Announcement Meet your new Community Manager.

This is one reason I didn't participate in this community event. You have no way of knowing if you are wasting your time. Turns out this one WAS a waste of time. A counter would have let the community know how close it was getting to the goal.

I didn't know that there were several kinds of harpy pets. I let one of my lower level toons get the spheres reward. A 2% health increase pet is just an insult. This has no use at all.

 

OK ... let the first Grimmag's ranger winner ( https://board-en.drakensang.com/threads/max-stats-gold-lines-c.72951/#post-664243 ) explain you something.
You can't see the big picture.
To enter the competition or to win something you you must have 2 things in disposal:
1. plenty of spare time. - nothing much to add about

2. clear vision and concise plan. - This is where you are struggling.
This competition is there so it can stimulate players to farm hard ... a lot more than they usually do. Is it worth? Yes it is ... because you get plenty of rewards by the farming itself ... the main reward is just an extra reward for your "job well done".
By farming you will get plenty of gold, GoPs, andermant, essences, gems, unique items ... etc ... on a daily basis. You can manage them as you like ... you can spend the gold at Jesters and get even more rewards. Usually i am spending gold at Jesters once in 3-4 months ... but during my way to the top i was gambling every day ... sometimes even twice a day. And yes I won even more clovers and radiant gems ... so your way to the royal gems is much shorter than you already said.
At the end of the month you will get those extra rewards: 10 clovers, 30K andermant emote, materi fragments ...
... and don't forget you get 1200 gold because if you are about to get high ranked you will have to get gold rank in all Qs.
But those rewards are just a small addition to the stuff you should have already won by farming.
So don't forget ... you are getting a truckload of rewards for your dedication. I guarantee you that.





While here ... i wan't to say something about the "fair play".
There should be unwritten mutual agreement among the players ... those who already won should not participate in the next one or two.
Because these rewards are for everyone ... it doesn't matter if you are better than the others ... let the others win something.
That is good for everyone ... and for the game itself. The more happy people in the game ... the better the community is.
Don't let your greed ruin the fun of the other players.
So far I noticed that Rangers and Dwarfs at Grimmag are following these "fair play" rules ... unfortunately SWs and DKs are the greedy ones.
So we are coming to a point seeing crazy amount of kill points ... which is raising the question "how fair and legal their playing is".
it is more than obvious a lot of them are ganbanging one account 24/7.
Don't forget ... the rankings are gathering information as well. Devs already have the necessary data of your farming.
So don't be greedy ... let everyone win something ... or you might end up "empty-handed".

 

I totally agree with winning once and then letting other players have a chance. One thing about the whole competition- it is resonably easy to win it if one has got a lot of spare time - like myself I could play around 8 hours after work and up to 14 hours on my days off however I personally find many PWs kind of 'boring' because of somewhat poorer drop rate comparing to Q3.I would wish the Devs increased on all PWs 1) drop rate ; 2) number of mini bosses that drop extraordinaries.Cheers.

 

I will put my 20 cents in on this one...

I am the first winner of the PWs Leaderboards as a Dragonknight. This was more of a prestige journey for me, and it was tough as, when people are chasing you and pressure is on from all directions. My main competitor stayed online for the last 24 hours I was told. As tough as it was, I truly enjoyed the challenge and the amount of items with high stats and the amount of GoP I got during that challenge was amazing. Those 30k ander wouldn't even cover a fraction of what I spent on essence but I still loved my rewards. On top of that, got something like 16 googles, 650 gold and an awesome emote. It was great fun!

My personal opinion is that the rewards are good and no need to change that, except for maybe 20k reds or something as a nice icing on the cake. The only thing that would be absolutely awesome to add, would be Hall of Fame, where all winners would have a permanent embedding of their achievement, and the emote should be permanent for the winner of the first place.

Having completed that achievement, I have now stepped back and I am letting others to get a shot at it without giving them any competition.

 

Yay, opening pandora's box.
Okay, I am one of the people who were incredibly upset regarding the Dragan reward. It's not because it's something we "demand" or being "ungrateful", but it's something that left me with a very bad taste. Let's elaborate a bit...

First of all, let me say that the argument "killing Dragan means you get stuff anyway" is totally irrelevant. People kill Dragan for the sake of getting the loot from him. For a regula player it takes time and a group to be able to do it efficiently, not to mention resources. (no, not everyone is a top player to finish him in under a minute solo and that's fine, it's part of the challenge!). Drakens, set items, you name it, the drop is good. Even if you already had the set, the drop isn't bad at all. Instead of doing something else, you invested your time there, getting guaranteed drakens and some potential uniques (which are good melt value at the very least).

