Info Im Team Applications + Item Rebalance Changelog

Dear god, okay, I can't be the only one getting a bit annoyed at not just the scope, but the >frequency< of these >massive< balance changes. Some items are meant to be better than others; it seems like the item team is trying to equalize absolutely everything, and a MMO where every item is equal is anti-variety and annoying. I'm not saying that's how it is now, and I don't mean literally the same, and im saying that's how "balance" isn't suposed to work, it's just a bit overwhelming. 200+ items changed and 100+ items added, after only barely 2 months after an update with 90+ items added and 500+ things changed.

It just, between the increasing frequency and scale of these updates, along with the constant ping-ponging off buffs/nerfs on the same items here and there, it seems like the Item Team can't make up its mind on what kind of trends they want and don't want to see in terms of item use. For some it seems the instant they see an item used in a creative and perhaps to greater use than they intended, they just nerf it (or vice versa) instead of respecting that creativity and letting those players relish in their discoveries. While some cases like Amulet of Rejuvination and the Hive Pieces WERE causing some extreme imbalance that needed to be addressed, the vast majority of items were not extreme problems, and theyre changing bi-monthly! It seems that quite often in the changelog's reasoning (mostly for nerfs) that the imbalances in question are a super viral issue that's being abused by loads of people, and they're looking at the ways things CAN be abused as opposed to how MUCH they are being so by players.

Don't get me wrong, I have no serious qualms with most of the individual changes in and of themselves, it's just hard for me to appreciate the work put into it because the reasoning and buffs/rebuffs, nerfs/renerfs just seem all over the place sometimes. It also seems hard for me to get legit replies on my speeches like this: By "legit" replies i mean those that don't politically correct me or pick out one concept or 'example' of my post and respond as if theyre the whole point. No, this is a multimodal issue I am having here, and I would like,

preferably from an Item team member,

an earnest reason/explanation as to

why these changes have become so much larger-scale AND at a market-strangling frequency, and why among the many community complaints over some not-so desired changes, why the item team likes to so adamantly underplay the potential negative effects of this increasing scale and frequency.

As I said before, it just seems like the ITem team is having an equal to or greater difficulty than even the player community at being consistent. I'm just surprised to see hundreds more changes in such a short time span since last time. It seems like more builds that are fun and greater than average are being disrupted or broken entirely, more than the amount of harmony in game balance being created. (in a server where tbh even 'decent' builds have fairly easy time with 90% of enemy design on the server.) perhaps we could try just a little less time on controlling item and builds and more on the difficulty of the PvE and mechanics of PvP themselves?

(Also not really a big complaint but why are ALL the new items in past months have to be Tier 3/4 loot chest exclusive? It seems like it's over-congesting Loot Runs nowadays, and with more player slots per-server, 100 to be exact, there are lower quantities of servers running at once and thus even less fresh loot chests to go around)

That was a long post, but rather than handle it in pieces across the forums I just went and splayed all my feelings at once here.

 

i skimmed through most of your post and this is the one part that i think really need answered, there is literally no reason for them to be loot exclusive, excluding accessories obvi

 

There needs to be more ways for items to generate, if they can't be drops.

 

Yeah, this is the one point that while not the focus of my post, I stand by 100% doubt-free. IT's getting way to hard to get any one of the hundreds of new items as of late, due to the limits of loot running and availability. I'd be a little more happy if they could be extended to appear in ANY tier loot chest. (except accessories)

This is another example of the staff team not really knowing what they're aiming for. Within the past year or so they started encouraging Mob Grinding by removing Quests from Item Bomb effects, doubling/tripling most mob XP output, and decreasing Loot Bonus's effects on Loot Chests. But now they're effectively discouraging Mob Grinding by adding hundreds of items available only in the rarest of the overworld's loot chests, inflating their worth and in some cases nerfing these items and their worth in the following update. What are they trying to achieve here??

Also I took another look through the wynndata full changelog, and... what's with these very morbid items named after oddly specific disabilities and fatal medical conditions? Aneurysm? Asphyxia? Dsynomia? Cardiac Arrest??? (really, wtf kind of name is that for a piece of equipment?)

