Thread: Re-balance Feedbacks

I have no clue about the dev team background and stuff so I can only believe in your word.

Thou I would maybe poke here and there about few things you said.

This game uses a lot of art, but a lot of it is well lets say static. World backgrounds, world pages BGs, main screen BGs are single images used for long time after they are made. You could argue the same about trolls sprites, but those get new versions for events, thou then again making those shouldn't take more than few hours at best assuming they do have head on their necks and know what they want.

The bulk of artist work is then mostly in story and new girls affection avatars/scenes. But I will never believe that you need day or more for a single picture of this quality. People draw in less than day stuff that this game didn't event stand next to. I mean its not bad, but its not like some uber quality that requires god knows how much work (thou I know talking about doing art when you yourself can't paint a decent stick figure is kinda hypocritical). Especially if you factor in most story scenes could be (and probably are) done like VN games do it - separate background and character sprites - just instead of display engine of the VN showing those to you the artist just joins layers in photoshop or what ever making end images uploaded to game server.

So it probably boils down to them being like you described head-less chicken running around, where every single one of them only knows their stuff and have no proper management steering them proper way. So you probably are right that they would need to get 1-2 more artists (I think 2 total is enough - one would work on story, one on everything else), someone who can freaking balance the game (thou is it really that hard with a battle/fighting system thats so damn simple?). And lastly but most importantly someone to manage the team (I would start with this person).

You know, I start to think that their biggest fuck-up is just this update, or rather deciding to overhaul the game so damn much. Especially if you lack a guy who knows how to balance stuff and/or management skills in the team.

I think the worst part of the update was deciding to change level cap to 400. Cause this makes balancing hard, especially if you give so much "stats" progress per level. If you make hardest boss beatable at like leave 200, you won't be able to even win with him at level 30-40. And if you make him beatable at 30-40, then for anyone beyond 50 it will seems a fucking joke.

I believe best option for this game would be to actually semi adapt a lot of things from Diablo 3. Take seasonal leader-boards for PvP. Would fix the problem of new players having no chance in PvP without really the need to change anything else other than just adding a reset once per x months option, and maybe adding some rewards (which would be copy-paste more or less of what happens in contests).

Take paragons - levels after you hit cap. Basically just let people after hitting level cap - continue leveling. For each "ding" on "over-cap-levels" just give players some gift, like kobans which we get now from dailies. Leveling those special levels would be far slower, and thus the additional free kobans wouldn't fuck up the market so much as this dailies ones will - thus no need to fuck up affection system as much ;].

And for sake of simpler balancing, just make it so that each world you release is treated like new expansion pack - has different level cap. Like you are in world 2 (the first one after introduction world) make it cap at like level 20, then make 10 more for each next world. Then you have a "static" number of levels, per world added, around which you can easily work with upgrades, exp progression, items, etc, so that you wont overkill to much even if you hit the cap by doing PvP/dailies/whatever other source of exp there is part story quests. And if people hit the cap for that world? Just use the "paragon special levels" with kobans/etc. rewards.

Just make sure you make rewards on each world/level cap different, so people wont try to abuse your bonus levels by not progressing the story. But that could be achieved by setting exp/level progression in such a way that you would ding over-cap levels at similar pace on each world/level cap. Making it more profitable to reach highest world/level cap available in game.

A small side idea, would be to make it so that you can level those 10 levels on each world on just story quests alone, so that when next world hit everyone will start at the same level. Alternatively make it so that quests exp reward can be scaled up/down depending on your level, to slow down "overachievers" who over-leveled, and speed up the "slow-progressers". Thou the first solution would be far simpler I suppose, and seem less "assholly". People doing just story, would level as fast in over-all way of game progression, and more active players would just get freebies from over-cap levels.

Simple solution, that makes balancing the game far, far easier, especially for team with management/balancing capabilities issues. Cause it basically reduces balancing scope to each world as a separate "system", you have idea of what are people stats at previous world, and you just go from there - set up what you want players to end up after finishing that new world you want to add, and balance stuff around those two "values". And each new world would be simply copy-paste with different low/high numbers ;]. With PvP "fixed" by seasonal resets and small rewards, and "bonus-over-cap-levels" - you also fixed already two of main issues people had - wasted exp at cap, broken PvP.

And PvP could actually use that separate level/worlds system as a divider of all players. AKA like contests take a random bunch of 50 people for each one of them, PvP should have brackets based on worlds level-caps. So like 21 to 30, 31 to 40, etc. Which actually would further help new players do PvP, cause then with their far lower level and probably stats/items, they actually would have a chance against similar to them lower level players. Worst enemies would be then people that hit cap on their bracket, and farmed better items than them.

You know, what makes me wonder now is, WTF happened at beta of this update? Did they got so unlucky that only morons beta tested? That such big flaws were deemed ready to release?

I think I should probably write that stuff about my ideas of level-caps/stuff as a second feed-back mail to their PR guy, I believe that most people including me wouldn't have anything against like a secondary big Update if it fixed all problems with the game, even if it would mean like losing some levels/stuff (assuming they would release the 3.0 update after some people already hit level 80+ as there are only 8 world now and with my idea level cap would have been 80 now - thou then they could just convert levels over 80 into bonus-levels and give the kobans rewards or something)

Anyway its 11AM and I should have gone to bed ages ago so I will end this wall of text and go to sleep XD (You would think that with this much to say/argue, I was already a part of the game dev team or something lol).