Now, the contest came with something extra. Something proposed by the "DSO team". From that moment, you engaged people on a supplementary thread. Would that make more people play the event and kill Dragan? Maybe... maybe not. I guess for some the 50k reward was a very good incentive to keep killing Dragan. But you set some expectation in another direction with the contest. And that raised the bar...

Then came the progressive messages telling us "how we're doing". I can understand why these ad-hoc contests do not always have in-game support. We don't have a global counter somewhere else telling us how we are doing. Of course this leads to three problems:

• You already have way too many threads informing the users - via the website, the forum, the game, email and Facebook. Without them being synchronized, it leads to a lot of confusion and people having to spend way too much time to look in all those places. We need a central place to push the information consistently in all these sources! Some people simply don't follow the facebook page. This will lead to future complaints and the feeling of lack of transparency from your part! You can't obligate everyone to follow each of these sources consistently - it's your responsibility if you are maintaining so many channels to align them properly. Very very important! The news in the game for instance is very often outdated. And that's the first place people look into - the moment they login. If you don't have the up to date information there, you've already committed a huge mistake.
• People can't see real-time progress, hence they have less of an incentive to make that "final push"... or any push at all. If I can see the information LIVE, I know how far we are. Not to mention it's the feeling of contribution - I see my kill there. It has a different impact for me to see my tiny kill changing the counter than someone crunching numbers and pushing me into the masses. It's a group challenge, but I want to feel I am contributing to the group and I want to see that contribution.
• We reach again the problem of transparency and trust. So much miscommunication from BigPoint's side has led to people mistrusting the information you give. Simply put, people don't trust when you are saying that "you missed by 2k kills". We take it as marketing and manipulation, and until you change the way people perceive you, you will run into this problem again and again. Furthermore, negative experiences in the disadvantage of the user will lead to more and more people leaving. You mistrust up to a point where you pick yourself up and leave!

In the end you gave a very nice reward for 50k kills, and you gave a crappy consolation prize for 2.49m kills. It's exactly like when you kill an end boss and end up dropping only green items. The inconsistency in the rewards vs. the effort was simply bad! And that frustrated a lot of people - no, we don't feel like the consolation prize shows you guys appreciated our interest and effort in the contest.

You reiterated so many times how amazing that reward would be, that you raised our expectations a lot! And then we ended up empty-handed - super frustrating. Do you know how it's like to brush a candy in front of a child's face, only to eat it and smile in their face? That's exactly how this felt "you were close enough, but nope... you get something crappy to *appreciate the effort*". It felt just plain mean and senseless (and no, I'm not starting a topic of "life isn't fair" cause really, this is not the moment or the place to go that way).

The servers under maintenance part was also mentioned - it chipped at the number of kills and yeah, might have affected those 2k kills which were dust in the wind anyway. Since the game was down, that should've had an adjustment on the initial challenge. Again, this is something players reiterated many times on the social network.

Ultimately I am disappointed of the way you took the decision of the challenge and setting the count, especially since you didn't take other factors into account. It was a poor heuristic. You can't just look at the current event's history and come up with a number - people change their habit as the event goes on and on, especially for very long events like this one. Historical data from previous events would've greatly helped you in this direction. Plus there were the minichallenges which pulled people from killing Dragan to finishing those as well (and the last minichallenge was particularly grindy compared to the arena minichallenge).

Conclusion? Yes, the idea was nice, yes, we are grateful for the initial reward and for getting whatever extra, but the execution from my opinion was poor, took a part from your reputation and lost the trust of many players once again. Losing when you are 2 meters from the finishing line is the reason why I choose to stay away from such "challenges" in real life - the reward is most often much less impactful than the negative feeling of almost being there but not exactly there. I hate competitions overall though because even though some make us work harder and become better, they also lead to comparisons which in our head can have much worse consequences. This was supposed to be a collaborative effort but it became a "players vs. Bigpoint" thing where we had no control.

 

Yes that and also one more thing bothered me. It's not so much about the fair play because it's this person's choice to do what he likes in the game, but I found it a little not correct towards other people.

