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Announce post #2918: 2018 In Review
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<h1>What were your wins or achievements in 2017?</h1>
<ul>
<li>PvE Rebalance + Hunting - Every class has had its NPC damage audited and brought in line. No longer do some classes just level faster than others, at least not egregiously. This also let us combine a number of skills into a new skillset, Hunting. This skillset ties to your level and let us decouple damage from guildskills. This way, you get better as you hunt, instead of having to invest lessons... and no more widely varying effectiveness by skillrank.
<li>DUNGEONS! - Our first Dungeon, Beneath, has been released. Requiring three people, this is a new type of content for Aetolia, and even includes speedruns. It has its own currency for rewards and lots of unique mechanics to solve.
<li>Bamathis - The Seals Event was a big win for everyone. The event was a blast, our staff had fun running it, and it was just great overall. Our previous lessons in storytelling freed us to come up with great ideas to shine every bit of this great story up, and major changes took place because of it. Aetolia's storyline is moving once more, in directions it hasn't taken before.
<li>New Mission System - The mission system is a neat new replacement for standard quests that lets players track the effects they have on an organizational scale. It also rewards Pk, PvP, and Crafting, giving everyone a way to pitch in! Our implementation wasn't perfect, but the response overall was very positive. Expect events in the future to have less intense implementation!
<li>New Talent - Perfumery... Now our players can stink less! Or at least customize their stink.
<li>Minipets Minipets Minipets - One of our most prolific promotional items, minipets are everywhere. Now they have things to do! They race in derbies for gold prizes in a new system that is city funded and rewarding. In the future, we'll expand them continent wide!
<li>Imvra - We've created a new Admin Role just for roleplaying questions, our Head of Lore. Tons of questions have finally been put to bed, and everything It answers is recorded so that our lore grows ever deeper. Remember to ask It all the questions you can think of about reproductive biology! It loves those.
<li>Rebuilt Honors - Titles can now be attached to honors, and the means by which you get honors lines has been redone. This means that custom rankings and titles are far easier to get, including things like honors lines for events that remember what you were doing!
</ul>
<h1>What went wrong this year?</h1>
<ul>
<li>Proxy War Length - We let this one go on too long. What should have been an Epic war dragged on for at least an extra month, leading to fatigue in both those running and those participating. Multiple new systems were tested all at once, and while we all had fun.. well, you don't see New War System up there in our Wins column yet. This taught us so much about running events! One had never been done this way, and likely won't be run so again... you can tell the difference in the event that followed!
<li>Still no Mages - This revamp is now an albatross around Tiur's neck. It's been plagued by design issues (we've thrown out two iterations!) and some technical issues. We're on this, though! It is a major part of our Q1 plan. We're also still very excited by some of the new concepts, including things no mud has ever done before.
<li>Indorani - We've tried a number of times to express that we want events and player actions to have repercussions. They did, and we lost a guild. To some it was obvious, to others a suprise. We don't feel like this is a Loss, but it needs work and love to be brought to the Win column.
</ul>
<h1>What would you do differently to try to avoid what went wrong?</h1>
<ul>
<li>We've learned a lot of lessons about discussing things with the playerbase. Some direct communications backfired, some helped, but we're learning. Communication is key, and we'll be increasing how much information flows outward officially. It may be neat to have a secret ending, but it's just more fun if everyone knows when to log in!
<li>Buckling down. There are a number of tasks *coughmagescough* that suffer from major schedule slippage due to various circumstances. That's not fair to players! Over the coming year expect a number of tasks that have been left half done to be finished. While we do enjoy jumping straight to whatever is new and shiny, half finished is unacceptable.
</ul>
<h1>How did you do in achieving the player-facing goals you put forth a year ago?</h1>
<ul>
<li>I think we succeeded most in bandaid pulling. When things needed changing, they were changed. There have been some hurt feelings, but largely our playerbase is with us in wanting the best game possible.
</ul>
<h1>Goals for 2019</h1>
<ul>
<li>Well, it's silly, but I want those Mages done. It'd be nice to move on!
