[Meta] Goals and Directions

[ShadowWar]

There have been a lot of changes recently. A lot of people are experiencing a lot of emotion over this right now as they digest, process, and try to understand the most recent patch. I don't believe that anyone is setting out to make this little hobby corner of the internet worse. All of these are obvious statements we should all be able to get on board with.

I think the players need a better indication of goals for this hobby. I don't want this to be a crazy long post or anything, but I think it's something that would really help keep the community engaged, content, and able to plan going forward as well. This game takes time, some might say, that's the most important aspect of it (and other hobbies). Most of us are old-ass adults now who play this game in a large part out of nostalgia, but that also means our day-to-day time tends toward the low, and want to make the most of it. Let us make the most, by seeing a general guideline that's more specific than an archetype role. This can be done by telling us what you want the individual classes/groups to do, again, in a general sense.

Examples can be more useful than words sometimes, so what I'm asking for is similar to something like this (not saying this is reality, right, or even good. This is just an example)

For Tanks: We want aura tanks to be all about utility, not particularly great in defense or offense, and mirrored across realms. We want BG's to be the best de-buffers in the game with highest damage, but lowest survivability, we want IB to be the same only reverse the damage/survivability and flip the de-buffer to buffer, the BO and the SM we want perfectly balanced across all capabilities, and similar across realms

The hardest part about this would be to have a design goal for them, because anyone who says design is easy, is speaking falsely.

Thanks for considering it!

[trh382]

This is a very good post.

The easiest to address issue that this community has right now is that it is unclear what goals and directions the team has for RoR.

Ive played for a few months now and I just have zero understanding of what drives decision making, timelines, or anything else. This makes it frustrating and difficult to engage with the server or plan when and how I want to play the game.

Even if things are unknown or uncertain - communicate that.

[Caleb]

I agree that more communication would help garnering a better relationship between the development team and the community - which is why I think they are looking for a Community Manager.

With that said I feel it's also almost impossible to achieve this if a large portion of the community is lazy to read already released News and Dev Blogs or even read announcements in the launcer with:

GIANT GLOWING RED TEXT SAYING PLEASE READ THIS, IT's IMPORTANT}

A lot of the current changes in the game are a first result of 2 years of incredibly hard work of implementing the new Ability System and the current state of classes isn't a desgin direction or plan - it is an unfortunate side effect of the new system that forced them to step many steps back - in order to be able to spring forward.

A lot of the classes will be fixed to be their former selves - others like stated and explained in the last developer news, have a new design goal :
viewtopic.php?t=51520

[Rotgut]

Yeah like Caleb said, most of our questions have been answered in that Dev Update thread. Most people either don't read or aren't aware of the existence of that thread.

And honestly, i don't think they should ask the community in general for advice, or foster a discussion. The majority of people won't make arguments in good faith or simply don't know how balance works. That is true for any game. There is a large skill gap between the top 10% of players and the rest of the community. Devs should ask long-term GOOD players for feedback, and have them discuss amongst themselves how the meta should progress. Are they gonna come up with perfect solutions? Of course not, but its the only viable path forward.

[trh382]

The Dev update was in August

The test server was announced / released Nov 5

There was a suddent live test Nov 29

The patch was released without notification Dec 9

In between these events I am not aware of any announcements regarding the progression of moving the patch live.

I am sure a lot of work went into everything that happened, but the absolute basics of community management involve telling people what is going on. That is not happening here at a basic level.

I agree that the Development update provides lots of great information. It does not address many questions and issues, including some of the significant changes that the patch implemented.

Its also worth noting that the development update isnt linked in any of the update posts.

When you make an important announcement, it is a good idea to link to relevant connecting information.

These are all very easy problems to fix. A couple more 2-3 bullet point announcements worked into the above timeline. A couple of links. Clean up the rambling nature of some of the posts or write brief 100 word summaries / bullet point summaries to help communicate key information to less detail oriented players.

I estimate that the extra communication work would take less than 1% of the time that the coding work takes and would non-trivially improve the response from the player base.

The communication is the low hanging fruit here. I do not think the RoR server vision is clear either - it is only addressed at a surface level from what I can tell - but as the above poster noted that is a more complex issue.

If you tell people what is going on, instead of springing it on them, the complaints will be from a vocal minority instead of reflecting a general frustration across the community. I suspect this will make everyone happier for very little effort.