Why I believe NGD has been doing the right thing- community criticisms

[fotomay]

A great many posts on these forums are highly critical of NGD's development of Regnum in the past 5 years. I want to post to express my qualified opinion on why I think , despite all the negative aspects, that NGD has actually been doing acceptably well. I would like to do so by addressing every single criticism raised by forum participants.

All the criticisms are excellent. They are excellent suggestions and they clearly show up where NGD has not hit the mark of a better outcome. However, the main reason I feel none of them justify the sometimes very derogatory and disenchanted remarks about Regnum is because many of them are not commercially realistic.

1) Email security difficulties: While I feel this could have been handled better by NGD, I feel the overall intent and strategy is sound. If we do not use some form of additional security measure, the game could suffer more attempt at hostile and malicious sabotage as may have occurred recently. Given the small size of NGD, I feel it is justified for the community to be more patient and to continue to be critical as NGD updstes it security. This may mean periods where you cannot access the game. Sad, but true.

2) Present unpopularity of TDM: In the past few months many mmos have been introducing PvP arenas and instances on a more focussed scale. So I do not begrudge NGD their attempt to do the saame. While it should have been better thought out, I feel the small size of NGD justifies their attempt to be busy and introduce popular elements. What do I mean by better thought out? I meanthat Regnum's single distinguishing characteristic is that it is the largest sngle instance RvR game on the market right now. TDMs detract from that and effort should not have gone into it without more careful consideration. Nonetheless, TDM instances may yet succeed, and I believe we should give NGD more time, even a year or more, before dispensing entirely with any TDM.

3) Warmasters Exapansion: Many players are sharply critical of how this harmed gameplay. Correct me if I am wrong, but one of they key purposes of warmasters was to improve the power of melee classes as against range and magic classes, rebalancing combat so that it was more tactically interesting. Personally I favour mages, but I feel that purpose has been achieved - Regnum still has the most interest trinity pvp balance in the industry. I feel all other criticisms of warmasters are secondary to this purpose and I give credit to NGD as long as they can maintain that pvp balance.

4) Pace of war: I place the many other criticisms by players under this rubric. This includes things like better bridge wars, settlements, linking TDM to war and so forth (all excellent suggestions, for example by Kyrottimus). Personally, i feel war should be visible on the map and occurring 100% of the time. At the moment, we have running and fort battles happening perhaps at best every 15-20 minutes, and in the meantime players stand idle at CS. This is an improvement on six months ago and I give NGD credit for that. However, I agree with the community that war should be happening 100% of the time. No player should feel comfortable standing idle and at a loss of what to do at CS at anytime (unless they are afk or just tired,).

Now, all the really good suggestions for improvement to the 4 items above fill a good part of these forums. However, the truth is, when I thought about it, NGD is :-
1) a group of 30+ adults (ie: out of date guys) trying to have families,
2) pressured by silly mmorpg "expert" consultants in the industry
3) pressured by wives/partners to make positive earnings
4) living in a country with somewhat deficient software programmers (Argentina)
5) trying desperately to listen to everything and do everything in a logical careful way.
So, when you think about it, I feel everything they have done has been commercially realistic. if they had embarked on any of the really good large scale ideas typically suggested by players, they might have ended up, after 3 months of work, with no justification for their effort.

This is why the ideas we propose must not only be logically sound, they (unfortunately) must be seen to be logically sound by the industry, or else NGD would not be able to justify any mistakes to the industry and may not be able to raise capital in future.

However, to bypass commercial pressures, I suggest this alternative way around the stupid industry pressures. NGD should engage the players on ideas and get players to prefund the cost of implementing those ideas, someone like a private community kickstarter (then we can run the modified version on a test server to test popularity).

So, for the reasons above, I feel we should really give NGD credit where credit is due and put our criticisms in perspective. I feel we should push NGD hard, but be aware it is really quite a small and somewhat parochial dev house tucked far away from the center of Western thought.

Finally, I strongly urge all players to stop insulting and putting down NGD in game and in forums. The number of times I see players stating "NGD is hopeless", "the game is gone to shit", "I am never coming back" etc etc is just not good. You are not helping the game and you are not helping yourselves. Instead, tell the world NGD is small, tell the world about the difficulties, but do so in a constructive meaningful fashion, or else you risk killing the population of your own game.

