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Crowfall Founder Gives Insight into Sale in Latest Blog Post | MMORPG.com
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Edit added: Bunker Builds simply could not be made to survive the DPS output of DPS meta's, the defensive / healing scaling was simply not in their favor, and everyone knew this, which again was why they revamped the WvW system.
I know you are a Banner waver for this game, so you should have at least been keeping up with all that as it was happening. Hell, I was a casual, and I was keeping up with it.
It's a damn shame, I wanted this game. I wanted to play and enjoy some PVP-centric gameplay. I was a little less tempted by the zerging focus but then I'd just find a bigger group of people to play with.
One fundamental problem, for me, that Crowfall (And many other games, actually) had was the payoff was underwhelming. Spend all that time preparing then looking for a fight, for it to just be over in a matter of seconds. I don't have first-hand knowledge of this, only videos I've seen, in the case of Crowfall.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
When they tried to give out free keys for the beta on this very site and they couldn't give them away for FREE... it should have been a strong message that something was wrong. Instead you had the head-bobbers who just assured us that all was well.
Anyhow... that is all in the past. Can it be fixed now and can they get another bite at the apple? We shall see.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Go in the corner and play with wrapping or something.
Just for reference, I did mainly WvW, Fractals, and PvE OW.
With that said, I see what the issue is. The way you see things is that as long as it can be fixed by running cookie cutter builds, or other means, there is no problem.
For me, as I see it, if you give players the ability to make dozens of combos, but in reality only 1 or 2 are any good, that is a massive waste time and effort on the part of the development team.
It also is a dishonest game design, as it wastes resources to give the illusion of choice, when in reality, there isn't one, and ideally, the game would have been better designed and easier to develop and build upon if they removed those kinds of wasted things, that at the end of the day serve no advantage to the players.
Now, I call these balance issues, because they set up within the game a disparity in power between builds, in some cases such a massive disparity in power between builds, making it so that the player cannot overcome these design deficiencies even with good gameplay.
In your view, as long as they can be fixed, (IE: Just play the Meta) there is no problem.
That IMHO, does not appeal to the modern PvP gamer.
When it comes to PvP games, players want their skill as a player to be the dividing factor, not the toon itself to be able to carry a inferior player.
This is one of the few things that GW2 did right, was that they Maxed Leveled and fully evened out the players in sPvP, there was no gear/level disparity in that platform. In WvW, they up leveled players, so that again, there was no level disparity, while up leveling was not a perfect system, it was, to their credit, a way to make for more balanced gameplay in a PvP environment.
I understand in your view, that level/gear disparity is not a balance issue, as you explained, as far as you see things, someone can simply just level up, or grind gear, as such, to you, this is not a balance problem.
However, To people that want to play a PvP game, at least in the modern sense, they want to be able to just get into the game and PvP not need to do a bunch of PvE crap tp get to the PvP.
In fact when I first started playing, one of the common gripes among the WvW players was that they needed to farm PvE content to fund the WvW war efforts. That is why, Not sure if you know this at all, as it might have been outside your scope of content played, but they removed the cost to repair gear because WvW players launched a gripe about this, and they made it so that if you were outmanned on the battle field you did not suffer any equipment damage from dying.
They also later after world mergers and a revision to their linking system, removed the PvE crafting stations from WvW, to remove ques and the like, so that inactive players, or Non-PvPers, would have little to no incentive to be out in WvW content.
This is Something, I think Crowfall should have paid attention to. Hence learning from other games and what they did wrong and right.
There seems a huge lack of that going on to be honest.
That is, IMHO, huge mistake that Crowfall made with live, was putting in a PvE gatekeeper, where players would get into the game and need to do a lot of PvE before you got to really get into the PvP, and even then, allowing for issues of gear, levels, and build, to throw off the game play on the actual PvP battlefields.
They also had shit PvE, so.. making some long ass PvE tutorial for a game that had shit PvE.. was.. IMHO.. not a smart move.
Even GW2, for all it's flaws did realize that level/gear disparity was a bad way to make a good PvP game mode, and while they could not fully fix that much with their WvW, they did address that problem directly with sPvP. Personally, I think they should have made it so that players used their sPvP builds for WvW. That would have made for a lot better WvW gameplay.