 

- Names from myths (And make them into the unqiue in shame)
- Cool and long random words (Including the random language)
- Smashing keyboard (Like pruklisllgdilfllxy)
- Just writing down random sentence
- Memes/References

This is how items are created

 

Most items’ names are meant to at least loosely match the ids on the item; for example, Asphyixia is the condition of the brain not receiving enough oxygen, which explains all the negative air-related ids on the item.

 

Breh, I know the relationships of how items are named XD I just think it's a bit inappropriate and not really cool-sounding at all to basically inscribe the name of a disease (cardiac arrest, aka heart attack) that some player who finds it had a family member suffer the condition shortly beforehand; it's gonna happen eventually. XD I relate it to the likes of using a racial/cultural slur in the name of a sports team; sensitive subject.

I dunno, alot of things just seems weird about this item update...

 

The issue here is that, before the item team became a thing, there were only really two item makers; myself, and Salted. Tantibus and AscendedKitten had made a handful of items, but they're mostly ones that ended up being extremely overpowered, such as Suppression, The Gambler, and Burnout. Salted, even, hardly made items after a point, only doing some dungeon items, up to Corrupted Lost Sanctuary, before I started making them. And, since it was an entirely new system, I had very little idea what I was doing in terms of balance. This means that a lot of items were way too strong, and a lot of items were near useless. Examples include Thermosphere, Black Arrow, and Resistance before the change.

With the Item Team, I finally got an extremely in-depth, unbiased view of what needed to happen with items to get them to a more balanced state. We're well aware that not every item should be as strong as another. Heck, this is something I've had to rag on the IM team a few times, since they often propose buffs to items that are meant to be just sort of boring, iffy filler pieces. The trick here is that the curves of certain stats on items and the accessibility of certain element combos, I completely failed at balancing and providing. Thanks to @Xavi and his overzealous examination of element gaps, we're filling in spaces where there needs to be made new things. However...

...in regards to the actual drop pool? It's full, pretty much. I have a specific baseline that I calculated to try and prevent the oversaturation of item drops. Items that can be found by any method, be it mobs or loot chests are called "obtainables" and these are the most common. Of them, there are 72 uniques, 36 rares, and 18 legendaries of each item type. That is to say, spears, wands, bows, daggers, helmets, chestplates, leggings, and boots, in addition to the normal items, of which there are 48 of each weapon and about 32 armours. This, in total, is approximately 1328 items, spread across all levels, though I may have gotten my math a bit wrong. This means, averaged, there are about 13 potential item drops at any given level, and I already have a lot of trouble finding the item I want from mobs. For instance, I was searching for a White Storm, a unique item, a while ago. I ended up trying to farm enemies to get it, but I got just about everything EXCEPT White Storm. By the time I got it, I already was in range for the next helmet I needed. Adding many more drops to this pool is an extremely risky move that I'd rather not do unless more classes are added.

Loot-exclusive items, excluding accessories, get half this value. 36 uniques, 18 rares, and 9 legendaries of each item type, so that's 504 items. Now, loot-exclusives are heavily weighted towards appearing in loot chests over normal obtainables, so when you open up a T3/4 chest, it's pretty likely you have about 5 items per level available to find. Accessories are an exception, as due to their odd status they get the normal drop in addition to their loot drop, so there will eventually be 108 unique, 54 rare, and 27 legendaries of each accessory type in loot chests, totalled up to 567 items. If we add this together with other loot drops, that becomes 1071, or about 11 potential items to find per level. Imagine that being on normal grind mobs!

And moreover on topic, the items themselves. The main changes that we're examining are "raw" curves right now. the vast majority of the changes were on items with raw health and raw spell, and we're gunning for raw melee soon, as there WAS no curve for those stats! They were pretty much given out at random, which led to items like Millennium being extremely overpowered, or cases like Antim where before, it had 5 raw melee...at Lv 99. That's utterly useless and inconsequential. Most of the changes here are simply us re-examining the raw curve, and we believe that while it may cause some market panic in the now, it will be much more worth it for the balance of the game in the end.