(edit: edited to remove "pathetic and disgusting" in the final paragraph and replaced it with "not good". maybe ive been watching too much Gordon Ramsay. also hi to Sanguinelamai! thx for any and all criticisms!)

[SanguineLamai]

Originally Posted by fotomay

A great many posts on these forums are highly critical of NGD's development of Regnum in the past 5 years. I want to post to express my qualified opinion on why I think , despite all the negative aspects, that NGD has actually been doing acceptably well. I would like to do so by addressing every single criticism raised by forum participants.

All the criticisms are excellent. They are excellent suggestions and they clearly show up where NGD has not hit the mark of a better outcome. However, the main reason I feel none of them justify the sometimes very derogatory and disenchanted remarks about Regnum is because many of them are not commercially realistic.

1) Email security difficulties: While I feel this could have been handled better by NGD, I feel the overall intent and strategy is sound. If we do not use some form of additional security measure, the game could suffer more attempt at hostile and malicious sabotage as may have occurred recently. Given the small size of NGD, I feel it is justified for the community to be more patient and to continue to be critical as NGD updstes it security. This may mean periods where you cannot access the game. Sad, but true.

2) Present unpopularity of TDM: In the past few months many mmos have been introducing PvP arenas and instances on a more focussed scale. So I do not begrudge NGD their attempt to do the saame. While it should have been better thought out, I feel the small size of NGD justifies their attempt to be busy and introduce popular elements. What do I mean by better thought out? I meanthat Regnum's single distinguishing characteristic is that it is the largest sngle instance RvR game on the market right now. TDMs detract from that and effort should not have gone into it without more careful consideration. Nonetheless, TDM instances may yet succeed, and I believe we should give NGD more time, even a year or more, before dispensing entirely with any TDM.

3) Warmasters Exapansion: Many players are sharply critical of how this harmed gameplay. Correct me if I am wrong, but one of they key purposes of warmasters was to improve the power of melee classes as against range and magic classes, rebalancing combat so that it was more tactically interesting. Personally I favour mages, but I feel that purpose has been achieved - Regnum still has the most interest trinity pvp balance in the industry. I feel all other criticisms of warmasters are secondary to this purpose and I give credit to NGD as long as they can maintain that pvp balance.

4) Pace of war: I place the many other criticisms by players under this rubric. This includes things like better bridge wars, settlements, linking TDM to war and so forth (all excellent suggestions, for example by Kyrottimus). Personally, i feel war should be visible on the map and occurring 100% of the time. At the moment, we have running and fort battles happening perhaps at best every 15-20 minutes, and in the meantime players stand idle at CS. This is an improvement on six months ago and I give NGD credit for that. However, I agree with the community that war should be happening 100% of the time. No player should feel comfortable standing idle and at a loss of what to do at CS at anytime (unless they are afk or just tired,).

Now, all the really good suggestions for improvement to the 4 items above fill a good part of these forums. However, the truth is, when I thought about it, NGD is :-
1) a group of 30+ adults (ie: out of date guys) trying to have families,
2) pressured by silly mmorpg "expert" consultants in the industry
3) pressured by wives/partners to make positive earnings
4) living in a country with somewhat deficient software programmers (Argentina)
5) trying desperately to listen to everything and do everything in a logical careful way.
So, when you think about it, I feel everything they have done has been commercially realistic. if they had embarked on any of the really good large scale ideas typically suggested by players, they might have ended up, after 3 months of work, with no justification for their effort.

This is why the ideas we propose must not only be logically sound, they (unfortunately) must be seen to be logically sound by the industry, or else NGD would not be able to justify any mistakes to the industry and may not be able to raise capital in future.

However, to bypass commercial pressures, I suggest this alternative way around the stupid industry pressures. NGD should engage the players on ideas and get players to prefund the cost of implementing those ideas, someone like a private community kickstarter (then we can run the modified version on a test server to test popularity).

So, for the reasons above, I feel we should really give NGD credit where credit is due and put our criticisms in perspective. I feel we should push NGD hard, but be aware it is really quite a small and somewhat parochial dev house tucked far away from the center of Western thought.