<li>Our commodity replacement system is nearing ready for stage 1 release. It won't replace everything, but you'll get an idea of what we're going for.
<li>Last year we spoke of the PvE update and how it went Worldmap - Dungeon - Endgame... The worldmap ended up being an issue from the design/code end, so we skipped ahead. PvE still needs its Endgame portion, so we're on track! And when the Worldmap works... we'll have things that use it. Expect more dungeons like Beneath, and another unreleased type.
<li>We'll be switching styles of schedule/dev management. Our Big Projects will be tracked in a more standardized, official manner. While you guys might not see a difference in information received, this is being implemented to prevent schedule slippage and more carefully track our resources. For fun I might release some of the design documents in the post-mortems so that everyone can see!
</ul>
<ul>
<li>PvE Rebalance + Hunting - Every class has had its NPC damage audited and brought in line. No longer do some classes just level faster than others, at least not egregiously. This also let us combine a number of skills into a new skillset, Hunting. This skillset ties to your level and let us decouple damage from guildskills. This way, you get better as you hunt, instead of having to invest lessons... and no more widely varying effectiveness by skillrank.
<li>DUNGEONS! - Our first Dungeon, Beneath, has been released. Requiring three people, this is a new type of content for Aetolia, and even includes speedruns. It has its own currency for rewards and lots of unique mechanics to solve.
<li>Bamathis - The Seals Event was a big win for everyone. The event was a blast, our staff had fun running it, and it was just great overall. Our previous lessons in storytelling freed us to come up with great ideas to shine every bit of this great story up, and major changes took place because of it. Aetolia's storyline is moving once more, in directions it hasn't taken before.
<li>New Mission System - The mission system is a neat new replacement for standard quests that lets players track the effects they have on an organizational scale. It also rewards Pk, PvP, and Crafting, giving everyone a way to pitch in! Our implementation wasn't perfect, but the response overall was very positive. Expect events in the future to have less intense implementation!
<li>New Talent - Perfumery... Now our players can stink less! Or at least customize their stink.
<li>Minipets Minipets Minipets - One of our most prolific promotional items, minipets are everywhere. Now they have things to do! They race in derbies for gold prizes in a new system that is city funded and rewarding. In the future, we'll expand them continent wide!
<li>Imvra - We've created a new Admin Role just for roleplaying questions, our Head of Lore. Tons of questions have finally been put to bed, and everything It answers is recorded so that our lore grows ever deeper. Remember to ask It all the questions you can think of about reproductive biology! It loves those.
<li>Rebuilt Honors - Titles can now be attached to honors, and the means by which you get honors lines has been redone. This means that custom rankings and titles are far easier to get, including things like honors lines for events that remember what you were doing!
</ul>
<h1>What went wrong this year?</h1>
<ul>
<li>Proxy War Length - We let this one go on too long. What should have been an Epic war dragged on for at least an extra month, leading to fatigue in both those running and those participating. Multiple new systems were tested all at once, and while we all had fun.. well, you don't see New War System up there in our Wins column yet. This taught us so much about running events! One had never been done this way, and likely won't be run so again... you can tell the difference in the event that followed!
<li>Still no Mages - This revamp is now an albatross around Tiur's neck. It's been plagued by design issues (we've thrown out two iterations!) and some technical issues. We're on this, though! It is a major part of our Q1 plan. We're also still very excited by some of the new concepts, including things no mud has ever done before.
<li>Indorani - We've tried a number of times to express that we want events and player actions to have repercussions. They did, and we lost a guild. To some it was obvious, to others a suprise. We don't feel like this is a Loss, but it needs work and love to be brought to the Win column.
</ul>
<h1>What would you do differently to try to avoid what went wrong?</h1>
<ul>
<li>We've learned a lot of lessons about discussing things with the playerbase. Some direct communications backfired, some helped, but we're learning. Communication is key, and we'll be increasing how much information flows outward officially. It may be neat to have a secret ending, but it's just more fun if everyone knows when to log in!
