Thoughts from a concerned citizen
I have several points I want to bring up in regards to this game, its development and its future progression they are:
1) The way development/updates are currently handled.
2) P2P/F2P Balance
3) Raid Difficulty and Character Scaling
1) The way development/updates are currently handled.
- Before I continue investing time and money in this game I want to know if you intend to address the issues with your development lifecycle. Currently it seems that only limited unit testing takes place before the entire update is released. Every major update has introduced multiple serious issues and even minor updates have often caused serious (and readily apparent) bugs. Even worse, many of these bugs are not well defined and exploitation of them, intentional or not, could be game breaking. I should not have to worry that I am going to lose all the time and money I have already spent because I got banned for "exploiting" a bug I was not even aware of and that should have been caught by any reasonable testing cycle.
If nothing else I am sure that a significant portion of the current user community would happily volunteer to assist in testing these updates. Releasing these updates to 50-100 regular players should allow you to catch most if not all of the bugs before a global release.
2) P2P/F2P Balance
I personally am P2P and yet I am very upset to see that the P2P advantage over F2P has been getting steadily larger. While P2P should rightfully gain some advantage from spending there still needs to be some balance. If not, the F2P and small-time buyers (who are most of your playerbase) will begin to quit as they can no longer even hope to compete at high levels.
The most recent updates (mods, additional ways to purchase raid gear) have only made this issue worse. In the case of mods requiring specific team compositions in order to get the items you need to stay competitive is a horrible idea. I fully understand the desire to encourage diversification but unless both credits and gear-farming are over-hauled it will simply act as a barrier to anyone who cannot pay to accelerate their progress.
3) Raid Difficulty and Character Scaling
The difficulty and design of the current raid needs to be addressed. It is now not just possible but common for an individual to be capable of millions of damage in one attack on a Tier 7 raid. While this is mitigated somewhat by overflow damage not being counted that is no way a permanent solution. Especially as the developers seem determined to continue adding ways to boost the power of our characters.
Adjusting the difficulty of the existing tier is probably out of the question but adding an additional tier (with increased health for the bosses) with only slightly greater rewards would help considerably. If this is not possible than a technical fix that allows everyone to get their name on the leaderboard (so they get rewards) would at least be something.
1) The way development/updates are currently handled.
2) P2P/F2P Balance
3) Raid Difficulty and Character Scaling
1) The way development/updates are currently handled.
- Before I continue investing time and money in this game I want to know if you intend to address the issues with your development lifecycle. Currently it seems that only limited unit testing takes place before the entire update is released. Every major update has introduced multiple serious issues and even minor updates have often caused serious (and readily apparent) bugs. Even worse, many of these bugs are not well defined and exploitation of them, intentional or not, could be game breaking. I should not have to worry that I am going to lose all the time and money I have already spent because I got banned for "exploiting" a bug I was not even aware of and that should have been caught by any reasonable testing cycle.
If nothing else I am sure that a significant portion of the current user community would happily volunteer to assist in testing these updates. Releasing these updates to 50-100 regular players should allow you to catch most if not all of the bugs before a global release.
2) P2P/F2P Balance
I personally am P2P and yet I am very upset to see that the P2P advantage over F2P has been getting steadily larger. While P2P should rightfully gain some advantage from spending there still needs to be some balance. If not, the F2P and small-time buyers (who are most of your playerbase) will begin to quit as they can no longer even hope to compete at high levels.
The most recent updates (mods, additional ways to purchase raid gear) have only made this issue worse. In the case of mods requiring specific team compositions in order to get the items you need to stay competitive is a horrible idea. I fully understand the desire to encourage diversification but unless both credits and gear-farming are over-hauled it will simply act as a barrier to anyone who cannot pay to accelerate their progress.
3) Raid Difficulty and Character Scaling
The difficulty and design of the current raid needs to be addressed. It is now not just possible but common for an individual to be capable of millions of damage in one attack on a Tier 7 raid. While this is mitigated somewhat by overflow damage not being counted that is no way a permanent solution. Especially as the developers seem determined to continue adding ways to boost the power of our characters.
Adjusting the difficulty of the existing tier is probably out of the question but adding an additional tier (with increased health for the bosses) with only slightly greater rewards would help considerably. If this is not possible than a technical fix that allows everyone to get their name on the leaderboard (so they get rewards) would at least be something.
