Monthly Development Update – 2nd July, 2014

[MrPete]

So no august update then?

[Leetlover]

The current profession "redifinitions" on test are simply not feasable or suited to the direction that AO is headed in.

mhm, what I see is more streamlining of professions at the expence of diversity. This is typical of FC: We ask for something, but what they do doesn't work or is way over the top (new cloaking devices). I honestly think they got overwhelmed by AO's complexity years ago when they started to rebalance and then made it narrow. They make up their own professions instead of balancing the existing ones.

Agent (lol, assaultdoctor) for example. The profession is supposed to focus on concealment and subterfuge-skills (and the fp-ability) in the description. That profession could use a rebalance. But as I and many others understood the documents they decided to basicly delete the profession and make it into Adventurer instead.

Now on test, stealthfriendly nanos are no longer stealthfriendly and stuff. Perception-setups for other professions than adventurer will be obsolete and it still doesn't seems like the diferent professions will have a distinct function that they are exceptional in when teaming. I do think they do many things right tho. Sorry, feedback and critisim is always so negative.

I seriously think the monsters needs a rebalance most. Totw could use more powerfull mobs (le-stuff and som-weapons makes it too easy) and a more updated loot-table. It's little point in professions when all you have to do is run up to a mob and dd it b4 going to the next. Today the game is dailies, kite/ost >>> inf-missions with highbies. Then get stuff alone (or from gmi/itemshop) or multilogged cause much content has been abandonded as the game progressed or that the game has outdated loot-mechanics.

[MachSchau]

And what about those Vets who have been fighting against these changes since thier first announcement? I guess we dont know anything either.

I've been quite vocal about my dislike of almost all of the proposed changes as both a normal player AND a professional for the engineer community.

Viewing most of the proposed changes on an indivisual profession basis they dont look quite so bad (though some of them still look idiotic), The real issue, for me atleast is when you view the changes as a whole.

Understanding the impact of these changes on the dynamics of a team/raidforce is where they realy start to look truly bad.
They may make more sense on the AO of 5 years ago, when we had more of a population to compensate for the fact that people will have to relearn professions they've spent years practicing at and rediscovering systems for each raid, but thats just not going to happen, you can throw all the new engines and steam releases at AO you like the population is only ever going to continue to shrink, sadly, AO has had its day and theres nothing that will change that.

The current profession "redifinitions" on test are simply not feasable or suited to the direction that AO is headed in.

I suggest you actualy try to think past the initial "yay new and shiny" mindset and actualy try to conssider the impact of these changes on your loot farming raids, the changes you'll need to make to team set ups and how much more difficult its going to make actualy gathering teams/raid forces for things that are allready difficult to gather teams for.

Wait, so its a bad thing that I cant 2-3-4 man an instance? It is bad that I am going to have to find REAL life living people to do content with? I should be upset that I cant steamroll content? Because that has been what the balance has been about (along with some pvp aspects).

The prof changes on test are a smidgin to what still needs to be introduced. While I may not agree that prof changes shouldn't be released to live until 100% completed, I cant help but see why they are releasing them in pieces which is to get feedback and make rapid (I/we hope) changes to them so they dont become neglected.

You cant even understand how ALL prof changes (let alone individual ones) will interact with one another. You know why? Because they haven't been released yet. Basing your entire argument on hypotheticals and numbers does not translate well when it comes down to the real thing. You cant compensate for the human ratio.

There are many reasons why AO has a low population some of them are: 1) Saturation of the market with MMOs. 2) Slow development. 3) Lack of content. LoX was released in 2009 and population levels were still pretty decent but since 2009 there has been no content. People are tired of doing the same raids especially when there is no incentive to really do it other than selling nodrop items or grinding the raid out for a friend/org mate. With an MMO there needs to be something a player needs to continually do. 4)Game runs horribly on new hardware.

As mentioned before, there is a reason why people dont randomly team anymore and it is because of how powerful a few select toons have become and a lack of content. People want to sell loot rights because that is the only incentive to raiding. People dont want to invite randoms from lft because that is competition. People just get tired of doing the same thing over and over again. Like, imagine when AO was released and they didn't make any content for the game, just bug fixes and feature implementation for 6 years, how populated do you think the game would be? Not very.

Lastly, I play an enforcer pvm. When I saw the changes to enforcer's (years ago) I wasn't too happy about them and was disappointed in the devs and the professionals. Sure there were some things I liked, but from what I recall, my feelings were of disgruntlement. Now, I dont really care. The playfield is changing for everyone and we dont know what profession is going to be flavor of the month (year) and I think that scares people because they are so accustomed to this OPed toon that can do tons of damage and take a lot of damage and dodge a lot of damage and pwn in pvp and uproot all that to where they cant do any of that. That scares and pisses people off.

