Where are we heading?

Fail_BM - Raging Tide

This is not a rant/QQ/plz fix thread, it is a "where are we going?" thread. I guess am worried noticing where is the game going.

As well all know, wanmei have been taking a lot of not so popular decisions to handle the different problems affecting the game.

Every now and then I see my server lose a fair part of its population because of x or y reason: boredom, those common breaks you take every month, ragequits, better games, there are many reasons to find something different to do. However, since last year we have been getting some patchs that doesn't benefits the majority, but PWE or a small minority that doesn't think that impact those little changes can cause to the playerbase.

Trying to remember, because my memory is not that good, one of those changes was the removal of coins in delta. At first glaze to earn 500-800k during a delta run is not that impresive, however, a lot of people are refusing to go through a 2/3 hours run to help a random player who wants to complete his culti. Random full deltas were gone with this patch, reducing great the amount of Mystical Tome Fragments but increasing the price of lvl 1 tome greatly.

The implementation of a botting system was pretty popular and a lot of people adopted it as its main income of coins. People knowing what botting really means was against this practice, because it leads to the fearsome inflation. Speculating, the DQ system was removed because we were getting away too many points from botting, causing a not desired effect to wanmei's future plans; forcing them to remove something we are still waiting for. Tables turned, and we had a lot more of people wanting it to go away because of how a lot of people abused it, yet this "popular" change led to something I knew was comming soon, earning time (which is not that bad).

Removing hypers from FC was a good move, two years late. FC caused so much damage to this game that a lot of people left the game when it was normalized, lots of QQ and people not wanting to lvl up anymore because, lets face it, it is very time consuming to lvl up here, time consuming means hard for a lot of people. If you want 1 mill exp, you have to work for it and you need many millions to reach lvl 100.

Note, I am not against the FC restriction, but after having bugged for so long, it was plain stupid to make a full restrain, instead of increasing the minimun level to 75.

Knowing we are getting so many "bad" patch, looking at my emtpy server, I wonder where this game is going, if it is trying to commit suicide.

Where is the game heading?

TL;DR version: We are not getting a lot of popular updates lately, what do you think wanmei is trying to do?

Bear with me, english is not my first language.

SylenThunder - Twilight Temple

Most all of the changes you mention, are just our version coming closer to matching what is, and has been, reality on the original version.

Most of that was in an effort to fight bots destroying the games economy. The bots were pretty good though, so they took another step and added Earning time, and a built-in bot that barely functions half as well as the 3rd party bots.

FC hyper mode was only custom to our specific version, and removing it has brought about some pretty happy changes to the servers. (Most of those that left because they couldn't sell the instance anymore weren't anyone that improved the community anyway.)

Be thankful that we still have our custom G16 and R9 recasts. I seriously doubt we'll be seeing the R8 and Warsoul upgrades that are being implemented in China because of it. Just imagine if they made that the same for our version as well. I imagine 90% of the people that worked hard for their R9rrr or simply blew a car payment or 4 on it would ragequit overnight if we got CN's versions.

It could even be argued that our version would have fewer bugs if we didn't have some of these customization's.

As for what Wanmei is trying to do...
They're fixing our client so it's closer to the actual client. This will make the next expansion much easier to implement.

twistedthings

personaly, i feel that the company wants this game dead, but they can't close servers while there are a certain nukber of players, so they drive us away, theres talk of when pw2 comes out that our accounts get "reset" meaning all toons/names, gear coin is all deleted.....just a rumor

mechabeastmc666

nothing wrong with the game, it'll still be here in 7 more years, Starting with this one. i know you think this is original and ect, but i can pull up countless threads with the search function that's just like this one all the way back from 2010. Dont worry, everything is fine in PWI. i think We desperately need a section for this.

nbreaking

I honestly think we are finally heading the way we should. I have tried the PWI2 expansion in the Chinese server and I can say I liked it. More quests, better exp, new starting zone, reduction on the enemies you have to kill per quest and etc...

Anyway, a new player that starts playing doesn't care about FC because they never had it to begin with so, they won't care.