Finally, I strongly urge all players to stop insulting and putting down NGD in game and in forums. The number of times I see players stating "NGD is hopeless", "the game is gone to shit", "I am never coming back" etc etc is just pathetic and disgusting. You are not helping the game and you are not helping yourselves. Instead, tell the world NGD is small, tell the world about the difficulties, but do so in a constructive meaningful fashion, or else you risk killing the population of your own game.

I strongly suspect Fotomay, that you may not have been pushing and fighting for changes as long as many of us has. There are many of us that have been around for much longer than you, I suspect, who has seen the evolution of change. That change has not been for the better, and there were better times in days of old.

While I admire your chutzpah, I iterate to you that some of us are old and tired, and we grow weary of the promises that never materlized, and the voices of whom spoke logical sense that never got heard.

[Adrian]

For starters, we should make a clearer statement about why Regnum users patience is worn.

*WARNING, might get philosophical*
*blink*
*WARNING, might get philosophical*

As a user of anything made by the human being will always, and mostly if we talk about a caring person, check on how they would do it instead. In some, this comes as the very first reaction. Regnum is full of caring people (for not saying that most of them are) and maybe it also is a requirement for them to stay. Caring people think highly of their ideas and, at any cost, they want them to be put in practice. This is why this kind of people achieve: because of the need of applying their ideas and of course, fail and learn.

As it is mentioned by OP, I think that the problems are not that community suggestions are bad (well, some of them suck and some are great, but you get the point) but that they are only subject to a single scenario: user satisfaction with gameplay.

What do you say Adrián? That's the most important scenario! U gon mad? Of course it is, but it must be tied to a bigger picture, in which the game attracts enough player base to subsist and that most of the mechanics live in peace with those changes. Your ideas have possible futures that are never analysed and also, and most important of all, as we all think highly of our ideas, we tend to forget that EVEN if some people support us, it's not what everyone would like. You can make a poll and get an enormous support, but practice is king here, and we risk putting in practice what the game allows to be put (always regarding mechanics, code, server performance, blah blah cassette tape).

*getting back to business*

We make mistakes because everyone makes them, even huge companies. The big difference is that this companies make them in private because of their huge structures. We are condemned to make the same mistakes forever because Regnum makes enough to support the game and our team, but not to make a giant leap and, for example, double the team. You may say "why not use the community to fill that gap?" people must be coordinated and that's not an easy thing to do, but of course, we could try harder.

We need your criticism, we read it. We can't reply everything but rest assured that we react to important issues when we see them. Communicating it all the time is not something we do, and should.

The only thing that really doesn't help is bashing. Saying that we do everything wrong is a paradox of why are we here discussing this and why is Regnum still alive.

[Raindance]

...And here we go back to pampering NGD like nothing ever happened. LIKE ALWAYS

[Adrian]

Originally Posted by Raindance

...And here we go back to pampering NGD like nothing ever happened. LIKE ALWAYS

No, no. Everything happened. I think that here there's a call to the community to try to see things from both perspectives. We might do wrong, but users should spend at least a bit thinking why we do it. Some times it is thought that we've "given up" on Regnum. We're still doing things for it, aren't we?

[Raindance]

I actually get the impression that when you guys see mass criticism building up, you actually start doing your job. You start posting more, you sometimes reverse the things the community fights against. I can't imagine what kind of game I'd be playing if the community never fought the fatigue changes.

[Adrian]

Originally Posted by Raindance

I actually get the impression that when you guys see mass criticism building up, you actually start doing your job. You start posting more, you sometimes reverse the things the community fights against. I can't imagine what kind of game I'd be playing if the community never fought the fatigue changes.

In your thread I said it clear: even if some anger is shown, I'm seeing topics which can be discussed, not the usual "NGD u suk" but some things that come from real concern. We always do our job and also that which isn't (I'm no CM or moderator) but it is not enough, we know.

[SanguineLamai]

Originally Posted by Adrian

In your thread I said it clear: even if some anger is shown, I'm seeing topics which can be discussed, not the usual "NGD u suk" but some things that come from real concern. We always do our job and also that which isn't (I'm no CM or moderator) but it is not enough, we know.

There are two issues at crux here, where NGD is concerned. The capacity to act, and the Will to act. Many think NGD lacks the capacity and the will to change things for the better.