[Uaintseenme]

Wait, so its a bad thing that I cant 2-3-4 man an instance? It is bad that I am going to have to find REAL life living people to do content with?.

yes it IS a bad thing when you cant actualy *find* a 5th, 6th, 7th etc etc person to do this content with.
Where exactly are you planning to find these REAL life living people to do this content with?
its certainly not going to be from the current emaciated game population.

A population that is only going to shrink still further when you "reboot" peoples toons, toons that some of us have spent 15 years learning and equiping to fit our preferd gaming style.
Given a choice of completely rebuilding a toon that someone was finaly happy with, or going elsewhere to get your MMO fix may not force every single veteran out there to quit, but it will be the final nail for "some of them" and at this point in AO's lifespan, thats enough to leave a lasting impact on the rest of the community.

This isnt rebalancing, for some professions its almost a complete re-writing of thier fundamental purpose and playstyle and if you change the very core aspects of what a person enjoys about thier chosen profession to somethign that they no longer enjoy, they arent going to continue playing it, they are simply going to go elsewhere.

With everyone of these new unwelcomed changes AO loses a few more of its community members, little by little, yet there are no hoards of new players ready to take thier place.

You may think that its a bad thing that 4 people can currently raid the 12man instance, we'll see if you still think that when you can only find 3 people who want to do it.


And: just as an afterthought, while 4 "players" can indeed raid alot of the end game content, they are more often than not, forced to dual log due to dwindling player numbers, so yes its 4 players, but it is also 8 "toons".

[Gargle]

Don't worry. Once the new engine is released and the NPE and Steam, all shall be well.

[Ophiuchus]

Most if not all of these changes that have come up on Testlive now have been around for a while with people testing them out and reporting back. For some, this isn't new and out of the blue because they've already been running with these changes. Some of them are great, some of them are awful. To claim that no one yet knows how it will affect things because it's newly out is false.

Maybe there are more major changes in the works that will further alter the way it comes together as a whole. If there are, we don't know abot them yet.

[macer85]

Most if not all of these changes that have come up on Testlive now have been around for a while with people testing them out and reporting back. For some, this isn't new and out of the blue because they've already been running with these changes. Some of them are great, some of them are awful. To claim that no one yet knows how it will affect things because it's newly out is false.

Maybe there are more major changes in the works that will further alter the way it comes together as a whole. If there are, we don't know abot them yet.

such major changes alter the original game i have grown to love. It should be released as a sequel or entirely new game. I love anarchy online and want it to remain as I've known it to be over the last decade

[Nanofat]

such major changes alter the original game i have grown to love. It should be released as a sequel or entirely new game. I love anarchy online and want it to remain as I've known it to be over the last decade

Sorry Mace. Nothing - good or bad; lasts forever.

<insert bob dylan's times they are a changin>

[Literary]

What will bring AO back to life for another year or is Steam. Actual marketing would useful too.

Here's a real example what AO can expect plus a lot of correlation: Defiance.

Defiance is a game I've put way too many hours into. It's produced by Trion and the Syfy (ugh!) channel in conjunction with the TV show, so way more marketing then here. It's an absolute blast to play which is what keeps players coming back to it despite its problems. Those problems drove most of the players to other games even though Defiance originally had a buy once/play forever model- (like TSW's current one) The single biggest problem is server side lag. (eventually you might think that one or more of the sys-ops is griefing the entire game)

Imagine, if you will, that you're in S42 or Pande and have just finished off the boss and blam, hello lock-up and eventually d/c. ARRRGH but hey, it happens, we've all been there and while it's a big deal at that moment we get over it and get back to having fun. But then it happens again and again and well, every day for the last 15 (yes, Fifteen) months or so. Player population nosedived.

So much so that Trion decided make it f2p and it went live as f2p on June 4th but they also revamped their launcher and it too, would not work with Steam. The download button disappeared...and for two months a daily brand new thread in the forums was a variation on "NO DOWNLOAD BUTTON???" You could just download directly from Trion and not play it through Steam but people either can't handle that concept or didn't want to.

Then the Download button finally got fixed, almost two months to the day after it went f2p, and Nine Thousand New Players logged on. Over the following week, it would get to 11k+. Expect similar results for AO.
On Steam you can see how many players are logged in (just Steam users-- non-Steam does not show up).

A useful tool/website is steamcharts.com. You can see how anyone is doing. Here's Defiance:

http://steamcharts.com/app/224600

The various blips/increases indicate release of DLC's...h'mm...nah, that would never work for AO....
It's nosediving again now since the lag issues are still on-going. As to why there are problems, well, does this sound familiar? Offices closed and staff cut to 2 or 3 devs, etc. At least AO's hamsters are properly fed. Yeah, lag & rubber-banding happens but rarely "Anarchy Online Server Not Available. Try Again/Quit?"

[Neista]

And what about those Vets who have been fighting against these changes since thier first announcement? I guess we dont know anything either.

