Featured Wynncraftian Fw S5e4 Part 4 - 12nebur27

FEATURED WYNNCRAFTIAN
Season 5, Episode 4,
Item Team Rank [4/5]

12NEBUR27

Hosted by @Pepinho!

Welcome to the fourth Staff Special Featured Wynncraftian! For the next two weeks, every two days a member of the Wynncraft Staff is going to be interviewed with questions by the community!
To submit a question please read: [This Thread]
If you have been outside of the planet Earth for some years now and don't know what Featured Wynncraftian is, let me explain it.
We feature people from the community who have done something relevant or are somewhat interesting and peculiar. They aren't always a popular member, they might be someone who we can do an interesting interview with.

If you think someone deserves Featured Wynncraftian, please nominate them: Here.
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Can you describe what the Item Maker team does in the staff team before we begin?

We started off only balancing existing items however at this point we make all newly added items and discuss just about anything related to gamebalance and in some cases even game design ;D

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Awesome! Our first question is, in situations where Item A is stronger than Item B(where Items A and B are similar level and fit similar niches), do you prefer nerfing Item A, buffing Item B, or both?

Thats quite a difficult question because it completely depends on how the items perform looking at the overall strength of items and how they are used. While we normally dont directly compare items much you get a good feeling for the overall strength of an item rather quickly if you look at items for many hours a day. I cant really give a clear answer but what i can say is that we generally dislike doing heavy nerfs because of how they will fuck up players.

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What is one thing people don't understand about items and balancing that you wish they did?

I wish that everyone understood that we arent doing the job for ourselves but for the community. Yes item balancing is a lot of fun and talking to the people on the team certianly is interesting as well, however the main force that drives us is improving the server and for whom do we want to make the server better? Before i joined the team I would have probably said that i want to make the server better for myself however at this point the thing that drives me the most is the excitement about seing the reactions of people over new items/gimmicks to the game. Despite this every now and then some people seem to get the idea that we are doing all these rebalance changes simply because why not. Usually this occours when they are unhappy with some of the decisions we made (at times because they have a different view on things than we do and at other times simply because we fucked up big time). As a result of this misconception some of the feedback is rather unproductive and isnt taken serious by us because its not well explained even though they may have actually had a very good point.
In short, it would make proper balancing a lot easier for both us and the community if everyone understood that we are rebalancing items for them because they might end up getting less mad and explain themselves properly.

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Does it make you feel bad if you create an item that goes unnoticed or is hated by the community because it's simply "too bad" compared to other, better items?

Depends on the purpose of the item. Some items just arent meant to be as good as others. Weapons are where this becomes the most aparent. Due to the weapon baseline damages unique weapons simply cant outclass legendaries. In this case i am ok with people not really getting hyped over the item.
If however we wanted to make an item thats actually very good and should see a lot of use but it doesnt because its worse than others then that means:
a) no one gets how to use the item properly (which does frustrate me)
b) we simply fucked up and didnt make the item good enough (which is not nice but can get fixed so its not too much of an issue)
c) there might be a way too op item because of which all other possible options get ignored (this does make me because that means that we fucked up at some point in time before and we have to fix it which ends up making ppl mad at us again)
d) something is wrong in the overall item/game balance that needs tweaking (this is probably the worst of all options because it means either that some really big changes in the item balance need to happen which will make even more ppl mad or (and this is the worst ;-;) we need to yell at salto and tell him that something in the overall gamebalance is wrong and then he ll tell us that its a feature .____.)

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From what I heard the item team already conducts a lot of game balancing outside of item balancing such as the previous heal and health regen changes, will the team see the chance of expanding in both the size and extent?

