2015/11/24

How to save Wartune, aka undo the nerfs

The player community is united in their opinion that patch 5.1, the "optimized" nerf-fest, where "R2 always puts players first", actually ruined Wartune. The situation is, all the critical problems could be solved really easily. You would say, yes, but they won't listen, so why bother. But there are some facts:


  • They still spend a lot of time developing the game. A ton of new changes arrive with each major patch.
  • They do have the capacity to react and correct things fast. Good example are: advanced sepu awarded instead of normal sepu in sylph enchant event; wild shop exploit; jewel hunt exploit; shadow soul exploit. When these became public, they corrected them in a matter of hours.
  • They do have some people who possess significant intelligence. When I wrote a ticket about not getting reward for making resist crystals, a GM replied me, telling that they are checking the logs, and they will send everything I miss. The reply had everything I wanted to hear, so whoever wrote it, is a person with a potential to listen to the players.
  • There is no human on Earth who is an enemy of his own wallet. True, stupidity is a widespread hobby these days, but just one highly ranked manager with some intelligence can be enough to turn the tide.


I know, lately a lot of people have quit, but I still believe there is a hope. I also believe there is at least one person from Wartune staff who reads my blog (if not, I will link it for them). So I will do a listing now what they need to fix to make the game playable again.

Tower of Kings
This was a good, challenging event with good rewards. Now it's completely unplayable, takes an hour to finish, and eudaemons are bugged like hell. Whenever I do it, I ask myself, why do I play this game? 
Solution: Remove the eudaemons from the opposing party. Simple, and easy to do.

Sylph Arena
A good rewarding event, nerfed into something insanely frustrating. Getting random opponents is one thing, but LOSING points for playing, and robbed of the previous reward is very frustrating.
Solution: Simply restore the old sylph arena module! With opponent selection, daily rewards, advanced sepulcrum reward. If thats not possible, at least put back adv.sepu reward, and give some +points for even losing.



Undo hot event nerfs
When the devs raised minimum reward from lvl 3 to 5 for cloth events and all the various gem events, they effectively finished off all players who started in the past 6-10 months, as well those who returned or had a pause. I don't know if there are any, but the goal of the game is to have some, right? Buffed up with some additional nerfs (cloth event awards reward only for current level, not previous ones; gem event gives each gem only once per day) these events are dead fish. The particularly bad thing is that the events were around for so long in their previous form, veteran players could use them for a long time. Nerfing these events were totally pointless.
Solution: Restore reward for lvl 3 and lvl 4 synths in hot events. Restore the unlimited gem reward for gem synthesis events. Restore giving rewards for previous levels in cloth, or increase the reward, because right now you lose more than you gain.

Recovery system
Simple, give back the old recovery system. Right now, the time required to play the game is a reason to quit. Recovery did one important thing: it saved players 20 minutes each day (ie. Dragon Invasion recovery). Now its either you play +20 minutes, or lose 12M gold.
Solution: Restore previous recovery system.

Gold for Atoll Boss
I don't mind the current Atoll Boss change, because AB simply took too much time. That I have to do it only once per day is better. But I do lack the gold reward. Together with the recovery nerf, and the gold requirement of mythic upgrades and holy forge, we have too much gold problem.
Solution: Reward gold for killing the sylphs and the boss. Previous AB gave 6-15M gold, per run. 200k per sylph, 2M per boss would be still much less, but it would be more than nothing.

Bound balens
The methods to gather bound balens in the game have been consistlently removed. The only thing we have remaining is the ultra-rare balen mine. Dimensions had so many nerfs, its not undone even with the last detect change (although it was a big positive step).
Solution: Either make balen mines more common, or make them visible objects.

Ancient beast shard
This might seem a small issue to the Wartune devs, but as time passes, this gets more annoying. Ancient beast shard is an item which you could get only for balens, or as bonus to recharge. And then, one day, the option to use it disappeared, replaced by Mount shop. So this is a kind of situation where you sell something to customers and then tell them it's not useable. This is a reason itself to stop cashing.
Solution: Add an exchange (or permanent synth) where players can exchange 1 ancient beast shard to 3 beast souls.

Soul crystal event
This is a thousand year issue, but it's still around. Like 2 years ago, there was a monthly event where players could exchange soul crystals to mount whips and runestones. Back them, players could make a high level stable this way. This is not availble ever since, so later players have no chance to catch up.
Solution: Restore SC event where you can get mount whips and other goodies. Even so, add more such exchange, or just add it as a blacksmith synthesis, where players can synth useless stuff into useful one. 10 sepulcrum to 1 advanced, 10 mahra to 1 advanced etc.

Lag in general
If you have a strong hardware, you can get rid of the lag in many areas, but not where it would be the most important, team pvp. Because its a server lag, a combat with 16 participants is impossible to handle it seems. The problem is, these are also the most challenging events: arena, titan war, chaos war, guild battle, cross-server guild battle. All these events are completely unplayable. Whenever I enter one, I think about quitting the game. (And ofc you can't skip all, these give the best rewards and the goal of playing).
Solution: Remove eudaemons from all team PVP battles. This seems harsh, but this is the ONLY solution. Seriously. Eudaemons will be still useful in 1 vs 1 pvp and in pve, but when it's the survival of the game or seeing eudaemons everywhere, I vote the first.