I wrote this in about ten minutes after coming home from work in a state of sleep-deprivation drunkness, so excuse any mistakes. I'll probably come back to this and address any specific complaints you have further, so do feel free to respond as I probably didn't answer everything you wanted.

 

Judging from this and the health regen complain you had last time, I get that you’re anti any QoL changes to items in general. We get that, heck I used to feel the same way as you do. But being a part of the bigger picture and looking at everything as a whole changed my perspective.

Wynncraft is a very incomplete game with active development, supported by a very active community. With new items, new mobs, new game mechanics, a slight imbalance can cause unfair and drastic change to the meta, as well as revising old mechanics to make sure they are not out of date. This is wt the item team do, to make sure items are fair and fun to use, sure some items are better than others, but they should all roughly provide a similar level of fun when u make builds with them.

Let’s think back wt the game is half a year ago before item team is a thing. Multi Hive set, easily 10/4 mana without real intel investment, mage heal op, hpr% does nothing, raw spell build is the only build that can kill Qira, melee builds are so powerful without any downsides, items are literally all over the place. With accumulating adjustments to respective mechanics we finally get to how the game currently is, where your effort and investments are worth and not denied becoz “it’s not meta”

Every time you see and fear that 500+ item changed, that’s one mechanic fixed for the better of the game. Think about how we actually went through 500+ items just so everyone can have a fairer gameplay, and don’t just lash out on us because your favourite item got nerfed for the right reason

 

I think you have a very good point that shouldn't be ignored. I must say, the constant ping-pong nerfs/buffs of certain items is getting more or less ridiculous at this point. I also see silvahs point, just only partially. I don't fully agree in part with this mentality and I don't feel any of the current responses to the criticism AmbassadorArt has given have fully addressed his point properly (Selvuts response made some good points, but it didn't seem to directly address certain points). The Item Team has a tough job, and in their position they will often be seen in poor light, it's just a fact that can't be denied. I see this struggle with the Item Team too often, they put a seemingly immense amount of work into balance, but at the cost of the communities unrest and frustration. Whilst of course this is a battle of perspectives, and all perspectives should be considered when giving constructive criticism, I think the item team has a very important question to ask themselves, is perfection and balance everything? I understand the item team listens to the community, and I'm certain are keen on improving communication with the community, but at some point you have to stop disregarding the opinions of those who disagree with the way you are doing things as "just mad that their favorite items are getting nerfed". Ambassador brought up some very good points, and so have others.

Perspective, Perspective, Perspective..

 

Still mad Bovine cuff wasn't made untradable :l

 

I agree perspective is a very important thing in the current topic. I'll answer some of the more "core" issues with the changes and communication im sure you and other people are wary of here.

While new people and, well, less experienced players that only just been serious about wynn recently might not know, the Item Team is actually made up of active veteran players, that is, we all have been through the struggles of trying to get CTs listen to our opinions before. With that in mind, you can bet that we understand how community thinks and how to adjust as much as possible.

Is "just mad that their favorite items are getting nerfed" an overused excuse? probably, but the thing is we have considered how the community would approach a patch everytime, especially for mechanic changes like heals/hpr, or curve changes like raw spell and melee. Market is a touchy subject for obvious reason but are what people always complain about. While we know changes can affect prices to a degree we cannot prioritise market values over the actual gameplay. Indeed trading is basically wt end game bored players do, but bare in mind that made up of less than 5% of our game's total player base. We must consider how gameplay feels like for the remaining 95% (Which that also includes better communication and information flow with those casual players, where, there are and will be systems in place to further improve that).

