Greetings AGS pals,
I don’t even know if this sort of feedback is useful, but I hope it is.
I’d like to share how the format of more recent changes feels, comparatively to alpha/pre-open beta changes.
Recalling specific times/dates is a struggle for me, but I can provide reference points.
Back before you launched the first EU beta server, like way back, some of you may remember the “hammer meta” days.
For the most part, the small percentage of top tier PvP’ers were using almost exclusively a combination of Sword/Shield, Warhammer, and Bow OR Hatchet - back when weapon ability cooldowns were shared and PvP melee stagger existed; aka a much higher skill ceiling/mastery curve.
Everybody and their mother used the Warhammer though, cuz it was blatantly more powerful; back when Path of Destiny had almost no Z-axis restrictions, etc.
So the hammer got nerfed, hard.
This change felt like someone looked into how and why the Warhammer was situationally too strong, then took corrective measures.
What wasn’t addressed at that time was PvP melee stagger, specifically regarding the hatchet, which bridges to the first “fast forward” and the first noticeable difference in how player feedback weighed into the decision making process of implemented changes.
If you’re familiar so far, I respect that you likely already know I’m pointing to the PvP stagger removal.
If you really want to understand my feedback, I’m not referencing the fact that the stagger was removed. I want to highlight the conditions under which the decision was made.
The PvP stagger mechanic didn’t change from earlier iterations of the game.
What did change, was the ratio of total players to total players with large amounts of experience/hours sunk into advanced melee-focused PvP games (Chivalry, Dark Souls, and Last Oasis come to mind).
My opinion is that this ratio shift was massive.
To put it another way, lots of MMO players expecting to play something familiar, only to experience a very harsh reality of it being a Melee-PvP style of environment with an additional element of MMO content.
You had it. This was the thing. This is what made your game so much different from everything else so far. Decent selection of advanced combat games existed, MMO’s were being cranked out like baby rabbits, but nobody had the balls to combine them at the level you did.
Back to the point, PvP melee stagger wasn’t “game breaking,” it was unfamiliar and uncomfortable for a huge part of the newer player population. That’s when the riots started. YouTube videos, Reddit posts, raging Discord chat PvP debates, the works.
If anyone from AGS would like me to do the work to put together specific examples to prove that out, I’m happy to accommodate. Fellow forum members, respectfully, you can do it yourself, I’m not here to prove/disprove anything to any of you.
This is where I saw a change in how player feedback impacted decisions on implemented change.
I don’t know where that mystery hero I referenced in my hammer nerf example went, because removing PvP melee stagger didn’t feel like someone knowledgeable on the dev team put in the effort to decide what/how should be changed.
This felt like a change that was based on enough people yelling about it. Almost like a feedback monitoring algorithm that tallies how many times something is complained about instead of a supernerd who loves their game and wants to improve it.
Fast forwarding one last time, to today…
It feels like all the original game designers are fired and there’s all new people in charge.
The intricacies of any advanced PvP content are a rapidly fading memory.
Silly mistakes like trying to remove Strike damage modifiers on lower level legendary rings and subsequently adding Strike damage to Hearty, because that’s what you changed it to.
Things like making repeaters in Settlement wars change to hitscan to improve server performance instead of improving the server to support the way the repeater was supposed to work.
Things like forgetting how to do math. This one is actually extremely shocking because of how often it shows up in different forms.
There’s not a nice way to ask this, so I apologize in advance for being blunt, but I’m going to ask anyway, how did you not know that fractional multiplication yields a net lesser total? Literally 5th grade mathematics (in America).
1 x 0.5 = 0.5 aka a 0.5% trophy is “bad”
Crit dmg vs Resilience in PvP.
Reimbursement gold formula that exploded today.
I can give you a tremendously more extensive list if actually needed, but I think you already know.
I’m not here to criticize your changes. Moment of truth, I still love playing the game and I don’t really care too much about any one particular thing. When a meta shifts, I shift. Part of the fun for me.
TLDR - the reasons behind what changes are implemented make me sad and it feels like you fired everyone who knew how the game was built, and please do better math.