Staff team changes

You are the owner here so you can just say whatever you want lol.
But there's no reason all the good GMs quit at almost same time.

 

Try checking your respond to my anonymous staff feedback that I organized before leaving Staff.

I'm pretty sure it's inside or somewhere. I'm not the kind to forget such a blatant show of biasness.

I agree with the last portion and hope it can be implemented to lighten your workload.

 

I do what I can- I don't fault anyone for doing that.

I never said I was great, and I never said I wanted to be an admin, or that I should be one. I am more than happy being a glorified forum junkie till this server dies. That's why I joined staff. You wanted to catch RWT'ers, and you did that when you joined staff.

Easy is subjective. I don't doubt catching a RWTer is more complicated than answering reports at face value, but it came easy to you. I can name over 400 drugs, their brand names, their drug class, their side effects, and a smattering of interactions between them in my sleep but I don't blame people for not knowing anything about the medication they take every morning. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and acknowledging those are how you become a good team member. You would have been miserable answering PM's all night- I'm glad I was (and continue to) able to do that so you guys who didn't like it- didn't have to.

 

have you or any other senior Staff members actually evaluated whether any of the changes made this year actually had their intended effects on the game? the economy continues to be a mess and legit players get penalised repeatedly. you say you try to appease the demands from both end-game and casual players, but you yourself have the tendency to side with the casual players in Staff simply because you're one yourself and you're closer to them too. just as an example, both you and Becca advocated to increase the Legendary Collector medal HP boost by a larger margin than was eventually implemented. we both know the true reason for that

i'm honestly shocked that this has "become truly apparent only in recent months". there was always a very, very skewed workload distribution amongst the Staff members, resulting in massive inefficiency in every way possible. these were brought up more than a couple of times and it just looks funny when you say it's a problem that surfaced recently

i'm sure you didn't just happen to see that post. how about the hundreds of other posts on that thread? besides this incident, there was the one that eventually led me to leave Staff. we both know i did the right thing but i was reprimanded all the same, and we both know why

this is not true. do a quick search on the Staff Discord with the keywords "Matt and I". there are many activities that you guys do together, in which other non-Admins would never have been able to see. remember the whole discussion about helping with wz edits? or are you going to conveniently leave that out here too?

this is what always happens; cyclical periods of activity where the Staff team just comes and goes as they please. yes, of course they're active now. there literally isn't anyone else in Staff to do work anymore. like i said in another of my previous posts, only time will tell but if you want to continue deluding yourself, i think we're just going to go deeper into the rabbit hole

also, if you still refuse to admit that your working and personal relationship with Becca has been nothing but detrimental to Staff dynamics and, as a result, the server, then it's really no surprise how hard and fast we're slipping

 

You obviously have access to objective data that I don't but could you elaborate on what you are trying to balance in the game? Who are these balancing changes being made for?
The balancing change received most positively from the server as a whole in living memory was all the way back when buccaneers, paladins and shadowers were overhauled, making these classes enjoyable and benefitting the community.

We've had a total of 6 updates this year - from 64 to 69, apart from the genuine complaints from the community about ongoing nerfs what have we actually achieved in 2020 as a whole?
I'd also point out that just because you don't quad ulu or bring mules everywhere does not mean these are activities restricted to "end-game players". There is little to no barrier for your so called 'casual playerbase' to engage in this and by implementing nerfing updates like the one seen in 65 you're not only harming veterans as a whole but also widening the gap between the newer and more experienced players.

"lack of persistence from those pushing for the change" is honestly a laughable excuse. Hear yourself. You want people to harp on about the same thing again and again when quite literally these proposed changes are being shut down by a mass of staff who have no experience to provide a substantiated opinion. Yet somehow if the same thing gets pushed again they'll suddenly turn around and realise their inexperience?

I am at a loss for words because the issue in hand that has supposedly been unapparent to you is kind of .. fundamental to how a team dynamic works?

 

It's a rather poor analogy to compare your unparalleled expertise of a full-time job which would've taken years of study and experience, to the varying different duties within a 2D MMORPG game. Josh was no doubt passionate about catching RWTers but there is no pre-requisite to doing so apart from playing the game and being aware of the issues that continue to plague the game itself.

