Announcement Meet your new Community Manager.

As a wish... If they had made an axe instead of a sword... It would've been more usable.

 

Good evening Clayton

ULTRAPEINLICH pretty much said everything needed for the moment and also trakilaki is correct about ranger skill EA which should only be reverted. Furthermore I'd like to add that there should be an extra arena, something more like to 3v3 and 6v6 where skills, strategy and teamwork matters the most. I had a proposition about it (if you're interested you can check this post https://board-en.drakensang.com/threads/pvp-general-complaints.72648/#post-662030 )

Many people seem to talk about this, but if it's about level expansion shouldn't we be aware of that? I don't get all this secrecy. And to be honest, people in social media are kinda losing their mind with assumptions, half of them wanting to quit the game and stop building their char. If they want to bring new levels, then good. But first they must make real good balance of broken things and actually bring people back in the game instead of scaring them off.

You seem to have good intentions and I hope you will keep up with this madness we had all this time. All I'm asking is that we'll be able to trust Drakensang Team in their future decisions.And for the love of God no more grinding! It's a game not hard labor.

Have a nice week!

 

Welcome Clayton.



I need to be a bit critical / Apologies on my behalf.

I have couple of questions for you.

Please answer these if you can.


How can we contact you beside Forums?(option for email or discord,skype)


And how can we be sure that you will collect our ideas and present them on the table to the Team?


I have a suggestion for you aswell.

PLEASE / Make a sticky thread on forums or even a new subsection " For Suggestions "

And Make a Sticky Thread for a suggestion format that every player needs to post in.

Otherwise there will be a mess and a pile of ideas that are hard to understand.

 

Hello @RedCrimson
The whole "Creative Corner" section is one Sticky Thread, divided into subsections.

Cheers.

 

Well it could be more direct I find the creative corner lacking...

 

Welcome to Mr. Clayton. Greetings from Russia! Waiting for your answers about the secrecy. Why only in English forum there is a direct relationship with you? And on what basis to remove our questions and comments?
PS: how well do you know Russian language?

 

Welcome.

Put bluntly......
Heard all these promises before..
the problem you face, is getting the Company to listen to you when you give them our feedback. You making promises based on the assumption that the Company will actually give a crap about anything you give them.
You are literally putting your head in THEIR chopping block and handing them the axe!
I personally wouldnt bank on promises that will take company employees,DEVS or Execs to implement or change. Your sure to go bankrupt if you do.

Thanks,
Doc, The severely jaded!

 

Hi folks!

I've been busy working on some really neat things which you will hear about soon, and its put a damper on my ability to keep up with this thread at the rate that the questions are coming in

I'm really happy to have this feedback from you! In order to give each question and comment the attention it deserves, I'll need to temporarily close this thread so that I can really take my time and give you good answers and send your feedback to the appropriate game teams.

After I post my reply, I'll open it back up with a more topical direction in mind.

All the best,
Clayton

 

Hello everybody!

As promised, I am back to provide you with answers and to set the focus for the continuation of this thread.
Here are my responses to your main themes. Since there is currently, some work in progress which is too early to talk about, I am going to be a bit vague in my responses. Going into specifics is not possible, as it is simply too early to provide definite information.

Forum stuff:
I know that there are sections of the forum which need updating from me. I simply have not been able to address that yet. Don't fret, its not forgotten. I'm currently putting a lot of effort into restructuring, which will free up time for Forum stuff down the road. Please bear with me on this one

Perception that Rangers are under-powered and unwanted in PvE:
This point brought up a lot of discussion at the office. We agree that this is an issue, and it is something we will address in the foreseeable future.

General on-going game issues which seem to have been ignored:
"If you read the forum, you'll see that the players are constantly writing about worthless uniques, bad drop rates, character balancing, inventory space for mounts/event items, pvp balancing, bugs galore, boring events, the lack of communication, new class of character and several other things that have been asked for over the years and not implemented. Some were promised by dso for quite a long time.
Meanwhile what is DSO concerned about? The names of the monsters."

