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Status Update From Devcat?
It feels like its time to hear from Devcat again. What would be your questions for them? I'll start. Mine involve the longevity of the game. I have a lot of questions and some potential solutions to a lot of them. I talked about these topics because I feel as if they are neglected the most and are a vital part to this game or any other for that matter. Feel free to add to mine, or provide your own!
What is your outlook for the future of this game?
What is the direction of future updates and storyline expansions? How will releases/expansions be structured moving forward? At the end of a Season, will the character and NPCs loose their memories again?
Has the team determined a way to keep the game from ageing and staying relevant when similar games are constantly being released and saturating the market. Have you considered a massive revamp of the game's engine to improve performance & stability? With hardware constantly improving, how will we see improvements to the user experience in game? Will we see improved graphics, and new technologies implemented as they are released from Nvidia & AMD? Will it be possible to allow the game to effectively utilize multiple CPU cores & threads. Since the game is CPU intensive, how can you better optimize the game by offloading taxing processes from the CPU to the GPU? As display technology improves, maximum resolutions and refresh rates increase. So, how would you handle the User Interface and DPI for larger resolutions, as well as remove the 60 fps lock on the game (or are physics tied to the frame rate limiter?)?
How do you plan to combat the extreme fluctuation of active players between new releases and waiting times? The European & North American merge seemed mostly positive. Have there been plans to merge East, West, Australia & Europe on the same server, or a manner similar so all players can play together regardless of location without having the need to create a new character? Has the thought occurred that servers/regions could be united based upon an established popular language? For example; [East, West, Australia & Europe could could merge into 'English Server'] Korea & China remain individual due to their respected languages & Regions. For people that are in these regions that do not prefer the standard language, they may be able to use a different language pack bundled with their region's game client. For all of this to work it would be ideal to bring all servers up to date with Korea and have simultaneous releases moving forward. It would be time consuming, but I believe its worth the time invested and will help stabilize the game's player base, allowing it to expand indefinitely.
Has the team lost sight of this game's original perspective in terms of teamwork? When launched, the game focused on the cooperation amongst different character classes and abilities, along with the use of secondary weapons. It has become apparent this has changed significantly. Now players try to deal as much damage as quickly as possible without using teamwork. To some degree this has been dealt with in Raids with varying obstacles needing to be completed in order to proceed. I have a feeling this can and should be greatly improved upon. Guilds have also been neglected and it hurts the teamwork perspective of this game. It would be appreciated to expand the usefulness of guilds and making them more sociable. Guild House/channel/etc?
There is so much more I would like to ask, but now it's time for everyone else to ask their questions.
Comments
Think you mean doesn't.
As to why, simply because that's how nexon markets their games to their western audiences. Nexon believes it is the correct way in terms of monetization. I read that somewhere from an interview with the CEO of nexon, I'll link it if you want me too but I can't be bothered to find it right now.
That is the sole reason why we get less costumes, less convenience, higher prices and other "bad" stuff that we've noted throughout the years.
So you want to tell us that the man in charge believes that enforcing discouraging systems in their games will increase revenue for the western market? If that's true I have no idea how the guy got to where he is now since this is some serious backwards logic.
(Seriously, most of the products these companies make now can barely be called games.)
There is a reason why you almost never hear from korean game developers directly when their products are licensed for overseas markets. Game companies with similar arrangements usually have the overseas distributor (Nexon NA in this case) handle everything with the overseas market because frankly, they could care less as long as they get paid according to the contract.
Its like, Mcdonalds. Mcdonalds has different branches all over the world right? Mcdonalds HQ isnt going to talk to, say, korean customers directly. Thats not their job. That's Mcdoanlds Korea's job. Mcdonalds HQ only cares about how well Mcdonalds in Korea performs. The only time Mcdonalds HQ starts looking at things on that level is if Mcdonalds Korea is making a MASSIVE loss and the HQ believes they need to completely replace senior management for Mcdonalds Korea. And even then they wont talk to Korean customers directly, they would be sending executives to Korea to do a major shakeup of the operation, and they would be talking to middle and lower management. At no point whatsoever would you see someone at Mcdoanld HQ trying to engage Korean customers via social media or whatever to find out what they think (even assuming they have someone capable of speaking Korean there).