So, I gave the Leaderboards a chance on the first day of this month and I started with q3 (I played only Fatal mode few bosses and a big group of mobs) it was enough to give me fast descent points and very soon I got gold and #1 rank for this dungeon. Now I know dungeon rankings are not that important BUT the thing is while I was playing I was checking one other ranger who was killing only boss, fatal mode solo, probably with red and he got so many points just by that and so fast. Not only this, he did the same to every dungeon. So I wonder how much "fair" is it to people who farm for the rewards if someone who has the ability to buy even more than 30k ander (that is literally nothing to him comparing to how much ander he bought for essence/portals), only to be in top 3 overall rankings.

I can't propose anything, of course I know he did nothing wrong but I feel all this provides more greed. At least until we have an option for group Leaderboard.

Now about the forum, fb, game challenges I think at first place the idea is not bad since we have the chance to gain something extra, but as the rest members said and especially regarding game challenges we just can't know our progress. Ever. Are we close? We'll never know... Is this the actual number of kills? Only the Team knows.

Concerning the latest bonus codes players are angry because DSO team announced on fb this code is going to be special and way better than the last one. They had "high promises". I honestly didn't mind the emote, it's one of my favorites that I didn't have, but don't give something from the store that it's available ANYTIME to buy, better give something else. Even if we didn't reach the number of kills, a code like this is a disgrace to the community and I don't know if I have to feel bad that I've became "immune" to this system and I didn't expect something better.

CM Clayton, I'd like to ask you again what is being said about the mystery 51lvl box that we saw on Test Server. Is it something only for TS or do we have to prepare ourselves for a new addition on live server?

Thank you for your time, have a nice week.

 

I do see the big picture.If you play for leaderboards you must either have a lot of free time or a lot of ander to spend.If the competition is fierce then you will have to spend a lot of ander on essences and portals, and maybe revives too, that is if you want to win.Fastest way to get points is to go with red and get to the boss asap then kill it for a lot of time points no?If you stay and farm mobs only on map 1-2 then those who rush for the boss with red or get buy portals and kill the boss with red will beat you easily.So at the end of the month you wouldve spent more than 30k on essences,revives and portals (assuming you would die from time to time at the boss).This is why i consider the rewards not that great.You do get legendaries, glyphs, gems and other stuff from drops indeed, but if you want to aim for the leaderboards and win 1st place then you will have to spend more than 30k ander or invest a lot of time.

As to those who share their accounts to be played by others just to win the leaderboards, i wouldnt hold my breath waiting for something to be done.I personally reported a guy who admited of having 6 others play his char just to win last month.He bragged about that on global chat.At the beginning of this month's leaderboards the same guy who won 1st prize last month PMed me and bragged that he will do same and win again this month.Do you know what happened after ive reported him? Nothing lol, and this month he will win again 1st prize on 2 classes even.His char was online 24/7 for more than 5-6 days at the beginning of this month, farming for the leaderboards.

 

Since this game is pay-to-win, it is usually people with lots of money who will "win" everything. At least we know that up front.

One of the reasons I don't play this game much anymore is the "random" drop rate. I tried for 2 months to get the 4th Mortis Ring of Death to get a tier 2 ring. I had 2 of them drop in a few weeks and the 4th one seemed doable. I was very high on the leaderboard because of my effort. Now the 4th ring seems out of reach. There are things that have never dropped for me even after 3 years of play.

 

Well it's yes and no here. Up to a point I would agree it is pay to win, or long endless grinding - depends on how much you pay and what you expect from "win". When you have a new character, it takes quite a bit of time to unlock very important functions such as inventory slots and minimal gems - which all cost andermant.

Now depends on how far you intend to go into the game. If you want to be a top player and want to accelerate quickly, it's your competitive choice to invest. Since there's no income for yourself regarding this it remains questionable why some people would buy Sacred gems upfront. The money spent there is absolutely ridiculous. But if some people pay, it's their choice. I don't play PVP specifically because of this - I am in competition with the game and enjoy the PVE ride, so I don't care how much other players invest.

On the other hand to a certain degree you can rely on "friends" after you are level 50 to grow faster - especially if they are taking you with them in PW runs so you can farm much faster and get some decent gear.

I would have liked if they removed the block XP approach and let other players help smaller characters level up. On one side this would allow the player to avoid speeding up by paying which can be a penalty. On the other hand there are many players who start the game and give up quite quickly because it takes obscenely long to advance. And those players could easily become premium players who give a small yet consistent amount of $$$.