The monster naming contest was just a little initiative on my end to get the community more involved with the game's development. A humble start, if you will. It is not reflective of our main concerns. This very valid feeling you have comes from a lack of communication on our end. That communication gap is what I aim to close on the road ahead. Let's dive into some topics!

Drop rates and unique: We are currently looking at this issue, as we have noticed it is a major concern and something we all feel when playing the game.

Character Balancing: This is a rather broad concept, but in general we want to extend character building in the game. This is already an ongoing topic in the game team.

PVP :
The community has asked for a lot of improvements and expansions to the game. We are working on those, but they can only happen one at a time. When we start working on PVP, we want to do properly, which means the estimated amount of man-hours that will go into it will be very high. If we start working on PVP now, it would block us from doing work on other aspects of the game that the community has asked for. Currently, we are not putting a focus on PVP work. We acknowledge that PVP needs a lot of work, and we have collected your feedback to help guide us on how to do that when the time comes. There will be things added to the game which will affect PVP – those additions have not been made with PVP in mind; It only makes sense to work on PVP all at once when the time comes. Making incremental changes to everything we release to ensure that it does not negatively impact PVP is actually more work than addressing PVP as a single project and putting direct focus into it. This is another reason why we have put other features and bug fixes as a priority above PVP.

Bugs:
I’m still working on a structure to get the entire community’s feedback on which bugs are most important to you guys and gals. This is one of the top priorities for me, and I want to make sure that the DSO team all agrees on a way forward. As you can imagine, this does not happen overnight. Rest assured that you will be updated when there is more to talk about on this subject.

boring events:
I’ll dive through the event feedback forum sections and report your info back to the team. Please continue giving us your feedback whenever a new event comes. I also saw some comments about events that have not returned. I’m going to bring that up in a meeting next week to find out why we stopped running some events, and which ones we can revitalize. We also need some new events, I agree. The grind on events is one that I think every player feels, and we are in discussions on how to make that better (using your feedback). The rewards could also use some work, and we are well aware of that! Hang tight, we’ll make events better in the foreseeable future!

Inventory Space:
There have been a lot of promises made the in past about new inventory management stuff. I am really hesitant to repeat the messages of the past, so I will just let you know this: As a player, inventory management is something I want as much as you do. As a Community Manager, I know how badly you all want us to deliver on our past promises. It's something I am pushing for, time will tell how effective I really am.

I'm designing a "ask the CM" plan for all languages (yet another structure change) so that all languages will get equal attention. As I am currently working solo, I need to make sure that the interactions I have on the forum are as meaningful to the entire community as possible. It is a bit of a balancing act.

"And on what basis to remove our questions and comments?" - I have not removed any questions or comments.

I am embarrassingly bad at speaking Russian. I do enjoy learning it, though!

The one thing I can absolutely promise is a boost in communication. I joined Bigpoint under the clearly stated promise that the community truly matters and that I will be heavily involved in the decision making process. Let me get these new structures into place before you make your final decision


I also want to thank you all for giving me such a warm welcome here. I respect your honest criticism, too!

There was a lot said in the forums, and I hope I covered everything with this overview of topics. Now lets discuss a recent topic which is of concern to me.

That's right, I'm talking about the Kill Dragan contest on Facebook.

My intention was to create a fair but obtainable challenge for the community.
Unfortunately, the community did not meet the 2.5 million kill benchmark. We did not see that coming, because set the goal to follow the average rate of daily kills.

I feel that the event lasted too long. People got tired of killing Dragan, but they kept killing him in hopes of getting the reward for 2.5M kills. Also, there was too large of a gap between rewards.

Going forward, I will not make an event last so long. The goals between milestones will be shorter, and I am debating whether or not to have a secret reward again.

Tell me what you think about the challenge.

• How do you feel about these types of community challenges in general?
• Are there other kind of in-game challenges that you would like to see in the future?
• What was good about the challenge?
• Besides what I pointed out, what else would you like to see me do differently next time?

Please share your ideas with me, because I am already planning contests. I want to make sure they are fun and fair for you all!

If you made it this far down into the post, you are a true DSO fan! Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing more about the Community Challenges.

