Hello my Fellows,
As you know, the team are hard at work on our push towards Fellowship 1.0 and we’re stoked that you’re on board for the ride; the feedback we’ve been getting is already helping us to contextualise changes, fixes and updates so thanks for that. That’s going to be a bit of theme for today so let’s talk about feedback.
We want to empower the Developers at Chief Rebel to create their own threads on Discord for specific feedback they need from you in this next phase. This idea came from an attempt to initiate discussion in a recent thread on Discord that was met with both fantastic feedback as well as some skepticism (fair enough!). We know that it’s frustrating to have common feedback yet to be addressed and this specific thread was a bit misplaced in the context of everything. What we want to do, rather than being apprehensive of getting feedback, is commit to even more transparency. While a lot of feedback exists in different threads and has been talked about in general discusison, our team have specific questions or hypotheticals they want to hear from the players about. Rather than hope the topic comes up in discussions, we want to directly ask in a place where we can get answers from as many different perspectives as possible. With our Developers posting feedback requests, we’ll be able to target actionable feedback that becomes a crucial part of Fellowship 1.0. Make your voice heard in this Developer Discussion Forum.
As you know, we have a very pretty Rewards tree in the game but it has been guilty of creating some unfortunate performance issues. Calle has been hard at work on a rework of this feature which should see much better usability for players as well as improved performance. When we make this available in Fellowship, we really look forward to your feedback on both the usability of it and any performance improvements that you notice.
We’ve been wanting to do this for a very long time and, as Will mentioned in our recent stream, it wasn’t as simple as it initially appeared. The team has an initial implementation working in our internal builds but the true test will be when we get it in the hands of our players. We’ll be looking at the basic functionality and how it’s used but we’re also interested in how player behaviour may change to reduce the need to abandon parties and return to the Stronghold. As to when this will make it into the game? We’re not sure just yet but we just wanted to show you it’s coming and we hope you’re as excited as we are.
We love answering your questions but unfortunately there’s less minutes in a day than there are good questions from our community! We had a look back at some of the questions we had thrown at us for the last stream and we thought this would be a good place to answer just a handful of some of the questions that we didn’t have time to get to. Nota: Are there plans to refresh the dungeon mobs with every season?
There are! We had a really positive response to the changes we made to enemy placement in the dungeons for EAS3 and we're interested in continuing to support that. We're looking at changing placement and also, where appropriate, changing which mobs appear in which dungeons.
AuffLimits: Will there be a method that lets us choose (for a high price) exactly how we want a piece of gear to be customized instead of the non-stop gambling?
A few people have been asking about the amount of RNG we have in our game. That's something we are working to address. We know it feels bad at the moment and the work we've done over the last few patches has been in an effort to move the experience closer to where we want it to be. We're focussing on making the crafting more deterministic but are stopping short of 'exact' choice of outcome at the moment.
Mendzia: Is "best healer is just highest dps healer" going to stay?
Not at all. Our intention with our healers if for them to each have their own niche in terms of how they heal. Aeona may do more DPS than Sylvie or Vigour maybe as she is built for it in her kit. The damage will fluctuate but we will try to combat that on the other healers by lifting their strengths. As that would be our goal for hero changes to get away from the "top DPS is best healer" meta we have right now.
Spitfire: do you plan to bring back advanced mechanics and spread them through league so it's not just boring to play in leagues before eternal (also let us play with crafting in leagues)?
We're looking at the rate at which we introduce advanced mechanics in the progression. We don't want to overwhelm new players and we want the challenge to feel gradual but achievable. The larger question for us right now is the league progression itself; how we guide beginner players into the game and either help them get better so they can undertake Eternal, or provide them with an experience at a lower difficulty they are happy at playing indefinitely.
Isidor: Why not push changes each week now until 1.0? Right now you have 200-400 “playtester“ on live, who can give you feedback to improve the game until 1.0.
Our plan is to use the time between now and 1.0 to roll out more experimental changes than we have done in previous seasons. Some need many players' perspectives on them, and that's why crafting materials and crafting rule changes have gone out already. The features we're working on, though, are not all ones that need public-facing testing. A lot of what is happening behind the scenes are changes to our game architecture; how we deliver patch content so we can have less downtime, how our dungeon logic talks to the server so we can reset the dungeon without the need to reset the server. Some of the features we want to trial need more up-front work. The reality of game-dev is that a feature could take a few weeks to develop, test, refine based on internal testing and then release. We don't want to put out work in progress content we already know won't give us useful feedback. The cadence of changes we are working on will not be 'weekly', maybe not even bi-weekly, but we won't be sitting on features we want to get feedback on.
In our future streams, we’ll be streamlining the Q&A portion to make sure we get to as many of the best questions as possible.
Longer lead time for our players to submit questions
This will allow us to be better prepared with meaningful answers
Better communication of whose questions are being answered
Please note that it’s not possible for us to address absolutely every question in these segments and we will need to prioritise questions where we feel we can provide valuable insight depending on who we have available to answer them. For our next stream, we'll be bringing on people that can provide specific insight relevant to the upcoming changes.
There are a couple of things on the horizon that you can already start to pencil into your calendars!
Our next patch is targeted for September 17th
We’re taking a few weeks to test these new changes internally with other parts of the game, and to ensure these changes don’t introduce new issues.
We will communicate a more comprehensive list fixes and changes in Patch Notes in the days prior to the update
Our next Roundtable will be streamed on September 16th so we can talk through the Patch and where we are currently in our development of Fellowship 1.0
SIGN UP NOW: https://discord.gg/playfellowship?event=1545625281694404688
That’s all for today. We’re really looking forward to sharing more progress with you all very soon. Catch you at the Roundtable!
- The Chief Rebel Devs