In this regard, simply put, Crowfall if they planned to be competitive in the WvW market, needed to build a solid, well designed, and engaging PvP game, that could rival what other games like GW2 were already offering, which, the absolute truth here is, they didn't.
And they marketed this as a PvP game, a Throne War game, not a PvE crafter/builder game, or dungeon runner, this was marketed as a Throne War PvP game, that means everything rested squarely on them needed to get the PvP right, and.. well.. as we all know.. they didn't.
That is like trying to market a pair of gloves to be touch phone capable, and they don't really work with your touch phone. It does not matter what else they do, the people that bought them, bought them to be able to use their phone while wearing them, and if they do not do that, and do it well, they are shit pair of gloves, regardless of all other factors.
Now some people might be like.. No, No, No, but the fact they didn't work with a phone, even if that is what their entire sale point was, is not what killed them, it was this guard on the thumb that didn't really protect your knuckle.
Which is what most of these people sound like when they are talking about Crowfall.
If they made the PvP right, balanced, fun, and engaging, they could have just dropped the PvE and made a BR, Arena, or straight up PvP game, and still been a success story, because Pure PvP is in fact popular.
They made a bad PvP game, end of discussion.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Just like I enjoy playing me some golf at the local half course, I rent the cart for the day, I laugh, drink, and have some fun with my buds as we knock some balls into the water traps, but even if I enjoying playing, I still won't watch a golf game even if you paid me.
That does not change the fact that professional golfing is insane profitable for some courses, and why a lot of smaller courses exist at all.
Hence the idea they could have just pumped out a BR and had that carry them.
With that put out.
Personally, I liked the targeting, it had a good feel between action combat and assisted targeting, which made the game more enticing for older less twitch intensive players, like myself.
I admit, It did take a little getting used to to follow the prompts in combat to execute combos and retaliation and the like, not what I would call a huge issue, it was a unique feature to Crowfall, and they did have a very fun feature with that retaliation ability, IMHO. But hardly some insurmountable problem, and something that was easily mastered during that long ass PvE tutorial they gave you.
As for Zerg Domination, it was marketed as a Throne War game. Not sure what to tell you on that one, as, that's how Large Scale Open World Throne War battles work, you played GW2, so you should already know that in WvW, the maps and top tiers get dominated by the side with the largest guilds and most active people.
This is a no brainer to anyone that has kept current playing Throne war/WvW games.
As such, I wager those complaints came from people who were stuck in the past of 20 years ago, where their little micro guild of 10ish people may have mattered, or played on some dead WvW like FC, where solo/small group camp flippers actually mattered, and had this illusion their little strike force guild was going to place a integral role.
It's been a lot of years since those old games, and the landscape has long changed, modern gamers have adopted to how the games are played these days, and what tactics it takes to dominate and win, and love it or hate it, large zerg guilds are what dominate Throne War games.
That was just the nature of that kind of game, which says a lot about the people that whined and complained about that, and less about the game itself.
Which brings us back to my first point, that started this discussion.
As I said, they made the game with all it's imbalances, because they were working from the premise that larger battles would balance out the class/level/gear power disparity, encouraged on by the old DAOC players that cried "Imbalance is Balance" ensuring them on their own private forums and also in public forums, that all would be well, if they did that.
Did it fail? Yes.. it did.. Which goes back to what I said about balancing for small scale, if you balance for 1 v1, it will balance for 1000 vs 1000.
By making it good for small scale (Which Crowfall did not do) they could then made a game around small scale strike combat, and those delusional stuck in yesteryear players that still think DAOC could make it today in todays market if they could only get a good engine and graphics update, could have taken their 10-ish person guild, and actually done content and been meaningful, because they could have made content scaled down for them.
Right now, they are dead in the water, not because of bad PvE, but because of poorly balanced gameplay, and outside a full revamp of class balance, I have no idea how they plan to breath life into Crowfall and still keep it to it's original design of a Throne War game, when the people that thought they wanted a Throne War game, really didn't... LOL.
Wishing the new company the best their accusation, good luck to them.