People that are not RB and are complaining at lvl 98 that it's hard to lvl, well, it is a bit, but it's not like it's going to take months. People who are RB and complain about FC... Uninstall please... It's super easy to lvl up when you are RB with the chain quest, BHs and etc, everything giving 4x or 3.5x exp.

Now, what I think PWI is lacking and will probably never have again (since PWE has new better games) is advertisement... I started playing PWI when it came out because I was on a webpage and there was an ad for it... It seemed awesome so I googled the game and here I am 6 years later. I have stopped seeing ads for it around 1 year after PWI's launch.

Anyway, that's what I think about our current situation. b:cute

bluestuffzzz

Fail_BM - Raging Tide wrote: »

This is not a rant/QQ/plz fix thread, it is a "where are we going?" thread. I guess am worried noticing where is the game going.

As well all know, wanmei have been taking a lot of not so popular decisions to handle the different problems affecting the game.

Every now and then I see my server lose a fair part of its population because of x or y reason: boredom, those common breaks you take every month, ragequits, better games, there are many reasons to find something different to do. However, since last year we have been getting some patchs that doesn't benefits the majority, but PWE or a small minority that doesn't think that impact those little changes can cause to the playerbase.

Trying to remember, because my memory is not that good, one of those changes was the removal of coins in delta. At first glaze to earn 500-800k during a delta run is not that impresive, however, a lot of people are refusing to go through a 2/3 hours run to help a random player who wants to complete his culti. Random full deltas were gone with this patch, reducing great the amount of Mystical Tome Fragments but increasing the price of lvl 1 tome greatly.

The implementation of a botting system was pretty popular and a lot of people adopted it as its main income of coins. People knowing what botting really means was against this practice, because it leads to the fearsome inflation. Speculating, the DQ system was removed because we were getting away too many points from botting, causing a not desired effect to wanmei's future plans; forcing them to remove something we are still waiting for. Tables turned, and we had a lot more of people wanting it to go away because of how a lot of people abused it, yet this "popular" change led to something I knew was comming soon, earning time (which is not that bad).

Removing hypers from FC was a good move, two years late. FC caused so much damage to this game that a lot of people left the game when it was normalized, lots of QQ and people not wanting to lvl up anymore because, lets face it, it is very time consuming to lvl up here, time consuming means hard for a lot of people. If you want 1 mill exp, you have to work for it and you need many millions to reach lvl 100.

Note, I am not against the FC restriction, but after having bugged for so long, it was plain stupid to make a full restrain, instead of increasing the minimun level to 75.

Knowing we are getting so many "bad" patch, looking at my emtpy server, I wonder where this game is going, if it is trying to commit suicide.

Where is the game heading?

TL;DR version: We are not getting a lot of popular updates lately, what do you think wanmei is trying to do?

Bear with me, english is not my first language.

I think a lot of these changes were made with good intentions but poorly thought out. The majority of players in-game don't realize or have any knowledge of how the in-game economy operates. The obvious logic is more coin = better, but what they often fail to realize is more coin on the server = higher gold prices = higher prices for most items in-game and a devalued coin currency. Wanmei has a track record of always taking the easy route out of things. Instead of implementing some form of anti-bot measure, they conformed to the idea that botting was what people wanted, and instead made their own bot. Instead of keeping DQ at the normal NPCable price from 2009, they slowly worked their way down to having all DQ become 1 coin since botting was a thing.

Removing small things in the game like coins in RB, changing JJ quests to ONLY 7 a day max, removing ways to obtain mirages/3*s from decomposing equipment, etc all makes people upset. The free to play player has a LOT of catching up in the game nowadays. It would take a year or more worth of dalies just to get the Primal/Morai skills (passives too), and what about leveling 3 times over? Then, the rest of the skills to level 10, then level 11, then 79/100 skills, then gear (which is harder to farm for the appropriate level since they buffed TT ages ago)? All in all, new players have a lot of work ahead of them.

