Q&A Development Team Letter

In my opinion it would be great if you guys stats working on how to improve and encourage players to start building a 1h build , there for you should in future q think to give us players some sets that would benefit playing an 1h build
And instead of increasing the lvl cap you could perhaps give some bonus of building a new character on the same account

 

It would be nice to have an option for the characters to sell their body to rack up some gold for crafting

But hey, they can introduce some interesting bugs with costumes

 

Actually accessible interiors in cities might be cool...

 

Are you going to improve the pathfinding? I've got a couple of friends that quitted the game because of the poor pathfinding system (actually doesn't seem to be implemented any Pathfinding algorithm in the game).

Are going to implement Hardcore mode? Seems a bit late for this one and since noone in the community ever mentioned it probably this is not what ppl is looking for (doesn't seem we have anough hardcore player to actually support it) but I would be interested in.

 

I'm curious as to why it was stated that this sewer grind event had better drops of keys when no one had noticed any change?

You guys upped the progress bar and removed the buffs just to add more grind. Sure it's 18 days, but who in their right mind wants to grind the same boring event with pitiful drops for 18 days?

Also, I would love to hear some official response as to why drops are lower for tougher maps? I get just as many keys on normal as I do on Infernal I. On top of that, I get more gear drops on normal. Where is the incentive to run harder maps? Why waste the ess and hp pots for no reward?

Yes, you get more dog tags, but that doesn't make up for the lack of key and gear drops.

Maybe you were not employed at DSO when it was claimed years ago that some of the grind would be removed, but the truth is that we get more and more with every updated event.

Now I fully expect that your answer will be "It's all random" and that tired excuse has been getting used for too long now. That excuse does have one major affect that isn't random, it is one of the reasons why so many players have and continue to leave this game.

 

Yeah random is like saying god works in misterious ways when asked about inconsistencies in the bible or in christianity, it's an asnwer that doesn't answer anything

 

Some players leave, but many come. And it'll take them a year or two until they fully realize the grind & gamble nature of this game and so some of them will leave. But in the meantime, many new fresh people will come and the cycle will go on and on and bp will be happy forever (relatively).

If you take the latest event for instance (Infested Sewers), it's shocking to realize that in a traditional single player game, you would get all the rewards for going through all 3 sewers and killing the worm boss once. Normally you wouldn't even be able to do the task again, because that's how traditional games work(ed).
I'm not saying DSO should be like that, but it should take some middle way solution.

 

You and I are having vastly different experiences in this game. It could be because I play on the ghost server where there might be a few hundred people playing on it so you notice when players leave.

If someone wanted to slowly kill a game, I cannot think of a better way to do it. A few years back there was this great event called Sargon and man was it tough, but the rewards for the effort were obvious. So DSO took it away.

Then by what I can only assume was an accident, they created Dragan. Not great, but not bad either. One boss kill, one unique. Players begged for this event monthly. So in typical DSO fashion, they added more grind, removed the reward, then decided to sell the reward, then made the original reward (Warlord set) basically obsolete. Now, no one begs for Dragan to return.

Look at Gnob. Man the amount of people begging for him to come to town was constant. So once again a dev accidentally made it possible to visit his cave and buy whatever you wanted. That sure didn't last long. So they bring him to town permanently and turned him into a slot machine.

All the events got longer with far more grind and little rewards. Again in true DSO fashion, they remove drops and "sell" them after you kill the boss.

If all this weren't bad enough, can anyone honestly say that pvp is better today than it was 4 years ago? Of course not. They went out of their way to increase dmg output a thousand percent without any clue as to why and it has constantly made pvp worse.

Then there are the semi annual nerfs. Yes 155 was the worst of all and drove so many out of the game that Tegan became a ghost town instantly and it wasn't that full to begin with.

There was a time back in the old PW where players were constantly forming groups do to boss runs. The open chat will fill and fill up again.

Today, you can park yourself for hours and never see a single request for a group.

Add to that, the failed promises of bug fixes, new character, pvp balancing, guild wars, etc. etc. etc.

Now consider why DSO went out of their way to make boss runs harder? Were you around when players farmed bosses like Mortis? It was fun.

