Support the Walk Out [Horus]

[niclam]

Whoa,

I want to clear two things out:

- The bug with players being able to shoot thru everything was an honest mistake and was quickly fixed one day after launch. For those not looking at the date, January 1st is a national holiday here in Argentina so we could have been anywhere else but chose to address this as hastily as possible to fix the problem. So if anyone has anything to say about us not fixing the problems, I dont know what the heck you are talking about.

- If anything we are going to bring more people into Horus, be that with a Character transfer service (we are thinking in adding this service in the near future) or by promoting through new partners. But these things take time, of course we would like Horus to be filled 24 hours after we opened it but it wasn't the case and we are working to remedy the situation.

I hope this sheds some light into this matter. We all want all the servers to be perfectly balanced in terms of population, so our work there is not yet done. The realm bonus was a measure meant exactly for that, I didnt work as expected? No problem, we will devise other ways, please be patient.

By the way, "Our boss" is one of the lead game designers of the game so Regnum Online is in part his creation (with its hits and misses).

One last thing, our main focus is ALL SERVERS, why would we care more about Ra than Horus? (Or Muspell/Niflheim for that matter). This is exactly the same as saying we favor one realm over the other. Let's get one thing straight, NO!, we favor ALL of them, we want ALL of the servers to have 1000+ users and we want ALL realms to be balanced.

Update:

You can support more users into Horus in a negative way, by going away for 4 days (?) or you can do something positive like this to help us. Whichever helps the most, is up to you.

Regards

[Syd_Vicious]

niclam,

Thank you for your response. Here is a detailed list of what I have seen evolve patch by patch since I have been playing since you are wondering what the heck I am talking about:

0.9.34 - Minor update, some minor fixes not much to gripe about except the collision engine sucks. Bunjee rocks, bunjee trees, you can jump off stairs run 5 meters and then magically be on the stairs again. Mobs disappear when hitting an obstructive object (ie. rock, tree) and then reappear behind it.

0.9.35 - Fixed only half way, even with newer updates being shipped out I have still gotten stuck on the "Loading Language Resources" screen and have uninstalled and reinstalled to try and remediate if it is a client corruption issue. Mostly this is likely on your resource server as we have seen during the invasion patch. So while the software may have been patched the hardware and connectivity on your end are still lacking, would appreciate an update.

0.9.36 - New mounts were added and comsmetic improvements rather than fixing pre-existing problems. These pre-existing problems include collision detection issues with players drowning in Gokstad in Alsius. Chilko came online and did a quick check and told us these issues were already known. There still hasn't been a fix and Alsius players (especially knights) are told of the issues in Gokstad and not to take a horse near there. Chilko's main questions though only pertained to possible FPS increases.

Also new super bosses were added that one realm could not take by themselves. On Horus there was a server wide initiative required in order for all three realms to fight as one against the bosses. Doing that we were Players vs. Game rather than RvR, and it continues to be that way since no realm can defeat all of the bosses by themselves.

Taking a fort increased in difficulty with this patch, if memory serves, and it slowly dwindled into a PvE and Hunting Party game. Fort wars became less and less fun due to realm imbalance issues and we started losing more people than normal, those who were more into fort wars than hunting. So the fun of the game started lacking. This patch also punished the archer class since they have to pay per hit with arrows, making it more expensive for them in game to participate in fort wars.

0.9.37 - This patch saw the first spout of commercial based content rather than fixing the previous problems. Some problems had been addressed, but questing problems arose where people didn't get the quest specific items that they should have. The corresponding following hotfix fixed this issue for players that had not taken the quests, but did nothing to resolve issues with players that had completed the quest and received nothing. So newer players that had completed the quest prior to the hotfix were walking around with less items than players prior to this patch and post hotfix. This also included the quests which required interaction with objects, that wasn't fixed until a month later. Wouldn't it had been simple to apply a script for any player that completed quests the previous days to have the item to their inventory? That would sound like good customer service to me. Prior to this Alsius on Horus lost one our most active clans, not just one or two people, but a whole clan. This is basically where the Pet incidents increased where Hunters pets went through fort doors and attacked players inside.

