What is NGD working on rn?

[Adrian]

Originally Posted by Hollow-Ichigo

Good to know. But the question on everyone's mind is, what's your opinion on 'we suck' becoming a meme?

I couldn't care less

[_Scias_]

Originally Posted by Adrian

...

I'm sorry but you've been invoking the "Somos pocos" trump card since at least 2008... You should really revisit your excuses pool to choose from in case of screwup (since it's either that or the community's fault in most cases)...
And even assuming these were/are justified, it doesn't make up for the really poor decision making and erratic communication around this game for the past years. For instance, why would you focus on piling a ton of half assed new features while leaving most of the previous ones still broken/useless/incomplete? Building on sand is like the worst thing to do in case of limited resources and especially if the code is spaghetti mess already.
Latest example in date : We get motd and soon clan levels/achievements, hurray, yet now it's impossible to set empty clan ranks anymore, and overall the clan management got no better if not worse than before. (clan window closing completely after every action such as kicking a member, clan chest still being useless, can't transfer ownership...)
Repeat the above pattern for the past 8 years and you get the tragic history of this game. A game with such a huge potential, so close to being a pleasant game if only it had a bit of polish and a small amount of quality of life improvements. Instead broken/incomplete expansions got piled on each other with most of them having negative to no positive impact today.

Another bad evolution with Ximerin taking an even more prevalent place in the gameplay, something that should have been restricted to cosmetic (and most of other online games understood it today - think about how much easy money you'd get from additional faces and haircuts) and prevents some of said 'quality of life' features to be implemented. Why would you have trainers in the War Zone when you can purchase a Xim book thing right? Same thing for horses, or the auction house... Why make the drop rate acceptable when you can sell gear boxes... Etc...

And the worst is that a good chunk of the so damned community is still here after all those years, willing to help and forgive provided you are willing to make minimal effort. Seriously what would it cost to open an updated version of Amun a week before the actual update ? If you can't afford to do QA (which would prevent things like say, being unable to set empty clan ranks right?) why not just let the community willingly do so? Not to mention you could make a whole new game from the Suggestions subforum.

I know it's easy to speak as a player who hasn't been experiencing what you did and before you raise the "old always-grumpy players preventing innovation™" argument you gotta know that complaints rarely come out just from sadistic trolling and pleasure. In fact it's just so tiring and saddening hearing the same "oh we screwed up again, sorry, somos pocos/damn this evil community/we suck (delete as appropriate)" after every update for this to repeat time and time again and with the same sterile communication in between...

Sorry just needed to vent this out. Anyways, don't change anything and just keep blaming yourselves or the community. It's been working wonders so far...

[mind-trick]

Originally Posted by Adrian

We had a lot of problems lately (internal, people on sick leave and such) and also an exploit abuse that has taken us two weeks and left us way behind schedule. Being a small team means things can really slow down when the unexpected happens. And this year (as most) it happened more than often.

Don't want it to sound as an excuse, as we don't have any excuse for going so slow. Just wanted you to know why. As someone correctly pointed out some time ago, maybe we should post about the problems we have so at least you know what's going on.

Anyway, this Roadmap was not to promise anything or dates of fulfilment. Just to show what we have in mind regarding the upcoming changes.

Right now we're finishing the Christmas event and surely will have it ready for next week to be tested. The Clan Objectives part is halfway done and sadly will not be live for Christmas but in January for sure. Then we will have to start with the Carnival event and some improvements to the war (invasions, initiation zone and skills).

