Pillars of Community interview Drygu and Hania
Recently, our Pillar of Community interviewed Drygu (CEO of Whitemoon Games) and Hania (Game Designer) on the channel of Galajus. The video is available here but since it’s fully in Polish, we’d like to give you a quick summary.
Main part of the interview
How did the launch of the new Polish server go?
The new server exceeded all our expectations. On the first day, there were more than 2669 people online at the same time at one point, which is our absolute record. The numbers were similar throughout the whole first week. At the moment, there are 1500 people online on average.
However, we learned a lot from this launch - we need to increase the number of mobs in early areas and modify their spawns so that everyone has enough targets to kill while not killing the server at the same time. We also need to rework dynamic events at early levels (potato beetles, observer, Trifkin’s Island).We want to adjust them to the server’s starting conditions and also make it possible to complete them at later stages, when there are more people. We also need to do something about Tangler as this champion is required for quest progression. We also want to provide more tutorials but this requires a lot of UI adjustments and we are short-handed on this front at the moment.
We also having a lot of people from Philipines testing early content and we’ll surely act upon the feedback they provide.
What about global servers? Will they also get some love in the form of more marketing to provide a steady influx of players? Would you like to merge them with Polish servers?
Merging isn’t something we want to do at the moment. When preparing the transfers from Thalia to Wyvern and from Paravar to Naravar, we found that this is not something players necessarily want. As for more marketing, we don’t plan on starting any new campaigns before mobile is out, but there are currently campaigns that get us some players. However, no big push until mobile as it will be the thing that should draw a lot of players in.
What do you think about the rewards provided by events? Do you think they provide enough to encourage players? What do you think about adding some really unique rewards?
As for the unique prizes, we don’t want players who participate in a given event to get too big of an advantage over those who don’t participate. A unique reward would need to really be something, e.g. player suggested an item that provides 100% upgrade chance - such a reward would definitely be overpowered. For now, we want to stick to providing utility items that are currently available in the game. Also, don’t forget about the cosmetic rewards as they are pretty unique.
As for other rewards, we don’t want players to log in just to do events because they’ll be able to make up for all the time they weren’t playing, so they can’t be too overpowered compared to normal content. Player activity on the servers should be constant for the health of the game. As for the rewards for the Easter event (xp, pxp, etc.), they were calculated to be 35% better on average than normal solo activities.
However, we’ll be looking at the survey results and if most players feel the event wasn’t very rewarding, we’ll consider adjustments.
Weren’t limit introduced so that you can really boost the rewards? We feel that despite having this additional level of control, you cut them too much.
The events at the beginning of Broken Ranks were simply a copy-paste of what we had in the Pride of Taern. With time, we started playing with the formula, trying to introduce new elements. This is something we’re learning to do as we speak and we’ll for sure analyze all the feedback we get to find the golden ratio of player satisfaction and server balance.
What do you think about the rewards we get from quests? Don’t you think they’re too low versus what we can currently get by just doing anything else?
Before the release of Broken Ranks, each quest had their rewards adjusted but we didn’t want to make them too good so that players don’t have the feeling that doing quests is mandatory to progress. However, the game became much faster with Broken Ranks (e.g. by adding various modifiers to combat rewards) and we see that the quest rewards just aren’t what they used to be. The problem is that making changes here is not easy as we’d have to take a look at every quest and manually adjust rewards that are sometimes given at different stages and depend on the path taken. We might do such an adjustment in the future while we look at tasks.
Speaking of tasks, are you going to do anything about tasks for Cell and Laboratory Key which are very difficult and make these low-level instances inaccessible to new players?
Yes, this is definitely on our to-do list, together with other adjustments to both V1 and Fyodor/GMO.
What do you think about scripted fights in quests? Are you going to add more of them?
The scripted fights are tightly connected to the plot but we understand that the implementation is sometimes seen by players as a bug. We plan to modify these fights to make it easier to understand for players.
Don’t you think that rewards at Tier 3 are much better than Tier 4? Is this intended and do you have any plans on pushing high-level players from Tier 3 and into the content meant for their level? This is especially egregious when looking at Hvar and the pxp it provides.
When adjusting rewards for Hvar, we took into account instances that are currently being soloed, i.e. V2 and Tit. We wanted Hvar to be an attractive instance, especially at the start, so that we don’t make the same mistake we did with Heurokratos, which was much too strong and provided not enough rewards for the dedicated level range. The pxp is probably too high there currently, but this doesn’t mean we want it to stay this way.
This situation stems from the fact that characters have become too strong and can solo content which they shouldn’t normally be able to solo. Instances such as Tit or V2 in Pride of Taern simply couldn’t be soloed. On the other hand, we don’t want to boost party-content in Tier 4, because the speed in which characters can progress is already very high and we don’t want to accelerate it further. Truth be told, the ideal solution here would be to decrease the rewards for soloing V2 and Tit but this is a difficult move to make since it’ll surely meet with outrage in the community. We don’t want a procession with torches and pitchforks coming to our office.
