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Azarael
Posts: 5332

Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#1 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 5:40 pm

Hi. Some of you may know me, and some of you may not. I am Azarael, one of the developers until early 2017 and formerly the de facto leader of Return of Reckoning.

Over the past few weeks, I've been working again behind the scenes on the project. I imagine some people had their suspicions of my involvement when the recent Archmage and Shaman changes were pushed through, which are essentially an evolution and refinement of the older Experimental Mode which was created in 2016. If you suspected that this was me, you were correct.

While I have certainly enjoyed the lack of personal pressure which comes from being an unknown presence and having my work credited to other team members, I feel that it is both beneficial and necessary that I assume my previous leadership role on the project, minus some of the technical aspects which are covered specifically by the lead developer, Natherul.

I have been watching the situation on Return of Reckoning over the last few months with some interest. I believe that the reputation of the project has suffered for various reasons, which I will outline below. I know that there are people who regard me, rightly or wrongly, as one of the architects of RoR, and thus I feel I am best placed to set right that which has caused some division and contention among some, but not all, of our community.

I also accept that I myself am complicit in what has been done, through the example that I set and some of the policies that I enacted during my previous period of leadership. Where this is the case, I will outline it below.

Issues

The current problems as I see them with the project are:

1) The moderation.

There has been overreach on Return of Reckoning, and this is my fault, because I set the precedent for it under my leadership. We went to lengths far too great to protect the staff and some of the players, to the extent that we were sanctioning people on Return of Reckoning for opinions which were being expressed on platforms that were not our own. I agree that in the case of players outright lying about the project, we must act to protect it, but players should otherwise be able to post what they wish about us outside of our own forums.

I have felt that the rules written in my era were overbearing and offered far too much leeway for misuse. Rule 0 in particular, expressing the right of Return of Reckoning to remove anyone for any reason, caused particular concern. The rules were rewritten at my (quite desperate!) behest, and I would say that I am happy with the result.

2) The relationship between community and staff.

Management of an MMO is not easy. It is a difficult genre which requires a lot of macro- and micromanagement of the community, a significant amount of content generation, and quite some compromise. These difficulties having been noted, it is still very important to listen to the community, because without the community, there is no game. I believe Return of Reckoning has shifted the balance of power too far in favour of the staff, to the detriment of the community. That, once again, is my fault; it formed part of my philosophy, and the result, from what I have heard from the community, has been reluctance to offer an opinion for fear of retribution or simply in the belief that it will not be paid any heed.

I am not stating for a minute that staff should be treated like dirt. But neither should we be treated like gods. I believe we need to accept the innate nature of humankind, in that we disagree and that there is conflict. Respect needs to be shown by all of us on the staff for dissenting opinions – no matter how vehemently expressed – so long as adequate respect for us is shown in kind. No adminstration will ever tolerate being directly insulted, for example. Disagreement and dissent are fine, but harassment and abuse are not, and this applies to both sides, the community and us.

A number of people seem to have been banned or turned away from the community as a result of the expression of dissent towards staff. I will outline my plan for those of you who feel that this applies to you at the end of my post.

3) Small, yet significant breaking changes being left to run, or changes that should never have been implemented breaking confidence.

This is linked to point 2) in that changes which should have been overturned in short order have been left to fester and hurt the community. Again, I am responsible for some of this, and in other ways, I am not. My contribution to this has been the morale regeneration rates and handling in general, which I plan to revert to match Age of Reckoning, and historically I was responsible for a number of failed experiments with respect to RvR, such as scaling on AoE attacks.

A recent example has been Disrupt, both in terms of disrupting DoTs on tick and on application, and in terms of there existing a significant Renown investment in the wake of the removal of Cleansing Wind and Resolute Defense (a removal which I support, I might add) of Disrupt, for which there exists no counter stat within the Renown system. There may be other examples, but I would rather look towards reconciliation rather than further division by needlessly retreading previous issues.

4) Leadership.

I should make a comment on the perception of the team's leadership and direction, as I know it has been criticised in some parts. I have read numerous times that it felt like Return of Reckoning lost its way when I left. I will say first of all that my leaving caused quite some problems for Return of Reckoning because of my knowledge and position and my continued control over some internal resources, and I apologise for that. I will also say that I believe the moderation increased precisely because of what people saw happen to me, although my leaving was much more the result of personal issues than Return of Reckoning itself.

Linking in with what I have said before, I would implore the community, all of it, to have some consideration for the fact that running this project can be stressful – after all, your changes are responsible for affecting the enjoyment of many people – and that it would be a natural urge for Return of Reckoning in the wake of my departure to strive to protect the other staff members as best they could from what they believed caused me to leave.

This said, it has been quite some time since the release of Tier 4, and some are concerned that there appears to be little progress in terms of pushing the campaign to the cities. I will say a few things on this topic:

First - RvR is a thankless task which very few people want. This is one of the lessons learned during my era, when I threw the kitchen sink at RvR and barely managed to fix anything. I myself will be recusing myself from RvR affairs for the considerable future, for my own protection and for the sake of the community. The team's focus has now reached the implementation of fortresses, and I think the opinion many share that the campaign's play on the local T4 level depends on actually wanting to reach the end goal of forts and cities is correct. Hence, I believe any work done on RvR right now should be on fortresses.

A lot of effort has been expended by the team on adjusting RvR in the present state, but unfortunately, it appears that without the endgame in place, this cannot satisfy some players who may play more seriously than others. Mistakes in direction are inevitable and were so under Mythic as well, but this does not mean that the team was slacking off.

