on how late I work. If I get out early (aka my original supposed to be 1:30 AM Eastern) then I shall. But if I get out at near 3AM then Absolutely not.....sleep is a thing after all :P
Nice, I hope you link your stream when it comes up.
From what I have read on the patch notes they will be doing these changes based on player feedback. This will NOT be a monthly update due to quality over quantity essentially. Since Test Server will be in May for this I will stream that for you all. I don't know if it will be ON the first day of Test Server yet. Depends on how late I work. If I get out early (aka my original supposed to be 1:30 AM Eastern) then I shall. But if I get out at near 3AM then Absolutely not.....sleep is a thing after all :P
Nice, I hope you link your stream when it comes up.
I tend to try and not link my stream here for the sake of not spamming it so I have it on my profile But I will link it in the Future Content section when the time comes. Depending on the changes I will either translate the content in game or not. I normally only do that when new story hits.
@Lavonne
It seemed like you used Google translate to translate this.... It has some major wrong translations.
I translated this to provide the correct information.
Hello. This is DOL. (he is in charge of Mabinogi Heroes)
Four months have passed in 2017, it is mid-April.
Since the update of Hurk 2nd Weapon in January, there has been monthly events however
there was no content update so, you may be curious about the current development status.
The reason why there have been no content updates is,
we are focusing on long-term development for the big changes in the game overall.
We decided that in order for the players that value Mabinogi Heroes(Vindictus) right now to continue to have fun playing,
Vindictus needs a big change.
To name a few,
Vindictus, as an online PC game, has difficult environment to interact and enjoy with many players.
With large updates and advertisements, we receive surprisingly a large number of new players but
in actuality, there are small number of players that reach the final level and keep playing.
(The majority are 1 ~ 30 levels.)
For the current players to have more fun, new players must grow and keep playing to
create crowded enviroment in battles and trade system.
In order to achieve this many parts of the game needs renewal.
From character creation to tutorial, season 1, season 2, growth routes, ease of use, intuitiveness, enjoyment during character growth, etc.
"Let's talk with the villagers."
With who should you talk about what?
"Let's go get Bryialne's Heart."
When does it appear in which battle? In some cases, it may appear as an intermediate boss.
Why is Emuloch so difficult, which is the correct path in the Sewers, why are the stairs in the battle Secret Naughty Chamber so long,
the player experience of taking 20+ minutes to clear the battle Silent Blade, Blood Lord or Ekinar... are they really at the difficulty which new players can clear.
Into season 2, suddenly hired as a Treasure Hunter,
different battle clear methods and longer playtime, large maps, etc causes confusion and at the same time reduce the fun.
In the past, this was the latest content, or the final difficulty, so this was possible but
now it's early content and not a stage to be challenging; players should be able to experience it and move on to the next stage quickly.
Other problems are the difficulty of equipment acquisition and the limitations of character growth.
In the current game, the drop rate of the major rare items is too low, so the reward expectation for repeated play is very low.
The so called 'Fun of getting rares' is an important element in a game; it does not apply if it is too easy to acquire
and also too hard to acquire is a problem, so the right level of improvement is needed.
Enhancing, enchanting also applies to this; The Dead es failing 8 times in a row, failing 5 times in a row at +10 enhancement, etc
We are trying to prevent these kind of things from now on.
In some views, the end of equipment growth is soon/short and the feeling of getting stronger is little.
If you play lightly, it may be difficult to agree.
For those that have invested many hours playing the game, and for players that have played the game for a long duration time,
you may have experienced it was fun to farm for equipments, but after a while the fun was gone.
Getting better equipments doesn't make you feel any stronger, and in some cases that progress is too short(ends too quickly).
These parts needs to be improved to be a more fun enviroment.
In order to do this, system improvements will be needed as well as all existing battles in the game must be re-balanced.
The development team is preparing big changes to the game consisting of over 100 changes.
The afore mentioned things are a part these changes.
Depending on the item, there may be a combination of things that can be explained in one or two lines and some things to introduce in several lines.
We are currently not at the stage in which we can talk about the new content so,
I only talked about the big changes.
New content is currently being developed with devotion, and we will prepare them at high qualities to bring you satisfaction.
The scale of this update is several times larger than our previous updates so,
we could not do monthly updates like previous updates.
If we divided the updates into monthly updates, then the overall update volume would have been decreased by half;
It would have turned into last year's Smash update.
(He means the quality would have gone down as well with the quantity of changes. KR's smash update was horrible.)
We aim to well prepare to meet the milestones of the development on time,
to possibly introduce the update to the test server sometime during May.
See you on the next development log with other news.
Thankyou.
Oh, I also saw comments regarding the April Fools' font change on a fan site posting. (he's talking about inven.co.kr)
It looked inappropriate for our game in my eyes as well so I requested to end the event early.
I'm sorry I couldn't prevent this event beforehand, and thankyou for the feedbacks.
(KR ended the font change thing after like 2 days. We had it for the whole event period though )
Incentivize gearing alts through less punishing enchantment/enhancement system & higher drop rate of S1 scrolls? Orange mats are easy enough to get nowadays and you can easily hit the stat cap with WB+Enthu combo. If I had real possibility of gearing several characters to sensible level instead of focusing on one I'd certainly play out of event periods.
But I don't since S1 farming is almost non existent because of abysmal drop rates resulting in scarcity of scrolls. Add Brynn to the mix and you've gotten yourself a finely brewed poison.
