Churgethoth's Words

This dev reply lecturing people for playing their precious game the 'wrong' way confirms these problems will never be fixed. I was holding out for a few days to see if the bind on craft thing was getting rolled back and I see the devs are even more wrong-headed than I even imagined.

Seriously, telling people they are playing the game differently than you designed is completely misguided. A game might have been designed by a small number of people to play a certain way, but once thousands of others get their hands on it and spend enough time, there is going to be a metagame that develops. It would be very unusual if the developers could have predicted the quirks of the emergent gameplay that the community builds.

Great example is the selling of basil ports. People realized that going through 4 levels of annoying dungeons for a pull at the recipe slot machine with very little heat and crown return was boring and a waste of 40 energy most of the time. So after a while a few people figure out that when you hit the jackpot on some good recipes, you can share the wealth and skim off the top, so to speak.

So from the above example, its a gestalt behavior that's developed as a workaround to the game mechanic that achieves the desired reward (getting high level recipes) without going through the undesirable aspects of the game (slogging through the poorly balanced and frustrating tier 3). So as a designer, you have to ask yourself: If players are using exploits to bypass undesirable portions of your game, what does that imply about your design? It would be rare for the devs to have anticipated such an emergent behavior.

So you can shrug your shoulders and say 'no problem'. But many people find this unfair and consider it an exploit. So now's your chance to put your design skills to the test and admit that the current design is faulty and reengineer it. Which is what you did with this patch. But another option might have been to make the 4 levels leading up to basil fun and worthwhile, or maybe introduced some random item into the dungeon like a 'Cryptic Schematic', which you scrounge up on the 4 floors leading up to Basil. Once you reach him, he will decipher them for you and reveal which recipes he is selling, one for each 'Cryptic Schematic' the party discovered along the way. Or some other redesigned game mechanic.

But the most important part of this process is to realize that this game no longer belongs to you, it belongs to the thousands of players who pay real money to be a part of it. So maybe some kind of explanatory post such as the OP might have been useful a month or two ago when you started to realize certain trends that didn't meet the original design document. If you had opened a dialogue with the player base a few weeks ago, you could have avoided this negative backlash and still had the chance to address the issues you saw developing. Or just maybe, there might have been a way to get player feedback and suggestions... oh, right, the suggestion forums! How silly of me to forget.

Now it's too late. The game is over for a lot of people and instead of gathering data and then implementing a change with plenty or warning, we get a massive dump on the goodwill of the player community, and then some blowhard shows up a few days later to lecture and reprimand people for having the gall to misbehave on his game. Better to bring up the subject and give people fair warning than to cludge together some amateur hour 'balance' patch and then try to be diplomatic about it when it blows up in your face.

So, boo freakin' hoo, everyone is running around with Divine Avengers. No one gets to feel like a precious unique snowflake and be the only one on the server with a glowy sword that they worked ever-so-hard to get. Cry me a river. Maybe don't attach the snowflake sword to the only halfway profitable grind in game and then you wont see dime-a-dozen Sealed Swords and Antiguas. There's a design tip for free. Or here's an idea, how about you do something about the gaping balance problems with tier 3 shock dungeons, chainstunning ice mobs, useless armor stats (seriously, piercing resist is the mark of a noob), and the million other problems that have existed since beta that have gone unaddressed. Not a word from the devs has been shared about the myriad design issues that may have contributed to all these players somehow messing up their enjoyment of the game by 'undervaluing' items. Seriously, your actions on this patch have generated much more dissatisfaction than any amount of regret over how 'easy' it was to get a glowy sword. What's more important, people paying money to you to have an item that they care about, or people getting a spanking over daddy's knee and a character-building lesson on the value of hard work? Please...

The biggest tragedy is that the money lost from this disastrous patch might have been spent on something that would have saved the game: more items, more monsters, more dungeons, more stuff to do. Sure that costs development time and art assets need to be created, but do you actually care about making a good game, or do you care about bilking money from suckers and chiding them when they try to do things you didn't think of?

So this is too little, too late in my opinion. I'm not going to be jerked around by some company that doesn't know what they're doing, and worse, won't even admit it. All this "Well you need to understand..." stuff is patronizing and insulting, and doing it after the fact is laughable. If this patch was given a week or two of warning, I could marvel at how inept it was, then take steps to guard myself against the brunt of it's negative effects. But the fact that it was dumped on me with no warning really just makes me shake my head in amazement.

So your post revealing your design dilemma between crafting-to-trade and maintaining the ~specialness~ of 'rare' items is cute and all, but your comments don't have any actionable information at this point. It's either misdirected and pointless consternation about theoretical game design or an attempt to appear 'in-touch' with the community, neither of which I find compelling. Again, it might have been good to know this a week before the patch that your game was having an identity crisis.

It's pointless now. Nothing will change, the game will tailspin, and I'll be long gone. What a shame.