It's been mentioned multiple times but I'll mention it again - the current staff roster seems to be fairly clueless about what's actually going on in game. No one from Staff thus far seems to be able to address the fact that many of the changes implemented in the last few updates make absolutely no sense to players at all, and following Johnny's departure have any of you actually been legitimately gathering feedback from the players themselves? What's being presented in the feedback subforums represents a small group of vocal but passionate players amongst the playerbase highlighting concerns about the different aspects of the game we think need improving and even then Staff's voice has been largely, as Sen correctly points out, defensive on the whole.

I appreciate that you took the initiative to answer PMs as forum moderator for 3 years and onwards but don't assume others would be miserable doing so. It sounds like this is something that could be specifically delegated to a few staff members to make functionality of Staff more efficient as a whole, and is something I would suggest you guys consider.

 

It's quite hard for me to state any evidence now since it's probably somewhere within staff chat. I looked through the anonymous feedback again and could only find Staff #14 mentioning it (I'm Staff #15 btw), though not implied you gave Becca access.

Since I'm not able to provide evidence and is stating things based off my memory, let's just agree to disagree and move on from here. At least it is stated for the record now in the public rather than in Staff chat.

Since you mentioned wz editing -- you're right in some sense. All we had to do was show interest and ask. That's fair enough. But I think what's not fair is when the both of you worked on things that weren't discussed formerly with staff, and we were only informed when it's done (evidence should be somewhere in the seas of "Matt and I did etc etc"). I believe the both of you have already stopped doing so , but just stating for the record again with respect to the topic.

 

i don't understand. some of the points that were raised during the debate about whether to implement these changes or not also included the fact that they would serve at least as a small meso sink or reduce the injection of farmed mesos into the economy. then now you say the end goal was not to fix the economy. then what would we have gained out of these changes at all? the feel good factor of other pots being used besides NLC ones and Elixirs/Power Elixirs?

it didn't get implemented because basically the rest of Staff voted against it. and ofc you could have used your Owner veto powers to override the decision, but that wouldn't have been very nice, would it? why choose the Legendary Collector medal to get buffed? just because you and Becca have done it? tons of other players have done the Quest Specialist medal (or any other medal/quest for that matter) as well, but there hasn't been any significant buffs made to them. not even a platform for discussion. whereas just because you and Becca completed the quests, we had a whole lengthy debate about how much HP to add, why it shouldn't be too much, how to keep it from being overpowered, how to balance it with other comparable medals etc. she even implored us to go try it for ourselves in an attempt to convince us to agree to the larger HP change. did the end-game players in the server tell you to go do quad ulu farming as well and see just how difficult it really is, so that you'd revert the equipment drop rates back?

then you should have seen the posts your girlfriend makes there before slapping a 3-day forum ban on someone else. this is obviously a move motivated by personal prejudice and involvement

you did not apologise until the argument amongst the entire Staff team got really heated, and only after i mentioned it. you'd definitely also not have acted that way if it was someone else's post that got deleted. you wouldn't even have known or cared about the incident. it was definitely because it involved Becca and i'm sure majority of the Staff who were present that day agree too

 

FYI when it was released in update 65 it was marketed as a tool to help fix the economy


It gave more value to power elixirs, yes. Mana elixirs? How? Sorcerer elixirs didn't get a price change at all and remains the most cost efficient of the non-% value MP potions available in the game?

Since you're going into specifics, unfortunately the infinity skill buff has now been largely undermined by a recent update which "fixed the 1/1 bug" and has caused concern among HT/Zakum bishops that their autopot will not function properly whilst the infinity skill is active. Has this bug been discussed at all among staff in the last 2 months? Is there a planned fix or will we just need to avoid using the skill in the interim whilst staff forget about it in the pile of bugs that randomly get fixed as people remember? What sort of meaning are you giving to a skill which has to be avoided under certain circumstances because of something with no planned fix in the foreseeable future?

 

It’s pretty obvious from Matt’s responses here that he has not changed since Admin Mike’s departure. In Admin Mike’s farewell message, he highlighted a lot of the key issues with staff that ultimately stem with Matt.

It’s pretty clear by Matt’s responses throughout time that he is either extremely detached with the state of thing, will feign ignorance to make himself look better or both. It’s one thing for a single incident but when you have a repeated, almost inevitable, pattern of dedicated staff members quitting and voicing their concerns, something must be wrong.