The hypers in FF... I could write a book on why this is good AND bad, but it should be noted that the main reason I'm against removing hypers in FF is the shere fact that there are limited quests and methods of getting from 1-100 3 times over. From my perspective, I completed all the quests on my BM in 2010, and all quests on my Barb around the same time. Reverting back to level 1 will give me a couple of quests to get *maybe* to level 50. Now I have to squad with randoms for PV... Oh wait! There is no one around my level. That leaves 1 PV run a day, and other dalies. Ultimately, once you run out of quests, you only have dalies. That leaves you at a heavy disadvantage to players who had the option to do hypered FF, because you will be stuck leveling longer, while they are already done leveling and partaking in the only thing the game pretty much caters too -- end-game content (100+).

The future of this game is at best a slow decline until the inevitable. I've been playing since beta. There were many, many, more players in-game around then. There has been a gradual decrease of active players each year. Most quit due to boredom, lack of time to complete the only thing the game offers (dalies), and a dislike for PWE/Wanmei's decisions over the years. PWI is PWE's flag-ship game, but it has been on the back-burner since 2010. The community has no support from anyone, because the one or two staff members from PWE that post on the forums (sparkie... Talking to you here), come on once a day to post once or twice (never responding to critical things), and then vanish until the next day. All other staff of PWE has been put on newer titles, and the support staff in the ticketing department always give auto-responses, don't listen/read the ticket, or tell the player to ask for help on the forums (lol).

Over the years PWE has dropped the ball so much more than Wanmei. PWE has done irreversible damage to the community. From the goon glitch fiasco, the d-orb fiasco, DQ points issues, ARC being pushed, no responses on forums, banning innocent players, lying about "stability", lying about "watching gold prices", broken events w/ no responses, mass DCs for days straight w/ no responses, poor customer support, no GM support, very few in-game events, censoring names in-game for 1 1/2 months, no support for the ARC push, lying about support for ARC (we got none), incorrect sale start/finish times, no guild base wars (even though it was promised by Frankie) and SO MUCH MORE!!

But honestly, the big problem we have beyond PWE is the lack of support. We have a lot of broken things in-game, and valid complaints, but no one to work on them or respond. Sparkie probably does try his best, which means that having ONE person to run multiple communities/games as a CM is irresponsible. We desperately need some thing fixed and complaints heard so that they can be passed on to the Chinese overlords. Much like the goon glitch fiasco that took nearly a year to get fully resolved, we have bugs in the game that probably won't get resolved until the next expansion. The chat-locking is the big one. We also have at least two missing NPCs, and for the last 1 1/2 the Theater of Blood event has been broken (server error).

Wanmei isn't being innovative enough, either. They are sticking to making new classes, adding in new areas and maps, etc. Even in the upcoming expansion, I don't see anything really *new* or *innovative*. They have taken some of the same models of mobs and bosses in-game and copied them into the new areas. They have taken old game assets from other games like Jade Dynasty, and put them in the new areas. The only true innovation was some of FSP and UCH, because the way the instance is set up AND the boss mechanics. The new instance in the upcoming expansion may bring some randomly generated instance stuff, but beyond that I don't see any really interesting and new stuff being added. They are also kinda capped at what they can do in-game. The client is out-dated and even with the update from Angelica 1.0 to 3.0 in the upcoming expansion, it still will run like garbage due to the age of the game engine. Furthermore, there isn't a push of what other, newer MMOs have done to become popular, like random public quests, and better open-world bosses. Even private servers have methods to do some of these features, like taking weapon models and putting whatever model of weapon you want into your weapon; this allows you to get any wep model while still having your wep.

So, where does the future stand for PWI? We have enough active players that push real money in the game to last us quite a while still. PWE will probably keep the license for Perfect World for years to come. I would start to worry around 2017-2018, when the game's age is really creeping up on it. PWE has only discontinued 3 games to date (Rusty Hearts, HoT3K, and LoMA), and all of them had a super super low player base (probably less than 100-200 players). Even on Ether Saga's forums, PWE has stated that there is no need to worry and that they will keep the game open with new updates for a long time still, as long as people keep playing. That's coming from a game that has maybe 1/10 of the population we have (their servers are completely empty). So, I have full faith that PWI will be here for years still.