<li>Buckling down. There are a number of tasks *coughmagescough* that suffer from major schedule slippage due to various circumstances. That's not fair to players! Over the coming year expect a number of tasks that have been left half done to be finished. While we do enjoy jumping straight to whatever is new and shiny, half finished is unacceptable.
</ul>
<h1>How did you do in achieving the player-facing goals you put forth a year ago?</h1>
<ul>
<li>I think we succeeded most in bandaid pulling. When things needed changing, they were changed. There have been some hurt feelings, but largely our playerbase is with us in wanting the best game possible.
</ul>
<h1>Goals for 2019</h1>
<ul>
<li>Well, it's silly, but I want those Mages done. It'd be nice to move on!
<li>Our commodity replacement system is nearing ready for stage 1 release. It won't replace everything, but you'll get an idea of what we're going for.
<li>Last year we spoke of the PvE update and how it went Worldmap - Dungeon - Endgame... The worldmap ended up being an issue from the design/code end, so we skipped ahead. PvE still needs its Endgame portion, so we're on track! And when the Worldmap works... we'll have things that use it. Expect more dungeons like Beneath, and another unreleased type.
<li>We'll be switching styles of schedule/dev management. Our Big Projects will be tracked in a more standardized, official manner. While you guys might not see a difference in information received, this is being implemented to prevent schedule slippage and more carefully track our resources. For fun I might release some of the design documents in the post-mortems so that everyone can see!
</ul>
7
Comments
1) Indorani not a loss? Uh, ok. As far as I know, most of us have largely or completely disengaged with the game, and the other organizations we were part of have suffered for it. Not sure how this isn't a loss considering the guild's population and activity pre-deletion, especially in such a tiny game. But sure, ok, spin it however you like.
2) I haven't seen the fruit of whatever lessons you've learned about communicating. I've been waiting on replies to emails for what I can only describe as unreasonable lengths of time, and I've even tried pinging @Tiur via a forum message. No response, but this self-congratulatory point about communication appears shortly after my last attempt. It seems like there continues to be a tendency to simply avoid dealing with issues. Plus, you still have staff who've made homophobic jokes across global channels, participated in shit-talking players with (other) players via possessed mobs, and otherwise communicated unprofessionally. Do you intend to put these lessons you've learned into practice at any point?
"Bamathis - The Seals Event was a big win for everyone."
'It was a big win for everyone in the US. For us Europeans, it was not as much of a win, since we either had to unicorns our sleeping schedule and that could affect our work, or simply skip out on the whole thing, like at least a few of us did. So I don't want to say that it was a big win for -everyone-.
And tonight there's a big event for everyone interested in Lightie rp! At howling! When Europeans are sleeping! So hooray! Still not learning that there are people outside of the US who might be interested in events. But I guess I'll read all about it.
Let's have an event when 12 people, one of whom is a very AFK Cariv, are on. We can discuss Lifer RP with the 5 of them it's relevant to, and post the resulting discussion onto the forums for the other 60+ of you, 40 of whom are lifers, to read and talk on. Well, that seems less efficient.
I know, let's have two meetings. Ten meetings. A meeting an hour? Then we can all have our say and...read everyone else's say. On the forums. And then talk there.
Howling hits most people online for live, fluid discussion. And then forums hits everyone else. In terms of "optimal", that's the only real way IMO- it's not your fault, but it's also not the admin's. Coming in guns blazing because they can't control - literally - people's login times seems excessively hostile and I'm usually pretty hostile.
They could do better with off-peak events, sure. But I think they need more off-peak Celani to do that, so gussy up your application and toss it in.
I'd say Zealot discussion could be done on forums 100%, but I dunno what the plan for the discussion is.
I'm gonna go back to trying to be nicer before I inevitably lose my mind sometime in March and start screaming again, so good luck with the thread!
That being said, I also agree with what @Toz said regarding optimal times and the futility/contradiction in giving the EU playerbase the huge, game alterting events to the detriment of the (larger body of) US players.
Welcome to Brexit.