Personally I have zero faith in any meaningful change being made here. If it hasn’t happened in the past few years, why would it happen now?

 

https://royals.ms/forum/threads/a-p...community-and-staff-input.116236/#post-653508

 

@Matt

I feel the community can agree that we need two things; The auto ban system and the ability for every level of staff to access, not manipulate but be able to navigate player logs. It was in Josh's suggestion in better wording. I understanding finding people willing to do this for free is problematic, time consuming and etc. I personally, and I'm sure other users would be open to as well to fund a developer to get these two projects done. I'm even willing to let you pick whom that developer is at whatever rate. I think it be beneficial to get a fair appraisal on these systems as well so the public understands the cost. My only condition is that it would have to be done by a certain date with a certain level of effectiveness, I'd need some consumer protection that those funds directly go to that project.

I feel these two projects would solve 90% of your issues, although I am definitely on the side of the decision Tim made was not appropriate, I feel if you'd wanted that conversation you would have gone to the other thread. But these projects are bigger than that and would allow you to have a more controlled, consistent, and happier staff if they were to come to fruition.

 

My thoughts are exactly the same as @liomio.

Being an old school player we’ve seen these types of revolution to push for a change countless times with no action. This isn’t the first and won’t be last either.

It’s actually sad to see my friends on here and the newer generation believing what they’re typing here today is going to have any impact in the grand scheme of things, I don’t disagree with any of my own friends post but I feel like I’d be doing you all a disservice by not telling you all that you’re fighting a battle that the old generation have already lost.

The root of the cause is Matt’s vision for server, (something he’s clearly never going to let go) and every change ever is going to be made to fit that vision, I think it’s funny when a feedback suggestion gets implemented as if you all believe he listened to you and thought “great idea”, nah you just got lucky it happened to fit his vision too.

There is zero chance anything will change, back then the community’s voice was twice as large as it is today, even then nothing changed and it won’t magically change today

 

I don’t know what has gone on in staff discussions, but as an outsider, I feel that most balance updates are just reasonable people coming up reasonable things trying to improve the game. Players will complain or nit pick all they want, but I really hope that staff can maintain a strong vision of what the game should look like, and not start caving into whatever the most vocal people are demanding.

At a high level, I believe a game design change is good if it introduces more options/decisions/fairness, and bad if it takes away options/decisions/fairness.

If you believe this is a reasonable premise, then I’d say the NLC potion change was a good one because it requires one to be more deliberate about pot choice, usage, and inventory, instead of just NPC-ing whatever reindeer milk or elixirs you have and buying ginger ales. Then, why hasn’t this pot been changed, or that pot? Again, emphasis on doing “reasonable” things, where reasonable is far from perfect. If you truly believe my premise above, then there should be an infinite number of things to tweak until players can be indifferent between all the options the game has to offer. Obviously this is infeasible, but I believe that steps towards this general direction is good.

In my opinion, the “fixing the economy” premise of this change matters far less, but is probably overly emphasized and disappointing to many because that’s what a lot of vocal players care about. It might have been a mistake to publicize this potential upside of a meso sink, seeing the players’ reactions now.

The nerf to quad mage ulu1 farming can also be argued on the grounds that it’s overpowered compared to other farming methods, and the change makes other ways of farming feel more viable (e.g. hearts, helm int/dex scrolls, area bosses, etc). On top of that, there’s probably an element of “that’s not how the game should be played”, though this point is a bit more contentious. The buff to gobies was probably another attempt to introduce more farming options, despite it not coming close to ulu. Again, these changes are imperfect and mesos/hr is far from balanced, but at least it feels like a reasonable step in the good direction.

Maybe my main point is these updates generally feel quite reasonable from a game design standpoint, and I appreciate them, whether or not they “fixed” the economy. End-game players are naturally going to be much more vocal about the “economy” part of the story, probably because end-game in Mapleroyals is truly just collecting mesos, buying WS’s to perfect some equip, or saving B coins for the next 1 atk or 50 range upgrade, and these game design choices affect them very little. Ultimately, this is a nostalgia server, and not a "let me reach a nice round number on my damage range" server.

I think this is also related to Matt’s point that the real fix to the economy is auto-ban.