The capacity to act is dependent on two kinds of resources, tangible resources such as money, equipment, and personnel. Its long been suggested that perhaps NGD doesnt have the resources, or they dont utilize the resources they have to accomplish this. Others have suggested that such intangible resources (Knowledge and skill), dont exist either, which is another primary component of the capacity to take such action. Both determine the degree to which NGD could act for the prevention of the problem and the curing of such problems.

The Will to act is dependent on two factors. Risk vs Reward. Is the reward by taking the risk beneficial to the entity as a whole, or is the risk too great and the reward too little. Often times many here would think that the risk in taking an action to fix things was never taken because the reward in taking that action was too little, or was in danger of making things worse. I stronly feel, as do many of the people who have played this game with me feel, that those who develop the entity do not have the willingness to act to truely correct the situation. And attempts previously to "correct things" have only made things worse.

Honestly to the core of it all, I would want to go back to unmodded forts, unmodded castles, less beautification and more function. Less dependance on making things look nice, or benefiting the game as a whole by offering a wider array of premium items. Instead I propose actually attempting to broaden and enrich the game as a whole. New classes could have long been added over attempting to constantly break fix the existing classes. Broaden the playing field, make the map larger, terraform new areas. Focus on the strategic aspects of the game, the very thing that draws players to it, much like myself.

Efrendi left the game, because of the nature in how Warmasters unbalanced the game. Because of what the game was turning into, and he saw it then. Perhaps he was right all along, and perhaps some of us should have listened to him.

Im just not sure anymore.

[JainFarstrider]

Originally Posted by Adrian

In your thread I said it clear: even if some anger is shown, I'm seeing topics which can be discussed, not the usual "NGD u suk" but some things that come from real concern. We always do our job and also that which isn't (I'm no CM or moderator) but it is not enough, we know.

Hey, this isn't that new of a thread, but I just wanted to make a comment on what you said.

I think when many of the people on these forums start to rage about NGD, it's because of the communication gap between the playerbase/forum and NGD. You guys have been consistently lessening that gap, I will give you credit for that, but the gap is still pretty big to make NGD seem very, very far away.

And when players who have been expressing their concerns or suggestions for a long time are met with cold silence from Regnum's developers, an answer like "hi, we've looked at your concerns and are discussing it" doesn't cut it for them. Normally it would. But years of threads with solid discussions and no NGD posts makes players feel unsatisfied with some of the replies NGD is making.

As for mistakes, I can't really discuss much about that since I have literally no experience in that field. But wouldn't it be wiser for NGD to at least reach out to the community? I don't mean like posting a poll or something, but perhaps have a group of dedicated players who can preview new patches or expansions to at least make sure that new content doesn't conflict with what already exists in the game.

One of the biggest problems that I see in CoR/RO is that NGD is RUSHING into patches/expansions/new content. Sometimes great amounts of thought and care are placed into long-awaited features of the game. And then sometime later a new patch renders those features useless or unplayable.

Many of the new releases in RO give off an impression that NGD isn't looking very much at the community and its responses to past content released. I don't know what prevents NGD from doing this. Could it be your sponsors pushing you? Internal conflicts in the company? I don't know, but I hope that NGD could steer towards this direction more often.

TL;DR
I think NGD needs to
1. Communicate more effectively and frequently
2. Revise old content carefully before releasing new content
3. Observe and plan very carefully about creating new content that would both satisfy the current ommunity and expand the player base
4. Perhaps stop making so much new random premium content (seems like wasted effort, I thought perhaps the pope skin might have been a bit too far)

Cheers, I don't play the game right now because where I live makes my ping go sky-high, but I really care for RO.

[Carn]

Originally Posted by JainFarstrider

TL;DR
I think NGD needs to

Every post should have this!

Originally Posted by JainFarstrider

1. Communicate more effectively and frequently
2. Revise old content carefully before releasing new content
3. Observe and plan very carefully about creating new content that would both satisfy the current ommunity and expand the player base
4. Perhaps stop making so much new random premium content (seems like wasted effort, I thought perhaps the pope skin might have been a bit too far)

Cheers, I don't play the game right now because where I live makes my ping go sky-high, but I really care for RO.

+1