Moreover, we do include market values in our consideration as much as possible especially for major changes, such as making the "best xxx in game" remain as the best xxx of that item type. But for mythics, only necessary changes are made to them due to how large the money transfer is, thats why we minimise "ping pong"-ing the stats of those. All Mythics should feel fun and worth it to use and isnt bluntly overpowered (old az)

Is "perfection and balance everything?", this is not something we need to ask ourselves because the answer is obvious, "no". However, there is only so much we can do. Instead of thinking us as the people that initiate changes and causing earthquakes, its better to think of us as clean up guys, cleaning up the messes left behind by old and new changes, meta shifting and mechanics revamps. Do keep in mind this is a game under active development, changes and updates are to be constantly expected and we the item team are the bridge to make the adjustments less drastic. instead of going for "perfection and balance" its more like "hey how about we duct tape everything so it doesnt fall apart"

To further answer the previous question again, try and imagine the following scenario:
If you bring a street orphan who has done nothing but salvaging garbages for a living in an underdeveloped country to a paradise mansion with 3 buffet a day, is the kid gonna be happy and well adjusted in an instant? the answer is no, but is it better to leave him on the street? the answer is probably no as well. :thonking:

Anyway, we always have channels for people to express their complains and suggestions, this thread is set up for the purpose of better information exchange and communication, we also have people on discord almost 24/7 to answer any of your questions no matter how big or small. Just tag any item team members would do

 

I see where you are coming from, and I'm glad you agree that perspective is a major factor in these types of issues. I do acknowledge that the item team is made up of active veteran players, and I've known some of the members of the item team for quite some time so I can easily sympathize with them and their goals. While it's obvious the item team see themselves in a way that makes them, as you call it, the "clean up guys", the community see's this from a difference angle. From your perspective you are fixing and balancing, from theirs you are breaking their builds they put large amounts of effort and time into. Not everyone wants balance and perfect harmony among items, and I think some of the newfound frustration is coming from the frequency of these changes. I mean take az for example, it keeps going from bad to good to good to bad practically every month ( Yes I know the powder slot buff may have made it too good for its level and I know the item team dislikes this and wants to to be in its correct "place" ). The item team wants mythics to be good but not overpowered, but seemingly doesn't grasp that players don't want to pay stacks upon stacks of le for just "good". There are non-mythic counterparts for that. This is a good example of the importance of balance but also fun, and also a good example of the differences in perspectives between the Item Team and community.

I just think that the Item Teams values differ from some of the communities values. To the item team it is largely about balancing and fixing items that seem out of place, and to a lot of the endgame community its about enjoying the game and making op builds. When their builds are being changed up so often they get frustrated, which is understandable. (Of course you have the consider the rest of the playerbase that are not endgame, but the reality of it is that the majority of casual non-endgame players don't care about balance).

 

indeed, however thats never going to go anywhere.

Its obvious that community enjoys op things, a point where its too overused that i didnt even bother to bring it up on my other posts, but doesnt mean they should be or intend to be that way. There are "op" things that are designed to be "op" from a community perspective but are actually balanced, take accelerator for example, literally 2 hours after being found people are screaming its gonna be nerfed coz it looks op, but these are the places where the experience of item balancing comes in. This shows how the Item Team are aware and actually values how builds play out when we make items, to give you guys items of the best of quality, good, fun and enjoyable without stepping away from boundaries.

Making everything and unintended things too good does not mean quality gameplay, one shotting everything might seems fun at first but it really isnt if its not challenging. For example, you wouldnt find grinding level 1 zombies with a lv 100 build fun, coz its boring, imagine a broken world where you can do that to everything, thats how wynn was before and thats why it isnt right now.

In regard of communication, I think you yourself pointed out the answer to why communication can never be fully accepted by both sides. People wants to be op but its our job to make sure it doesnt always ended up like that. There are limits to how things should be. There are reasonable "good" and there are "wayy too good".

Lets take Az for example again, I think we can all agree that it got changed for far too many times, but this is also why low level mythics are hard to balanced, coz mythics are designed to be wayy better than other things, but not that far away. Can I guarantee you Az wont get changed again? probably not. But does that means its gonna break your builds? definitely not. If you really think about it, we seldom break builds really, if there are builds that are broken then the reason for those are obvious, and its not like we do that on a wimp. Lets take Shimmersight as an example, it went through months of discussion and argument and community feedback posts before we decided, we always make sure we take in as many opinions and different perspectives as possible, but the fact remains, there will always be people that overlook buffs and focus on nerfs, there will always be people that only think about their own builds, and there will always be complains.