I'm going to address your first point and not the second only because I have zero experience with the staff being disrespectful to players. My experience and observations have been quite the opposite where the players are overly impatient, plainly rude, or extremely sensitive to the admins while not being cognizant of the admins having a -lot- on their hands in the *game* in addition to their personal lives.
Yes, I'm emphasizing the word game here for a reason. Everyone uses the excuse that this is 'just a game, take it easy, take a break' but at the heart of the matter, we've all been loyal to this community for years and have learned quite a bit about ourselves and about how kind, ugly, and backstabbing people are and can be. So, it's not just a game when you consider the life-lessons you're learning at the hands of others and sometimes at your own hands.
However, it still is just a game and a business in some respect, but this isn't retail where you, the customer, are always right.
Having said all that, I think you're missing the point that the OP was making: "We've tried a number of times to express that we want events and player actions to have repercussions. They did, and we lost a guild."
Notice how the OP wrote "we" lost a guild?
This is because they are part of this too, not out to get you or any specific group of people. The lesson that they instilled was for everyone, which is that actions have consequences regardless of the storyline or the RP being had. This wasn't the case in the past, and this is an excellent step in the right direction, in my opinion, because now every leader will think twice before throwing the weight of their entire organization behind a decision.
This is just one side of this "Loss" statement.
The other side is what you're talking about - if everyone in the guild decided to leave the game because of this event, that's okay because not everyone is going to be happy with the outcome of everything. In my experience, and quite recently learned, people (not you) will always first see what they want to look at in a situation or what they've been taught to see (or traumatized) into seeing.
I hope you'll see that not everything is negative, there's always a positive side to every situation.
Edit: typo fixing!
Make it a Saturday (Sunday for Aussies) and lo and behold, most people could, with some compromise, attend the event! Everyone would have to compromise in one way or another, but everyone would be able to attend.
Just saying.
"I hate Tiur" = "Sorry about that, do it again and I'll ban you."
"Tiur doesn't do a good enough job giving us weretigers, so I hate him. Here is my honest opinion about why we should have weretigers." = Productive! We can at least debate.
Vyxsis: I can't believe you're posting either! I'm glad that you're still around and giving things a go.
1) Indorani are not a loss! Staff are building, progging, debugging, creating, doing all sorts of things to make quality content to address the consequences of the Indorani's destruction. That's awesome! I didn't allocate resources for anything like this, and had to redo the 2019 project schedule. To me, that's a super cool example of player agency. But it's not a win, we have a lot of work to do, and clearly needed more time. I thank everyone who's giving us leeway here, and hopefully they'll be as excited as us about the new things that result from it.
2) Our communication has gotten a lot better! I have ongoing dialogues with the entire community on important topics to them and me, and we're doing things now like announcing events in advance (at least the scripted portions) so that everyone who wants to show up and see stuff go down can. Personal player - admin communication might be a bit lacking, especially when it's abusive, as I'm the only one who will reply to that sort of thing. I think it shows that the community can learn as well! I'm paid, so yes, you can say rude things to me and I feel obligated to listen. Literally no other member of Aetolia's staff will. I have actually made it a rule. All demands, harassment, abusive language, etc goes through me, everyone else is left to work in peace. So! If anyone feels I am slow or unhelpful, please remember that positive interactions have better results and a wider audience.
Konnorn:
I'm sorry the event missed you somehow! We actually track every org's activity as a function of time, then specifically put scripted portions of events at 'peak' hours. We want to get the biggest audience possible! For nonscripted bits it is entirely up to when we have the staff around, and in most events, that will be US or AU timezones. For the Bamathis event we did go out of our way to have odd sleep schedules and keep things going at all hours, so we're sorry we missed you for those other bits.
There really is a push to include the EU more. Every event's planning phase has the question "How will we include off-peak timezones" included in its discussion. If EU players are still feeling left out we'll work harder on this.
Sidenote:
Of course I'm going to spin everything positively, it's my job. Every mistake I make is a learning experience, so it's rare that I consider anything an outright loss. And when it is a mistake of that magnitude, I accept it. Mages, it's my fault, and we will get this done.