Well, part of that issue is that there is no real reason to gear an alt in the first place unless you want to mix things up every now and then. It is much cheaper and easier to just get VIP on your main if you want to do raids more than once (plus you get the +1 core bonus among other things).
Even if i have two characters with full oj enchanted gear for endgame, I would still play my main all the time instead of the alt.
Sounds like we're mostly getting quality of life changes, which are certainly welcome, but they don't directly address any structural problems that Vindictus has.
I wouldn't get my hopes up that this update will "fix" vindictus, but at the very least it might help keep some of the more flakey long term players.
I also wouldn't expect an engine update, keep your hopes realistic or you'll just end up mad.
Comments
Yea, i would take the player feedback thing with a bucket of salt personally. Anyone who has tried giving player feedback or talking to game developers can testify that 99% of the time, whatever they say is ignored in favor of the devs doing what they want. How many times have you seen a game get released only to bomb because it wasnt what the fans wanted, and the devs KNEW it anyway, but insisted on doing something "different"? Im sure countless player feedback for this game has been given to derpcat over the years, most of which probably got ignored.
But at this point any improvement would be nice, even if you cant help but think "too little, too late".
My view of the problem of lacking new comers is actually how to make end game interesting so they can attract more people. The core of the problem is that people will only spend 2 weeks if hardcore leveling prior to lv90 at current stage, and months or years at lv 90 end game. Therefore, how to make the end game more fun, is the solution to the problems. Most people given a little skill, can solo mostly everything except raids prior to s2. Therefore, derpcat really needs to fix the end game experience when people are in a group instead of soloing. Also, how to make the battles more fun, challenging but acceptable. I would say, make more dynamic experiences, have people to be able to do different things each day, farming the same bosses over and over and over everyday, can quickly get a person bored. Maybe they can implement the idea of limited raids, but a lot higher drop rates, improving PVP experience and balance (which I think it's another core issue, i don't think many enjoy a mmo without a solid pvp system), which could also mean that introducing an actual pvp gear set, instead of the existing useless pieces other than the artifacts. Introducing ranked matches, 2v2 or 3v3 with exclusive rewards and ladder system.
so in conclusion:
1. fix all the bugs/glitches causing drop in end game experience
2. find a solution to the endless same boss farming everyday (less farming, higher drop rates, also extend the fights a bit longer with more dynamic boss mechanisms, i think neam is a really good approach here)
3. balance the pvp, introduce a more enjoyable and engaged pvp system
IMHO, the problem is more about getting new players to reach end game in the first place. Most newbies give up before they get anywhere near it. Best record so far : A guy who got to level 6 playing Delia then quit because he didn't want to solo. Newbies who do get to level 80 often get stuck because they have a +0 level 80 weapon, finished the s2 storyline, and can't do s3.
Most of the players who do get to end game quit not because they are bored of the game itself, but they are bored with the inability to progress. Brynn/Ferghus being the main culprits here.
Sure, material synthesis is guaranteed progression, but the costs are so high that most people refuse to touch it. Good idea, flawed execution.
Personally, I think when people say they get bored of "farming the same bosses over and over", what they REALLY mean is that they get bored of having no decent drops. Most people only do dailies once and raids once, or certain raids twice with VIP. They dont do 10 BCE runs in a row, which will make almost everyone get bored. Doing a raid once or twice a day is unlikely to make people bored, given the Vindi style of combat. Usually when I ask further, people admit that they are actually bored of no drops or don't want to talk to people to find a party.
Pretty much every end game player (the kind with full OJ enchanted gear, etc) whom I have seen quit because they are "bored" is doing it because they have nothing easy left to do. Material synthesis costs too much, so they wont do it. Most of them have two star gear because upgrading 3 star to OJ costs too much. These are the type of players that only show up at end of quarter events (the big kind, where nexon gives out good stuff), get whatever easy event rewards they can, and dissapear till the next content update. When the next content update rolls around, they come back, play for a month max, do the easy stuff, then quit again.
Not sure what can be done to keep those players playing for long, because if you do make things easy enough for them to consider doing it, they will finish it in a month or less and quit again.
Neam is not a good example. The kind of players that I mentioned above all hate Neam and only did it a few times to complete the quest or to help their friends complete the quest and proceeded to quit again right after. Anything hard is strictly out of the question for these players. A 30 minute + boss fight is considered unacceptable for them because they are used to doing s3 raids in 5 minutes with a party full of +15s.
But I don't since S1 farming is almost non existent because of abysmal drop rates resulting in scarcity of scrolls. Add Brynn to the mix and you've gotten yourself a finely brewed poison.
I agree. The one thing I have been paying attention to is the small rumor of a possible engine overhaul in the future. Though Im not holding my breath but at the same time It may be possible.
Nice, I hope you link your stream when it comes up.
I tend to try and not link my stream here for the sake of not spamming it so I have it on my profile
It seemed like you used Google translate to translate this.... It has some major wrong translations.
I translated this to provide the correct information.
Well, part of that issue is that there is no real reason to gear an alt in the first place unless you want to mix things up every now and then. It is much cheaper and easier to just get VIP on your main if you want to do raids more than once (plus you get the +1 core bonus among other things).
Even if i have two characters with full oj enchanted gear for endgame, I would still play my main all the time instead of the alt.
I wouldn't get my hopes up that this update will "fix" vindictus, but at the very least it might help keep some of the more flakey long term players.
I also wouldn't expect an engine update, keep your hopes realistic or you'll just end up mad.