Nusquam,
From the vantage point of a customer, Funcom has horribly mismanaged this game over the years and I'd have to be a fool to believe that was going to change. It has never been the sole fault of any individual be it a designer, coder or director. So the past couple times that I've returned to AO, I returned in the spirit of: Play the game for released content, not for the hopes of what is to be released.
I don't think it is unreasonable for us, as players, to expect that you at least make sure that existing content is working properly. Fixing bugs, exploits and correcting blatant game design issues with EXISTING/CURRENT CONTENT is reasonably in the scope of what one should expect when they pay for a monthly subscription. So if you are choosing to spend the resources our monthly subscription and item shop purchases provide on future content rather than focus those resources on what we are indeed paying for (per your explanation) then I guess I'd like to know why you're doing that? I mean I already know but since you're making it seem as if we're way off base to have reasonable expectations for future development then I'm very interested to hear why you aren't fixing what we have previously and are currently paying for, contentwise.
For example:
- I spent darn near 2.5 hours trying to farm a Brimstone Heart from a Brimstone Demon for the Inferno Anansi quest last night. We even killed the other type of demon there with the thought that maybe it was an either/or random roll thing to determine if a brimstone or the other demon would spawn. TWO AND A HALF HOURS to farm a quest item.
I contacted a GM and was actually told that 2 mobs spawning in 90 min was working as intended. Additionally, there's a part of the same questline where you have to kill 5 mobs and only 3 are spawned at any given time. To add insult to injury, both my toon and another guy's got stuck in the geometry and had to deal with the good ole "Cannot use /stuck while standing" message. It makes absolutely 0 sense when about 90% of the time you get stuck its because you dropped down into something or hopped up through a celing and won't be able to sit down. The result, for me, was that my evening of questing with friends and having fun got completely ruined by messed up game design. I'd also like to add that I didn't even get to finish the quest on my fixer because I didn't want to hold the others up (they all got their hearts from the first spawn of mobs). So yeah, 2.5 hours on a quest, not finished and have to go back today to kill left/right hand to get it done.
- The GMI was put on Live over 2 years ago and there are still things that were not completed from back then. We never got org bank functionality or a replacement for the 'org only shop', for example. This is the only MMO I've played that doesn't have any sort of org bank functionality, yet if you store stuff on a froob and account share you risk getting banned.
- I was recording a How-to video the other night on basic GUI customization and went to open my friends list and got a blank panel. This happens quite a bit and has been a bug or problem since I started play over 10 years ago and still hasn't been fixed. I actually had to do that section of the video over because I stumbled through how to explain why my friends list wasn't populating. It really is mind boggling.
- We've been asking for years to have inferno missions listed as easy/medium/hard with the same rewards regardless of if they are rolled by a 210 or a 220. Is there anyone that's played the game in the last 5 years that is in disagreement with such a change? Is it a hard fix?
- It seems like most people I know utilize outside tanking at 2 Mountains and Kite Hill to level their toons. I'm generally anti-OST teams and I've even jumped on the bandwagon because the alternative is to level alone. There haven't really been any implemented solutions to address this long-term problem.
These are the types of things that really need to be fixed with existing content. No matter how much effort you put into the engine or how much you try to re-balance the classes.. if you don't fix what is broken with the current content, the new people you manage to attract will leave. The people currently playing are going to be way more tolerant of the blatant game design flaws in live content than some new person trying the game for the first time. We are, after all, used to the problems and we just find a way to work around them.
I'm not in your industry but I can't believe that some of these 'quality of life' fixes would take a lot of time. We're not talking about implementing new playfields or doing complete reworks of a profession. Some things are as simple as placing an extra mob or two in the world, adjusting spawn timers, fixing drop rates, changing loot tables and swapping out rewards. I have no idea what your budget is for the game but I can't imagine that pulling someone in for a 3-6 month clean-up project would break the bank or overly tax your resources. It would, however, make a world of difference to the enjoyment factor of your released content.
----
So I asked a question yesterday that I really should have asked a long time ago regarding who designed my favorite playfield in game. Turns out it was Genele that designed Dark Ruins.. and apparently, from her own statement, when she was new to using the tools. That instance, on an AO scale, is brilliant and probably the best designed in the game (with the exception of the fact that something a bit more awesome needs to be provided as the final reward.. to coax more people to do it). Whoever opted to have her working on whatever she was doing instead of putting out more of what she was obviously good at doing really dropped the ball. And I'll just leave it at that because anything else I could say wouldn't be founded in fact.