Unfortunately, just because the server is here for years to come, doesn't mean it's all great and dandy. We will loose people often do to what I mentioned above, and the game's activity will decrease. Over the coming years, I would expect a decrease of really awesome content -- we will just have to take what we can get, and even worse support from PWE both in-game and on the forums, as well as a decrease in customer support in the form of tickets. As the game begins to loose more players, there will be less ways from free players to work on getting coin, and the value of coins will go up. That means that gold may stay the same or go down, but it will be harder to obtain what will be equal to 1 gold. As this happens, many free players will leave, and eventually what remains will be cash shoppers and addicts (people willing to play as long as it takes to get the new stuff).

That's pretty much the future in a nutshell. Just be happy with what we have, I guess, is the moral of the story.

Edit: Something I also failed to mention is the idea that when the game does get shut down, we will probably see more private servers opening and much more action on that part. If we take other games for example, many games that are shut down officially and are capable of being emulated with server and client tools, often get many private servers popping up all over the place. Considering that we already have 20-30 private servers out there right now, I'd guess that the number would probably double when our version gets shut down.

Also, even when PWE decides to kill the PW license, Wanmei will probably keep supporting the game. They still support LoMA for sure, so they will probably keep PW alive too. This would be interesting, because the community would have to do the localization and translations in order to get the new content up on private servers.

Anyways, just some food for thought.

LuckingFoco - Raging Tide

You make some valid points though I think botting was a small problem. What you also stated is people over the years got bored and moved on. That includes a lot of cash shoppers. Today I'm sure there is barely a 10th of the cashers still spending a lot of money. Less cashers means meds gold that the f2p player can ride the coat tails of. They have plently of free to play players itching to use their coins, but the cash shoppers with their gold are dwindling.

Most of those that are the heavy spenders have most of what they need already so their spending of real money goes to other things. No real sense in selling your gold when you don't need anything other than cards and a small handful of pack items.

To see how desperate f2p players are still just buy something like mysterious chip packs and put them in a catshop. In less than a day and several times replenishing my catshop, I made over a billion coins. People were buying them in droves. F2p players have the coins, but few cashers to exchange with for items they need.

meranya

Like it has been already written, the game certainly won't die tomorrow or next month. In fact, I find these predictions crawling all over the place recently to be pretty much like so-called apocalypse prophecies in real life.
Nobody can know for certain what or when or if, here we are just speculating and trying to estimate but we are not actually able to crack open the heads of those running this to see what, for certain, they have planned.

All we can do is enjoy (or hate) what we have and hope for whatever makes anyone's fancy. Which lately seems to boil down to either the game's final curtain or unexpected survival.

In my opinion, we are headed for uncertainty, with high doses of stupid and madness combined with moderate sense and very rare drops of awesome.
So, I'm on the 'unexpected survival' side.

What Wanmei is trying to do? A lot of things at the same time, and we all know how well those things can turn out sometimes... Heh.

Azura - Lost City

What Sylen is saying is true. The real version of PW is so different to ours. I've always wondered why is so different. If our version was just like China's version we wouldn't have so many bugs, and the game would be a lot more balanced. All these patches have been painful, since we are used to something else, but it may be for the best. I just wonder if the community will be able to resist all the changes.

Salari - Raging Tide

I agree with what you said blue, but you have to remember pwe is owned by pw-cn or pwrd. I doubt very seriously they would drop the us market, even with such lower amount of players around it still makes them money

Azura - Lost City wrote: »

What Sylen is saying is true. The real version of PW is so different to ours. I've always wondered why is so different. If our version was just like China's version we wouldn't have so many bugs, and the game would be a lot more balanced. All these patches have been painful, since we are used to something else, but it may be for the best. I just wonder if the community will be able to resist all the changes.

the main reason is our version is a micro-transaction model vers pay to play

Sir_comsizer - Archosaur

I've read all that you have all written and i somewhat agree to a point.

