PsychoNuke [Offline]

[PsychoNuke]

I have been testing games on different platforms for past 6 years in my free time as a member of VMC; So, I understand that developers can lack on testing skills and more importantly developers should understand that Testing a game in-house is an entirely inadequate test in contrast to reality of being in hands of players. Not only players are going to face the things differently or think about things differently, but also by sheer numbers they will crush or test things in very different way.
Now if developers understand this basic thing about app/game development then they should enable the Public Test Servers(PTS) for the players with debuggers attached so they can get verbose data to fix the issues.

Nonetheless, this is one of the reasons why I like Futumsh, s/he is a very hard working productive developer and even without the verbose data he is able to reproduce and fix the issues. But at the end of the day he cannot fix intermittent issues or issues that are not been reported by players because they are not on forums, after all we are only as good as the tools we use.

Similarly I liked Vroom, he had many things lined up, he had transparency with players in community and provided honest answers on why something can/cannot be done. We use to test, gather and provide him the data and in return he worked on the feedbacks related to game balance. The two big things that Vroom was working on was PVP and Class Balance; when I say working I mean he created two dev blogs to collect data on issues with PVP and Class Balance, then he enabled some of those changes in game for 1 week and asked the players to test it and provide feedback on it. This is called a strategic approach, and we are talking about almost 4 to 6 months of testing and data.

Then Vroom and Lojak left AL, a sad day for everyone but more importantly all the work that was done just went in vain.

The Loco dev joins the front-end and starts to nerf everything for every class without even understanding how these classes are functioning in game or taking the notes from Vroom into consideration (I mean if he had, he would have continued working on those threads/issues). This resulted in majority of the players to leave Forums and quit AL. Devs become more shy on forums because they didnt have any answers to give to the rest of us, which resulted in more players to leave. The players who turned toxic because of these issues got banned, and the number reduced even more. Some of us still stayed and because we had faith. Finally after months one day on chat we get a response stating:
1) On PVP: It will be balanced, the idea is to disable loadouts and get pvp specific gear like we have in our other legend game.
2) On PVE: PVE requires classes to be interdependent, Warriors should tank, rogues should damage and mage should CC/buff/debuff with heal and curse.
[I LMAO when I heard mages buff/debuff in PVE. Its a great example of how devs think players play their game. Assumption Vs Reality, something you can only understand when you are a part of reality, when you play the game yourself Or talk to players who play your game(s).]

Anyway.. so, I have been waiting ever since... I waited for almost 7 months and I am starting to realize that nothing is going to change on that front, especially as (JustG) Gary also left. Hence I am going to pause till the next expansion, if I don't see anything changed with respect to game-play/classes then I ll stop and move on.

My final feedback:

1. Reduce the raw damage and armor gap between Rogue, Warrior and Mage class. I am talking about the raw stats that you get from Weapon(most importantly), Armor and Helm. They have been increasing exponentially ever since the major stat change happened at level 57. (Data is already collected and compared, feel free to use what I posted or DIY).
2. Make content that require all the roles in a party. In simple terms the content should require Warriors to take Aggro, Mechanics for Mages to use CC and Rogues to Dodge while dealing damage.
3. Pets and weapon procs should be extensions, they shouldn't be OP enough to replace a class or skill.
   Exmaple:
   
   • Pet: Breeze Passive and AA can freeze Bosses (like Northal or event bosses) and Players for 5sec every few seconds, in contrast to Mage skill Frost Bolt (with mastery) cannot freeze players or bosses for 2sec.
   • Pet: Glowstik is used in place of Warrior for the Fly Lord Orrick instant kill mechanic, which btw was specifically designed so warriors use taunt and aggro boss.
   • Proc: Ebon Weapon Procs, mages already have a skill that does the same thing its called Curse. Here is an idea! next time give amped-up Aimshot to Mages and amped-up Juggernaut to Rogues. SMH...
4. Class balance in terms of statistics (armor/crit/damage etc) should be different in PVP and PVE. I mean there is a DUAL option, which means any class should be able to go 1vs1 on similar gear and same level. If PVE requires inter-dependence of classes then PVP require independence. Simple concept, isn't it?

Anyway, I am not expecting anyone to read this, things I mentioned here are nothing new, been mentioned in many threads before. I DO NOT expect anything. My final words of wisdom to the forum members is that do not speculate and fight among yourself. Class balance will benefit all the classes, it gives players the freedom to choose any class they want to play. Things will only change when players start thinking about the overall game-play experience instead how to get benefit on their own class. Because any imbalance is going to affect everyone, I mean just look at the rogue item prices, its high because the majority of the endgame players are rogues (confirmed by dev).

Don't worry this game will not die, it is fueled by the events, till the time it has a year full of events it will entertain different players every year with repeat and recolors.