Nerfing from OP to good doesnt mean its not good, its just not broken, and people will always think its bad.

We dont value that differently, its just we have a job to do, and you are just playing a game. In fact, there are players that take the game and balance seriously and help us do balancing on a casual and opinion based methods, we would appreciate nothing more than community members to tell us directly what they value and how things they think should be. However, its only fine for you guys to look at yourselves and see the loses to your own character, but for us, even when we fully understand that, and we value that, there are simply more to it than meets the ordinary player's eyes.

 

Of course you have a job to do, but the opinions of the player-base is the most valuable and most raw viewpoint you are going to get. Every time the sort of opinion that goes against the item teams views on whats needed and whats not, it is almost always instantly shut down and completely disregarded. If the item team is truly open to all feedback, the selective ideals and acceptance of suggestions need to stop. If you don't want to ask yourself the question of "is balance and perfection everything", instead question whether the item teams agenda and values are more important than what the community wants, even if in you're opinion its for the betterment of the game quality. Even then, what do you consider the betterment of game quality? Equality of items? Balance? My personal opinion is that the approval, and what the community wants both tie in to game quality, not just technical perfection.

I doubt anything will change, but hopefully what I've said won't be completely disregarded as usual. I don't have more time to spare this morning to continue debating this as I have things to do, but as usual it was a pleasure debating this matter with you Silvah.

 

Its fine if you are busy, we're running out of things to say anyway.

Its not about technical perfection, again i'll stress this one last time, we value and actually take in community perspective and opinions. Its not selectively accepting opinions, but there are a line that we cannot cross. Listening to the community might be the best way to make every *active* players happy, but its not gonna make the game a better place. The community will always want better and more op stuff, less nerfs and more buffs, thats not how accepting opinions works. I dont think I need to elaborate any longer because what I am saying is basically common sense.

I'll leave this as the final note, if anyone wants to express a fair and objective opinion about items and game balancing, feel free to let any Item Team members know, as always we would love to chat with you.

 

Not quite what I was trying to get at, but thanks for taking in what I'm saying regardless.

 

Note: I don't want to pretend that I am all knowing, or even knowing at all, in-game balance, dev/community relations, or even item naming. So take this reply with a grain of salt.

Alright, I’m pretty much dead on wynncraft. I barely play it anymore, and I mainly just lurk on the forums. However, I’m going to take the time to explain my thoughts on how to balance the game and my problems with both the developer and community in the relations and the item naming. I know full well that most likely nobody is going to read this at all, but I’m bored and in the mood to go off on a tangent, so here we are. I’ll be sure to leave a tldr at the end of each section though. So buckle your seatbelts and prepare for a rambling rant by someone who has no right to go off on one.


Socrates of a Minecraft Server: My take on game balance philosophy.

Alright, so from what I’ve been seeing, game balance has been going in this vicious cycle recently: item team nerfs items to promote game creativity, community comes up with good and creative builds slightly over the balance curve for that patch, Item team goes “oh shit” and nerfs that build into the ground to promote game creativity and balance, rinse and repeat.

Frankly, I’m sick of all my stored builds being killed off or neutered by balance changes. I’m using a terrible water build in-game that does only 6k bomb arrows because I’m scared of investing a stack or so into a build with great id’s, only for it to be killed off by balance changes. I personally feel as though builds and items slightly over the balance curve should be able to survive. There is always going to be items that are meta, and there is no way to avoid that. The meta is unkillable, all-knowing, and encompassing. Resistance against it is futile. What the item team should do is instead of bringing the meta builds down, they should bring the other build up to that level. Before you say anything, I know what power creep is. Therefore, in order to make the game not easier than your average lego game, you bring the bosses stats up to match the builds. It will only involve changing the stats on a couple bosses. (which doesn't seem that hard coding wise, correct me if I’m wrong). Redoing mob stats is unnecessary because we’ve been 1hkoing them for ages by now (if anything they need a stat buff pronto, but that’s another thing). By making everything equal instead of nerfing the best item in each patch every balance change, it would make everyone happy.