 

One more question: what are your thoughts on the rewards for individual (personal) challenges like the top 100 Dragan killer contest?

 

In my experience players don't like those kind of community challenges because of few reasons:
1. They can't see if the ranking is real or not ... they will have to believe BP's word they are real which is highly unlikely
2. Players believe only what they see ... if there is a quest and I know I did it 100% ... then I know I will get the reward. Other than this it is only a "witch hunting" ... players believe that maybe DSO team is lying ... maybe they did more than 2.5M kills but maybe they just don't want to give the reward so they would say no goal achieved
3. These kind of competitions have been always followed by a big fights among the players in the forums:
"I did it right ... better than the ones who got the rewards"
"My joke/meme/story was better than those who got rewarded"
... etc
4. Players want to know what they are competing for ... in advance. 25 lucky spheres (if goal achieved) are not appealing reward for some players (maybe most of the players) ... like me. I didn't play Dragan. Why should I ? The event was offering nothing new to me ... and certainly nothing worth playing for.

... etc

In short ... even if the players play for it ... there is no guarantee those top 100 would be the real ones. In players perspective there is always spot for "ME" and not the others in the top 100.

 

Totally agree here.Lets take the dragan milestone challenge for instance.The only way we could know how many kills were done was to check on FB or forums and hopefully there would be some new infos.If we had like a counter showing the exact number of kills then things would be different.Like trakilaki said, for now, you can only trust the GM team, and to be honest, recently i doubt that many people really trust you guys.

I would suggest you implement a way to see the exact progress for each milestone when you decide to make others or stop with them.We maybe did over 2.5 mil kills, but we cant see for sure so we have to trust you on your word when you say it was under 2.5m...like you havent deceived us in the past on more than one ocassion.

About the rewards per person, i can only say that those are a joke.I dont know if you guys realise that you need a few million ander to get latest gems in this game (royal and jester gems).How can you offer rewards like 10 lucky spheres of a useless companion or few lockpicks/pots and expect positive feedback?Same with the PvE leaderboards, monthly rewards.Farming for a month for 30k ander and 10 clovers is ridiculous.Why dont you give some serious rewards for each event (like ander or decent gems which are the main rewards that every player need) instead of some silly costumes or companions?Draken currency is useless for the majority (since you dont bring usefull things at the gnob) so theres no point to get them anymore, especially after a point.

Main point, the community milestones are great, but the rewards are pathetic and this is why you get so much negative feedback.When you ask for 2.5mil kills, which takes a lot of time and resources and you offer a reward like 160 drakens (10 lucky spheres) for 2.4 mil kills will sure make the community rage and reconsider playing these type of events.You expect a lot from your community so it would only be fair from your community to expect a lot in return.Wont you agree here?

 

Just want to emphasize that I was presenting the player's perception not my own

I must disagree with this one.
The rewards are more than decent. Besides ...you get them on top of the other things you get while farming.

 

I played this game for about 3 years. Now I just log in every day for the free gem and to check out any events. The only event I have really played in the last few months is Full Moon. As stated in previous posts, there just isn't anything worth playing/grinding for. It used to be if you played half of an event, you would get something that you could use. I just don't have enough time to finish the events as they are now. I don't even bother posting to the forum because other people have already complained about the issues that I have experienced.

Why are bonus codes and events posted on the Facebook page and not in this forum? When I log in, the opening page has a "NEWS" box that is usually at least 2 weeks out of date which could be used for this.

As we all know, there are a LOT of issues going back several years that have not been fixed. I will continue to check in, but I really don't expect this game to get any better.

 

Welcome Mr Clayton.
Thank you for asking us our opinion directly. You'd be surprised how little this has happened in the past. Maybe things are changing...

