You want constructive feedback? Give the community some substance to construct with.

Don't be expecting constructive feedback when it's blatantly clear how little testing there has been with regards to the most recent update.

I won't talk much about the NL/shadower nerf because Sean's kindly started another thread to discuss the complete lack of communication with the community regarding a bizarre and frankly ludicrous nerf, but let's have a look at the other changes, shall we?

Map changes:

Spoiler

- how many of us go and grind in ludi in today's day and age?
- will the change to ludibrium maps encourage anyone to actually go and grind there or are we making minute changes because one player/staff member decided the map was too inconvenient after 8 long years?

- who in the world even goes to Along Ulu City lmao
- the duku buff was introduced in update 65 to offset the ulu nerf (also uncalled for and given relatively extensive feedback on). Didn't expect trio duku to be the new leeching meta did you? Instead of reverting the change instead we've gone and changed mob spawn so that it's become an obsolete map again. 6 updates later and we're left with a nerfed ulu1. did anyone see that coming?

Spoiler

ya ok let's nerf the bucc by changing map layout
warriors have to deal with permastun now. fun
inadvertent buff to NLs since they get affected the least lmao

Mob/Skill changes

Spoiler

Nerfing a custom change by customising the skill more, then changing the way bosses work (and have worked for 15 long years) to fit your customised change. Smart.

Royals is heading towards its 8 year anniversary.
Can someone please explain what in the world makes our current staff team think that changing game mechanics this far down the track would be beneficial to the longevity or the enjoyment of this server?
There will always be a metagame no matter how you change your game around. The majority of your players will inevitably gravitate towards that metagame. By changing game mechanics around in order to shift the metagame you are essentially fking around your players who have potentially spent months (read: hundreds of in-game hours, hundreds more than staff apparently dedicate to the betterment of this server) to work towards that meta.

Seeing as you guys all want the game to be more balanced, here are some things to think about:
- The obvious elephant in the room is the sheer volume of real world trading that happens in this server. Without punishing legitimate players what are some ideas that could be put in place to reduce the amount of RWT going forward?
- Established metagames should be touched as little as possible and balancing tweaks to make other classes more playable should be made around these. I do not think it's a good idea to modify pre-existing game design to suit your custom additions
- When changes are made extensive testing should be done. 12 months ago Kai, Johnny and June were apparently tanking the majority of game testing with limited time given to them. I'm doubtful the situation has improved but happy to be proven wrong
- Is the current staff team in any way a balanced one? No offence all I see are Matt/Becca's friends from degen in the new batch of interns lmao
- If you guys can't assess someone's suitability to become GM from their application alone and are relying on existing staff's knowledge of these players it means your GM application proforma is useless

If I'm sounding increasingly cynical, sardonic and rude, it means I'm losing what little patience I have left. For what it's worth I think irrespective of how the new interns have been selected you guys have been doing a great job regardless, and I would encourage you all to speak up if your fellow alumni are not taking a fair share of the workload. It is your job to learn how to be a GM as an intern, not your job to do their bitchwork.

Perhaps try not to go around on your staff accounts asking players where they're getting their gears from lmao that's not how you investigate RWT

 

About Duku idk the main reason for destroying the map, but i think increasing duku level to a 120+ leech would be a decent nerf. With that change Skel and Petri would be a decent leech again, Skel for 108-120 and Petri 105-120.

And since theres a lot of 3 mages players who lost their home, i hope they can manage to find a decent alternative way to farm. lets create a discord server to share ideas

 

Continuously making changes and implementing nerfs to the end game does not create balance nor does it make Royals more attractive to new players.

 

I wouldn't feel that disappointed in these recent nerfs (potion price, mage macro, and the most recent crash/NL nerfs) if we were on the same playing field with everyone else on the server. Some/Majority of the hardcore players use unorthodox methods to try and combat illicit players (mainly hackers/RWTers/vote abusers). The tragic fact is that neither the hardcore nor normal players are on the same playing field as the illicit players. To make things worse, staff continuously thinks it is a good idea to nerf the legitimate players, especially during the time when hackers/RWTers/vote abusers are running around. The least staff can do is not make things worse for the legit players. Like if staff feels the dying need to nerf legit players, PLEASE for the love of god do it after auto-ban is out.

Also, if you guys are not planning to revert, can you at least increase the horizontal and vertical reach range of the total crash buff?

 

adding on to the list :the release of an imbalanced auf helm too, rip to those that grinded for a perfect zhelm / scar helm. an estimated 160b worth of investment on an untradeable, essentially forcing players to main one character if they wanna be one of the top. what a big f-you to legit players with multiple characters.