Final sylph evolution
This is an odd issue in this list, but I think it is equally important. The strong part of Wartune is that it always gives goals. Requiring 600 USD for reaching a goal made it impossible for 99,9% of your players, which is insanely frustrating. Issuing a direct cash value to this advancement instead of using items was a dire mistake. If I can't reach my goals, then I better quit. So this must be addressed. A solution is needed where players who made the purchase don't get frustrated (although there are not many).
Solution: there are many good solutions. Allow bound balens for the purchase. Give balen reward to those who already have it (via Sylph Tamer), and reduce the price afterwards. Replace the balen cost with an item. I know that their "solution" will be probably a free Loki seal for an 500 or 1000 USD recharge, but I don't think it's a good solution.

I'm sure the list can go on, but if they do "just" these things, that would be a great Christmas gift in Wartune, and would keep me playing, and even spending. I'm sure these things can be implemented relatively quick.

12 comments:

  1. tl;dr;
    Give us the game back when it was patch 4.5 (when dimensions was first made interesting with balen card draw)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anyways, about the lag, its amazing how gtarcade manage team battles for LoA nicely,
    with some sort of structured battle order (with agility attribute) but the animation is still lasts pretty long,
    if your opponent is strong.

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  3. I would add a sentence in your lag section about disabling the over the top crit and damage graphics. Your super computer may handle it but normally it just freezes flash player for most. And don't forget about the "hide all players" button. Not being able to see you opponents or team mates make any in fight battle strategy obsolete.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, I completely agree those crits must go.

      Delete
  4. The bugs are out in full force with this patch. But this has also been the patch that I've seen more growth with my toon than before. Lots of sepulcrum from sky trail now. Now that kid damage counts in WB, gold production is way up. There are other little things too, like no cooldown when I go fishing. I can get material to upgrade sylph equipment from atoll (or just skip it, but I don't have to feel bad about being left out of the #1 group on my server). Dimensions are nice now that I can find the exits fast with the search button. And since this game can take a lot of time, it is nice that I don't have to worry about doing TOK, cloud adventures, or sylph atoll now.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wrote an analyis of the patch when it came out (see earlier) and yes, the patch has some good sides, but sadly, the bad ones are much more. Imagine how good this patch would be without the bad ones :) About saving time by not doing ToK, Cloud and AB, yes, its true, you save time here, but these gave important resources (10k whip/month, golden holy water, and like 20M gold per day from AB), losing these is not cool.

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  5. I came across this thread about another R2 game recently and it worries me....... I see wartune going the same way, the things the players say in this thread........I may as well be reading wartune forum there are so many similarities :/
    http://forum.r2games.com/showthread.php?191414-Blood-and-Jade-Servers-Shutting-Down/page6

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In another part of the forum, i found that
      http://forum.r2games.com/showthread.php?191454-i-think-this-game-will-shutdown
      Wartune seems to still be their most successful game (for now) as it's the one they propose as replacement

      as long as update come, even if they add bugs, it mean that the game will survive.
      you will have to worry when there will be no new update/maintenance.

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    2. I guess so but The game you posted about was eternal saga, the game I posted about is called Blood and Jade and having read through the whole thing players there were saying it was on the cards as for the last few months they had been implementing sub standard patches that were full of bugs (sound familiar?) I really hope Wartune doesn`t go down the drain. I have invested alot of my time and (for me) Money in this game and still do. But it doesn`t look good when R2 can give 1 months notice that they are going to shut down a game and offer the last 3 months recharges as compensation :/ R2 pull the plug I`d like ALL my recharges back over the last 2 and a half yrs. Don`t know exactly how much it is but I do know it is in the 1000`s (not many 1000`s but still) . I am No super casher but do buy AT LEAST 10k balens a month. 30k balens compensation would be an insult :/ BUT I`d NEVER play another R2 game again anyway. And on top of that I`m on a kabam server so may not even get a thing back anyways :(

      Delete
    3. Yes, when you know the game is going to end in a month, no balen can compensate you for that. I never understood the policy of shutting down games, as long as it had players. Sure, when you have fewer and fewer players, you stop updates, players will complain louder and louder - but at least those who want can still play. I work for a company which runs games since 20 years. We have games which have very few players left - still, the game is running. Few players mean low maintenance cost anyway.

      About compensation etc. If R2 announces Wartune is shutting down, you can chargeback all your spendings from the last 120 (maybe even 180?) days via Paypal. So I strongly recommend use paypal. You can get back at least some of the money spent. But even better, maybe stop spending until we see the situation improving. Since 2 months, I dont even look at spender etc. events. If I see issues in the above list start being fixed, I will spend again.

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    4. Problem is IF u don`t spend u fall behind too quickly these days :( With Christmas approaching I have already cut back on my in game spending to save for X.mas.......And this month was the 1st month in about the last 4-5 months I didn`t qualify for CW`s finals :(

      Delete
    5. Yes, I see the same. For a few months, I was in top16, not anymore. Without an Odin, Im getting more and more behind.

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