Issue #1: Game allowed THOUSANDS of players to nutcup ally. Only 200ish fit in a zone. Total. A game can exist with thousand player alliances. A game can exist with 200ish player zones. A game CANNOT exist with both together.
Issue #2: Maps were too small. The blob could get from 1 part of a zone to another in a minute. No tactics required. Just blob around.
Issue #3: The game systems did not fit together. EK served nearly zero purpose. They switched from their initial skill progression to a 100% RNG drop model. VIP was pointless except for skipping the tutorial and respecing. Go farm 20 hours to get no better at that skill. Guy next to you got his "purple" drop in 5 minutes. Then the way it worked the progression of the RNG grew exponentially. The Tutorial was totally disconnected from the actual game. In general... nothing fit together.
Issue #4: Even given the small zone caps, game performance in actual sieges was very uneven. I had pretty good performance but I was on Discord with lots of people getting disconnected (then locked out of the zone in a queue). If your game is going to be a Territory Control PvP one... you need to be able to support a few hundred people fighting when you launch. I mean, Dude even admits that he never played past the Tutorial, supposedly because the game ran like shit for him. Maybe, just MAYBE that should ring a bell about how important of a factor that was in the game's downfall?
Dude: I cant play because the game runs so bad
People: So that was a major reason for the game failing? That a Territory Control PvP game struggled with it's performance?
Dude: No. It was because an assassin could kill 4 guys in the perfect setup..
Yes. Somewhere down the list... wayyyy down the list... is class balance. Thats the kind of shit you argue about when you have a fully functional and coherent game.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
Please stop being stupid, or at the very least, go be stupid someplace else.
2. To be clear you are saying that the engine worked well and was not a major factor in the game failing? Just to be CLEAR on that. Please confirm so not as to be "taken out of context"
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
I keep thinking about this while reading this thread
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Anyway, lets get something clear, I don't enjoy being called a liar by someone that spent the last 4 years crying about the terms and conditions of the contracts they signed, who then tries to say they sign off big budget construction contracts.
Anyone that signs contracts like that, knows their shit about contracts, and the fact that keep crying about the contracts you signed off on, means you are either, the dumbest moron to ever sit in that kind of position, and by god, didn't get the job based on any work related merits, or you're a complete laying sack of shit.
With that said, I don't care if you believe me or not.. you can fuck right off with your butthurt little shit attitude.
I would have thought the answer was obvious.
In more relevant news:
Who is happy that Walton is the one sticking with Crowfall instead of Coleman? If you had to pick one of the two to turn it around, is he the one you would pick?
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
As an old EQ1 player, lag has just been a part of MMO's for me, so, if the Janky was lag related, I didn't see it as anything other than.. MMO's have lag.
2) While there was a lot of talk on the GW2 forums about small groups and solo players in GW2 WvW, that was really only for the lower Tiers, mainly due the lack of coverage, something that a lot of people here who talk about Crowfall do not understand.
But, once you got up past Tier 3, there was no room for solo small group play, the maps were way too well covered, so, unless you planned to be a scout, solo and small group had no place, as you were not going to go camp flipping or tower capping, without some backup, and the other team, often with their scouts, could respond fast enough to not only stop you, but also kill you and then dance on your body.
3) Believe this or not, GW2, was in fact designed for 1 v 1, as if you notice they didn't build with any kind of role based classes, every class was able to stand on their own, and in their own right. While the balance issues were a little wonky and the disparity between optimized and not was insane, a necro and a ranger could duel, just like a thief and a guardian could duel, and the outcome would be unknown.
While the system had a lot of issues, and to be dead honest, they didn't do a good job, as there were a huge amount of power imbalances, between optimized, and also with the elite spec and then the whole trying to make roles, as well as some classes having distinct advantages in combat, but for a lot of those situations, there was no way to fix them. IE: Thief. High Mobility and Stealth, just made them OP, but they could not really do much about that, without totally nerfing the class to oblivion.
It got really muddy as time went on. But from the start, you could see that the goal was in fact to make every class viable in and of their own right, ergo 1 v 1.
So GW2 was a game where it was mainly built on the 1 v 1 base, and as irony would have it, it was a game you have put a lot of hours into.
