Hello Friends,
Firstly I would like to apologize on behalf of the team in regards to all of the issues that many of you are facing with the new release. We were pretty devastated ourselves by what has been going on and have worked hard to put out a hotfix this morning. Let me know if you guys are continuing to see issues.
So lets get into it:
Unfortunately, I haven't been nearly as active in here as I should. Things have been rather busy and we've been working hard on both current and future releases. Candidly, Reddit is a bit more involved in comparison to Discord or Twitter(where I can respond actively on the fly and they have good notification tools), at least more so than I am able to maintain as equally. I apologize for that.
I do want to work with the Reddit community as you are all just as passionate as us devs and the other community hubs. My time away and the time between patches have seem to have shaken faith, trust and dehumanized interactions and perspectives. So let's fix that.
In this post, I want you to hit me with feedback and questions and today I'll do my best to answer as many as possible, no question goes unanswered. You guys deserve at least that much respect and deserved to be heard. We are all here in this community because we love the game, so being able to have good, civil and healthy conversations is important.
I'll kick off with a question that I'm sure some of you have:
"Where and how in the hell did you arrive at these design decisions?"
With this question I'm assuming it's in regards to some of the changes(Weapons) that have been challenging for us and a part of our community. When I was approached by leadership and the former design lead(whom I've worked with for the entirety of RoCo and then some), to take on the responsibility: my first step was to have discussions on what we should do for RoCo to keep it growing, thriving and be the long lasting game it deserves to be. We love RoCo dearly and we want it to succeed.
Talking with Scott, Brad, other former designers, die-hard devs who play everyday, the community, looking at months/years of data and so on. The one big thing that we landed on and wanted to address in the game was depth and identity. Our intentions were to always have characters to have strong identities and our weapons to give unique playstyles. Over the years that intention had gotten muddied as we had struggled to really clarify what our game's core was to be about(was it tactical? was it casual/arcade-y? what is our game?). It was time to start working towards that direction and it's going to be difficult.
Change like this is a scary thing to do and something that we attempted at solving previously but didn't succeed(Speed/Toughness comes to mind). It's scary because it challenges player comfort zones and forces players endure the turbulence and having to adapt to changes. Candidly, RoCo was sitting relatively untended to for a long time and the core had stagnated. The Will that I carry on from our previous leads was to fix this core and put RoCo on SOME KIND of direction that would bring back our original desire of having depth and identity(and thus, variety) in our game.
These aren't easy or frivolous decisions to make, they are very hard and carry a lot of weight. As such, we look at the weight of data, how our players are responding to the changes and how we respond to the changes as well. All game studios do this, we are just way more transparent of our intentions and how the sausage is made.
I have been and will continue to be clear and transparent with our decisions for RoCo.
All you have to do is ask.
Discussions can and should be had.
Maybe newer/better solutions spring from it?
Or we make compromises.
This is a joint effort so ask away and give me feedback directly.
So, what are your questions? :)
External link →