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When can we expect some real development fluidity in this "open beta"?
madqhue
Member Posts: 58 Arc User
Open Beta. The game is in 'soft release' with the use of this term allowing a get-out-of-jail free card with respect to any problem within the game yet allowing the unfettered income possible from a fully released title.
Beyond technical networking issues associated with a large inflation of the playerbase we have seen very few actual changes to the gameplay or responses from the development team other than a few cursory "we are gathering some data, thank you" postings.
Gauntlgrym PVE and PVP are main backbones of the 'endgame' content and are not yet done. They were included as part of the Event system schedule for a few days even at the launch of the game and the only mention of them since has been to simply remove those events from the shuffle and leave gaps in the schedule where no events take place. Is this content still coming? When can we expect to see it?
Very nearly every dungeon has a number of exploits associated with them which are now becoming the defacto strategies for the game. The wholesale adoption of this exploiting is driven by encounters whose difficulty is far too spikey and closely correlated to character abilities which are ill-matched to the game content. The dungeons are too long by about 30% in terms of the sheer quantity of trash that needs to be waded through which leads to places like Pirates being very popular because knockback allows the content to be largely skipped making it more enjoyable and far less of a chore to complete. The sole boss mechanic of "infinite waves of adds with large hit point pools" has caused a number of fundamental shifts in the Roles of different classes that I feel are not at all intended. 'Tanks' are now required to build themselves to be as high damage as possible and forgo any and all defense capacity in order to be able to hold any aggro at all. 'Healers' have to spec themselves to be tanks / kiters as very nearly every boss strategy is "everyone dps the boss while the cleric kites". Less than half of the healing spells even function within the game resulting in all healing being associated with either a fixed location or immediate proximity to a targeted monster. Any boss fight which is designed around maintaining distance or a spread out party is thus not able to be defeated in the intended manner. All of these factors have led to what would normally be called 'exploits' to be the main strategy of the game. The longer this goes on the more this behavior will become set as the main culture for the game as a whole.
If we reach the one month 'anniversary' of the effective release of the game with no major changes to address these issues then the culture will become all but irreversible among the current playerbase resulting in a loss of customers. Some will leave because they don't want to play where exploits are the standard tactic and others will leave when the exploits are finally closed because they don't want to play without them.
Quite frankly the "we are gathering data" responses is insufficient for either an open beta or a released game. In an open beta you would expect a high degree of responsiveness and fluidity as various things are tried and adjusted in order to try and achieve a more enjoyable experience. In a released game you would expect more things to be 'done' and a lot more action on the really broken aspects. Instead of a highly dynamic and iterative environment we are seeing one that is much less adaptive than I've ever seen even on fully released titles. Open Beta excuses the lack of completeness, it does not excuse the lack of any action at all.
While the game is 'free to play' a very large number of people have paid money to play it. The Founder packs are all the price of a normal release title and from the frequency of global announcements regarding acquisition of nightmare mounts I have to guess that the sale of Zen for keys alone is rather healthy. Doing every possible thing to persuade the existing playerbase to stay should be the absolute number one goal of every producer at PWE right now. If a player feels confident that they will stay then they will buy a nicer companion, they will buy Bags of Holding, they will spending money on building tradeskills etc. As soon as those players start to feel less confident in the title as a whole the temptation to load up their account with some Zen will fade and so will potential revenue. A 'free to play' title needs to be so much more aggressive with its response for this very reason.
There is no test server. There is no 'in development' list of features to come with the first patch. Given the number of things which are broken now which were broken in the earlier Beta weekends months ago one has to expect that the chances of one additional iteration getting much done is rather low. In the last few days the game has suffered a MASSIVE exploit which has all but crippled the in-game economy and feeling of 'progression' and the response has been very lethargic and lackluster.
Right now it almost looks like the goal is to sell as many Founder packs (those were going away after launch werent they... seem to be selling quite well still..), Bags of Holding and Keys as possible from as large a community as possible as a quick cash grab to fund ongoing development for a few months to a year in the hopes that customers will come back later rather than sticking around now. It worked for STO so why not this right?
Teasing a .gif of 'episode 1' is not sufficient to address fundamental problems in the game. When can we expect to see some sign that Perfect World Entertainment is actually invested in the game it has produced?