1.0 - This patch saw item qualities and substances changed, the invasion system was in place and mobs now aggressively attacked players. While this was exciting at first, the large imbalances of realms and time zone disparities turned this into a one sided invasion system. During normal daytime hours for GMT -5 and late day to night time hours for our European players, no one was able to invade. When night time hit and most players had gone to sleep, realms were invaded with little resistance. This only perpetuates the realm imbalance and makes it harder on lower populated realms since they are always on the defense. There have already been a couple posts on negative implications of the invasion system and

The item quality and substance change, while it didnt impact the statistics of the weapon, was a negative impact on player gold economy. Whereas in lower levels item drops are plenty, at higher levels that rates differ dramatically. Some items that were paid for prior to the patch with in game gold were dropped dramatically by level. So as an example if a level 40 staff was purchased at 180k gold and it is now available to newer players at 130k gold at level 37, that is somewhat cheating players out of the ability to say purchase half a level of a fort upgrade.

Speaking of Fort Upgrades and Gold, lower population servers such as Horus do not have as vibrant economy as more populated servers such as Ra. Players have typically applied a give back what you received for taking a fort, but this is not an ultimatum and not everyone applies it. At higher levels with all quests completed it is hard to make 100k gold even with the sparse treasure drops that are around.

On the topic of XP the patch basically erased the realm xp bonus due to the increasing the difficulty of grinding. Not to mention the respawn rates had been changed in the previous patch and some of our grinding spots lost suitability due to this. Increasing the difficulty on newer players hurts more than any realm bonus helps.

1.0.1 - This patch was another commercial based update. While you opened up Central Island for an "Xmas" event for everyone to chat, you forgot to turn off the teleporters there. Xmas eve Alsius was defending against potential Syrtis Invaders appearing on our wall, behind our guards and sometimes in the realm space between the inner realm gate and the warzone gate. One noob mage even got inside the realm and had to be chased down while the Gates were still up. Of course at this time your abuse email was full, no one had answered any support emails to disable the teleporters - so this patch was shot. Kind of like a new toy to keep players placated by giving them something else to do. While I will admit the xmas tree search was a nice change of pace, forgetting to disable the teleporters trumped that.

1.0.2 - This was basically the straw that broke the camels back for me. I was killed multiple times while on the Alsius stairs leading to the wall space over looking the warzone outside our gate. I was killed once with my barb by the inside guards and the mutant guard running straight through the back of a fort as if the walls did not exist, on top of trying to fight them off the archers were casting the level 5 fire rain spells the whole time.

So while you say some of these things are oversights, ok I can agree with that. I understand having a unified patching system to apply to all servers as a best practice in order to maintain lower development time for the game as a whole. What I do not agree with is the continued indifference to issues caused by realm imbalance that can vary between server to server and ignoring the fixing of long term problems. Compounding on that from an IT standpoint it appears that with Amun down we are all now the test bed, so without a separate test enterprise to aid in the evaluation and mitigation of some of these problems I do not see where you will be able to correct these problems without first making it everyone's problem.
l
I would recommend that some of your devs go to Horus as players, not as devs, and make characters in all three realms in order to better appreciate the different playing environment that exists. An experiment such as this might give you insight in validation of a lot of our forum posts.

That is where I stand from my end user perspective.

[niclam]

Well,

I have read your entire last post and I can only say that thank you for a well written criticism.
We may or may not agree on some points but we do agree in the fact that we all want the game to keep growing and improving so we'll keep working on the shortcomings.

Regards

[Syd_Vicious]

Well, coming to an agreement is the easy part. Even if its agreeing to disagree.

Seeing action or a plan of action (planned fixes, hell even a cheesy flow chart) would be a much more desirable end result to encourage ppl to stay.

But I appreciate your professionalism of not having us boil it down to the bytes and bits of what is right and wrong with the game.

[Syd_Vicious]

To help out in case some of you guys at NGD didn't see them are threads discussing possible fixes and player retention notations/posts:


Grinding and Player Retention


Ideas to Complement the Invasion System


A couple Suggestions for Horus and the Invasion System


Response to the Update

[Nightchill]

Originally Posted by niclam

So if anyone has anything to say about us not fixing the problems, I dont know what the heck you are talking about.

Nice, how about you fix the problem of charging in euros more then in dollars and stop blatantly ripping off people you live from? Or is that too part of your grand plan to balance all 3 realms and both world poles at same time?

anyway, I can't say I agree completely with Syd's first post/thread starter because walking out will probably cause even more imbalance but if horus community doesn't get the attention that it needs to get in order to grow it's best for everyone to find another game.

oh yeah, as for ra-horus transfer i was wondering will it be possible to transfer chars from horus to ra and how much do you plan to charge for this service? i hope not much because we've already put in tons of money in our chars and another extra big cost would not be fair.