Our goal is to end up not just being an item balancing team but an overall game balancing team. Because of this we are trying to get more involved in every other possible balancing area. If it was up to us we would likely push for further major balancing changes in the future.
As for increasing the size of the team... at the moment we dont desperately need new people and thus have the luxury to be extremely picky. Joining the team atm isnt really about "Hey Item Team I like making items and am probably pretty good at balancing with a bit of training". Its more like us asking ourselves what people can offer us that we dont already have and that we need to improve in. Should there ever be proper applications for the Item team then they will most likely be pretty hard to pass.
So yes it is possible that we will increase in size, however only if we find people that are really good at what we want.

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What is Wynncraft more of, a traditional MMORPG, or an overall RPG with multiplayer aspects. What would you like it to become?

At the moment wynn is more of an rpg than an mmo in my opinion. We dont have many things that require groups and those that do are viewed as a nuisance. While i would love to see wynn becoming more of an mmo in the future that would most likely require way more players per server. The wynn map is getting bigger all the time and with "only" 100 players per server we can hardly introduce group based content without it becoming very annoying.

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One of the IM team goals as you said is becoming more of a general balancement team. What do you think of a new class? Do you think Wynn should improve their 4 classes before introducing a new one?

I would love to see a new class getting added to the game and i dont really see a reason why we cant do both improving current classes and adding a new class in a single update. I am not entirely sure how long balancing the the spells of a new class would take but i can say that for the items, if we really set our mind to it, it prooobably wouldnt take more than 2months for us to make enough items so that the major gaps at all levels are filled. Improving current classes can happen alongside this because we already know the classes well. So if we ever do this kind of thing there would probably be an update in which the item team solely focusses on class balance (and adding the items of the new class).

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How did the Item Team appear and are you part of the Content Team, or something else?

Well I actually wasnt around when it first appeared. From what I can tell Pretz made a discord group with mutton ecto and bloww at some point in August. They started discussing things a lot and then Selvut joined and the team sorta became a team. No one knew about us at that point.. most CT people didnt either. With time passing more and more people were suggested and asked to join the team with me being the last one to join shortly after poke and silver. About 2 months later we started being part of the CT and were soon after made official to the community. We still enjoy quite a bit of independence from the rest of the team however because when it comes to items we are basically left to do whatever we want.

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What is your favorite item and/or the item you're really proud of creating?

Its probably either Magellan's Sail or Mudskipper. Magellan's sail because it was the first item i made completely alone and this is where i decided that i want to from now on have a very good justification for every single id on my items... not balance wise but i want every single id to fit to the name in some way (for example.. i tried giving Icarus -% water defense because he fell into the ocean.. just stuff like that)
I love Mudskipper because mine and blows intent was to make an "angry fish"-bloww. Selvut nixed its original designs 2 or 3 times completely until i finally made it tri elemental and got it ig as a non endgame unique.

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Alrighty, that's it for today! Thank you for this interview ;D

This concludes the fourth staff interview of the fifth season of Featured Wynncraftian!
Message me if you have any feedback to give.
The next interview should be in around two days!
Here you can find previous Featured Wynncraftian interviews: Interviews.​

 

wt is item team and where do i apply

 

sorry i didnt really read the thread except parts here and there but that bunny sure is cute

 

@12DaBob27 whats an item???

 

@12DaBob27 when will pandemonium get nerfed?

 

@12DaBob27 add more air spear

 

@12DaBob27 how much room is there in the cage?

 

@12DaBob27 get back in the bag

 

@12DaBob27 when will the builds we talked about get nurfed?
You're a bunny that balances items... Wynncraft is clearly in good hands lol.

 

If i didnt know better id say that you guys planned to all do these replies ;-;

YES finally someone understands it. This rabbit always gets me into a good mood every time i look at it ._.

 

funnyrabbit.jpg

 

IM isn't real

 

@12DaBob27 tl;dr nice bunny

 

@12DaBob27 Still waiting for Grillface 2, Grillface 3, Grillface 4, Grillface 5, and Grillface Omega.

 

Can confirm

 

What's balanced

 

pandemonium

 

The ultimate weapon

 

There's an IM team?