Beyond technical networking issues associated with a large inflation of the playerbase we have seen very few actual changes to the gameplay or responses from the development team other than a few cursory "we are gathering some data, thank you" postings.
Gauntlgrym PVE and PVP are main backbones of the 'endgame' content and are not yet done. They were included as part of the Event system schedule for a few days even at the launch of the game and the only mention of them since has been to simply remove those events from the shuffle and leave gaps in the schedule where no events take place. Is this content still coming? When can we expect to see it?
Very nearly every dungeon has a number of exploits associated with them which are now becoming the defacto strategies for the game. The wholesale adoption of this exploiting is driven by encounters whose difficulty is far too spikey and closely correlated to character abilities which are ill-matched to the game content. The dungeons are too long by about 30% in terms of the sheer quantity of trash that needs to be waded through which leads to places like Pirates being very popular because knockback allows the content to be largely skipped making it more enjoyable and far less of a chore to complete. The sole boss mechanic of "infinite waves of adds with large hit point pools" has caused a number of fundamental shifts in the Roles of different classes that I feel are not at all intended. 'Tanks' are now required to build themselves to be as high damage as possible and forgo any and all defense capacity in order to be able to hold any aggro at all. 'Healers' have to spec themselves to be tanks / kiters as very nearly every boss strategy is "everyone dps the boss while the cleric kites". Less than half of the healing spells even function within the game resulting in all healing being associated with either a fixed location or immediate proximity to a targeted monster. Any boss fight which is designed around maintaining distance or a spread out party is thus not able to be defeated in the intended manner. All of these factors have led to what would normally be called 'exploits' to be the main strategy of the game. The longer this goes on the more this behavior will become set as the main culture for the game as a whole.
If we reach the one month 'anniversary' of the effective release of the game with no major changes to address these issues then the culture will become all but irreversible among the current playerbase resulting in a loss of customers. Some will leave because they don't want to play where exploits are the standard tactic and others will leave when the exploits are finally closed because they don't want to play without them.
Quite frankly the "we are gathering data" responses is insufficient for either an open beta or a released game. In an open beta you would expect a high degree of responsiveness and fluidity as various things are tried and adjusted in order to try and achieve a more enjoyable experience. In a released game you would expect more things to be 'done' and a lot more action on the really broken aspects. Instead of a highly dynamic and iterative environment we are seeing one that is much less adaptive than I've ever seen even on fully released titles. Open Beta excuses the lack of completeness, it does not excuse the lack of any action at all.
While the game is 'free to play' a very large number of people have paid money to play it. The Founder packs are all the price of a normal release title and from the frequency of global announcements regarding acquisition of nightmare mounts I have to guess that the sale of Zen for keys alone is rather healthy. Doing every possible thing to persuade the existing playerbase to stay should be the absolute number one goal of every producer at PWE right now. If a player feels confident that they will stay then they will buy a nicer companion, they will buy Bags of Holding, they will spending money on building tradeskills etc. As soon as those players start to feel less confident in the title as a whole the temptation to load up their account with some Zen will fade and so will potential revenue. A 'free to play' title needs to be so much more aggressive with its response for this very reason.
There is no test server. There is no 'in development' list of features to come with the first patch. Given the number of things which are broken now which were broken in the earlier Beta weekends months ago one has to expect that the chances of one additional iteration getting much done is rather low. In the last few days the game has suffered a MASSIVE exploit which has all but crippled the in-game economy and feeling of 'progression' and the response has been very lethargic and lackluster.
Right now it almost looks like the goal is to sell as many Founder packs (those were going away after launch werent they... seem to be selling quite well still..), Bags of Holding and Keys as possible from as large a community as possible as a quick cash grab to fund ongoing development for a few months to a year in the hopes that customers will come back later rather than sticking around now. It worked for STO so why not this right?
Teasing a .gif of 'episode 1' is not sufficient to address fundamental problems in the game. When can we expect to see some sign that Perfect World Entertainment is actually invested in the game it has produced?
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Perfect World never invests in their games. They sell you lockboxes and build the next game so that when you tire of this cash grab, you'll shuffle on to their next big thing and do it again. Look at CO.
I believe Cryptic/PWE are working on things, but am not sure why certain tasks take so long.