 

This helmet should've never been released unnerfed, but now it's too late and any change would be unfair towards the players who finished/are working on one.
huge mistake in my opnion.

 

Man if only you knew.

This one I have no idea about, as this past wave was one I had very little feedback about because I didnt really know any of the people being suggested .. but ill be completely honest it's kind of funny. Best I could tell theyre good interns, but only time will tell I suppose.

 

Come on now, you were literally in Staff when we selected the newest batch of interns lol. I don't know if I am allowed to disclose this level of information (so y'all may see this post magically poof), but I've been hearing a lot of rumors about unfair bias in the recent selection of interns--and I can see much of that attitude reflected directly in the way people have been antagonistically treating the interns as soon as they began their work. So I'm going to take the initiative in addressing some of those rumors.

With the hiring of this newest batch of interns, we had an internal discussion through a discord channel in our server which was removed upon their selection (this is standard procedure). We discuss anything we can contribute, based on our personal knowledge of the applicant, our personal experience with the applicant, the contributions the applicant has had in the community, and the strength of their application. Given that most of us don't know most of the applicants personally, much of our impressions are based on their contributions on the forums--guides that they've posted, reports that they've submitted, general help they've provided other players, discussions that they've contributed to, and so on. The application itself is also much more important than people probably realize, as it is realistically the only way that most of us will learn about your experiences and qualifications that would make you successful in the role. So while we do rely mostly on factors that we can objectively analyze, we do also rely on personal perspectives (and I think it would be remiss to ignore them completely)--particularly when there have been red flags about certain applicants.

Throughout this process, the vast majority of Staff members have voiced their opinions on every single player that submitted an application. And amongst the applicants, Stephen, Kenny, Vincent, Dasha, and Alan all stood out in this regard--every single one of them were supported by the vast majority of the current Staff and none of them received a negative review of their application. The ultimate decision on who to hire is based on a private discussion between the Admins that the rest of Staff are not privy to. So is it possible that there is a world in which Becca underhandedly influences Matt to pick her friends for Staff? I mean yeah, I guess. But even if that were true (which I personally don't believe is true), I want to emphasize that the selection of this newest batch of interns was very much in line with what the vast majority of Staff members supported. Personally, the only person that I knew was in Degen was Dasha--I didn't even know Becca was in Degen. In that same vein, even Becca didn't know that some of the new interns were in Degen either. And in all fairness I can understand why people have raised eyebrows, because as soon as I found out that the majority of interns were from Degen even I remember distinctly thinking to myself "Hmm this could come across as suspicious..." but hopefully this can alleviate those suspicions.

In terms of "balance," I presume much of this criticism is rooted in the concerns that the majority of Staff don't actively participate in the end-game meta. We do have a significant amount of Staff members who have reached 200, but I do understand the concerns--especially given that much of these recent changes have been introduced without active input by the community. But I would just like to remind you all that these are just numbers, and as we all know numbers are always easily adjustable. I noticed feedback threads on two hot tamale topics already, and I want to emphasize that Staff actually do carefully read and consider every single post--along with feedback from players on discord and in-game which often aren't aligned with the views of veterans on the forums. We do also extensively test game changes, and our newest interns have been particularly helpful with that. And as much I love June I sincerely hope she wasn't testing game changes 12 months ago, as she was not on Staff during that time lol.

Additionally, Joel has alluded to the fact that we are considering alternative positions (based on a model that seems to have worked successfully for a peer server) to contribute to the work of Staff, and I believe I have mentioned this as well in the previous feedback thread regarding this topic. I still think these positions would be massively helpful in addressing what many people feel are a lack of testing and input with many of these game changes--as much as we make an active effort the incorporate as much input from the community as possible, we are a very small team with naturally limited resources and viewpoints and I do think there is a lot of progress that can be made with actively incorporating a balance team and a game testing team. And purely based on my personal opinion, I would also like to see another batch of interns. Because I've noticed that as great of a work that interns do every cycle, the workload is truly tremendous and the burnout is truly real. Anyways, hopefully these changes can be ones that everyone looks forward to.

 

I mean, nothing i said was false. This was the first wave I didnt have a lot of involvement in. Thats a fact, I didnt go thru the selection and choose because i was mostly unfamiliar with the group who applied.

 

Thanks Sen for a dedicated and very professional response.