I am up to the point when I no longer need to invest in andermant - though I admit in the past I did buy some fair (though not obscene) amounts of andermant - and that's over the past 4 years. I keep the premium account because otherwise I just find the game unfun - but I guess other people are okay with the standard account too. I just don't like dying in map and not being able to resurrect (even though for that you can use a small amount of andermant you earn really quick anyway).

But I find paying for the premium account as an okay price - it's money that keeps the game alive and pays the team's salaries. There's no such thing as a free meal. If I played only 2 hours a week I wouldn't pay but since I am logging in daily and it's a fun activity, I find it fair to pay a minimal amount for it.

Ultimately it's those people's choice who leave the game to do so. You can buy another "non-free" game, get everything in the game "for free" just by playing and no such thing as ingame purchases with $$$. Nobody is forcing anyone to stick around... Different people have different opinions on what's acceptable and what's not for them.

 

One problem with such contest as the Dragan one is that other things that might "steal attention" are completely ignored. This game had more, such as people running the spider, people farming for the weapon and people doing the minis. All are part of the event as well as Dragan, but the feel was as if you expected everyone to only do Dragan... that's why we failed, and just by a tiny wee bit, anyway. The prize wasn't the worst, but as it's been said, it just left a bad taste, comparatively to the previous. This also happened with the winter challenges... the reason why one or two of them got an overkill was because there was nothing else running... and then the bar was raised with a challenge that ran in the same time as New Moon... and of course the numbers plummeted, yet they still looked surprised. I, for one, appreciate the extra incentives to do Dragan (as he was starting to get overshadowed by the other things in the event) and liked the rewards (last one too simply as I didn't have the emote already), but that still doesn't mean it was the same for all and that the discrepancy from the two codes taking into account their tasks was easy to digest.

Now, just some things I wanted to note...

#1 Could the stack-size for Materi revives be upped? 10 is just low. Other stuff could use a plus too.
#2 Fire, Ice & Lightning blasts from mini-bosses have faulty-designed auras - they hit even if you're just on the verge of the circle.
#3 Uhm, this and "Ask the CMs" is basically the same thing xD ? Extra work for you, eh.
#4 What's up with the increased time for patching, almost no-substance releases (but still 1GB+) an the "reserved right" to edit announcements without warning and even more so, now, to not bother releasing patchnotes before a downtime?

 

No man you don't
If someone has below par character ... s/he surely can't win. In that case work on your build and just farm the PWs.
You don't really expect to win a competition with undeveloped character?
1. Why would you spend andermant for portals??? You will get materi fragments more than you can spend.

Not just materi fragment you would get a lot of gold and andermant ... like at least 1000 gold and 10K anderamant per day.
That is at least 30K-40K gold and 150K-300K andermant ... is that small amount?
You can even have commodity to spend andermant at Jesters .
I was spending gold and some farmed andermant and I have got a lot ... you would get red, purple, blue essences ... there is no need to buy them with andermant.
I see people only talking ... but in reality they don't know anything. They look like 3-4 year old kids talking about sex
Here are some pics of something I won with farmed resources:
http://image.prntscr.com/image/78ea003cf5e642e596214b3295a602ad.png
http://image.prntscr.com/image/88c69cc937984babb4fc6b5b0be8ed0c.png
http://image.prntscr.com/image/c7ea48fecfdb4f70ae54a31d972f86a6.png
http://image.prntscr.com/image/ba88cd205f2f45e28ca993945939c35c.png
http://image.prntscr.com/image/d67b8ac178ba4873813431bf68d72485.png

2. You will get a lot of items and uniques as well


3. It is more than clear thad you and some other players have no clear vision ... and because you have no vision you can't make a good plan. But planning in front is the key to success.
I wont tell you my estimates and my plans since they are secret ... all I can say is you are all wrong. You don't have to kill the bosses at all ... also you don't have to play at fatal mode at all. All it takes i good strategy. I was speaking with Troneck86 in the social media and Wiki ... he shared his thoughts on how he is planning to win the competition ... I shared my methods how I did it ... it turned out we have similar methods and strategies. That is why he will be crowned victor at his server in something like 24-25 hours

If you have spare time in the next 28 days ... hit me at FB ... i will tell you how and what to play

 

Just farm the knight in any mode but fatal.