----------------------
Also, it's totally time for a town hall, so let's open that to discussion. I know that if I want to hit as many as possible, Friday evenings US or Saturday Mornings US are best? Please let me know your preference! Also, the format can be up for debate. We can use the internal system, a stream, or even a hybrid of the two where I stream the formal event in game. We'll also take questions in advance (in another thread) so that people who cannot attend can throw their ideas out.
In my own opinion, I think the biggest thing that went wrong this year is the change to xp loss upon death. Many people, including myself, have often claimed that the 1% xp loss is too heavy of an impact for a death via PVE or the 2% death in PVP. These losses have discouraged some people from even wanting to take part in either of those. I understand the desire to make death mean something, but as I've been saying for quite some time now.... this does not meet the justification nor requirement to make death mean something.
In all reality, this seems to be an overstepping knee jerk reaction of "Fine. You want something? Here! TAKE IT!" Should there be some sort of a loss on a death, sure. But 1% for dying to a mob.... that's a bit excessive. As it stands, for some people it can take hours for them to get it all back. Usually the ones that are 150+.
I understand that a lot of this mewling about death came about because people would throw themselves into guards repeatedly in an attempt to murder all of them. For that, I think the 5% xp loss on death inside an enemy city is more than adequate to dissuade that kind of activity. But for things like generic PVP outside of the Sect, you shouldn't lose 2%. For dying to a group of aggressive mobs in Tiyen, you shouldn't lose 1% for that. Accidents happen and the only thing the current xp loss idea does is stop people from wanting to bash/pk in any form at all.
On a serious note, though, I've had to completely remove certain mobs off my bashing list because of how scary they can be (against my weak audit) and the toll that death takes. I always kick myself when I forget the starburst too. But Tiyen...man... thank God for the vindictive charm sometimes because otherwise it would take me a bit of hit and run to split up some of those groups, especially when they congregate with the creature.
It still took a little creative work to get around some of this, like learning how to up my crit rate and fixing my system to sometimes attack by type and not by number since I can get three kills per combo in some places.
I do hope there's a less taxing alternative in the near future but I'm an adaptive person so it's easy for me to just go with the flow of things and hope for the best.
Just my opinion but personally the time wasted standing there staring at the mirror and having those little heart to heart chats with Varian, combined with losing all my buffs (orbs especially) is "meaningful" enough.
That said... There was a time before where a decent portion of the playerbase said that dying was too expensive. They said lowering XP loss would increase activity. The admin of the time were reluctant but eventually made the change (or maybe they had a different reason, I forget it's been so long). The people rejoiced and ... Very little changed with the playerbase in the long term. Over time people said death was meaningless. Others argued that the loss was still too high an investment to frequently PvP while others toted "but bashing so easy and good". Eventually, no xp loss on death was granted for leylines (I forgot the official reasoning for this but besides the point). Even with that - little actually changed in terms of players wanting to fight in the long term.
The reality is that those who want to fight will fight. Those who want to bash will bash. When it comes to things players want there are seemingly no bounds whereas when it comes to things players need they will more often than not take the path with the least amount of resistance.
That ever elusive "meaningful death" is something that each individual player must decide for themselves for each of their characters. Death has already been defined for us in the game. Anything beyond that is what -we- make it. It's where we decide to make it and engage the other players. Measure your success by those willing to engage you back.
If there is to be any change at all on the admin part for this topic I think it should be in 2 places:
1) Better telegraphing an area's or mob's difficulty. I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard over the years "holy unicorn... That's supposed to be a level 80 area?!"
2) Streamlining area design, scope and purpose. Not just the new areas but also going back to the old. Aetolia has so much content that's under utilized and ignored because it's so disjointed from the rest of the world and especially it's surrounding region.
Anywho. Those are my thoughts anyway.
Telegraph would be nice. We had a moratorium on certain things Starmourn has as features because they're its claim to fame. But given time, we'll generalize upgrades like telegraphing.