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Old 01-26-2009, 05:28 PM   #21
Kianoni
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chilko
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thank you chilko, you just made me extremely happy. it may seem I complain a lot but this is the kind of feedback I would like to hear more often.
love the game, keep working and we'll keep playing
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Old 01-26-2009, 08:32 PM   #22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chilko
1) Horus is our priority indeed.
1.1) the bug that you are mentioning has been fixed, the problem that you are experiencing is a problem with synchronization between client and server (why do you think that we are re-wrighting the movement system in the game?, simulation, comunications and client side prediction?)
Also, (and i hope this is the last time i have to say this) animations are made by animators, bugs are fixed by programmers.

2.) there are many issues with invasions that we are aware of. we are going to adress them on a bigger patch later, including things related to realm balance such as handicap. This is a difficult task as we cannot make 2 games one for big pop servers and another for low pop servers.
Fixing important problem on either of servers, no matter if its well populated or not, should be your priority always. While Horus will feel more benefit from it than Ra, both server would have one bug less, and customers would be satisfied. Don't forget, players are your customers. Depending how you treat them, your overall income and popularity will adjust to it. By that I mean spending real money in game and advertising for free on other forums, to friends and so on. Do you really think that someone would invest its money for xp boosters while having -xp bonus because bug abusers used bugs to get other gems(yes, examples of logging in enemy realm and trying stealing gems etc..), defend own etc ? Do you really think anyone will recommend such game to his/her friend? Put yourself in position of my friend, what would you say to hear this? Or even see this by yourself?

Also check one fact: Ra, more populated server, no portals have been opened so far if I am correct. Horus, less populated server, your current priority now, 7 times opened portal by same realm. Tons of complaints, people aren't enjoying, and many are angry. Do you know what Syrtis did last night after being killed again by bug abusers at Ignis gate in less than minute? They went to kill Vesper. Can you guess why? To try at least there to have some FUN in GAME. And game, by its definition, should most of the time provide fun.

When you opened English server, many left Ra and joined Horus, leaving even some of Spanish friends and good positions there. Many new players joined Horus too. And what happened since all those sweet words of yours about new server? Nothing. First all was ok. Each realm had its power, chance to invade. Syrtis even invaded Ignis first time in peak hours. Then what happened?
They started to use bugs, sneak at night hours, fighting against NPCs. Since then, none can even touch their gate. You know why? because battle there don't last more than max 2 mins. Why? Areas need time for casting. Time required for casting giving enough chance to enemy to try break your casting. We don't have that. Instant casting areas, one by another, and cool. This situation lasted very long, yet you didn't respond at all till today. Why ? Did we see any of your moves against it? To take a look in matter, fix it, finding alternatives, anything? And that is what pisses most players off. You are silent in front of those problems who are active for very long time there. As well as you are silent for UDP problem and many scripts that appeared recently. In my eyes this looks like you want to stay blind in front of these very important problems. Every game had these problems, earlier or later, but none of their dev teams acted like you here. Their priorities were always fixing very important exploits ASAP, not like you "later in the big patch". I see you re taking WoW as example while developing this game. Why didn't you take also their example how they treat with such problems?

There is really no excuse for this behavior. If you don't have programmers, well go recruit. Make reorganization, do something, don't just look at your monitors who are saying:"its okay NGD, everything is fine there".

I m extremely angry that my friends, and myself too, who abandoned our work and more than one year spent on RA, in the name of population your new server, are now not having fun at all. We were all patient, server to get new players, things to get sorted out, but this situation is lasting too long. I personally don't feel that anyone of you care this ->.<- much about Horus at all. Nothing has changed, you are just all posting that you have super plans, from month till month giving us many false hopes without doing a shit. What can player say you did so far? New crappy lucky boxes, fatigue, negative xp feature in invasion system, total disorder and imbalance of realms, complete F A I L. Give me one positive thing you did since opening Horus. First time after all this time I invested in playing this game, I feel so much disappointed in you. Why I need to go again to RA, so I could have fun, and cant have SOME fun, 1/10 of Ra fun, at Horus? Why aren't you doing anything? What happened with all promises and "perfect" plans of yours how to improve situation on Horus about population, balance etc?

Oh cmon, give me a break. You can ban me, I don't care, but you failed and yet you are still pushing some stories and false hopes. And that is, Chilko, and the rest of you, very hypocrite and rude from your side. How much more to wait? Will it happen anything at all when that "big patch" of yours come? Or will there be yet another bug that we ll need to wait yet another couple of months for its fix in yet another "big patch"? Woot big patch for bugs and quick hotfix for removing items, premium one too and destroying event ones too.

Really good job there. Keep up extremely "good" work.
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Old 01-26-2009, 09:28 PM   #23
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Dear Anpu.

It's not like we don't want to fix important bugs or that we don't take horus into account whenever we make a decision...