I've been quite vocal about my dislike of almost all of the proposed changes as both a normal player AND a professional for the engineer community.

Viewing most of the proposed changes on an indivisual profession basis they dont look quite so bad (though some of them still look idiotic), The real issue, for me atleast is when you view the changes as a whole.

Understanding the impact of these changes on the dynamics of a team/raidforce is where they realy start to look truly bad.
They may make more sense on the AO of 5 years ago, when we had more of a population to compensate for the fact that people will have to relearn professions they've spent years practicing at and rediscovering systems for each raid, but thats just not going to happen, you can throw all the new engines and steam releases at AO you like the population is only ever going to continue to shrink, sadly, AO has had its day and theres nothing that will change that.

The current profession "redifinitions" on test are simply not feasable or suited to the direction that AO is headed in.

I suggest you actualy try to think past the initial "yay new and shiny" mindset and actualy try to conssider the impact of these changes on your loot farming raids, the changes you'll need to make to team set ups and how much more difficult its going to make actualy gathering teams/raid forces for things that are allready difficult to gather teams for.

I think these are some of the truest words ive heard spoken about the new changes. Its too much, too late and could possibly be the death of AO. Little changes even nerfs here and there are acceptable but a total reorganization of how professions work makes no sense at all in a game this elderly and with such a small playerbase (some of whom have been here since the start).

This is some kind of ill-starred attempt to appeal to new players which just isnt going to happen. Gamers these days want handholding and easymode....its oldschool players who love the complexity that enjoy AO and this patch is a slap in the face to far too many of them, however good the intentions behind it

[Gargle]

You kinda wonder why they don't hold of the rebalancing till after the NPE/Engine and most importantly Steam is introduced. I think the whole rebalancing would be easier to swallow if there were droves of new players running around to help or level up with for fun. But has the AO team ever stopped to think ahead? Perhaps planned ahead? Perhaps hired a writer/game director that did the lore prior to designing and releasing major new content in perhaps an expansion that could be released with the new engine? Perhaps took time to ask, where are we, where are we going? Perhaps stopped and said... hey lets plan this out instead of just reacting to what people are spamming on the forums to please them so the cash flow keeps coming and we can drag it out another year? Perhaps I should shut up? Perhaps...

[Pennypacker]

You kinda wonder why they don't hold of the rebalancing till after the NPE/Engine and most importantly Steam is introduced. I think the whole rebalancing would be easier to swallow if there were droves of new players running around to help or level up with for fun. But has the AO team ever stopped to think ahead? Perhaps planned ahead? Perhaps hired a writer/game director that did the lore prior to designing and releasing major new content in perhaps an expansion that could be released with the new engine? Perhaps took time to ask, where are we, where are we going? Perhaps stopped and said... hey lets plan this out instead of just reacting to what people are spamming on the forums to please them so the cash flow keeps coming and we can drag it out another year? Perhaps I should shut up? Perhaps...

I don't get how it can be hard to understand. Current subscribers are being used as guinea pigs as the rebalance require actual testing before it can be released live.

[Gargle]

Steam release and new engine = influx of new and returning players. When you get a significant release milestone like that you want the game to be in the best shape possible and as balanced as you can get it as it's part of the process of convincing the new players to stick around. If you release on Steam and then drop a huge gameplay rebalance a few months after, it'll confuse a large amount of users, and the experience they started with will be inferior in quality.

Who's talking about a huge gameplay rebalance? Why not use slap and tickle? Tweak a little here, tweak a little there. Perhaps a few people change professions with the new mini tweak and stay an extra few months? Then tweak a little here, add a new item there to balance stuff.

Rebalance does not = to one static giant mother of a patch that automatically fixes things. It's a continuous process especially in a complex game like AO. And wouldn't it have been better if this game was on Steam 12 months ago with a new engine and they could do minor adjustments up until today?

[Gargle]

Things they're now implementing such as the NPE and itemization revamps, item rarity values and nano changes are things that definitely need to go in before engine or Steam launches. Profession balancing is less essential for sure, but the existing game is so frustrating to approach to a player just starting out that the game would've likely fizzled out with people quitting before level 15.

I have no problem with the NPE and the rest. However, the rebalancing can delay the release of Steam (new engine, NPE, etc) until 2214 and unless we come up with the same technology that Roman, Vanya, Eric, Simon, Sara, and the rest of the contributors to the nanobot did. We're pretty much out of luck ever seeing it.

[Neista]

Steam release and new engine = influx of new and returning players. When you get a significant release milestone like that you want the game to be in the best shape possible and as balanced as you can get it as it's part of the process of convincing the new players to stick around. If you release on Steam and then drop a huge gameplay rebalance a few months after, it'll confuse a large amount of users, and the experience they started with will be inferior in quality.

