Recently, our CEO Drygu and our Lead Game Designer Daro talked with the Polish streamer Tato. Since the videos (which can be found here and here) are in Polish, we decided to give you a short summary of the most important items that were discussed:
When are you going to implement the ragebar? Can you tell us more about it?
We’re doing all we can to make it happen still in March as scheduled. This mechanic will aim to reduce frustration, especially on lower levels, when you don’t hit anything with high chances and get hit with low chances. We want to reforge negative feelings related to this into something positive. This new mechanic will be implemented in addition to the current mechanics that let players hit more easily. However, we aren’t messing with hit chances at all in this update.
What about Act 4 of the main storyline?
Unfortunately, it’ll be pushed back to Q2, but this is mostly because the new quest will be much bigger and better than we initially thought. What was supposed to be quite small has grown into an extensive plot with many new NPCs, areas, and lots of dialogues. You’ll be mostly expanding on Thalia but that’s all we’re going to say for now so that we don’t spoil anything.
And what can you tell us about the challenge arena?
It’s still a long way off, but we can definitely say it’s not going to be PvP-related. It’ll be an expanded version of the birthday event. From what we see right now is that it’s going to be a very big project and we’ll possibly release a basic version of it at first and then keep adding new features. We also think the game as a whole lacks significant challenges and we’d like to add more of them. We want to reward players for succeeding after a lot of trying and dying.
Speaking of the birthday event - what do you think about this type of limitation (entry tickets)?
In our opinion, it’s much better than the mob limit implemented currently for most events and is something we’ll strive to do in the future when we rework all the events transferred from Pride of Taern. The mob limit was just a temporary solution that allowed us to have more control over what players do so as not to damage the economy of the game and also prevent burnout among players. However, a lot of players started treating this kind of limit as a sort of challenge and it actually increased their activity during events.
Can you tell us more about the coming community update then?
We’ll surely base it on your suggestions. However, we currently have over 10.000 suggestions categorized in our documentation, so it’s not going to be easy to choose. What we usually do is choose 2 or 3 main features that we want to improve (these usually take several people many hours of work) and then we add as many several small features as we can (ones that one person on our team can do in a couple of hours). What we want to focus on in the next community update is improving the marketplace.
And the pet reform?
There’s not much we can say at the moment because we don’t know much ourselves yet. We’ll focus on this when we are finished with the ragebar and have a working version of the challenge arena. One thing is for sure - it’ll be a complete rework. Mobile was a big part of why we decided to put this on the menu. We also want to improve player retention. However, we aren’t abandoning high level players - the new endgame boss is still coming.
Is it going to have any new, special mechanics?
Yes, we want to add something unique to it to make the people who have finalized their builds still want to run it.
Don’t you think it’s currently taking players too much time to actually reach the endgame?
We kinda agree, but this is a problem for the future. When we can focus more on endgame content, it’s possible that we’ll make the road to max level faster.
Are you thinking of a way for players to trade characters or maybe about the possibility of transferring characters between servers?
This is something that could generate income for the company but we don’t think it’d be good for the community. We don’t want players to trade characters because it would shatter the bonds that players (through their characters) create between themselves. Server transfers could be a possibility if there are more servers but it’s not something we’re considering at the moment.
What are you doing to improve player retention?
Our data suggests that players mainly start leaving around level 35-40. The main reason for this that we identified is that sidequests become more sparse and players need to really start grinding. We implemented daily challenges as a way to give them direction and it really helped. At the moment, our player retention numbers are much better than industry average, so we’re very happy about this, but at the same time we aren’t a big game and a lot of our players come from referrals or from watching streams and these sources tend to have better retention. We’re also constantly working on patching up content gaps
Did you add items required to enter Hvar to Icicles on purpose to make farming them more profitable for players around level 60?
Yes, it was all on purpose. Whenever we add new bosses with an entry item, we want to liven up trading between higher and lower level players and Ice Power Cores are a great example of this. However, the popularity of Hvar has exceeded our expectations, but we can’t say it’s a bad thing. In general, we tend to make bosses more profitable at the beginning to make a good first impression and then adjust them as needed. Hvar in particular was meant as a boss where you can consistently get lots of psychoexperience.