They also changed the game dynamics that basically force all ranged classes into 2H and Dk's into 1 handed aggro spamming robots.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see where things went wrong. Go back and read any "official" feedback thread and find a single player who asked for more grind or less rewards. Yet that is what we got. Heck, they ignore more feedback than any other game that I can think of. We spent 18 months on the moon events and guess how many player ideas were introduced. That's right, zero. What we did get was longer progress and less drops.

It used to be that uniques were basically worthless, now we have 2 sets that are must have. Q4 and Q7. Is the concept of having multiple options so unthinkable that it can't be allowed?

I could go on and on, but there is no point. The dev's have proven time and time again that what players really want is not important. Yes, they occasionally throw us a bone, but that often comes wrapped in new bugs and more grind.

I used to wonder if any dev at DSO had ever played a game before, but now I'm pretty sure that they have a running contest to see which idea can drive the most players from the game.

Edit to add:

What other MMO rewards people for playing solo and makes everything harder when you group?

 

I agree, exept i think in manhy ways the game is better now:
now you no longer have to farm crystals of truth, which was complete EDIT, now i can buy uniques, instead on reying on luck to drop them,the system is fairer now, or do you want a system where everynoob drops Riddle from khalys the first try, while pro players have to do thousands of runs and never see a unique?No thanks, that was complete bull, and thanfully they gave those who are unlucky a chance to buy

Now uniques are more useful, stop the EDIT of leggendaries being better than uniques

They didn't remove the drops, even from dragan, they just gave the option to buy them, to those who are unlucky, otherwise it would have been a gambling system. Yes, they removed the old dragan set, which i think is a bad idea, they should have reworked it, along side dragonache, darkness, ecc

 

I actually liked the idea that the merchant should be on Varholm too, but I've made up my mind: I think it'd be better if they simply just increased (significantly) the drop chance. Merchant is not bad, but it's not the best option either.

Many people just join a super duper powerful group, go infernal I with them, wait till they destroy the boss, and buy a whole super duper tier 4 set with draken. I mean.. in this regard it's far from fair.

Yes, that might be it. I'm on EU server and it seems pretty bustling there to me.

But also, I haven't played the game for that long to actually remember the Sargon event for instance. So I can only judge from my 1.5 year experience.
From what you describe it seems like devs are basically destroying the game. But the fact is, the company is run by businessmen who don't care if the game is good or not. Such people are everywhere, in TV, book publishing, you name it. They only care for money, and if their graphs showed that turning DSO into a fishing simulator would double their earnings, they'd do it immediately.
I'm sure the dev team is not really the one to blame in the first place. It's the bunch of guys in suits and ties who don't even have a clue what a video game is, inventing perverse business models and pushing the dev team to create slot machines and grinders and whatnot.

It doesn't seem to work in the US anymore, but EU servers are still pretty populated. And maybe one day when europeans get upset at last, there's still room for Dragon (to) rise in the vast Asian market...

To make it clear,
I don't want to hate DSO. I enjoy the basic concept so much. I just despise the actual way it's currently being executed. Let's hope bp snaps out of it.

 

Didn't remove drops? Have you seen the threads where people have been asking for tier one drops again? This is not the only case.

Having the option to "buy" for the unlucky is fine, but why does it have to be one or the other? Once you "buy" the Q4 or Q7 set, why bother to run those maps again? You don't need anything else.

The game needs to be something more than a buying/gambling game.

That's my point. You buy the two sets you need and then what? There is no incentive to do anything else.

I'm a business owner and I learned day one that happy customers spend far more than unhappy customers. This is a lesson that obviously DSO doesn't understand.

I've been hoping for that for years now.

 

Of course they can increase the drop rate, but they seem unwilling to do that, if they wanted they would have that years ago
The ability to buy is a decent compromise and solution to solve the problem of the unfairness of drop rates

Well, you for once have to farm nuclei to craft those uniques, you definitely have to run those maps again
And there are also the ladders
And also base values from uniques are random, so buying them is still not the ideal choice, if you want to reach the top in statistics, you have to do those maps again and again and again until you get the unique with 3 gold base values
Or they can introduce resources uniques to those q, if they plan to implement alchemy they can introduce specific resources to those q, or they can increase the loot from the maps, so maybe people will be encouraged to run: if people could get much more loot out of farming q4 or q7 instead of the same amount of q3 map 1 or q1 circle, people will do them more

Uniques have to be buyable, otherwise we return to be extremely unfair system of yore, where noobs could get ad unique the first, without doing any work, while pros have to run and run 'till vomiting without getting anything. Drop rates must be increased if buyable uniques are removed, and considering how uniques are necessary in today's system, I don't think it is a good idea

 

Your entire argument is based on end game top tier players, which is fine because obviously you fit into that category. If you go back and read what I wrote to begin with, my statement is based on more players leaving than new ones coming into the game.