Influx of new players? at 15 dollars/Euro a month for a game that even with the new graphics engine will still look a decade out of date? I hardly think so

[Uaintseenme]

Steam release and new engine = influx of new and returning players.

I truly wish this would be the case, I've enjoyed this game for a long time now and theres othig more that I'd like than to see it get a shot in the arm of new players.....

But if you are putting your hopes on the new engine and a steam release, then you are going to be massively dissapointed.


There are any number of newer, better looking, more supported and above all CHEAPER MMO's on steam, all of them more appealing to a casual observer looking at the listings for something new to play.

The "NEW" engine... yeah thats going to amount to nothing, because its NOT "NEW", its old, noticably so, while we may notice a slight improvement in visual quality, to anyone who hasnt played the current engine, its just going to look old and out-dated, to a new visitor, theres going to be no difference between the current engine and the newer one.
Infact, if FC Marketing department even *try* to use the word "new" in any advertising they might do for AO, they are going to be laughed at by the gaming community, trying to suggest something like this is "NEW!!" will actualy hurt FC's reputation more than they have allready hurt it themselves.

And finaly, AO's one saving Grace, its unique complexity, the core gameplay, the thing thats kept most of us here for as long as we have been....
It's being slowly taken away, simplified, dumbed down, what ever you want to call it, its happening.
Attempting to make AO appeal to a wider audience would, even in its heyday, have been a double edge sword, because its that complexity and difficult learning curve that made AO so unique and intresting to alot of people.

As i said, i do wish there was light at the end of the tunnel for AO, but there really isnt, the most i could have realisticly hoped for is to be allowed to enjoy the last year or so of AO untill it met its inevitable conclusion, but it seems that even that wish wont be granted.

[DigitalBath]

I truly wish this would be the case, I've enjoyed this game for a long time now and theres othig more that I'd like than to see it get a shot in the arm of new players.....

But if you are putting your hopes on the new engine and a steam release, then you are going to be massively dissapointed.


There are any number of newer, better looking, more supported and above all CHEAPER MMO's on steam, all of them more appealing to a casual observer looking at the listings for something new to play.

The "NEW" engine... yeah thats going to amount to nothing, because its NOT "NEW", its old, noticably so, while we may notice a slight improvement in visual quality, to anyone who hasnt played the current engine, its just going to look old and out-dated, to a new visitor, theres going to be no difference between the current engine and the newer one.
Infact, if FC Marketing department even *try* to use the word "new" in any advertising they might do for AO, they are going to be laughed at by the gaming community, trying to suggest something like this is "NEW!!" will actualy hurt FC's reputation more than they have allready hurt it themselves.

And finaly, AO's one saving Grace, its unique complexity, the core gameplay, the thing thats kept most of us here for as long as we have been....
It's being slowly taken away, simplified, dumbed down, what ever you want to call it, its happening.
Attempting to make AO appeal to a wider audience would, even in its heyday, have been a double edge sword, because its that complexity and difficult learning curve that made AO so unique and intresting to alot of people.

As i said, i do wish there was light at the end of the tunnel for AO, but there really isnt, the most i could have realisticly hoped for is to be allowed to enjoy the last year or so of AO untill it met its inevitable conclusion, but it seems that even that wish wont be granted.

To me, AO's only envisionable future that won't destroy it's legacy while bringing new players is for a team of (overly) dedicated veterans crowdfunded the buyout of it's IP. The current people in charge are running it straight to ground by not understanding what made Anarchy Online what it is.

If you're weaving the content into a "new" engine but not releasing suitably modern assets (textures, models, etc) along with it, you're going to fail.

If you're marketing this game as anything other than a hardcore, old-school, difficult to learn, grindy and complex MMO, you're going to fail.

If you violate the roles of each Profession instead of respecting them and making them usable within that role, you're going to fail.

But all this will be ignored since AO has already lasted longer than predicted as a profitable business and that's "good enough". If it died today, they would say "well, it was a good run, we'll focus on the others now". The team changed so much over the years I'd be surprised any tears would be shed. Some may not even blink.

Oh well, my 2c.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

If you're marketing this game as anything other than a hardcore, old-school, difficult to learn, grindy and complex MMO, you're going to fail.

I LOL'd, and then I realized it was true, and then I got annoyed, and then I went back to work.

The four stages of something.

[Leetlover]

AO's one saving Grace, its unique complexity, the core gameplay, the thing thats kept most of us here for as long as we have been....
It's being slowly taken away, simplified, dumbed down, what ever you want to call it, its happening.

agree w this. dunno what pc-gamer would really want to for example do old ao-quests (bazzist or w/e) in 2014.

[Ekarona]

agree w this. dunno what pc-gamer would really want to for example do old ao-quests (bazzist or w/e) in 2014.

Take away the pain, but keep in the interesting parts. Which they have failed by introducing one more must do busy quest...