Gamedirection & targetaudience

[wonshot]

Dear RoR team and RoR community, this is probably as good a time as ever to ask the big question of "where is the game headed and what are the goals?"

Gamedirection
Ever since the City sieges released on RoR the campaign and PvP was caught up to Age of Reckoning in terms of content, a couple more dungeons still needs to be added to fully have the same content as AoR did. And on top RoR added some homemade pieces to surpass the Live game servers. Such as Garden, Roleplay cities, Modern Land of the Dead, Ranked scenarios, Chapter 22, and Discordant scenario queue.

Why is it important to know where a game is headed. Well mostly because of MMOs are generally a big timeinvestment, let alone a private server which can shut down from day to day. Eventhough I would argue RoR has a history that should kill most doubt about longevity, so that leaves us with the wondering of the game direction.

Where are we headed in terms of content, just roughly?
We know that Lost Vale dungeon is "missing" along with Mini Tombs, Collosus worldboss and Tomb of the Vulture lord. This was previously hinted towards a LOTD part 2 RoR teaser, but that is many years ago now.
Over the years we have heard talks about the "Underpass" scenario, city sieges in the new cities and other plans. But what is the general vision for RoR?

Is the server to be viewed as in maintenance mode and any & all additions will just be added from passion and impulsive motivational pushes, are there rough estimated plans of content is supposed to come which year, is there a list of content that is the goal to release for a finished product, such as the two missing dungeons?

There seem to be a couple of pressing issues, that from the outside should have been made big alarming high priority issues. Class mechanics not working with pet pathing. Items gone missing in the great Bankrobbery of 2024, and these are still not adressed or priorities, how come? Are these not important to keeping players logging in day after day, and to the timecommitment and sense of stability?

Targetaudience
With the ability rework us, the community, were told something along the lines. That bugfixing and bigger overhauls would then become more available with more hands freed up. We have seen more orange names added to the RoR discord, and this is probably the biggest exciting news the sever has seen in years, even if you guys dont want to celebrate it, then I think we all should!

But along with more hands supposedly freed up, and more added, we are now soon entering the 9th month into the year. With Ability rework finishing around start of this year iirc.
So as far as I understand it, different people work on different projects. Whenever a project is almost done, or some hands are freed up, or extra motivation on a coder spikes then projects gets pushed and finished. Such as the fortress changes, fantastic work with that!! Really!

But a question has risen in the community over the last while. Who are the changes with careers made for, are we balancing for solo, smallscale, ranked, group, warband, or for ourselves.
Balancing will always get heated, players have biases, we all do and some bigger than others.
When we get reasoning posts about changes, its becoming easier to swallow the changes, easier to see what you are trying to reach and aim for.
But what happends when bigger procentages of the community disagrees with the direction of those elected nonbias enough to pull the trigger.

Last few months of patches, probably all the way back to the Ability change "reset" patch started to ruffle some feathers. And happiness and population has been in a extra downward trend this summer, hard to say if it has direct connection to patchdirection or not.
Every player can probably ask themselves the following question:
"Has the game become more fun, and more balanced since balancing began again?"
If majority of the players either think so, or are neutral. That would be great. But that is not the trend we are seeing in population and in the guilds.
Almost every guild I have talked to over the last week have mentioned a worrying trend of guildmembers losing faith and interest in the gamedirection and targetaudience. Basicly a procentage of the playerbase is worred at the game direction lately, they dont feel included in the targetaudience of changes, and/or are losing faith in this server as a whole.
That, is worrying and something I seriously think needs instant adressing.
We are talking about veterans who have celebrated ten years of timeinvestment on this server who cant recognice the direction, playerbehaviors and game systems to provide them with fun any more. Shouldnt we as a whole, try to find solutions and common interest in getting the train back on tracks (no Secrets, not that train)

As I am hearing it right now,
I lost some core members to patch changes this week. And Im rethinking if RoR is going in a direction I can support.
Our beloved veteran ingame rivals of Freebootaz have had enough and put their ten year guild on break, as a result of the gamefun and direction in rvr.
Retribution had to stop some warband events due to lack of signups and especially the Aoe cap test made a handful of players lose interest.
A national 26man guild stopped and pulled the plug annouced in patchnote topic.
Hand of Blood lost alot of their damagedealer players and leadership is rethinking the timeinvestment of ror with it's state of rvr.
And probably a lot more unguilded or guilds I havnt been in contact with. The picture is pretty clear though.

If there is enough feedback and backlash to almost every proposal forwarded from the balancing team, if the community is struggling to follow the approach, goals, and reasoning posts. Are we then going in the "right" direction together. Are the community being represented into a direction the majority wants. And who is the target audience, if the target is a mixture of both smallerscale, largerscale, soloers, casuals and hardcore. Can we then even make changes, but more importantly what does the end vision look like. For example "all classes can pve level-up to CR 40 with a viable spec to do quests. All careers have a warband viable spec, all careers can compete in competitive ranked and city instance" That sounds like a solid goal for me, but all the fiddling with nonesence changes noone has asked for with main attributes seem to not benefit anyone, it only has the risk of upsetting players so is it worth it? Who are those changes directed at, are we looking at endgame competitie matches done by a minority, but end up hurting casual superfan veterans, is that a cost the server is best served with?