Maybe on the popular servers, this isn't noticeable as much as it is on the small ones. If you were a brand new player or newer and weak, and by some mistake started on Tegan you would think differently. Since 155 I've seen entire guilds worth of players go away and they aren't being replaced by new players.

Yes, I could be entirely selfish and not give a crap, just focus on my end game characters and run Infernal day and night by myself until Tegan goes away all together, or I could state what drove the players away and offer some ideas on how to get new players to maybe join and stick with the game. I choose to do the latter.

Turning this into a buy/gamble game is not helping newer players. Removing the drops and selling them does not help newer players. Limiting the gear to 1 or 2 sets, does not help the newer players. Nerfing characters does not help the newer players (I know it doesn't help anyone, but hurts the newer ones worse).

Now because they have chosen to "sell" everything, we are getting a new crafting system where once again you have to run around and buy things.

You love the idea of buying gear and that's great, but I loved constant boss runs far more than buying things. It was fun. Can you honestly say that buying and crafting are as fun as endless boss runs?

Now if we want to do just boss runs what do we have to do? Oh yeah, buy our way in.

They are stripping the fun out of this game release by release and that is one major reason why people are leaving and why others are not coming in.

 

It is not fun to do thousands of runs and not drop any uniques, while noobs, who do not deserve anything, they have not put any merit or work into the game get that unique in a single run and complete a set in a few runs. This is a gambling game, the old game was a gambling game, not to mention that drops are still avaible, they are also reintroducing uniques to painful and excruciating in the PW with the next release. If you are pro noob, you either support buyable uniques and/or much higher drop rates, otherwise, if you are pro old model you are arguing against noobs. At least by being able to buy they can at least cover the gap between them and top players, they can acquire useful bonus sets and they can hope to become strong enough to solo painful PW, which will be very useful at least to do the ladders and start crafting

I very much prefer the new system, at least I get results from my work and they are certain, they do depend entirely on me, not on some random factor

 

Guys, if it's true that the drop chance is totally random, as bp keeps claiming,
then every time you kill a boss, a dice rolls. No matter what % chance there is, it can always fail.
So I think, in order to make the game more fair, we need to limit the number of kills needed to get the desired item. I'm sorry. I've just posted the same suggestion in the Infested Sewers event thread as well, but it seems to be more and more acute.

What I mean is that the dice can roll every time you kill a boss, and it can always fail, BUT if it is your say 25th run or so, you should be guaranteed to get the desired drop.
If it's always random without any such number of kills/runs limitation, you may as well keep killing the boss FOREVER and receive nothing.

That's right.

 

BP logic at its best...increasing the difficulties without increasing the rewards aswell.They probably think that ppl will run this sewer event on infernal 2 and waste ander to enter the sewers just to get the same drop that they get on normal mode without paying the entrance fee lol.

Also i remember that a few twitch sessions ago they said that one of their main objectives is to try and remove the grinding as much as possible from the game.Removing the buffs and increasing the progress bar sure takes the grinding away according to BP's logic.

 

They believe that 10 is less then 1, so they also believe that completing the event in 10 days is less then completing the event in 1 day
It takes away the grind, if you follow that logic

 

I am glad that there are many new ideas about making this gave a better game.
I would suggest if there could be also a special bonus for the mount.
Right now there are 2 types of mount: normal and epic.
I do not see why I should be attracted to buy a new mount (beside visual) if i do not get special bonus with it

 

There are 3 mount types already. Normal, Epic and Mythical. Mythical mount also gives +120% travel speed which makes it faster than any other mount. Currently there is only one Mythical mount called Long Forgotten Bone dragon.

 

You must've missed the Collector's bag.