Now you may think it was 5 v 5 because the sPvP arena maches were 5 v 5, but you had 5 people and 3 control points, so you legit, could not actually fight 5 v 5 and win the game, you had to fight in smaller groups to both be able to take and defend points at the same time, and you needed to hold at least 2 points to win. That means most of the fights were going be around 2 v 2 or the 1 defender of a point, fighting off others till back up arrived.
So it was not scaled to 5 v 5, it was in fact, made with the 1 vs in mind, which is also why it was such a good solo game as well... 1 vs P/E
4) This seems to be something I can say a Million times and people still don't seem to get it, It's a PvP game.
Not a PvE Game with PvP, Crowfall was a PvP game, everything else was.. as best I can explain this.. just fluff.
In fact, they changed how harvesting worked from Beta to Live, as when I did beta, they had seasons, and the best harvesting was done in the spring/summer, and then by winter, harvesting was pretty much a joke and something you would not even bother with. So, I was expecting a derby style harvesting at the start, and then by winter being doing the PvP, like I did in Beta.
Yah.. not sure why that one turned to shit too. But anyway..
But Crowfall is a PvP game, as such, the way to tell if they mad ea good pvP game, is to be able to to tell the PvE in the game to go jack off in the corner and the game would still be a good game.
Now, to really grasp this idea, to see it first hand, you know that in GW2, sPvP was put separate from PvE. They were totally separate game modes, legit, Anet took their sPvP, and totally separated it from their PvE, and people enjoyed the sPvP for it was, a pure pvp platform. Thus the PvP in GW2, was tested as viable in it's own right, now could it have been a stand alone game?
Well.. IMHO.. while GW2 sPvP was not good enough to be it's own stand alone game, lets face hard facts here, we both know that it was better than the PvP in Crowfall.. and that is why Crowfall failed.
If you don't think you are making an ass of yourself, you would be wrong.
There was also huge issues with skill lag in world bosses, I remember missing a few MAW's because my attacks would just not go off, and they would kill the Shaman before my lag cleared up. SB was another common culprit.
2) Low Tiers may, and I say that tentatively, MAY, have had a full map on reset, but I saw a picture, someone from ET posted, about how many players they had, when the map crashed, and it was like 16 players total to cover 4 maps. So.. I'll just take your word that they were full. When you got to the higher tiers, there was no room for the little guys, just the way the game was.
The thing that people miss is that Crowfall was not even built with the idea of tiers, where your rag tag team of casual fair weather players could gather and slap fight it out, and the hardcore MFers could play on their own tiers, it was set up so that the whole game was Tier 1, and you were gonna face JQ, regardless if you were vastly unprepared for it or not.
3) GW2: No class was built for healing, the healing and defensive stats in GW2 did not scale well against the DPS stats, and even with Water based Elementalist and Heal Spec Guards, where not anywhere near able to keep up against Mob or player DPS, which is why Zerk was Meta, and remained such for a very.. very.. long time, might still be, might have been dethroned, not sure on that one.
I know druds became some kind of quality healer in the raid scene, and also in some T4 fractals, but.. I really was on my way out at that time, so.. maybe after HoT, with the rise of Raids they converted to more team based 5 v 5, or what have you.
But core was built around the idea that you could solo with every class, in both PvE and PvP.
4) bullshit, sPvP in GW2's didn't have an economy, you played the game, so you knew damn well that there was absolutely zero economy in sPvP at all. No Economy at all. It was all about the ranks, titles and skins, that changed a bit with the reward tracks, but with core, there was no economy in sPvP.
As far as WvW went, it was a flat out end game money sink for most players that were lookin for the next tier of challenge after capping their toon, players and guilds would do PvE crap to make money to fund WvW. On top of that, the PvE was not related to the WvW in any way, it was just a pointless grind, like doing World Bosses, Jumping Puzzles or Dungeon/Fractal Runs, purely to harvest gold, and no impact on WvW at all.
Again, It got better later, with the reward tracks and no longer needing to pay for upgrades, but Core, there was no economy in WvW, you went into that, knowing damn well you were going to take a fiscal loss for the glory of the battles.
