Skill Rework ETA?

[Secrets]

Now the elephant in the room is: would the RoR community have any weight in taking the discussion to Games Workshop and Gamebryo|EA to allow a form of funding for a non-profit organization?

I mean I would tip for paying the team from time to time. Contributors highly deserve it.

The team could ask for state/regional funding (AFAIK servers run in EU, aren't they?)

Even, maybe, think about a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) where they could raise community funding (using crypto utility tokens) with voting rights about the RoR next batch of skins, pocket items, armor, weapons, class rework, you name it.

/Salute
Swizz

The moment GW/EA get involved, the moment money gets involved. And the moment public interest will plummet.

The reason RoR is so popular with such a high CCU (yes, 900-1200 online in peak hours is a LOT compared to most games-as-a-service titles) is because it's free without any additional caost.

The moment you add payments in any way - be they DAO or Blockchain supported, or state/regional funding, or MTX - the moment the product effectively stops being seen as 'free' - balance changes become 'pay to balance', subscriptions become 'pay to access', and the current state of the game provides effectively unlimited access for free. No MTX, no crypto, no purchase price or sub fee.

Even professionally, I don't think crypto has any right being near games - there is only one case where it could help, and it's with paying people making mods for an official game that results in people needing to sign legally binding agreements and cutting checks - like Roblox pays their developers right now. Roblox is the type of company that would benefit from crypto, not a bunch of hobbyists.

None of those Web3 situations will ever be favorable to volunteers, and would squarely force GW's hands, as they now can say "someone is profiting off of our game with Web3 technology" - and even if it's decentralized, the game itself is not, and would ultimately feel the wrath of GW and co swiftly.

There would be no one from this community defending any blockchain/NFT/Web3 tech - in fact, I would imagine they'd cheer GW on to shut the project down swiftly. Without the community's support, the fans working on the project would be making it for themselves - not for the love of the game - and it would be plainly obvious to see.

Even if you were to go the 'legal route', and charge a sub, or monetize with microtransactions... F2P or Box/Sub or Sub (Web2) would fail as well, as they currently do not pay money for this title, and effectively charging for this game would cut it off for a majority of people who weren't previously paying.

Web3 wouldn't solve an issue here, it wouldn't provide a method in which players could have access to something they wouldn't before - it would further complicate the above issue with subscriptions or f2p, be unfavorable, etc. Imagine if MassivelyOP got wind of the news that their favorite rogue server started integrating blockchain - it'd be a death sentence politically and offer nothing interesting that the US dollar can't already provide.

I've had to explain to many C-level execs, recruiters, etc over the last few years that blockchain has far too many bad actors, and I would have to decline any role in which a financial incentive is made first, and a game second - there's no guarantee they will have money to pay me upfront if they are involved with Web3/Blockchain.

There is one exclusion where blockchain can be useful, but it's for commercial purposes, and it's no different than what Steam, Roblox, and soon to be Fortnite is doing fundamentally - taking a cut off the top of mod sales, and paying people in one of the many standardized cryptocurrency that they can immediately cash out into USD.

This will avoid the legal red tape associated with paying people as contractors (or 1099-MISC in the US) - by doing so, you offload the responsibility to the creator cashing out the crypto asset yearly, instead of the company filing and reporting taxes or having players reveal their legal identity - and you're able to pay players for their creations without involving SWIFT-based payment processors like Paypal, Venmo, Cashapp, etc.

[mryay]

I was probably not clear enough.

I am nowhere near advocating the game be turned into supporting micro-transaction, ads, subscriptions, cash shops, or any form of a business model that would indicate the game generates some revenue. It has to stay free, forever, without any loophole. That we can agree on.

What I was referring to is more of a nonbinding and selfless contribution based upon tipping just to show support to the maintainers, the same way you would support an open-source community or even streamers on Twitch.

There would be no one from this community defending any blockchain/NFT/Web3 tech - in fact, I would imagine they'd cheer GW on to shut the project down swiftly. Without the community's support, the fans working on the project would be making it for themselves - not for the love of the game - and it would be plainly obvious to see.

I would be openly supporting it, given the selfless purpose of the team actually works. And I have the feeling I would be the only one. 1000 - 2000 supporting is not much, I agree. But is more than 0 and could cover the basic stuff such as server costs, event organization, etc. All for the community, not for sustaining a salary for the core team members.

I've had to explain to many C-level execs, recruiters, etc over the last few years that blockchain has far too many bad actors, and I would have to decline any role in which a financial incentive is made first, and a game second - there's no guarantee they will have money to pay me upfront if they are involved with Web3/Blockchain.

There is one exclusion where blockchain can be useful, but it's for commercial purposes, and it's no different than what Steam, Roblox, and soon to be Fortnite is doing fundamentally - taking a cut off the top of mod sales, and paying people in one of the many standardized cryptocurrency that they can immediately cash out into USD.

I couldn't agree more. Also, it adds a means of facilitating "payment". But there are still frictions: getting a wallet, buying blockchain tokens, swap and still having trust is not for everyone. Everybody understands what € and $ are .

This will avoid the legal red tape associated with paying people as contractors (or 1099-MISC in the US) - by doing so, you offload the responsibility to the creator cashing out the crypto asset yearly, instead of the company filing and reporting taxes or having players reveal their legal identity - and you're able to pay players for their creations without involving SWIFT-based payment processors like Paypal, Venmo, Cashapp, etc.

Living in the EU zone, I am learning interesting insights, here. Thanks for sharing. It will probably trigger other questions on this matter later on, but this is off-topic.

/Salute
Swizz

[Scottx125]

Spoiler:

I will say it for Secrets before Secrets can say it. Apply to join the team and maybe will go faster.