To be honest, I’m not even confident that the economy is broken far beyond a supply & demand story. When people say that the economy is broken, are they just secretly hoping that WS/CS will drop back to 300m once autoban is released?

When WS/CS was 300m, the optimal farming method at that time was gobies with SI, which netted 80m/hr. Compare that to ulu farming in the new source, then WS/CS at 500m doesn’t feel so crazy.

I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if WS/CS stayed above 480-500m long after auto-ban is released, and I hope players then won’t be pointing fingers at the administration saying that they are ineffective and the damage has already been done or something (which might be partly true, but it’d be a fruitless discussion). Auto-ban is extremely important from a fairness standpoint, and that is sufficient reason for it to be a very high priority update.

As for the bug fixes, maybe what you’re asking is for more transparency in staff responses. I think that would be a great improvement to what we see now, but I won’t go as far as saying that the staff doesn’t care about it. I personally just default to the assumption that it’s a complicated bug to investigate or requires large code changes, idk. I think it would be helpful if Kevin shows up once it a while and comment on things like this.

 

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand half the time you don't even answer. I have had so many posts in #nx-suggestions on asking how I could help you implement new NX. Got ghosted. I expressed interest in helping choose NX. Got beat relentlessly for asking to implement free NX for free-to-play players. Then Becca came out and had already chosen all the NX without any discussion.

You didn't even have the winter Ola Ola map in your update notes. I didn't even get to bug test it or help out with outfits. Do NOT come at me saying we were not proactive enough.

Even when I first started, I decided to ask Joel instead how I could help since you weren't responsive. He told me to just do things and present things FINISHED for you to implement them. I took SO much initiative as an intern, and actually finished things because I didn't wait for your approval to do something. Others weren't as confident to do the same, and that's why so many suggestions get passed over.

@Johnny would literally copy paste all the good feedback posts, ask questions regarding bug reports, and even requested better event maps- not just reskins. And almost everything he posted would fall flat. That's why we only use that Amoria RR map- because no one listened to Johnny's, the primary RR hoster, suggestions for a better experience. Who cares if the guy hosts events consistently every day? Johnny and I even warned you beforehand about the stupid platform in spooky fitness. Fell flat and everyone raged and they couldn't jump. Who cares about the two GMs that tested the halloween maps, right?

I'm tired of you saying we didn't try. Hours before Tim's gaslighting, I VOLUNTEERED TO REVISE THE ENTIRE TERMS AND CONDITIONS BECAUSE NO ONE WAS DOING IT. I even provided a TANGIBLE DUE DATE. Yes, people volunteered to help when they found time, but everyone refused to take charge.

Honestly? Stop defending your piss poor leadership and do better. You've had over a year since Michael's departure to grow and you pissed it away. You had an amazing team and you chose to delegitimize our concerns.

 

@Matt you cannot pick and choose when to be a leader. You cannot shrink back when people voice their concerns about the game, and then only choose to stand up when Becca or you are involved. You haven't even addressed Tim's tantrum.

 

the forum madnes, double standards and all the cheaters raving (ban evading) is just sad...

i don't want to come like attacking you or defending someone but collector medals was allready set as endgame medals before the update 67. makes no sense to HP buff other medals when all aim to use or allready used collector medals especially when there is need for more HP

you also touch the multiclienting issue and how "difficult" it is when everyone knows how alt tab works and how f/p or i/l barely needs any fund to 1 shot at low lvls and how broken the meso/hour rates were
the nerf affected evryone just because people went extreme on multiclienting, is not science fiction to run multiple mages
if there is difficulty thats in 1 client farming & grinding like it used to be in legacy MS not alt tab ulti-macro spam

 

I absolutely love the Legendary collector medal buff, which addresses the constant complaints about the need for hp washing from the community. I have both received positive feedback from the casual player and the new player on this particular matter. The medal buff gave them an alternative way to gaining more hp, which means a lot for those who have limited hp-washing. It also encourages the player to explore the maps while still requires tons of time and effort. On the other side, the medal itself actually have lower time: hp ratio compare to the new implemented hp quest but it doesn't stop the players from working toward this goal. Alternatively, the quest specialist medal could be buff too, but I suggest to not over-buff this medal because it's relatively easy to obtain quest specialist compare to the legendary collector. FYI, quest specialist can be easily completed while hunting cards for the legendary collector