In fact, you might remember when you needed to do WvW to get a Legendary weapon, many PvE players hated that part, with a fiery passion, the cries on the forums were.. no joke, legendary... because it was not only, not small group or solo friendly if you had the shitty luck to be on a higher tier server, so you needed to be in a larger WvW guild if you wanted to be competitive, and beyond that annoying ass stuff, it was costly to do at all.
Which brings us to a point.
Crowfall was a badly made PvP game.
But it was a PvP game, first and foremost.
So yes, the PvE fluff was just bullshit in the background, and the test if they made a good game would be, if they removed it, could the game stand on it's own merits of being a fun PvP game.
Now, to really grasp the merit of that test, and the disparity, between a poorly made PvP game mode like Crowfall, and a well made PvP Game mode, the WvW players in GW2, would lose money, and do enterally unrelated PvE grind bullshit, within the guilds and discords I was on, there was a common consensus that it was annoying as all hell to have to do that just to make game money, just so they could continue to partake in the thrill of the WvW battles.
So.. again.. it was PvP game. PvE cannot kill a PvP game, shitty PvP kills a PvP game.
But see, that was another huge problem with Crowfall.. as from what I have been told, a lot of backers it seems, were small groups and solo's, and they did in fact apply, and also expected the game to be viable for them as well, and got upset when they were not catered to.
In fact, that was in fact one of Slapshots largest gripes that large guilds dominated the game and his micro guild was not able to be competitive or important, and according to Slap, he was very much not alone.
So there was a lot wrong going on.. no doubt there.
For me.. I still sit on the fact that whole thing failed because they had set up a poorly balanced PvP game, even GW2, up-level people for WvW to establish an equal footing, but Crowfall just let all the imbalance fly, levels/class/race/gear, all of it, urged on by those that chanted "Imbalance is balance" as I said, if the scaled the balance to be 1 v 1, or even if they set it up to be say, 5 v 5, they would have been able to just stuff in some small scale game mode to placate those micro guild masses, who really had no idea what a Throne War game was really about.
But they didn't, they just expected massive open world battles to somehow magically hide how badly balanced the game actually was.
I really have no idea how they plan to fix this mess.. but I wish them well, none the less.
In any case, I legit believe that if someone made a standalone game like the WvW of GW2, it would be insanely popular, and I was somewhat expecting Crowfall to be that game, the WvW of GW2, just better.
Ideally more PvP focused classes not bogged down with needing to balance for PvE content, with better more fitting balance, as well as meaningful and purpose driven PvP.
Anyway.. and while it had a good feel in Beta that it could have become that, and so much more, I don't need to say how badly I was let down at launch, but I still wish the new company well.
The gripes around the blob guilds were twofold.
1. The game launched without the intermediary campaign worlds. There was supposed to be the Eternal Kingdoms and then an actual 3 way RvR type campaign and another that would be 6-12 way, and then guild vs guild finally there should be the dregs which was supposed to be the FFA worlds. The game at launch went from tutorial world to the Dregs. That caused a huge gap. They attempted to correct this after launch, but it was too late and also by this time the Dregs were dead except for siege times so the same guilds just blobbed into the other ruleset because they were bored.
2. The zones in the Dregs were too small for the alliance/guild sizes. The zone cap was 200 but you had guilds and alliances in the thousands. Common sense would cause one to realize those numbers didn’t make sense. There is nothing inherently wrong with either, but both cannot exist together. Then on top of that, the zones themselves were tiny. So within seconds of taking a POI, it would be reswarmed by the Blob.
You keep making the inane argument that small guilds cried because they didn’t understand the type of game Crowfall was. In fact, we understood quite well that the game, as it was launching, was doing so with the fatal flaws outlined above. The game was missing the parts which would have allowed non-Zerg guilds to play and have fun, while leaving the Dregs to the Blob alliances. We said this PRIOR to launch, when folks like you were saying just to launch the game and it was fine. This didn’t just “happen”. It was glaringly evident that these features were missing in beta and there were many, many threads and posts in the beta forums begging Artcraft to close the gap between the Tutorial and the Dregs before launch.
Since launch, Artcraft has repeatedly acknowledged the errors I outlined above. It’s not Slapshot saying it. It was Walton acknowledging it.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018