I find that, although they have changed the game, it's just the WAY they did it.

They give no warning to alot of the changes just lately and i think that is what has annoyed people the most. It seems PWI just implement changes at their own free will just lately and it's like a middle finger to long standing players ( and to all newcomers ofc )

If we are to change things at work, we have to give 30 days notice, surely this can be implemented in the same way?

bluestuffzzz

Sir_comsizer - Archosaur wrote: »

I've read all that you have all written and i somewhat agree to a point.

I find that, although they have changed the game, it's just the WAY they did it.

They give no warning to alot of the changes just lately and i think that is what has annoyed people the most. It seems PWI just implement changes at their own free will just lately and it's like a middle finger to long standing players ( and to all newcomers ofc )

If we are to change things at work, we have to give 30 days notice, surely this can be implemented in the same way?

Even if we were given a 30-day notice of changes coming, it wouldn't help much in any way. Most changes that come to our version are known months prior, because PW-CN has acquired the updates before us. Some things are not known, like bugs and intentional changes (hypers in FF no longer being able to be used). In the case of those changes, a notice would be nice, but PWE doesn't get a full set of patch notes from Wanmei, so they aren't even in the know. Ever since the dawn of this game, it's been up to the player base to test out all the new content, features, and find all the bugs in each patch. After doing that, it's been our duty to contact PWE with information (and often-times screen shots) with information on how the content works.

Part of the problem on this front is that Wanmei isn't telling PWE everything that is changed each major content update, so our patch notes aren't and never have been complete. They aren't telling PWE how each instance operates, how each piece of content works, and intended changes being pushed out each update. The result? We knew that hypers in FF were disabled because we TESTED it ourselves as a community -- not PWE. PWE had no knowledge of this change. This means that a 30-day notice wouldn't work, as the change has already happened.

Salari - Raging Tide wrote: »

I agree with what you said blue, but you have to remember pwe is owned by pw-cn or pwrd. I doubt very seriously they would drop the us market, even with such lower amount of players around it still makes them money



the main reason is our version is a micro-transaction model vers pay to play

This isn't a "US" version, per-say. It's an international version license (almost all countries can play our version minus a few select ones). PW-MY is a prime example of what can happen when players leave the game and you don't get a solid revenue stream. They received so little cash that they couldn't buy the latest updates to PW (PWE has a direct license, so they don't need to buy each update separately), and eventually had to shut down. I don't think PWI will be shutting down anytime soon, but once the game looses most players in the future, all that will remain will be heavy cash shoppers. Once that time comes, they too, will get bored with having no one to play the game with, and quit. The game will close eventually, that's a given. As I stated above, I think it's more likely to hit a critical area around 2017-2018, when the game's age will be really old and other MMOs will be taking over in PW's place. Keep in mind that PW as a game in general has been worked on since 2004. That means that a lot of the content in-game, assets, and game engine are all very outdated. Players will look for a better running game in the future, with more innovative designs instead of the older, grindy-MMOs from the past generation.

So, I would think that eventually the International version would be shut down. Not anytime soon, but it's inevitable. Sparkie himself stated in the GM event that PWE isn't advertsing Perfect World anymore, and has no plans in the future to advertise this game. PWE will be advertising (and has pretty much always) their newer, more profitable titles. PW isn't even on the front page of ARC.COM's website most of the time. Furthermore, PWE seems to be transitioning into a name-change for their company in the future. They have been working with "ARC" for a while ever since Core Client's beta, and developed their website and name around "ARC". This may be to move away from using PW as their flag-ship game. It would be pretty dumb in my opinion, to run a company under a name of the game that you barely support anymore and has a declining population.

Azura - Lost City

Salari - Raging Tide wrote: »

the main reason is our version is a micro-transaction model vers pay to play

You are wrong, over there in China it's also free to play too.

