devtrackers.gg
Ladies and gents,
We've locked that other thread since it was going off-course, but I've been reading it and putting together answers to some of the continued posts and questions in there. I hope we will be able to keep it civil in this thread as well.
I've allowed myself to aggregate some recurring themes into a longer form reply, because otherwise the separate replies are kind of out of context and disconnected, but I'll tag some key posters.
On timelines for drop rates and other changes
@SpectreHD @TheArc @xXUglykidXx @Hookie_Bell
No, we technically cannot disclose drop rates starting tomorrow. You may compare us to any number of institutions you have personal experience with, but even if “they can do it” that doesn’t mean that we have the same technical infrastructure, processes or risk profiles.
Changing business practices like this one carries risks for the game. There are multiple steps to this process and multiple dependencies, across different systems and in different regions of the world. Our efforts to publish the game in China with our partner company do play a role in this. We will not skip these steps, because that also does not contribute to the health of the product. We have to take into account all aspects of making a decision, not just the technical capability of making a change.
@LTC_Tiger
Many players are saying “I wish we could go back to 2016”. I understand the context and the sentiment, but it’s also true that back then we had four separate regional game clients and the game differed between them in some content and events. Players didn’t like that and were constantly complaining that this region or another had better player rewards or events, so we changed it over time. Now we have one game client for all four clusters (China has a separate one as a necessity) and are committed to having the same content across all of them, with only minor exceptions for some small regional missions or events. This includes drop rates, which are the same across all four clusters. Did we do it purely because players were complaining? No. Did we remove ALL differences between clusters? No – as I wrote above there are still minor differences and we need them to be able to operate effectively when needed. Did we address that pain point of the global community? Yes, I believe we did. Our commitments from yesterday are aimed at achieving the same result – either addressing your concerns, directly where possible or by finding a middle ground solution where it’s not, in the shortest possible time frame.
@Nabucodonosor21 @MalgusKerensky
We are taking your feedback aboard on all these items and will act on those commitments as stated, as well as explore other ways, options, features, content etc. that is relevant and can contribute to your enjoyment of the product and satisfaction with our services and with us as a company. Where we do not act on your feedback, we will do better to explain our thought process, as well as how your feedback fits into decision making.
However, we will not abandon core operational principles we follow in areas like balancing and game design purely based on feedback from this thread and others like it now. I am saying this because many of you have strong opinions on what the game should look like, which is nothing new. In this thread some of you have stated your passion directly and that’s just awesome, but there are also statements about changing specific parts of the game that are loaded with expectations or telling us to roll back to a previous state. We will not be able to fulfill some of those expectations and will have to disappoint those players – I’d rather say that now than later be accused by the internet of lying to players. I will also not go deep into the details of our operational or business processes, especially on monetization, because they are sensitive information. In some areas, especially those closer to the player experience, we are happy to tell you more, and in some areas less. This is normal business practice. I know many of you would like to know everything behind the curtains of development and publishing, but it’s not a reasonable expectation, even if you are part of our VIP player groups.
@Airtroops83
It was said that we see players as numbers. Certainly, data science and statistics play a vital role in operating games in this genre, but we don’t see players as numbers within the relationships we have with any of you. Even just from forum posts it is clear that there are personalities and characters here that are most likely tied to real humans at keyboards (can’t be entirely sure nowadays). However, our relationship is that of players, users, customers and staff – it is important that our mutual expectations remain within the boundaries of this relationship. This is one of the things we got wrong more recently and maybe overall – we made some of our players feel like co-developers, raised their expectations accordingly and then disappointed them. It’s one of our commitments to change and clarify that. This topic is actually aimed at doing just that - starting to clarify our relationship, so that it's easier to understand the context in which we view each other.
I know that the sentiment right now is that my words carry little value and this is understandable. It does not remove the need for me to write them though, because that's one of the reasons we are here for. So where do we go from here?
We will start working and continue talking, as well as acting on some of the feedback we've received from you. Our NA Community team is currently understaffed, but we are working on remedying the situation and you will see new faces within a few weeks. We'll revamp the forums and create more room for that feedback process. We'll see about that "issue tracker" suggestion mentioned in the other thread as well and figure out where to put it.
Reliance on churn @FinderKeeper
No, the fact that we need a relatively long time (months) to make a change doesn't mean that we will rotate a significant part of our audience in that time. That's not how the cycle works. We will rotate mostly new audience who will try the game for a while and leave.
Achievement rewards @Omega414 @CrazyHorse_Denver
For us this was not a significant change, since in our minds we simply moved flags to a more broadly accessible medium, while achievements by their nature are already a reward in themselves (despite some comments to the contrary). We didn't anticipate that people would be upset about it that much. Since this is the case, we'll look into attaching some other rewards back to achievements.
Restoring Missouri @machsquad
I believe we did that yesterday by changing the mission credit modifier to +30%. This should be enough to raise her earnings back to pre-patch levels. As we said we will also compensate owners of old MO for the credits they missed out on in the period where the mission was inadequate.
Line splits @Iron_Salvo921
We will give you all of those lines over time. As you'll all know by now - we will be releasing new lines, as well as alternate lines or split-lines. This will just take time - right now we're managing 4-5 lines per year.
Winback incentives @DoctorDoom99
I'm sorry you feel that way, but I can't agree that we shouldn't do winback incentives because they are unfair for active players. Active players are able to participate in in-game events, contests and get rewards over time. Non-active players don't get rewards over time, but we generally offer them different incentives at different points in time in the hope they will return to the game. Those are based on audience research and we try different things. As i said in a different answer: churn is a normal part of games-as-a-service. So is getting players back to the game.
Explaining balance @Seawolf148
Absolutely Seawolf. It's one of the things we will do - provide more context to increase the understanding of the general balance state of ships in the game and where we want them to be.
Surveys @dionkraft
We do constantly run different surveys, both on smaller parts of our audience, as well as on everyone. We ask for all sorts of things and get interesting data. There was also another comment from someone saying that we should offer survey incentives. This is not a good idea, because while we might get uplift in participation, we would get polluted data as some users would simply select any answers just to grind the reward.
Also, regarding the comments about WG being listed on the stock exchange - the company was listed between 2011 and 2014 and chose to remain privately owned and to subsequently stop meeting requirements and be delisted. This is a fairly normal procedure and there's not much to speculate on there.
I would also like to thank @Sipsoup and others for their kind words of support. They mean a lot. o7
A special mention also goes to @WanderingGhost . I will try to respond to your absolute monster posts separately in the next few days. They are really well written and there is a lot to unpack there. I'm not a balance designer, but I'm happy to dig into it.
I will also hang out on the forums over the weekend and might jump into our Community Discord server for some battles.
I'll see you here or there if you want to chat.