So no, devcat isnt going to answer any questions, even assuming they understand it. Hell, I bet they ignore most korean players all the time unless they want to do a highly publciized Q&A session (like most game companies).
What is the direction of the game? More lame parallel updates to delay content release obviously. Devcat has been following this model since the start of s2 since it is very easy for them. Why increase the level cap every episode when you can delay level cap increases for a whole season instead? More lazily copied and pasted gear all with the exact same stats (this isnt a prediction, we already KNOW Dullahan will just be using copied and pasted stats).
Getting more players to play? They dont care about that. Devcat is not out to grab market share. That is not theri business model. They are out to maximize profits. So if one crazy korean guy spends $200 per month on runes, they are totally fine with that vs 10 players spending less money per month (which is how BDO and other western games operate).
While Nexon NA likely has some leeway to set prices for their regions, its Devcat that ultimately determines things like "No, you HAVE to keep the shitty permanent item destruction model, we don't care if you lose players to games like BDO because of it, how else will we make money from runes?".
Devcat doesnt care at all about competition from games like BDO. Why? They are not korean focused. Devcat's major competitors are OTHER korean MMOs who are targetting korean players, most of which we have never heard from. It's the overseas publishers that are facing competition from games like BDO, but their licence agreement obviously limits them in terms of what they can do. To Devcat, if Nexon NA is struggling because too many people are hopping over to BDO (becuse of the enhancing/enchanting system, etc) , thats not their problem, it's Nexon NA's problem.
Basically, its like you (sales manager) telling your boss (CEO) that the product sucks and customers are jumping ship to your competitors. Your boss shrugs and tells you to deal with it because thats your job. Thats assuming Nexon NA even recognises a problem in the first place. Keep in mind that executives dont see the situation on the ground....they dont login and see the masses of afkers in town playing BDO. They just look at quarterly reports and as long as they see a nice profit they are happy with that. I can 100% guarantee you that they have absolutely NO idea how many of the accounts that have been inactive for a yearr or more quit beacuse of other games like BDO, because they dont bother trying to find out why those accounts are inactive (assuming they even prepare reports with the number of inactive accounts).
This is why everytime we near the end of a quarter, Nexon NA brings out big events to try and get people to spend money (so the managers can prepare reports that look good to senior management). End result : tons of afkers in town, like what we see now. All those people logging in just to afk, get free stuff, logout, then play BDO. Ask yourself, how many people on your friend list do you know just login to afk while they play other games?
Im honestly not sure why Nexon NA isnt trying to copy games like BDO in terms of how they monetize the game. Companies are usually very quick to copy a competitor when they do something successful, look at the Apple Iphone for example, Nokia and everyone else jumped straight on the smartphone + touch screen bandwagon. Maybe they are limited by their licence agreement or they genuinely believe that their current system works just fine.
Then again, they dont play this game and dont see more than 75% of the server afking in town while playing BDO, they only look at the bottom line. Which will remain profitable as long as people login, afk, spend $500 on boxes for things like the succubus queen outfit then go play BDO.
Honestly if we continually got the event rewards like we're seeing now that are the norm for the Asian regions the RNG would remain bearable. Yes, there would continue to be risks going for +12 and higher, but it would be relatively smooth for most players to get at least a +10 or 11 weapon and a fully scrolled set of gear just by playing semi-casually.
I agree, it truly is sad...
Devcat stated they've introduced so much custom code into the current one that porting vindi to a newer engine is out of the question.