I want to start by saying in no way do I disagree with the importance of the written application itself. However, the very fact that forum contributions and personal knowledge / experiences / opinions (if I may add) play a part in the selection process means that there is always going to be significant selection bias, and points directly to the flaws within the application. The current staff application quite literally doesn't ask for any of your MapleRoyals experiences, nor does it adequately assess if someone would contribute meaningful discussion regarding game design to staff chat.

To say that majority of staff aren't end-game meta oriented is somewhat flawed because "end-game" and "meta" are two separate concepts. I do not believe staff need to be end-game to make meaningful contribution - but being an end-game player should certainly be helpful in one's capacity as staff. However, I think knowledge of the current metagame is imperative to a staff team working well. Game changes, particularly balancing changes must be carefully considered with regards to the impact it would have upon the metagame, and the population of players that are likely to suffer from those changes. On paper it might be just a few numbers that get changed here and there, but this often translates to months, sometimes even years of dedicated effort by individual players in the game. Reverting these changes are not easy - there are numerous examples on forums alone that I'm sure you are more than aware of where controversial changes have stayed despite widespread community backlash.

Good pick up on the June part - I probably meant to say 6-12 months ago (though really, it was probably 4-6 months for her, 6-12 months for Johnny and 12-36 months for Kai). That aside, my comment about how time-pressured game testing is probably still stands - I'm glad to hear newest interns are contributing. Again, nothing in the staff application form points to any experience with game testing and nor do they appear to receive any form of dedicated training though again I may be proven wrong. When there is limited transparency into the way back-end processes work, people will tend to look at results directly and what I'm seeing is that
- community backlash is almost universal with each update
- server maintenance less than 48 hours post-patch is also almost universal
- some changes get reverted months after they've been implemented - months after the backlash has died down because people have given up. For instance, I haven't played my marksman even once since the snipe nerf got reverted (granted it's just received an inadvertent nerf again as of the latest patch due to crash's newfound ability).

Most people's passion for the server seem to wax and wane at a cycle of somewhere between 6-18 months. Royals has been waiting for autoban for over 4 years. As the community becomes increasingly jaded at the marathon towards a hacker-free server, we continue to get thrown hurdles every few months with a new nerf balancing change someone on staff's randomly thought of. Personally I am not optimistic that we would be able to adopt Legends' model successfully given the current staff roster can't seem to even divide their workload in an efficient manner.

A team of 18 staff members is no longer very small. Resources may be limited, but a discussion about how to improve workflow within staff would seem long overdue.

 

Those are all fair questions! And I know I went on a bit of a tangent near the end, but my main goal was to address the pervasive rumor and attitude that the current batch of interns were unqualified and were chosen based solely on the personal influences of a specific member of Staff. To address some of your other questions to the best of my abilities (because yay transparency):

1. Revamping our application was actually something that most of us agreed was needed, but unfortunately this conversation was left aside with everything else that was going on around that time. Although we do ask for relevant skills, I do agree that many of our questions are either too vaguely worded to be useful or just wholly irrelevant. I will be sure to bring this up again!

2. Interns do receive training, and it's an incredibly comprehensive amount of training. It does include game testing as well. I can't speak on it too extensively--partly because I don't know if I'm allowed to, but mostly because I'm a Forum Mod and I haven't received that training so I just don't know that much about it lol.

3. I honestly do think the current roster on Staff is still very small, or at least too small. I would say that the main issue is less with workflow and more with workload (although we have had workflow issues in the past and we have improved tremendously since). We were already planning on hiring a new batch of interns even before the wave of GMs quit a few months ago. So I do think that a larger team--as well as new, expanded roles--would be extremely helpful with our work.

4. This I know for sure I can't speak too extensively on... but I will just say that internally, game changes being introduced are unrelated to the progress of the autoban. If players disagree with certain game changes being introduced I think that's totally fair, and if players agree that the autoban needed to arrive many years ago I think that's also totally fair. And if players believe that game changes being introduced are intimately interrelated with the progress of the autoban given the way they directly affect the community's gameplay experience, well them's just facts. But these game changes being introduced doesn't mean that they're done so at the expense of progress on the autoban.​

 

And this is the main problem. Being fair i have to trow some guilt to the players that constantly said things like "Shame on you, you should know your own game" or the ones who flamed the staff saying "you should be focusing in autoban instead of....." i guess you guys took it as ppl saying you were distracted from doing it. Thats not everyone case, at least not mine. I wish you guys were hand tied specially from market related things TILL AUTO BAN IS READY. No one is gonna cry is you guys fix heros cr range, or fix the issue with MM recent boost, even if you respond with popular requirement as change the shape of auf haven map to make it more difficult(altought expect some feedback threds about that too soontm). But to "balance" things related of how players progress, you should be like us. Waiting for auto ban. Lemme state something here. This is a cooperative game, but with a comepetitive market. To have a fair competition, one should have:

1.-Options.
2.-Equal oportunities based on your play time effort and creativity.

