Importance of Feedback

Hey everyone, Conash here! First on the table, backers, the new  release is available now, and we managed to get on top of a lot of  things this release, way more than we thought we’d accomplish, which is  nice! With that said, I’d like to discuss a bit about feedback.

So, I’ve been a bit open about how I’ve changed my mind on the AoE  change that I mentioned in my last blog post, so it won’t be coming in  anytime soon, but I’d like to mention it and what went into that whole  process here for a bit. So, for a long time we’ve had a few of our  long-time fans complain about any enemies who have the spell ‘Force  Barrage’ as they point out that it’s broken. This has been a complaint  that I’ve tried to handle in various ways over the years that I’ve been  here, ranging from reducing how often it was used, to making it a lot  harder for both players and enemies to utilize permanent stunlock  strategies (old fans may remember how the mimics in ‘Research Materials  used to be very frustrating back when sleep would target your entire  team). These changes seemed to have at least reduced the complaints but  anytime that I specifically ask about those enemies it’s made clear that  they’re still a very big issue, but I was at a point that I didn’t  really know how to better deal with it so I put it on hold until the  grand re-balancing we have planned. Then more recently when working on  ‘Crystal Clarity as I was designing the boss I had come to the  conclusion that it wouldn’t fit the situation unless I made it so that  they would use an AoE force attack a lot, ‘Force Barrage’ made more  sense as throwing out the control version would only serve to exaggerate  the issue, so I couldn’t put it on hold much longer, and that is when I  realized that I could potentially kill two birds with one stone by  focusing on giving players a good counter.

Another complaint that I had gotten for awhile is that AoE moves  basically rendered tanks useless, this was very easy to see as AoE  completely ignored the mechanic that we used for tanks, but I’ve gone  into that quite a bit in another blog post. The plan then came to be  that putting in the blocking mechanic alongside ‘Crystal Clarity’ would  help give players a way to properly deal with ‘Force Barrage’, and heck  since if you guard you become immune to the knockdown status, for that  turn, it’d further help the guard option be a lot more effective (I find  guarding in a lot of games to usually be a waste of an action, as you  spend an action that could reduce the time of the battle to take 50%  damage, meanwhile now your enemy will live 1 turn longer meaning that  overall you took 50% more damage, so unless you know for a fact that a  super attack is coming it’s usually not worth it), so I put forward the  blocking mechanic, worked with testers some to get some feedback and  thought that everything was good.

Once the release came out though, the feedback I got ran contrary to  my expectations. While I knew that tanks could get overwhelmed by the  amount of incoming damage and end up getting killed if players weren’t  careful, the feedback I was getting had left me of the belief that it  was basically impossible to keep tanks alive if you went in with roughly  the same power as enemies, but the blocking mechanic itself I still  found to be important as AoEs are going to be becoming a bit more  frequent, just as players use better skills when they level up so too  should enemies as it continues the sort of balance. This is were I made a  bit of a mistake, as the blocking mechanic was less than a month old so  I should have given it some more time than put in effort to collect  more direct feedback to make sure this wasn’t just some ‘growing pains’  if you would, instead I did my usual thing of viewing this immediate  feedback as indicative of a problem and ultimately resigned myself to  the simple fact that AoEs just flat out break the action economy, which  is true as they’re effectively a 400% damage multiplier on top of their  ability to stack secondary effect rates. This lead to me coming to the  conclusion that a nerf to AoEs as a whole needed to be rolled out ASAP  in order to fix this entire broken situation rather than hold onto it. I  had worked out a lot of details with NM and well, it ultimately lead to  me briefly mentioning it in my last blog post since I didn’t want it to  be completely out of nowhere even though it was still largely in  conceptual stages. The feedback I had gotten from that blog post was  generally mild discontent, no one particularly seemed happy about my  proposed changes but I’ve certainly gotten much bigger blow back for  some of my ideas before, which lead to me thinking that maybe players  understood where I was coming from.

Now, I had been spending a lot of time refining the math in my head,  working out all the details of this stuff, but there was always this  nagging voice in the back of my head that it wasn’t right. I’m sure  several of you may have noticed that some of the quests in the game can  start to become a large time investment between the quantity and quality  of enemies lately, and while we have gotten complaints about it, it’s  usually pretty minor and I like to try to resolve these issues by giving  players savepoints during the quest so that they can tackle the  dungeons in increments rather than all at once, but savepoints can only  do so much. The prospect of reducing your AoEs by half their  effectiveness would cause these dungeons to become all the worse as you  have to spend probably double or more time in each of them just didn’t  sit right with me, so when this nagging feeling got to it’s worst I  decided that I should talk with backers about the issue, they’ve been  putting their money and time into this game so if I’m going to make a  change like this they should get a voice in it. So I went to the backers  and talked about my concerns, the issues with keeping tanks alive, the  issues with AoEs being too powerful, and the feedback I got surprised  me. As it turned out, we had several players who were able to  effectively use the blocking mechanic to help deal with the boss of  ‘Crystal Clarity’, to the point they were using single target buff items  to make their tanks able to tank which definitely stood out to me as  that kind of a shift in the meta is something that I hadn’t anticipated  and is something that I do want to encourage typically. Honestly my  biggest take-away was that I needed to put in more items and equipment  to allow tanks to tank, not to reduce damage across the board (though we  did get a few backers who expressed they were looking forward to the  AoE nerf, so between that and the raw math of how much more effective  they are then alternative options one will be added in eventually, but  it’s been slated for a general ‘in the future’ time-frame). Guess that’s  what I get for trying to rush to fix a problem based on the people who  spoke up rather than actively seeking out comprehensive feedback.

Man this turned out to be a lot more of a rambling mess than I had  expected, but well the ultimate takeaway is that feedback is important  but you need to make sure that you’re getting a full perspective of the  feedback, when you put in something new make sure to give people time to  try it out, and make sure that the people who enjoy it aren’t left out  of the discussion just because they don’t think the ship is sinking.  I’ve got a bad habit of looking for problems to solve where there are  none myself, so feel free to let me know your thoughts about anything  that sticks out to you whether it’s big or minor, whether it’s a problem  or you like it, because who knows maybe you’ll be the voice that stops  me from jumping the gun in the future!