[Caelia]

Originally Posted by niclam

- If anything we are going to bring more people into Horus, be that with a Character transfer service (we are thinking in adding this service in the near future) or by promoting through new partners. But these things take time, of course we would like Horus to be filled 24 hours after we opened it but it wasn't the case and we are working to remedy the situation.

Oh man, as much as I would LOVE to have more players in Horus, I do not want this possibility. I have a character on Ra - (barb with the same name as the barb I have on Horus) and I have put money in leveling the 2nd despite the fact that I wasn't sure if I wanted to start over. I fell in love with the tight-knit community we had on the Horus server (something that I didnt have outside of my clan on Ra) and decided to stay there.

To think that if I had only just waited to transfer my Ra barb onto Horus, well... Just seems a bit cruel to everyone who started over on the Horus server from Ra. We wanted that character transfer at the very beginning as well, but we sucked it up and went on there because we wanted a chance to have an English server. Now we find that others who didnt want to give it a chance can have a free ride? Again, just doesn't seem fair I guess.

I want more players as much as anyone else on Horus, but I don't like that decision :/

Sorry - on topic - I don't think having a walk out would change much, if anything, would only make things worse in a way. The ones who stayed would only have it that much easier to rule the wz. And because of that, I think we should stay and defend as much as we can despite everything.

<3

[Mikan]

Originally Posted by LunarSeraph

...

You're one of the last who feels that way. (link)

Personally, I would never transfer servers, even to an English server. It's too little, too late, in a long list of bad decisions by NGD. We should've had an English server in the beginning, and when it finally came we should've been allowed character transfers, instead of people having to put money into leveling characters all over again from scratch, only to face this shameful situation.

Until the game gains more staying-power, not much is going to improve on Horus. NGD thinks they can just get more and more people, but the truth is the game is simply not worth staying for in the eyes of English players. Many people keep trying to tell them this and niclam's own responses in this thread prove they aren't listening. New English players just don't like Regnum Online's first impressions.

Every single English player I have ever invited to the game had nothing but complaints about it. And I am being brutally honest about that, and I've invited alot of people over time.

Sydonay_Rex's (constructive) critisism hit all of the nails right on their heads.

Please don't misunderstand NGD, I'm not saying you are bad folks or anything. But you just aren't listening to us, even if you think that you are. You haven't been for a year or longer, and almost anyone that you ask will tell you that, and it doesn't matter how much you defend yourselves and your decisions, we wouldn't go to such lengths and say these things (repeatedly) if they weren't true.

"A person with a problem is always the last one to realize it." I think this applies to groups of people too.

There are some glimmers of hope that you care, such as the long-awaited balance update. But other than that, as a whole the English community tends to go ignored in favor of the Spanish community. Perhaps what you really need is a dedicated English community manager, who is sensetive to the issues that we face, rather than a shared community manager like Kailer who many think has done more harm than good (again with my brute honesty - nothing personal Kailer, but it's true).

But me, I'm tired of discussing it, over and over, to no end. This will be my last post on the subject. I want to say that I have alot of karma because I deserve it, but I honestly don't know. But I do hope that people will find some merit in my words, thoughts and feelings and not simply dismiss them as unimportant. I think that Regnum Online can reach high places, but for now, there's no way with the current system.

There's just no way.

Regards,

[-Edge-]

At least NGD makes the community feel better when they talk to us, honestly, I think most of us prefer an open discussion more often over some secret updates done in the shadows.

This community is shaken to a point where we need to hear something good again from NGD. What does it mean wait and see? Tell us something more. There used to be a feeling where it felt like we were all the same, its started to fade away as Regnum started to look like a moneymaker.

Originally Posted by niclam

(Or Muspell/Niflheim for that matter)

I just wanted to say shortly why Muspell and Nilfhelm don't have fatigue or the new exp curve? Infact it seems Gamingo can choose what they want to go through and what they don't want. If thats not true then im sorry, but at least I think its like this, im not 100% sure.

[mute]

Originally Posted by niclam

- If anything we are going to bring more people into Horus, be that with a Character transfer service (we are thinking in adding this service in the near future) or by promoting through new partners. But these things take time, of course we would like Horus to be filled 24 hours after we opened it but it wasn't the case and we are working to remedy the situation.

Yeah, we suggested this transfer service many times. Moving Chars from RA to Horus would be a nice help for Horus.

Originally Posted by Rated_R_Edge

I just wanted to say shortly why Muspell and Nilfhelm don't have fatigue or the new exp curve? Infact it seems Gamingo can choose what they want to go through and what they don't want. If thats not true then im sorry, but at least I think its like this, im not 100% sure.

As far as I know, there are the same rules as on RA or Horus