AMA with Phelan -Answers Part II

  • Sorry for being a bit late. I caught a cold and missed a 2 days where I could have discussed the questions with the team.

    Here some answers around the game content. The discussion will be in another thread

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    Why is Siege War still in Beta?

    Simple answer: Because it is in no condition to be called commercial.

    More context: Some years ago, we discussed with Runewaker about improvements to the Siege Wars and fixed that you guys had requested, with the intention of finally getting the SW out of Beta. However, like in every game in development, sometimes priorities shift around.

    With the new found raport between us and Runewaker, we put it back on the agenda as they are still something we want to address, but we also need to focus on new content.

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    Are u still working on improving the sw? maps, bugs, rules, out of beta. such things. Can you tell us things about the planned content? e.g. Levelcaps, Worldbosses, new/planned Features, Balancing,... When can we expect some balancing-patches - as well for PvE as for PvP - which are needed for years now? What is the vision for Rom’s future? are more Races, classes, higher elite skills on the horizon? Will crafting make a step out of the shadow? With the recent influx of new and old players, has there been any development consideration to fix known issues with the game?

    No, we cannot be specific on new content at this point. What I can tell you is that the current storyline will wrap up in the upcoming patches, and we are working together with Runewaker on a concept for future new content.

    I think one of our first priorities will be the fixes of some events so we can entertain you more in the short run, then fixes on the most annoying bugs (Siege War seems to be one, the memory leak another one, even though that one seems specifically hard maybe even impossible to tackle). The zone crashes are also a big annoyance, for you as well as the Sysadmins that have to get up at night.

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    Are there any plans to make the normal-mode for instances useful again? Today you can't run anything if you don't have 10-12 people because if you have less, then nobody wants to run normal-mode instead of hard-mode even if they know that they won't get enough people for hard-mode during the next hours. The reason for this is: - 95% of the stats that drop in normal-mode are crap and nobody wants to run for hours to get 1 good stat in the end that he has to share with 5 other people - Hard-mode gear is much more powerful than normal-mode gear so even people who know that they will never be able to run hard-mode refuse to run normal-mode and prefer to buy hard-mode gear in auction house - With every new zone there is usually only 1 useful piece of accessory that you can buy for ancient mementos and once you got that piece, all you can buy for mementos is mats for crafting or guild which makes mementos pretty obsolete nowadays compared to the times where you had a chance to get good stats on memento items

    Is this question more about the difficulty of the inis or more about the drop rates? But useful instance content for all item levels are important. We will be looking into the normal mode.

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    Years ago, when the Diamond trading option via the ingame auction house was disabled, this was labeled as "temporary" until a long term solution for the existing problems was found. Do you plan to enable an official diamond trading option in any way in the foreseeable future or are satisfied with the current situation? Solutions to realize this in a way hopefully without or minimal involvement of runewaker where made by the community. If you are not aware of those, the board crew can surely give you information on that.

    Nope. That NPC won’t come back. Never before and never after did we have such a massive fraud issue than then. The fraud there were otters that farmed gold and then sold the diamonds. Same goes for official Diamond trading, albeit from another angle. Here it is credit card fraudsters that buy diamonds and sell them afterwards. Tradable items are always a huge incentive for fraudsters, making this official will get us legions of botters and credit card fraudsters. Sorry for being so harsh there, but credit card fraud is really one of the biggest problems for a publisher. It is not only that we loose money, with every charge back we loose in our creditscore, and the lower you get, the higher the fee is that you have to pay.

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    Will you be reviewing things in the game so you can make relevant updates? eg. Looking at the blue quest gear items and ensuring still workable/relevant and providing updated Experience Points/Talent Points for quests or providing more or longer potions free for new people questing because getting to cap in a few days is not achievable to all. Updating festival event items and titles. Changing up events for new ones or new mini games. Providing access to more rare recipes ingame to enable people to be more self sufficient.

    That is an easy one: Yes.

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    Will next content be reasonably tested and only released, and only released when it’s fit to be played – and not shut down 2h later?

    RoM really is special when it comes to behavior in a testing environment and in real life ☹ It is not that we release untested content (well.. the SW is best tested under real conditions, that is why we have a.. shall we say long beta phase), it is that once the servers are open weird stuff happens.

  • Phelan

    Closed the thread.