Salari - Raging Tide

Even though the name is international it was released for the north american market as stated on pwrd's releases page. Other countries that can access the game is just the nature of the internet, not because it was intended for a world wide audience. This version is not ran off a license, its owned and operated by the perfect world company, just like pw-my. If you would like to see which versions are actual licenses go here http://www.pwrd.com/en/international/overseas/region/region.shtml


Azura

While I have not played any other version, I was basing my remark off pwrd's site about pefect world. The first version was released as a timed-based revenue vers pw2 (ours) as a item based model. I was not aware they also released a f2p in china.

ovenusarmanio

Salari - Raging Tide wrote: »

Even though the name is international it was released for the north american market as stated on pwrd's releases page. Other countries that can access the game is just the nature of the internet, not because it was intended for a world wide audience. This version is not ran off a license, its owned and operated by the perfect world company, just like pw-my. If you would like to see which versions are actual licenses go here http://www.pwrd.com/en/international/overseas/region/region.shtml


Azura

While I have not played any other version, I was basing my remark off pwrd's site about pefect world. The first version was released as a timed-based revenue vers pw2 (ours) as a item based model. I was not aware they also released a f2p in china.

They actually have both PW1 and PW2 over there. Their version of PW2 is what ours is based off and gets almost every update first with the one caveat that we received the expansion that brought g16 first as that expansion was the direct result of our complaints. This is run simultaneously with PW1, which is the pay-to-play version. The P2P version not only has a different revenue model but wholly different updates, even their classes have different skills. Their tideborn function very different than ours, for example. The relationship between our PW2 and theirs is why there is an exception for whole discussion about the Chinese version of the game, even though the other versions of PW aren't permitted to be discussed in the way that the Chinese version is discussed.

Salari - Raging Tide

Thanks venus that clears that up for me b:thanks

warlockxkos187

your businaee decisions reminds me of a mud fense >> pretty stupid right>> so what are ya going to do with fc? are you going to make nirvy into somthing worth two squirts of ****? act now or be destroyed.

bluestuffzzz

Salari - Raging Tide wrote: »

Even though the name is international it was released for the north american market as stated on pwrd's releases page. Other countries that can access the game is just the nature of the internet, not because it was intended for a world wide audience. This version is not ran off a license, its owned and operated by the perfect world company, just like pw-my. If you would like to see which versions are actual licenses go here http://www.pwrd.com/en/international/overseas/region/region.shtml


Azura

While I have not played any other version, I was basing my remark off pwrd's site about pefect world. The first version was released as a timed-based revenue vers pw2 (ours) as a item based model. I was not aware they also released a f2p in china.

Yeah, I understand I may have worded what I meant a bit off, but I get that our version (International) is located in NA and ran under NA law. We get updates synced directly from Wanmei, while other PWs with licenses generally have to buy each patch as they are released. Either way, this is really irrelevant. Perfect World Entertainment can and eventually will close this game; that's inevitable. This thread was mainly discussing the reasoning why, when, how, and where the future will go for this game -- not the licenses of other PW titles, per-say (though I don't mind discussing this stuff, it's pretty interesting).

warlockxkos187 wrote: »

your businaee decisions reminds me of a mud fense >> pretty stupid right>> so what are ya going to do with fc? are you going to make nirvy into somthing worth two squirts of ****? act now or be destroyed.

As discussed in great depth during this thread's existence, you should already have known that this isn't something PWE can control. Wanmei made the choice to create Nation Wars and have our version give the same drops that Nirvana gave but 100x cheaper. Wanmei decided that they didn't want hypers to work in FF. PWE, while they do have poor management and understanding of how the game operates, didn't have any say in either matter. I agree that a lot of PWE's business decisions are pretty dumb. The idea of having micro-transactions in games that are free is a great way to make profit, but adding in gear and skills for cash is a poor decision.

Furthermore, threatening the company that:
-Has no control over the content of our game
-Has no control over changes coming to the game
-Has almost all staff moved to other titles (upper-management issues...)
-Has a severe lack of support for the forums, in-game, and ticketing department

...will ultimately make you look like a fool, and get you nowhere. I agree on the one point about poor business decisions, and that I would love to see Nirvana and hypers back in action. However, you have went about complaining in a childish manner. b:shutup