But you all know for sure: better actions than words. So, we'll keep on going and trying to do as much as we can while maintaining the systems and keeping everything stable, finding alternatives for things that monthly go bad, investigating abuse cases which end up in exploits that require half the team reading logs for who knows how many hours, climbing the walls in our path that NG3D puts when something has to be achieved, praying that we end the month with stable finances so the game can go on, trying not to get badly sick when you're a key part of a department, dealing with changes in the requirements of third party services, finding candidates to help in the new positions we need in a country that it seems that being proficient in German + liking MMOs is not something to be found and maybe, if we have a bit of time... developing new features or modifying the existing ones

I am aware that you have small team, but your efficiency is just low. Thats why ive been wanting to make it easier for you by giving advice. Question what sets this game apart from other MMOs. And question what the majority people really want and how they want it, and implement it while also taking resources and time into consideration. If a proposal or idea raises controversy, then simply put it on-hold.
The roadmaps say what goals you have, but theyre vague. Its nowhere explained how exactly you were to reach them.

You guys have added features such as crafting, clan stash, dragon raid, designed a new tdm map, placed lvl 50+ mobs all over wz, etc etc. But are these what people desperately needed these last few years? These features are obviously nice but wont improve the current state of the game.

[Adrian]

Originally Posted by mind-trick

I am aware that you have small team, but your efficiency is just low. Thats why ive been wanting to make it easier for you by giving advice. Question what sets this game apart from other MMOs. And question what the majority people really want and how they want it, and implement it while also taking resources and time into consideration. If a proposal or idea raises controversy, then simply put it on-hold.
The roadmaps say what goals you have, but theyre vague. Its nowhere explained how exactly you were to reach them.

You guys have added features such as crafting, clan stash, dragon raid, designed a new tdm map, placed lvl 50+ mobs all over wz, etc etc. But are these what people desperately needed these last few years? These features are obviously nice but wont improve the current state of the game.

Efficiency is low because we lack enough programmers that can work with NG3D and also because we're having more problems than last year, and even more than in 2015. Anyway, I insist: I'm not here to convince anyone. Just for those interested to know in what page we are now, as the title of the thread suggests.

What the game needs is a team of 10 at least working full time and already organised and up to date with NG3D. But, this can't happen: Regnum doesn't earn enough for that, but we're trying to get there as we can. In the last months we tried and we failed but for instance, now we're ensuring an art pipeline and soon, if everything goes fine, a new programmer too.

This is possible because we're maintaining things stable. If we focused on development only and bugfixing we would go bankrupt. We did this kind of focus in the past and yes, believe it or not, doesn't pay off.

Everyone here seems to know everything, but I beg for all of you to be a bit more humble, to accept that we know what we fail on and just try to contribute instead of saying what has been repeated a million times and that we also accepted another million times too.

Simple example: someone saw a few small changes that could help a lot in the BZs and posted a suggestion with those simple but very well though changes. Also, try to change the "you-do-not-do-anything-good" into "i-would-love-to-see-this-happening" and if for some reason you fell not heard or that we don't do anything about it, avoid taking it personally as it seems that happens most of the times with everyone.

And lastly, people that don't care, that are "retired" and yet post here and all of the similar cases: just leave the forums. Some users even believe we have something against them. NO. This is a tool that not a lot know how to use. We don't need people that need to be right or wrong. We need well thought feedback. Just that. And that comes only when good intentions are the main premise.

The forum has low activity and I like it that way. Social networks took most of the people that just wanted to be "social" and here you can see mostly people that are interested in getting details from what's happening with the game, but all of these people need to really understand that even if they post suggestions or whatever, it can be useless if it's not given enough thought and analysis. AND BEING BRIEF is an amazing perk too, hehe. Not my case here but I feel like explaining myself in detail this time.

My thanks to all of those that insist in helping somehow, but please be careful with what you think is helping or not. Paraphrasing mind-trick I could say that: "all of you have been telling us that we fail and we are not effective in many ways and that lead to nothing, but did you get to provide the feedback that was needed to improve the state of the game?"

TL;DR: We are not being effective because money doesn't allow that when a lot of problems arise. And the forums are a useful tool that need a wide look at the big picture and a good deal of analysis for a thread to be useful and most of all, directed at the game and not to US. Giving feedback is not that easy and no one should take for granted that it was provided.