But what if an item is far above the power curve, that it needs to be nerfed? If that's the case, nerf away. However, there is one thing that I hate more than anything balance wise, and that's having options taken away from me. That's why I still disagree with the multi-hive removal, why I disagree with every skill point req increase and every skill point bonus nerf. If you have to nerf an item, nerf it in its stats, not the options in which you can use it. Let's take an imaginary item, let's call it thingamajigger. Let's say it has an Intel req of 75, and id’s of base ¾’s mana regen and base 10% water damage. Let's say that it is also so far above the power curve, nerfing it is necessary. For me, the course of balance is to never increase that 75 intel req, I would always bring down it is not skill point id’s instead. However, would bring down its Mr and damage. No builds should be made Literally unusable from nerfs.


TLDR: Stop gutting builds that are slightly above the power curve, and when nerfing never remove player options


Play nice, Play fair: The relations between the IT and the community

I’m going to be frank. I expected better from both the community and the Item team during communications. So let this hypocritical bashing begin, shall we?


Let's start off with the item team. From what I understand, the item team is supposed to be a link between the community and game balance. However, from I’ve seen, the IT has adopted the “Holier than thou” tone that I’ve always disliked from members of the development team, and if anything they use said tone much more than other branches of the development team ever did. I’m not saying that IT doesn't have the right to use it, they have done more for the game than the good I’ll probably ever do for anything. However, they have talked down to members of the community that have disagreed with so many times, I’m sick of it. To be fair, some of the members of the community have deserved it, but I’ve seen it happen to members of the community that have made solid points and was respectful. Also, from what i’ve seen the item team constantly says something along the lines “if you want to have a serious discussion about game balance, we’re glad to hear it” and then constantly disregards people who try to have a serious discussion who disagrees with them as “salty about having there OP items nerfed.”. Make up your mind if you want to actually discuss balance with members who disagree with you, will you? Because if I see the phrase “salty about having their OP items nerfed” one more time, I may have a mental breakdown.



Alright, time to needlessly bash another group. Dear Community: Stop bashing the item team for no reason, will you? From calling the IT, “Item nerfers” to sending literally death threats over item nerfs (seriously if ever did this you deserve you license to anything revoked). If the community stops bashing the item team over such minor things, they might stop being so jaded and maybe we can have an actual discussion over balance (wouldn’t that be nice).


Tldr: It would be nice for the item team to stop speaking in such a “holier than thou” tone, and for the community to stop needlessly bashing the item team instead of having serious balance discussion.



Wynncrafts item naming skills to OP: I stole this title from YYGAYMER (and also item naming)

Ok, this may be a bit off topic, but seriously. Stop naming items over IRL things that cause people so much grief. Cancer? Asphyxia? Cardiac Arrest? Really? I don't know about you, but having item names that openly mock real-life issues that people are struggling with are just plain wrong. Whats next, naming a helmet suicide? Oh wait a second, There is a helmet named suicide. Sometimes, during lunch, I spend some time working on builds in Wynndata. Sometimes, my friends watch. And without fail, they always make a disgusted remark about seeing items with names like that in the item list. So seriously, stop naming items after real-life issues, It mocks people who are dealing with those issues in real life. Inb4 I get called a snowflake.


TLDR: Read the last sentence


And that Concludes my mental downward spiral. You may now return to something worth reading.

 

Cancer was actually in reference to the zodiac symbol. Salted was the one who made that, and personally I disagreed with it too. As for Suicide, I want to remove that item from the game quite badly, as it was even from an unused quest reward with overly campy and insensitive feelings as well.

But for the most part, look at which item type utilizes these illnesses: Earth/Thunder, the thing that sacrifices everything possible for sake of power. Cancer being the one exception that I'm aware of, and maybe Asphyxia but I don't know since Silver made that one, most of them are life-threatening situations, rather than illnesses such as Dementia that slowly tear apart families. For what it's worth, I'll try to avoid this in the future, I simply felt it was fitting for earth/thunder. Also, Dysnomia is simply lawlessness, not an illness, as far as I'm aware.

 

I would like this answered.