 

1. I think they are quite cool because, during those challenges, many players remember this is a MMORPG (or kind of) and not a solo game;
2. I'd like to see a challenge about PWs.. like that if we clear the challenge, all players recive something good [like a box containing a random t3 unique (just for lvl50 players), or a lot of materi fragments (30-50k), or any other thing related to PWs];
3. about last dragan challenge it was good to have a bigger chance to join a team and complete dragan set. But that's not enough. We missed the 2.5M dragan kills just for 2k kills so you gave us those 2 bonus codes (gift are always welcome). Have you taken into account the time lost because of the 2 patch applied in the game? Have you taken into account the fist-day-of-event hotfix? Well, in my opinion, we would have killed dragan even 2.6M times if servers were not shut down for those reasons.
4. I'd like to see you play this game on twich channel at least 2 times a week. Doing this would show an interest from BP to his videogame (something we feel it's not happening).

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About rangers, I'm playing this class since august 2012 (it's not a lot of time compared with other players that are joining this forum) and I've never felt so much left on the side at least untill you (BP) changed the PWs last year.
Some classes of character have a damage output per second that is exagerated compered to others. There is also a class wich just needs 2 out of 4 offensive stats (attack speed and damage) so the other 2 (crit rate and crit damage) can be ignored.. Just some examples...



There is a lot of work to balance the messed up game Bp created and you must do it before introducing a new cap level.

 

@trakilaki...I guess that some see those rewards appealing and some dont.It depends on how valuable time is for each person.Indeed, you can make a lot of ander and Mf from farming certain maps, and yes some maps can give u up to 10k ander or so per day (depending on how much free time you have on hand), but some maps are not that great for farming.And if you want to win 1st place on leaderboards you will be forced to farm those "bad maps" aswell.You get 10k a day or more in d1 -d3 and not even half in d4 for instance.So, the time that you would have to spend on d4 collecting points, you could use to farm d1 or d3.

Lets assume someone plays only d1-d3 for the entire month and farms 10k ander a day.He will make like 300k a month.Lets assume the same guy decides to go for the leaderboards and has to farm maps that give him under 5k a day(like d4 for instance).He would win 30k ander indeed from the leaderboards, but overall if he wouldve farmed d1 or d3 he wouldve won way more.This is why i consider these rewards bad.But like ive said, for some the rewards are good, for some arent.

 

In my experience, a gilded clover is worth approximately 30k Andermant. If you take those from the reward into consideration I doubt it's way more. I don't farm the leaderboards competitively though, so I don't know for sure.

@CMClayton Thanks for the reply. I understand you need time for your restructuring so asking more and more questions over again isn't effetive before we haven't seen the results of your work. However, it would be great if you could elaborate a little bit on what is going to be released in the near future. We used to have an annual roadmap once. For over a year it rather feels like we are stumbling from bug to bug and sudden ideas here and there that nobody really knows where they came from. (Crafting 2.0 being the great exception here).
So, is there going to be a roadmap that we can stick to? What does the developing plan look like? I would really prefer clear statements instead of secrets, rumours and surprises (like that mysterious expansion talking...).

Thanks

 

when we take a look back at last 3 releases, there was nothing what is worth to notice...so i hope that the dev team are working on really big and impressive features, otherwise it will be a shame for this game. the communication between bp and community was never the best, but now it's seems more worse as ever before. the most of us user understand, that you are new in your job and that you need time, but to be honest, i can't understand why in forums (german for example) we haven't any informations about new patches before servers go down..in my opinion, that's not work of a professional team.

 

You don't have to farm them man ... I don't know why can't you see the big picture.
All you have to do there is 1-2 hour long farm in the entire month.

 

Is critical hit and critical damage calculated into that DPS?

 

Now that you made me think about it... I would mean "over time"... don't know why I wrote "per second"

 

Hi folks, Thank you VERY MUCH for all of your input!

I'm going to lock this thread again so I can digest your information next week. I'm going to be slower getting back to you this time due to the current load I'm carrying.

Quick responses:

Kill Dragan Feedback Bar - I wanted it too, but I couldn't disrupt the current flow of development at such short notice. Part of me wonders whether or not a progress bar would actually solve the trust issue, because anything can be theoretically manipulated.

Believing in change - Did you notice that the bugs reported from last year's Dark Dwarf Heist were resolved? (well, at least the bugs reported on by the Previous CM). Change happens slowly, but this is how it begins. We can only change what we are aware of. I'm still working on ways to get more information, as well as ways to be more transparent with what we do with it

I'm still working out some kinks in the information pipeline, so please excuse me for not providing an event timeline and other normal information yet.