A feature such as Invasions, opens so many doors for emergent behavior that we decided to take the time to analyze everything first, do the proper design and implement fixes later on an important update. Population by time zone and by server adds another dimension of difficulty for addressing this. We are still in the design process, and we are following all topics on this forum about this matter to gather feedback. Also, it is summer in Argentina, and many developers have left or are leaving soon on vacation. We've decided to postpone big updates until after that. for obvious reasons.

Horus was a great bet for us, we came to the conclusion that we would never have a big international community because of the barrier that language played, so we invested on new hardware for opening a second server.
We hoped that we could land an advertisement deal fast (something similar to what we have in germany) to be able for the server to grow as fast as necessary. Sadly, all of this deals went down, but we are still trying to sign one that might change the situation radically.

As for your advice on how to run our company let me just tell you that you should be more humble as you have no idea of our reality. We are a very small company, doing two games at the same time, working on a very low budget and within a very small local industry.
Its not like we place an ad in a Buenos Aires newspaper and we find a ton of experienced game programmers. Even if we could find one, it's not like we have enough money to hire them.

We are an independent studio, we are not a great success case but we still do the best efforts that we can because we believe in this product and we are very passionate about making games.

Luckily, our second project (a work for hire that sustained Regnum during this whole year) is almost done. and soon we will have 6-7 more developers working on Regnum. We hope to address this and many other issues as soon as we can (also considering all the other things that also need to be done).

As always, we will not ban you for feeling bad about the game, believe me, the worst thing for us is to loose players. but there is so much we can do considering the situation. I can even tell you that there might be bugs that we might never be able to fix, or features that we may never be able to implement (although in a given time, such impossibility never happened yet)

If you don't feel comfortable, playing on a free game, with a small, Argentinean, independent, developer behind it i'm sorry. I hope that you come back in a couple of months to see if the situation or the game or the company has improved.

Best regards,

- Chilko
NGD Studios
General Manager

Last edited by chilko; 01-26-2009 at 10:05 PM.
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Old 01-26-2009, 10:13 PM   #24
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I don't understand the reasoning behind the Horus bet, as you call it. You want it to grow as fast as possible, and put your hopes on promotion deals. So far so good, a perfectly sane move that anyone would do.

What I fail to understand is the lack of a plan B, in case the deals didn't work out. I know that the final outcome of a deal can take a while before it's obvious, but it's also obvious if it's not succesful immediately as you wanted (needed) it to be. You are not blind, you saw that there was no deal that brought new players at the very start of the server, even if some of these potential deals still were not clear whether they would last or not. It *was* clear however that they didn't work when needed the most.

So, why no plan B to save that situation as much as possible with what you already have? And it's not like you did not have suggestions for a plan B. Migration has been suggested before the actual launch, ever since the announcement for a server was made.

I understand the will to start a server with completely new players, new individual paying customers to horizontally expand your income, but this is secondary priority. If Horus failed to expand horizontally (by horizontally I mean more customers, same average income per customer), you could always go for migrations to quickly help Horus get back on it's feet as soon as possible, and possibly expand your income vertically (Same amount of customers, paying more money) by charging migrations. Horus would be in a better situation right now, some extra cash would be in your pocket, and you would have bought enough time to try a second time for some more horizontal expansion by new promotion deals.

It is not too late, you can still do this.
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Old 01-26-2009, 10:25 PM   #25
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chilko
We hoped that we could land an advertisement deal fast (something similar to what we have in germany) to be able for the server to grow as fast as necessary. Sadly, all of this deals went down, but we are still trying to sign one that might change the situation radically.
Wouldn't it be easier to change xp curve to some more player friendly one?
Now 1 of every 30-40 ppl starting to play this game makes it to lvl40. The rest quits and will never come back. Don't you see the lost chances ? You should treat these ppl as lost money for you and lost fun for us - players, because it would also have impact on game balance (positive i think). And probably no bonuses would be needed.

Regards.
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Old 01-26-2009, 10:36 PM   #26
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Miraculix

So, why no plan B to save that situation as much as possible with what you already have? And it's not like you did not have suggestions for a plan B. Migration has been suggested before the actual launch, ever since the announcement for a server was made.

I understand the will to start a server with completely new players, new individual paying customers to horizontally expand your income, but this is secondary priority. If Horus failed to expand horizontally (by horizontally I mean more customers, same average income per customer), you could always go for migrations to quickly help Horus get back on it's feet as soon as possible, and possibly expand your income vertically (Same amount of customers, paying more money) by charging migrations. Horus would be in a better situation right now, some extra cash would be in your pocket, and you would have bought enough time to try a second time for some more horizontal expansion by new promotion deals.

It is not too late, you can still do this.
At the time, this deals that I mentioned seemed like almost done.
Also, implementing a character transfer system was very hard to do considering our database structure (this has been recently solved)

We really thought that by word of mouth Horus would grow (at least at the same speed as Ra), we hoped it would be enough. Anyway, we see that after invasions, player population on Horus is growing, slowly but consistently.