We are also aware that players want instances that they can finish relatively easily and quickly - solo Tier 3 is perfect for this while Tier 4 is lacking. That’s another reason why we don’t want to nerf Tier 3 without giving players something in exchange at Tier 4. One thing we consider is to add an easy version of some current instances (with some instance mechanics modified, of course). Another thing we’re thinking about is doing some adjustments to Draugul, e.g. changing the entry cost.
Why does Tier 3 have a higher guaranteed loot cap than other tiers?
When introducing this, we were aware that this might be punitive for those at the dedicated level for Tier 3 but due to the sheer number of bosses killed by level 140s at this level, the increase in loot was simply too big to allow it to happen, otherwise the market could suffer. At the moment we aren’t planning on changing anything here. If our plans to redirect high-level players to Tier 4 pan out, we may do some adjustments.
Is the next instance and zone going to be Tier 5 or Tier 4?
The next instance will definitely be Tier 4. Tier 5 is definitely coming in the future, but we can’t say if that’s going to be the next boss or the one after that.
Questions from Discord and the audience
Are drifs with elemental damage ever going to work on Archer, Druid, and Voodoo?
We don’t want to see a situation where Archers use Ice Arrow and deal fire damage. That’s the main reason. Will this ever change? When we dive deeper into damage formulas for each class, we’ll take a look at this again. In the future, we may prevent people from putting these drifs into bows and staves, as well as upgrading these weapons with damage.
Are Grandmaster Glyphs going to be usable for anything more?
We don’t like situations where items aren’t really useful and players are stuck with piles of them, but we don’t have a plan for them yet.
Did you consider making a single resource restoration/chance to hit orb/drif that works on all zones?
Not really, we think it’d lower build variety. However, we’ll likely introduce QoL changes that would make people using more than one modifier to adjust their builds to the situation.
What about Knight balance?
We have a concept of changes and we’ll start implementing and testing our ideas. The main problem we see is that Knights have no incentives to invest into better gear or drifs, all they need is HP. This makes it difficult for them to solo content. Another big problem we want to fix is that Knights don’t scale too well with levels as far as usefulness in a party goes.
Will we ever get an interface that would allow us to perform more actions at once via dialogues? E.g. converting 100 dielectrics into pxp is a pain in the ass
We’ve had this on our mind for the longest time, but although this change seems easy in general, it’s very difficult to program and make it bug-proof. The right moment will surely come for it.
Will we ever see xp lock so that tournament players can sigh with relief?
This feature would be very niche, therefore it’s not high on the list of priorities.
Are there any plans to introduce tangible rewards for achievements?
Keep your fingers crossed and maybe you’ll see this in the 2026 roadmap.
Why is this year’s roadmap so short and general?
We’re focusing more on everyday communication to give you more insight into what is coming. Not including too many details also gives us flexibility that the previous roadmaps lacked.
Act 4 when?
Soon.
In the previous interview, you mentioned changes to the marketplace - can you tell us more?
We have a list of suggestions. Some of the major ones are offers to buy, timeline of item prices, and a lot of QoL updates, like seeing the top10 lowest offers on an item. Auctions are a no.
When introducing Tier 5, are you going to add another tier of drifs and orbs after Arch?
Most likely yes, but this is still a long way away.
Do you think players will be able to kill Sidraga on the new servers with the recent buffs?
We’ll see when players get there. We hope they will. Just to be clear - the instance was tested in pre-Sidraga gear. It’s just meant to be the biggest challenge in the game currently.
Will we ever be able to filter the recent drops list?
Currently, it’s not possible for technical reasons - it’s just too much data to process for all the players.
What about binding gear to accounts instead of players?
We don’t want to do this, because it’d definitely decrease demand for rares, which is not that high at the moment anyway. The most likely way we’ll encourage players to create alts is to change the alt bonus, e.g. by adding a pxp bonus to it.
Why do the death cards take so long?
It’s a part of the punishment for dying but we understand that it’s a bit frustrating, so we may make changes to this feature in the future but it’s not a high priority. However, we’re unlikely to decrease the time the animations take.
Are there any plans to add ads to the mobile version?
No.
Are there any plans to make rares from Greater Hawk and Wendigo more easily available?
We have a plan on how to deal with this shortage and you may see it implemented this year. The bosses will most likely simply get their own instances.
Are you doing anything about overcrowded events, e.g. lempo, where players just kill one mob and the stage ends without anyone getting xp?
Our solution to this has already been tested in the Bridge Defense event with stages always lasting a certain amount of time, no matter the number of mobs killed. We wanted to see if players like this kind of thing and they did, so we’ll most likely implement it more widely in the game.
Will we see any changes to the Morana event to make it less susceptible to players trolling others?
If there are any changes, they’ll come when we dive deeper into Tier 4.
Are you thinking about adding the ability to swap between sets of skills?
Yes, this is something we want to introduce in one of the upcoming community updates.
Are we going to see some changes to PvP?
We know there aren’t too many people doing PvP currently, so we definitely want to introduce some changes to it and add more PvP content. However, definitely don’t expect this to come this year, maybe the next. We’re currently focusing much more on PvE since this is what most players want.