To finish this post I will attach a poll and I hope the community will respect it with seriousness and vote for the one area of the game, YOU, think needs the most attention for the game to improve at its current state. Naturally several areas can be developed at the same time, but I would be an interesting result that hopefully can serve us all to get a better Return of Reckoning server for us all to enjoy for many more years.

[Akalukz]

The game is stale, balance will never be achieved, so quit trying so hard. Revamp/vitalize the RvR content.

[Sever1n]

Why choise 1? I want all, exept pve

[Nelly74]

The idea is good, but if the devs listened to something other than their messed-up ideas, we wouldn't be here. The only place this game and its player community are headed is straight into a wall.

[Hellforce]

Very interesting poll and very simple...I hope so more people will vote and developers follow this simple but important method for next steps...Ask the community what they want ...so easy sometimes but never done lately

[Fimbar]

Thank you for taking the time to say it in a more civil manner than we do.
Thank you for your time and investment Bombling.
I wish more people in this community were like you.

Cheers.

[VulnerantOmnes]

RVR Campaign is the heart of ROR and the main content that can attract new players or keep some veterans login everyday after years.
And we all know the current state of RVR needs a lot of improvement to : break the everyday blob, give to the campaign some challenges, revive cities etc...
But imo the scenario matchmaking is also a big thing because currently the full random system leads to meaningless fights 99 percent of time

[Panel]

While any improvement to rvr systems would be very welcome the careers participating in them need to be balanced or its pointless - but thx bombling for a calm,rational post - im incapable atm cos im still seething over being flipped the middle finger the day after i spent ridiculous amounts of gold and time making rings that are now sub par

[Culexus]

I went with sc rework. It seems like it would be far quicker to get up and running than the RvR overhaul, which will probably take considerable time and testing to implement. Get rid of barriers, bring back guards, and put a decent matchmaking system in place alongside the already existing queue tool for ranked so we can see who is in the queue. Rename discordant to 'solo queue' then consider scs finished and move on to other projects.

Something that's not in the poll but I think is the biggest thing that needs to be worked on by the team is communication. The policy of silence needs to come to an end when it comes to discussing future plans. We've just had a week of watching what happens when doom posting is left to run rampant and the effect it has on the playerbase. Although this is something the community needs to take a look at in itself, because quite frankly it's been disgusting, simply letting us know how changes (or things that aren't changed) fit into a larger whole could have solved a lot of peoples issues with the direction of the game.

My dream scenario for the direction of RoR?

- Sc rework first to get that out of the way.

- Balance updates continue with more attention on each class after the archetypes are done. Each class feels unique, fun, and with a variety of build options with a main spec, dps spec and hybrid spec for tanks/healers and st, aoe, and tanky/utility spec for dps.

- RvR rework that has a way that wbs, groups, and even solo players can contribute to the campaign, with the campaign itself become the goal rather than killfarming.

- Cities made to be true endgame content with endgame loot & consumables only obtainable through city bags so rr80+ players have a reason to go there to get and maintain true BiS.

- Lost Vale released, T3/T4 PvE completed and all the major game bugs fixed while this is all going on.

- Only when all this is done, LotD with ToVL drops. This will bring loads of people back to the game, and with all the above changes in place they will be more likely to stick around.

- Once all this is done, then the server finally goes to beta with a big marketing campaign to promote the game.

I really hope the above happens one day. This game deserves the life that AoR never got to have as there really is no game quite like it.

[Baaldr]

I went with sc rework. It seems like it would be far quicker to get up and running than the RvR overhaul, which will probably take considerable time and testing to implement. Get rid of barriers, bring back guards, and put a decent matchmaking system in place alongside the already existing queue tool for ranked so we can see who is in the queue. Rename discordant to 'solo queue' then consider scs finished and move on to other projects.

Something that's not in the poll but I think is the biggest thing that needs to be worked on by the team is communication. The policy of silence needs to come to an end when it comes to discussing future plans. We've just had a week of watching what happens when doom posting is left to run rampant and the effect it has on the playerbase. Although this is something the community needs to take a look at in itself, because quite frankly it's been disgusting, simply letting us know how changes (or things that aren't changed) fit into a larger whole could have solved a lot of peoples issues with the direction of the game.

My dream scenario for the direction of RoR?

- Sc rework first to get that out of the way.

- Balance updates continue with more attention on each class after the archetypes are done. Each class feels unique, fun, and with a variety of build options with a main spec, dps spec and hybrid spec for tanks/healers and st, aoe, and tanky/utility spec for dps.

- RvR rework that has a way that wbs, groups, and even solo players can contribute to the campaign, with the campaign itself become the goal rather than killfarming.

- Cities made to be true endgame content with endgame loot & consumables only obtainable through city bags so rr80+ players have a reason to go there to get and maintain true BiS.

- Lost Vale released, T3/T4 PvE completed and all the major game bugs fixed while this is all going on.

- Only when all this is done, LotD with ToVL drops. This will bring loads of people back to the game, and with all the above changes in place they will be more likely to stick around.

- Once all this is done, then the server finally goes to beta with a big marketing campaign to promote the game.

I really hope the above happens one day. This game deserves the life that AoR never got to have as there really is no game quite like it.

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