We wanted to make horus a fair server where everyone starts fresh...
I guess that, character transfers will be available in the future as we already have the basic feature implemented. We don't see that transfers will fix the problem anyway.

Growing horizontally is the only way that Regnum can grow, you know why? because for it to become successful/sustainable we need to multiply its revenew 10 times (not 1.7 times).

It's difficult to have plan B's given our real situation... its evident that you still don't understand that many times our plan B was shutting down the game, filling for chapter 11 and in my case go back to my mom's apartment

I can now say that we now have proved that the game works, as a game and as a business. Also, we managed to work on another game to to sustain the whole company. Now we have another turn at the bat, at least invasions was a hit (maybe not the home run we initially thought)

regards,

- Chilko
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Old 01-26-2009, 10:41 PM   #27
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Quote:
Originally Posted by n4gh4sh
Wouldn't it be easier to change xp curve to some more player friendly one?
Now 1 of every 30-40 ppl starting to play this game makes it to lvl40. The rest quits and will never come back. Don't you see the lost chances ? You should treat these ppl as lost money for you and lost fun for us - players, because it would also have impact on game balance (positive i think). And probably no bonuses would be needed.

Regards.
this is a free to play game and most of our income comes from XP boosters (as in every other F2P game out there) the new experience curve was a request from our partner in germany, because the game was not monetizing well and they have a lot of experience managing other games with this business models.

clearly we have problems with retention because of this (and because of other reasons), this is why we are removing fatigue (considering that now people have less time to lvl because of invasions and working on enhancements to the newbie areas, quests, and we will be working on some interesting features to put the end game right there from the beginning.

Best regards,

- Chilko
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Old 01-26-2009, 10:59 PM   #28
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I understand that Regnum has walked a fine line between shutdown and extreme self-sacrifice, NGD reminds us at every turn. What you don't seem to understand is that the playerbase already knows that. It's probably the main reason most of your customers are still around and not payed about the same amount of money to some other, cold and faceless buisness that develops another game. Regnum financial system is not unique, in fact the subscription based model is dying out, microtransactions are looking like they are the future, so it's not like they don't have an economically similar choice.

I never said migrations would solve the problem, and I understand (through repeated NGD spam about it... ) that Regnum needs more players, not more expensive transactions. I only said that it would (and will) buy you enough time to make the server fun for new players to actually play there. Such deadlocks like Horus are not solved by a single change, it's always a combination of things. Migration would be one of these. The RLM system (broken as it may be for now, I believe once it works it will produce results) is another. Good word of mouth is also a helping factor, but a tricky one.

I don't accuse NGD for relying on word of mouth - in fact, I commend that. No matter what amount of banner spam there is for a game, people will eventually "be sold" to a game if the existing playerbase is entusiastic about the game they play. Speaking as a player from both servers, the only reason I would recommend someone to play the game (and I have, on multiple occasions) is because of my previous experience on Ra.

Don't get me wrong, what Regnum is, it's core gameplay design, is probably the best thing I've seen in an MMO out there (and I have done my homework, I've looked around) and one of the main reasons I stick around. Horus *can* be fun. But I'm not the average player - I don't mind losing, I try to enjoy the fight as much as I can. This is far from the average mentality in your target group (teenagers). Hell, last night someone was crying in Ignis because he didn't get the Draconic Gem and said he would quit the game. For people that like to win, or at least have a chance at winning, Horus is most definitely not fun, and the people in that situation will not be very enthusiastic about the game they play, so word of mouth is working against Horus right now.

The Horus playerbase, and their happiness about the game they play should be top prioruty (in acts, not just words) if you want the word-of-mouth factor to kick in and work in favor of that server.

Fixing the RLM system, implementing migrations, and providing feedback on your actual acts for the Horus playerbase (instead of keeping us in the dark about it) will give you good word of mouth. In my opinion, anyway. It's not my company at risk, I can just say things from a safe perspective. But it's definitely something to try at least, I think.
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Old 01-26-2009, 11:06 PM   #29
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NGD communicating.
I love you guys
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Old 01-26-2009, 11:23 PM   #30
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First I would like to thank you for such fast reply to my ideas. I'ts also nice to see NGD is doing so more often recently.

About fatigue I must say it didn't hinder me that much and I think there is quite lot of ppl who doesn't play more that 4 hours often. However taking into account the second group of ppl who can play like a maniac of a very long time, it is good you address their complaints.

About xp curve change I mean mostly levels between 25 and 35(37) in which I see the most players retention. In these levels they realize how much grinding is before them to be able to do something in warzone. And that's the real reason of quitting. The players who quit earlier would probably do so sooner or later for other reasons.

I wish you this game to be a real success concerning ingame player experience as well as business success. I know you have put a lot of time and work in it and I really appreciate that.

Best regards
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