Originally Posted by
Hal`cyon Sskyler
There's been a lot of negativity on the boards lately, so here's a tl;dr post for everyone to enjoy from the perspective of a long-time player that has moved into the development environment of Horizons.
Ever since I started this internship at Tulga, I've suddenly been given a sharply different perspective as to how things work and specifically how things are implemented into the game. The offices are full with conversation about various topics, white boards are covered with the next big things (TM) and I'm lucky to be privy to all the internal goings-on with the company and where it is headed. I'm getting to know much of the staff personally, and I'm starting actually get into some design of my own rather than implementation and fixes. For example, internally all existing loot crystals should have been fixed, documented, described, de-typo'd, and consumed crystal effects are no longer worse than their permanent equip bonus.
Firstly, it's important to remember is that none of these people are making the kind of money that would be found in other high-tech industries. It's a general rule that no one gets into games for the money, and even with all the creativity and enjoyment that may come from developing games, much of it is long, hard work. The reason these people work in this industry is because of their love of what they do. If they didn't, they wouldn't be working in this field.
Anyway, one thing I have always picked up on is that everyone at Tulga truly wants to make the game succeed and most importantly fun. People like Amon will work 60+ hours a week, coming in on weekends, working until dark, and even working from home on their days off. Hell, I've seen the artists willingly come in on a holiday, busy working on what needs to be done.
With all the quick, sweeping, sometimes shoddy work that HAD to be done at merge to keep the game alive, much of what everyone has been busy with is cleaning up and filling in the world, no small task for such a small development team. Priorities had to be made, and there is no plan that can keep every player happy while the game pushes forward.
The biggest problem with the decisions that need to be made by the current staff is cleaning up other people's bad design. Horizons is still rife with problems in many of its gameplay aspects, the result of a ridiculously troublesome past well before release and an extremely rushed and unfinished launch. All the problems with the merge and the complete redesign of the world in less than a month have given the current staff far more work that can be reasonably accomplished. Only now, with the true core developers working together as a team are things beginning to come together.
Right now things are really starting to look up for the future of the game. Numbers are growing, big words are being used, and the very important newbie game is finally nearing completion. New tech and ideas behind the New Trismus and Lesser Aradoth changes are also beginning to come together, and much of the new ideas going into the early game can be easily modified to provide new, exciting content for the rest of the game's players.
Anyway, on to the recent nerfs.
In my non-company-related opinion, they simply needed to be done. As much as it truly sucks to see your game experience suddenly get more difficult, everything from Nadia to Tier VI resources were needed to make the game more successful in the long term. It's impossible to grow the game without making adjustments to bad design, and it's also impossible to please everyone when needed changes require making existing content more difficult or time-consuming when the players have become accustomed to something much quicker, albeit emptier. However, in time everything settles down, tempers calm, people come and go, but the game is poised for a better experience once things even out.
It all boils down to players growing spoiled by bad original design. I currently have spent over 140 hours in-game (and I don't log in idle.) I am well aware of how easy it is to simply grind or pawn whatever your favorite resource happens to be in order to purchase the tech components for any needed item. Even before I had a single school at 100, all I had to do when I needed a new suit of armor was to go dig gems for a couple hours, barter in market, then grab the rest from Nadia. Fully teched, multiple sets of equipment has become a normal thing for many players. I still feel little accomplishment in creating a new set of whatever gear I happen to feel like having made.
The biggest problem we have such a weak player economy is that there is a cap to any technique component that can be sold, and that cap has always been Nadia. Even with the pawnbroker changes it has always been easier to just grind coin for components. This is not healthy for the game. Such a design is encouraging everything dull, boring, and un-fun that is grinding coin. On the other side, many adventurers don't see a market in gathering most technique components because few are willing to buy for prices that actually make the time spent gathering those components worthwhile.
Tier VI is another issue that's been coming up. Again, let me say that nerfs to things suck. Long ago it was announced that the developers need to make the existing current in the game better before trying to expand tier VI items and resources to the same level as tier V. This is a real slap to the face for players already with multiple hundreds in many schools, but even if everything were dropped in favor of a shoddy tier VI implementation, what would happen 6 months after the changes? We'd be in the same spot, players demanding a further push for content, begging for tier VII. Except now, the mid-level game is still dull and empty, and the hoard of new players coming in wouldn't even make it to the high-end game.
Tier VI resources were never meant to be plentiful or on-par with the lower tiers. Given the limits of the development staff, the best tier VI can offer is what we already have in-game with some minor additions (like other tier-6 processing forms). Stretching out what is already in place and assigning value to the highest of the high-end is a part of making the game successful in future months and years. In general, some things are just easy to the point that players just don't care. Back before we had ANY tier VI processing forms aside from transmutation, tier VI structures were a sight to behold. Now that the Cenotaph event is behind us we have most of the tier VI resource forms, and those once-godly structures are becoming less and less valuable to players. They're moving towards being just another standard building that exists in nearly every player town you visit.
I wish it were possible to simply “turn on� the same level of content we now have for Lesser Aradoth and New Trismus, but now that I've actually worked for the company almost two weeks I'm getting a hard-earned lesson in the sheer volume of work that is required in making quality new content.
All I can really respond with is that all the recent changes effecting some of the elder population is something that needs to be done to make a better overall game for players, is not a problem of the designers wanting to screw players over, and many of these changes have had such an impact because they should have been made months ago.
All content in Horizons is relative. As a player you are presented a process that takes an arbitrary amount of your time to complete. The amount of time required is determined by the developers, and as players you simply conform to whatever design aspect is created. One key factor in how much value an accomplishment means to a player comes from the time invested. It's this value that measures how much other players are “awed� by the accomplishments of their peers. Without this value, we descend into the problem of people not feeling special when they accomplish some piece of very high-end content.
When you boil down all the tier VI buildings out there, they constitute little more than a slightly larger model compared to tier V, and a marginal increase in functionality that is never absolutely needed for a player to enjoy the functionality of the structure. Nothing in the tier VI range is required for a player to enjoy the game, and by design such structures are meant to be extremely difficult feats of dedication and skill. Leaving tier VI construction as yet another easily accomplished feat undermines on of the special aspects of the game that is accomplishing something permanent that stays behind when you log out.
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To summarize, things look very different from the other side. These people are professionals, and it is inherent to every MMO that has ever existed that people become upset at decisions made by the developer staff, no matter how good or bad they may be at their jobs. We're not “boiling the frog� here, it's business as usual for any game out there. Slight reductions in the effectiveness of mining travertine, a resource that for the longest time had to be transmuted, isn't what I would consider a game-ending change. Neither is Nadia, the biggest proponent of coin grind and stifled player-to-player trading ever in Horizons.
It's sad to see old players leave, and the growing cynicism before they cancel has always been heartbreaking to me as a player. However, this process is unavoidable in the greater scheme of things, and no matter what game you play you see the exact same behavior, always. The only advice I can give to old players growing tired with the game is to try making a new character and take it in a different direction than your main. There's enough content in the lower levels now that elders re-experiencing Horizons will find a completely new game in New Trismus and Lesser Aradoth. Who knows, maybe by the time you make it through all the lowbie areas some of the exciting new bits of content in the pipeline will already have been pushed to live.
I mean seriously, there are about 80 changes in the latest patch notes, an overwhelming number of them completely positive, ripe with new things like flying cargo disks (a player request for some time) and the ever-useful cargo-disk homing device on your map.