Second - a lot of the work that has been done on Return of Reckoning has been in accordance with the Pareto Principle (80% of the work requires 20% of the time, and vice versa.) When I returned briefly earlier on this year, I noticed that the commit logs for the emulator were constantly filled, yet what I had been reading elsewhere suggested no work was being done. I'd like to state publicly that this was not the case - the work that was being done was the other half of the Pareto Principle - that work which requires 80% of the time, but constitutes 20% of the whole.

Third - RvR has always had problems, and efforts to deal with them have always been limited by the structure that exists as well as our knowledge of some of the packets. The wait for the ability to patch the client to overcome such restrictions has been long, and that power has been gained only recently. This has been something the majority of the team members have not been able to contribute towards, for various reasons, but with its accomplishment now, it should be worthwhile for the team to move forward with RvR. Similarly, the process of gaining knowledge is slow - Pareto principle again, and this does not mean a lack of effort or will.

Should we have the power to do so in the future, now that we can patch the client, I would like to see skilled artists redesign keeps and fortresses to be more conducive to flowing and interesting play with larger numbers.

My own intentions

As previously stated, I intend to assume the role that I did before. For those of you who have never known me, I managed the community, especially PvP issues, was responsible for most of the direction and leadership of the team and was specifically interested in small-scale PvP and anything related to it.

This post, obviously, was my first intention. Afterwards, I wished to rewrite the rules, but I see they have already been rewritten, though I still need to touch on the aggressively-written "Guide to how alpha servers work" topic, which is also my work. Right now, I am interested in:
  • Personally handling the cases of any people who may have been banned from the community for dissent against its leadership, or because of overreach. Bear in mind that I know that some of the people who have been banned deserved it, and this is not an amnesty. It may also be a slow process, depending on how many people appeal and how much time is taken to collate evidence. I anticipate this will take up a substantial amount of my time for the moment.
  • Reviewing the balance situation. I know from my own experience that it is impossible to make everyone happy, and I cannot stress this enough. One of the lessons I've had to learn is that I should not attempt to do this. That said, if there is a perception that feedback on any changes (including my own) is not being listened to or properly addressed, this will quickly cause disharmony and discord among the community. The price of having power over the direction of this game is that we justify ourselves to the community in a tolerant and patient fashion. Thus, as part of my PvP role, and as I did before, I will be the handler and gateway of feedback regarding PvP changes and I will maintain the authority to override changes as I see fit.
This post has worked out as rather longer than I intended, and I am sorry for the long read, but I feel it is important that I do what I can to restore confidence among those of you for whom it may have been lost these past few years.

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Bloodlet
Posts: 71

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#2 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 5:55 pm

Welcome back, and thank you for all that you have done.

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oberst12
Posts: 18

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#3 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 5:55 pm

glad to hear about that, and welcome back!

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Amakusa
Posts: 66

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#4 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 5:58 pm

Welcome back! Can we celebrate your return with another 2 x RP 3 x XP 4 x Inf week? :D
Egos, Kyoshiro, Kokoshibu, Sosa, Riegert, Luniz, Gankplank <Morituri>
Dunning, Boyka, Iluv, Shirokyo, Snusnu, Engrimar, Soge <Holmgang>

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zumos2
Posts: 431

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#5 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 5:58 pm

Welcome back Azarael :) I have a lot of respect for the way you take your responsibility and your ability to admit your mistakes when you made them. I wish you a lot of luck with the project.
Zumos - Member of Red Guard

Current Guilds: The Unlikely Plan - Deep and Dry - Dark Omen

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Ugle
Posts: 589

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#6 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:01 pm

Welcome back! Looking forward to the next chapter of ROR!
inactive

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Xergon
Posts: 798

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#7 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:04 pm

Damn, welcome back and thanks for sharing with us.
I wasnt here when your were involved in leading project, but looking at post i think its good to have you back, seems to me you know how to deal with current problems, looking forward for it.
I hope everything will go even better from now on.
Last edited by Xergon on Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Charlthuan
Posts: 5

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#8 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:07 pm

Welcome back!

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zarx
Posts: 1

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#9 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:08 pm

Extremely interesting post, welcome back.

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Danielle
Posts: 206

Re: Reintroductions and reflections.

Post#10 » Sat Jul 28, 2018 6:15 pm

Welcome back.

I am glad to see ab ex Shaman/AM mode is back, it was incredibly fun to play in terms of mechanics, but unfortunately also incredibly overpowered to the point where it broke the small scale meta-game. The concept is and was very good and is pretty much a first example of a working lifetap healer, it will definitely require more fine tuning in terms of healing numbers/cds depending on how it performs in its' new form.

As per feedback and devs, my advice is to try and take feedback specifically and not personally. Just because someone hates one of your paintings doesn't mean they think you are a horrible painter. Equivalently just because someone thinks one of your changes in a game is bad one, doesn't automatically mean they think you are a crap developer.

If you don't mind a bit of feedback on your previous changes here it goes:
Personally I admire your goals and direction, like trying to make lifetap healers work or trying to help outnumbered sides fight the enemy, even if they, at times, feel overly ambitious. Conceptually, on the levels of ideas, you get your stuff right 98% of the time or more. I'd urge you to stick to a concept and try to improve on where the idea hits reality: Numbers and statistics on abilities, Statistics of keeps taken and BOs taken and kills done in a zone under different systems to find out what promotes more fighting etc., rather than scrapping concepts immediately and coming up with new ones.

Good luck, and I hope you enjoy the fruits of your work here.
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Raging Slayer overextender and Healbot of Deep and Dry and Dark Omen
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Yes, you are welcome to this hitlist. I REALLY enjoy being chased across a whole zone.

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