As a player that's not very powerful, not has the time to play more than 15+ hours a week, I feel that any individual challenges, such as fastest time to complete a PW map, or most boss kills, will be obviously be won buy the strongest players, making them even stronger. For this reason most average players won't even attempt to compete.
The challenge is to make winning these individual trials achievable by all. I don't claim to have the answer to this, only suggestions;

1. Random lottery approach - This has been done before for certain events, with some great prizes on offer. Skeledragon\Armoured Bear mounts etc.The more you play the higher the chance to win. But crucially everyone has a chance. The only problem is as others have stated above. Can we believe the lottery is fairly drawn.

2. Skill-based approach - I'm not sure if this is feasible, or even possible within the game engine, but points based on accuracy of hits on monsters and evading hits from monsters in PvE. In this case the most skillful, regardless of strength would be the ones rewarded.

BTW. If you want more participation of events, in particular the monthly ones, please make draken valuable again. It used to be that the most powerful items in the game could only be bought with draken.

 

Hello @Dragenstein

They were posted in the Event Announcement section here

Cheers

 

OK, but there are official announcements, event announcements, and maintenance announcements. I definitely did not see this announcement. I believe that there are too many threads to navigate and the titles of the announcements don't always indicate what is in the post. Sometimes the only way I get information is from whatever guild I happen to be in. Thanks for your response.

 

You are actually proving Dragenstein's point. There was no mention about the 2.5million kill community event until after it ended and the joke of a prize was awarded.

Anyone not on facebook would have never known about it until it was over.

To the new CM.

Read the past feedback, most of it is still ignored by the dev's.

You need to realize that most players are tired of the lies and failed promises, so you need to remember that most will assume that you are not going to follow through with any claim (whether your fault or not).

Until you prove that your word will be kept, it is pointless to make promises of changes.

 

Well said.Imagine you run a game and you force your community to find out the news through other media, like FB .Is this a FB game? No...then why do i have to find the news on fb and not through the game?

How do we know that we reach the milestones if there arent any counters or something to show the actual progress ingame?We cant, so we have to assume that the infos that you give us are accurate.

As to this one i have to disagree.Seriously now...30k ander if u farm like crazy and get 1st prize? Thats not even enough for a perfect offensive gem.Wasting 1 month to play for the leaderboards just to get a 25E -30E prize is silly.You could get way more if you farm d1 or d3 lvl 3 only m1 in terms of ander.30k ander per month, in 3 months you get a sacred offensive gem...in a year you might get a royal one, if u play like crazy that is.You dont this this is a bit ridiculous?

The current pve leaderboards rewards are more suited for daily leaderboard rewards and not monthly ones imo.We talk here about 1 month of dedication and wasted time .....25E sure su cks for that.

 

I am a fan of a community challenge but first, I need to feel that there is a community. Lately it seems that BP is changing the game to be more solo-play oriented. Even you hadn't been in a group until you were on Twitch at level 30 something. When in a group, monsters are exponentially harder. At lower levels, you at least get the bonus of more XP but once at level 50, that is completely useless.

When I started playing, I was in groups a lot. I learned how to play better by seeing what those more experienced players were doing. I saw different play styles and how each team member affected what the others did. Now, I think most just solo as it is easier and faster, particularly if there is a goal in mind.

The prize for this challenge was better than the last one (the Solstice Reindeer) because nothing was unique. The problem with the Reindeer is that it was a prize won after arduously completing a previous Solstice event. The toon I took though that past event worked hard (was at a lower level) and was only able to succeed by going to the last 15 minutes of the event. Now, everyone has the Epic Mount and that diminishes my hard won prize. I would like to suggest that when giving away items, that they not be something that older players worked hard for.

All events start off going fast. The tougher players finish sooner and stop playing the event as they already have what they event has to offer. Keep that in mind if you are going to do this kind of counting event again.

As for the personal challenges, just like the counting contest, the users have no way to know if it was honest or even how to tell that the players who won really earned it. I'd rather see a personal challenge with a progress bar that was just mine. But then, that becomes an event.

I like the kind of events we have on the forum such as the counting of all the presents for the Solstice event. We've had several of them and in some, everyone with the right number gets something and in others, only X number of players get something. I like the former best. If you got the right number, you win something. Doesn't have to be something big either (although that would be awesome!).

Thanks for asking for our opinion. I hope it makes a difference.