The concept of more developers/staff = faster products is flawed. As team sizes grow inefficiencies also grow. You also have a transition period where it's not expected for developers to realistically contribute much to a project until 2-6 months after they join, as they need to become familiar with the code base, brush up an areas they need to know aside from their core skill set. And essentially get up to speed with the project and development processes unique to that project as a whole. It also assumes he has the skills applicable to join the team.

And from what I've heard, the recruitment process isn't as open as it used to be. The devs are very protective over their code base and don't want it falling into the open domain like it did several years ago. If it was up to me the entire project would be open source. But whatever.

Inefficiencies with this team are because there are two developers working on it total - dalen and MaxHayman.

If you spend 3 months learning the codebase and a developer has to take 8 hours of their volunteer time training you per week, that's effectively 96 hours they could recoup in the period of a few weeks to a month (I often spent somewhere like 20 hours a week on the project, higher when I was more active)

This may be true in bigger companies or companies where costs are problematic, but in hobby engineering, it simply isn't true that less engineers is somehow better and never training someone new is a bad idea. There's no 'job security' by denying others to work on the project, there's no competition about salaries, and technical debt and lack of people who know the product is a death sentence even in professional games industry engineering - at some of the companies where I work, if someone gets hit by a bus and can't provide me the info I need, it will take upwards of 6 months to a year to replace them versus just training 6 people (and if only 2 of them stay, that's 2 more engineers that I have now compared to before.) - and by proxy, technical debt is resolved.

You might be thinking, "Why not document everything?" - well, even in business engineering for video games, you may not have time to actually document everything.

Post-production games (of which RoR would qualify, even though it's a hobby) don't get the luxury of giant teams anyway, depending on the product of course. Obviously, a company like Blizzard with 300 employees may be able to afford paying someone to do documentation and planning that is technically savvy - and the sheer amount of people involved in said product may help avoid large swaths of technical debt.

But even then, with them returning to the office, they've slashed a large number of their workforce due to having people not wanting to go back to the office as they may see doing so as an inefficiency (or they live now in an area where doing so isn't beneficial)

All true. And I do some hobbist C# game development myself so I understand some of the troubles. But as I said, for smaller projects open source tends to be far more beneficial. And I understand the devs not wanting to share work that they and their predecessors have spend hundreds, thousands of hours working on. But the unfortunate side effect of that is slow progress. I can't convince the devs to change their mind. Only point out that the recruitment isn't open, but has a lot of trust restrictions behind it. Even if someone only spends 5 hours a week doing dev work, that's enough to help squash minor bugs and free up more time for the head devs to push ahead on other features.

[Secrets]

What I was referring to is more of a nonbinding and selfless contribution based upon tipping just to show support to the maintainers, the same way you would support an open-source community or even streamers on Twitch.

Direct tipping would be effectively monetary income for their work - which, if offered directly on their website for perks ingame such as prioritizing bugfixes, would cross the legal red tape line - plus it'd just suck for players if someone could bribe a developer $10,000 in a tip to their crypto wallet in return for some feature being prioritized.

Games Workshop, Broadsword , and/or EA would probably come down on any project that deliberately took in money to line a developer's pockets exceptionally hard.

[Stelios123]

I can only hope the ''skill rework'' will bring more balance patches.

[MedV]

I hope the rework (at first at least) isnt huge new shiny abilities but small changes to shake up the Meta. For example, increasing base dmg numbers or changing base debuffs/buffs or time of debuffs, shifting talent trees etc. I love this game so much for what it is right now.

Shifting the meta is what I would hope is the plan.

Tbh, it sucks loving a game so much and wanting to help out but having no coding skills and the artistry of a 5 year old.
If you guys ever need very shittily drawn armor on a piece of paper let me know.

[ShadowWar]

It's hard to find motivation to work for free.

This. 1000%. I spend 45+ hours a week architecting and developing in my enterprise gig. Take out time for wife, kids, dog, house, etc... and my free hobby time would rather be spent on painting little plastic minis, developing my DnD game, or playing here. As much as I have a deep love of the game, putting that much effort would feel exactly like work to me at this point.

Maybe in a few years in my career when I'm completely divorced from writing and code and just making boxes with arrows, I'd be interested to scratch an itch. Not now though.

Good luck and thank you for all the work!

[Thulza]

/secrets "A skill revamp (in the sense that you're thinking of) has never been planned. " - so it was just a community misunderstanding on a massive scale then. I was quite looking fw to a skill rewamp myself. And,,how come former a staff member responding on the behalf on the current staff? Surely even the current staff knows if the game lacks balancing or not, theres been balancing in the past (or at least alterations of skills and such a like), more than once, so why is it so beyond reach this time?

[Gangan]

Afaik it was never stated that a revamp will immediately happen.
It was said that the system of how skills and stuff work is rewritten to make balancing and/or bugfixing in the future easier. (Atm even tooltips can't be fixed easily due to wonky coding )

What I'm looking forward to is several skill related bugs being fixed and after all hopefully more universal rules for stacking buffs, debuffs, gear with skills and moral, etc.
Imo after this is build it's time to start with working on balancing.

[Secrets]

/secrets "A skill revamp (in the sense that you're thinking of) has never been planned. " - so it was just a community misunderstanding on a massive scale then. I was quite looking fw to a skill rewamp myself. And,,how come former a staff member responding on the behalf on the current staff? Surely even the current staff knows if the game lacks balancing or not, theres been balancing in the past (or at least alterations of skills and such a like), more than once, so why is it so beyond reach this time?

Probably because I was the one who mentioned it to the community - I imagine they didn't want to burden themselves with explaining misconceptions like in the OP.

I am not actively involved with RoR, but I do maintain friendship with some of its staff.