Dear Amazon Game Studios,
Given the current state of my server Tritonis (our peak player count in the past 4 days was 600 active players), I figured I’d shoot one last shot into the void of the forums in case it by some miracle actually reaches your ears/eyes. The fact that I feel that way goes to other posts I’ve made regarding communication (especially using social media), but that’s not the point of this post.
This is some overall feedback, and is a theme that I’ve noticed across multiple dev companies in the MMO genre, not just AGS. I hope that you take this feedback as intended. Specific to your team, I think you need to draw a line between a “developer” bug and a “player” bug, and how you respond to each of them.
A “developer” bug is what most would call an exploit. It’s a bug that causes the game to not function as intended, but does not necessarily ruin player experience. If anything, it’s the opposite, it rewards players too much. For example: Major Portals. They were spawning too quickly, allowing players to get too much Azoth, gear, and corrupted fragments. That is a developer problem. From a player perspective, it was a quick and easy way to farm Azoth, gear, and fragments. Why does it matter that it’s a developer problem? Because that affects the choice of solution you take. Most of the time, a developer problem (such as a balancing issue or an exploit) remains in the game until you figure out how to fix it. You do so because taking a more extreme solution (such as stopping them from giving rewards completely like you did) ruins the player experience. That is ESPECIALLY the case for any bug involving a key form of repeatable content. Major Portals are required to get the fragments for expeditions, and high tier gear is required to do them. Shutting them down completely because some people (even most) might get too much gear prevents players from being able to create expedition orbs and experience other content.
In case any non-developers are reading this and don’t understand the issue, basically the solution implemented is the equivalent of saying that you’ll try to solve workplace obesity by no longer paying your employees. It’s extreme and while it may work (they won’t have money to buy food), it’s also going to cause most of your employees to leave. Or, to use a less extreme example, you discovered that some employees are taking too long of a lunch break, so you deny all employees the ability to take a lunch break. It’s an extreme solution that is not workable.
An example of a player bug: outpost rush stuck issues. That’s something that ruins player experience and you are COMPLETELY right to stop it. It does mean less content, but as the bug ruins player experience you have no choice but to stop it. In this case, it’s the equivalent of finding out your manufacturing plant has a toxic leak in it. You shut it down completely to avoid harm to the employees.
Why understanding the difference and adjusting course on the changes you’ve already made matters: at the moment there is little to no end game content available, especially on servers with low populations where there is no war or player economy to speak of which means even less content. Outpost Rush being bugged the way it is means it has to be shut down. Thus, you need to enable the chests from major portals again, so that players can start to run expeditions. You can disable it later on, roll back the gear, punish exploiters (with forewarning that you will), whatever. But shutting it down completely hurts the player base tremendously when you’ve also shut down the other easily accessible end game content (outpost rush). I’m in one of the leading companies on my server which means I get access to invasions and wars, and I still find it hard to enjoy the end game right now. For other players it would only be worse.
I hope that you’ll listen, and even if you disagree, I really do hope to see a response. I have almost 13 days of play time since launch, and I really love what this game should be (and what I think eventually it will be). Outpost Rush, for the little while I got to play it, was genuinely incredible and gave me the same feeling as the first time I played Overwatch (that of a familiar yet utterly unique gameplay experience). I really hope you can keep the game alive until then (though perhaps it’s doing fine, keep in mind that my viewpoint is literally that of someone playing on a dead or nearly dead server).
Regards,
AndrewReise