Keep in mind that updating the game to a newer Source engine would most likely require licencing it from Valve again and that would cost them a lot of money. I'm pretty sure Nexon has no intention of investing more money than they already have into this game since it pretty much at this point just generates a lot of free money for them. You can't tell me that hosting 2 servers to store player data and that god forsaken sad excuse called "Royal Lag Fest" would cost them much money. The game runs on peer2peer which keeps the cost low. And since when did KR actually care about the NA player base? If they did I'm sure a lot of problems would have been solved by now.
They did this Q&A with Europe as well two years ago.
https://forum.nexoneu.com/showthread.php?1440348-Developer-Q-amp-A-3
Then wouldn't you agree it's about time for another Q&A since a lot has changed since the last Q&As?
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Agreed. It's not really a huge deal since optimizing what we already have would make a major, major difference. I'd love some slight graphical upgrades, but the game doesn't exactly look badly.
Not really true, there are two ways to handle the f2p model (in general). You can either make money via lots of micro transactions for minor things like cosmetics, more character slots, minor buffs, etc, or make lots of money via relatively few transactions for huge things like enchancement runes, etc.
Nexon KR/Devcat obviously went with the latter. The problem with this is that it has resulted in tons of people quitting for games like BDO. Low server population (NOT counting the afkers) simply encourages more people to jump ship to BDO and other games because "ehhhh theres nobody playing this game anyway".
Nexon's reaction to people quitting has always been "meh, as long as we make a profit, who cares?". That's one way of looking at it, sure. To use an analogy...imagine if you had a cafe or something, and you realised that most of the people coming in to your cafe were just sitting around eating food brought in from elsewhere but not buying anything from you (aka playing BDO while afking for free stuff). Some cafe owners would simply shrug and not care as long as they make a profit at the end of the quarter (what Nexon does), while some cafe owners would stop and think about how they could make all those potential customers spend money at their place instead of their competitors instead.
Nexon isn't doing the latter. Hence, masses of afkers in town playing BDO and more and more people quitting because "the game is dead, may as well go over to BDO where all my friends are".
Theres a myth in the MMO industry that you have to make the cash shop super expensive and powerful to get people to buy from it. Many MMOs have repeatedly proven this false. BDO is just the most famous example. Sure, you get stat boosts from the BDO cash shop, but nothing is nearly as important as needing runes to make a +10 enchanted weapon to be (moderately) useful in end game content. It is really, really hard to get new players to stick around the moment they realise they have to buy runes to +10 and double enchant a weapon for s3. Unless there is an event giving them free enhancement coupons or whatever, most new players just give up and quit when they realise this.
The current direction of the game is sadly, looking to be more pay2win. You need at least a +12 to hit neamhain's attack cap without temp buffs, and she is obviously balanced for people at attack cap. Level 95 weapons will have 3k more attack compared to level 90 ones and level 95 bosses will have stats balanced for people in full level 95 gear, just like how s3 bosses are balanced for people in full level 90 gear. Royal raids alone are balanced for 16 man parties of very well geared players...runs take 20+ minutes of soul crushing boredom if at least half the party isnt very well geared. And they are going to re-balance RRs/Nif so that the bosses drop the same loot but their stats are balanced for people in full level 95 gear when Dullahan is released.
This is honestly, dumb as . It is the s2 fiasco again, when even KR players quit the game en-masse because the stat requirements were insane and devcat had to scramble to reduce the s2 boss DEF and make it easier to craft level 70 gear. Anyone else remember how many people used to play this game when level 70 was the cap and roch/drags were the end game? Even the AUS server had 100+ players online at prime time during this point because roch/dragons was the most well designed point of the game, in terms of progression and storyline. s2's stat requirements contributed to a massive exodus of players who felt that they couldnt get the stats required to do end game, so simply stopped trying.
Most of those players are now playing other games and will never come back. And Devcat wants to repeat history again. I already know one guy with a +15 OJ weapon and fully enchanted gear who literally rage quitted when he found out about Dullahan and level 95 gear. He is now playing BDO and refuses to come back. This guy spent tons of money in the supply depot and Nexon has lost one of their cash cows because they are desperate to milk people for runes with level 95 gear.