Royals already have a current meso/hr standar if you nerf it hardly, ppl gonna move to another content that allows you to make a similar amount, if you nerf all meso making methods all togheter at once(or at least the main ones), that has to have an impact on market. if it doesnt have one big impact, it means YOU TARGETED THE WRONG PPL.

Best example is what happened this last event, i guess you guys nerfed the envelope/apples ratio to avoid having a big impact on game economy. What happened? envelopes price dropped quickly and the influx of mesos/nx was huge anyways, why? bcs despite there was ppl making billions daily, hackers make at least twice as much as the most hardcore player, as for me, i wish this last events never happened.(and im not a farmer, or heavy multclienter LOL)

Now ill trow now an impopular opinion, the last changes you guy made were not bad, actually many of them were actually good(refering to the previous patches, not this one), sadly with the impact of hackers and rwters ingame turned good changes into terrible ones.

TLDR.- Some positive /balance changes are bad meanwhile hackers a rwters do their bussines around, regardless of if this changes does not took your atention from auto ban development.- It is a good thing to say to your boyfriend/girlfriend that you love him/her, but its terrible to do it on the 1st date, its all about timing.

If you guys preffer not to wait till auto ban is ready and you want to balance the game b4 that, change game mechanics to screw this guys up, and ask the community, how they will affected by this or this change, but mainly focused on balance THEM 1ST PLS @Matt @Tim @staff

 

Man i miss the good old days of testing new contents. It was fun.

I hated testing wedding system the most.

 

Make me GM and I'll make sure Royals become the game that everyone will enjoy.

 

My thoughts exactly, I was highly disappointed and thought that at the very least shar and ozzy would be exactly what this server needs atm.

 

I have a bad feeling that the server staffs/owner/coders are walking further away from player bases and just doing whatever they feel like doing,
instead of doing things for the wellbeing of the server/player base.

At this point I'm quite convinced that no matter how much we voice out our dissatisfactions, when there's no one up in there listening, it's all futile efforts

 

What I find appalling is that they are making MAJOR changes to the fundamentals of the game (for end game players) from just the views of the current staff.

There are clearly many old veteran players who are against such changes, that I feel should be part of a feedback process before making such huge changes in the first place. One example I'll use is @Doo who owns multiple 200s and spent thousands of hours into this game. And there's many others who have sunk so many hours in this game that I feel the staff should possibly listen to what they say on the forums and maybe communicate more on what changes they have in mind, because they are the ones who have dedicated so much for the server.

I understand that all changes are never final, but let's be real, has there really ever been a revert? Take feedback and adjust accordingly from the start. You're just driving away your longstanding players by making changes you think are necessary to 'balance' the game. But it's quite clear the feedback of those who are putting in the work everyday should be listened to more. If you lose them, what is this server left with???

 

It's left with new players and the 90% playerbase that doesn't use the forums and just plays the game casually, who don't particularly care about small balance changes, instead of the few that have sunk tens of thousands of hours into Royals. Whether the people with thousands of hours are the backbone of the server is up to debate

 

So when is an admin gonna address everything above?
@Matt @Tim

Your loyal players demand an answer.

 

Where are you sourcing your numbers from? You’re implying that 90% of the player base 1) does not use forums and 2) share a different POV from forum users. Neither of which are necessarily true. Who are you to say that new players do not care about game changes either?

whether or not you agree with the forum consensus doesn’t dilute the fact that players who have sunk 1000s of hours into the game are able to bring a much more holistic perspective of the impact across each element of game change. Something that staff often do not foresee before implementing.

None of the players, whether new or old, are looking to gatekeep people from the game. Fundamentally any game or server will die eventually without having a healthy flow of new players to balance out churn. The most frustrating part of these game changes is that they are continually hindering legitimate players and the ability for new players to bridge the gap and transition to the end game. Continuously nerfing mules and multi-mage farming may seem to make the game more “noob” friendly but does little to help a new joiner in 2021 wash and build a character should they want to compete and get end game gear. A player in the old source before daily boss limits or in the mass summon farming era had a much easier time farming for their 63+ CGS set than the options currently available to new players.