Featured Wynncraftian Fw S5e5 - Cruuk

FEATURED WYNNCRAFTIAN
Season 5, Episode 5:

CRUUK


Hosted by @Pepinho!

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. We interview those people here every two weeks!
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.
As we are only mid season you still have time to nominate people.

Our next Fw has been here for 5 years now and has seen many features come and go, he also has a lot of experience in Wynn's game designing.
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Let's begin the interview then Cruuk! You are a really vocal Wynn member who's been here for many years now, and who's also posted many threads that show concern towards the current state of the game. What is unique in Wynncraft that made you stay for such a long time and care about the game enough to post feedback and be vocal about changes that should be/were made?

Who are you people, how'd you get in here?!
Ok ok, I'll talk.

Simply put, Wynn has by far been the server, and community that I've invested the most time into, no other community has really come close compared to the amount of time I've spent here. I joined Wynn on July 9th 2013. And other than a month-long hiatus in September of the same year, I've never really had a true hiatus in my time of being here for almost 5 years now. Making me honestly believe that I'm one of the most dedicated members here. You'd expect people like me to only pop in every once for a while, but no, I'm still just as active as I ever was. (I've been on Discord more recently as well!)

And yes, I still do play the game. Not as much as I used to but I still play it in intervals. Shocking I know.

What is unique in Wynncraft to me that made me stay for such a long time? That... Is a very difficult question to answer.
....I guess if I had to explain it in one phrase, it'd be "Came for the premise, stayed for the community and the updates."
I watched Craftedmovie frequently back in the day. When they uploaded the Wynn trailer it interested me. I played it and got interested, once I got invested it, it all snowballed from there...
I think it's mostly the appeal of it all, the way the game is designed, and seeing it grow. It all blends together into something pretty good.

As for the more recent threads, that's... Sort of a coincidence? One day I decided to make one, then later, I decided to make another, etc.
To truly love something, you must become aware of it's flaws, and I really do believe that despite it's almost elderly age when compared to other Minecraft servers, that it still has a very long way to go, if it's current flaws are dealt with.
... That being said, going back to me still being dedicated despite my time here, I've always disliked it when someone says they "miss the old days", I've always been heavily against the concept of nostalgia in general, the irrational claims that have spawned from it have plagued many a discussion. It almost feels insulting to the developer, if they're changing the game for the better, what will happen when people say the opposite? Was all the hard work for naught? If people do nothing but complain about the "golden days", the "current day" will only get worse.
Even I get nostalgic for stuff, but I don't let it cloud my vision.
That's what I'm sort of doing here- Wanting to improve the game instead of clinging to the past. Also I feel like pre-gavel Wynn is just not very good at all compared to today's standards. At the time it was great, but not anymore.

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Exactly, people want it back but if Wynn changed back to "Legacy Wynn" I don't think people would actually play it and complain that new Wynn is better. Another example is Wizard Fortress. Do you think a legacy version could work? Or Wizard Fortress being re-added?
Not nostalgic anymore, but about the future now. Do you think Wynn can have it's own game in it's current state of development or is it an awesome project for Minecraft but would get lost among professional MMORpgs?

I don't think both can work in the end.
Legacy Wynn would be a neat novelty to have... For a week, after that it's gonna pretty empty. Not worth the development in my opinion.
As for Wizard Fortress......... I'll admit. I never played Wizard Fortress, at all. I know people have suggested bringing it back, but people have said that Wynn isn't a minigame and that it would detract development time from the actual game, and I kind of have to agree there. It looked fun though.

As for question numero dos, I've never really been into MMOs other than Wynn really. I am aware that there are MMOs who do things better than Wynn. But at the same time... I've always been sort of against Wynn becoming it's own game? It would be nice to not have to deal with any limitations, but at the same time it would sort of lose the charm of being able to work in an existing game engine that has famous for having noticeable limitations in certain areas.
Furthermore, it'd be a risky move. Minecraft is still popular, so some people may not wish to transfer. Also, if you invest all your time in a game which may not succeed without showing attention to the thing that is doing pretty good, that may spell out death of the playerbase.

If Wynn reaches it's peak and is still in Minecraft, I think it could hit a middle ground- Considered a very well-made minecraft project, and even be considered a decent MMORPG by MMO standards.

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Have you ever been that interested in a game? It's balancement and community?

Hmm... The other significant one that springs to mind is Team Fortress 2, I first started playing it in October 2013, 3 months after I joined Wynn. I admittedly don't have the most hours on that game (I haven't reached 1000 :( ), but I've been pretty deeply invested in it otherwise.

Fun fact: I think my longest played game on PC is Donkey Kong 64, I got that game when I was really young, and played the hell out of it. The game has an ingame timer, and according to that timer my save file has like 300+ hours.

Anyway, I think part of what got me so invested in Wynn was something that happened in my "early years" on Wynn, around my level 20s I met 2 players, slightly higher than me, I dueled one of them and I lost, and a "rivalry" between me and the other player began. That 2nd player mainly acted as a spectator more than anything.
I put air quotations because I think it was only me that treated this as a rivalry, while he played the game normally.

Lets call my "rival" Tom, the reason I treated this as a competition was primarily because Tom just happened to be at a higher level than me. I'd duel him... And he usually won, a truly sad story I know. He was never rude about it, it was me that overreacted.
Around level 35 was when I took that aforementioned hiatus. When I came back... To my shocking surprise I find that Tom is in his level 50s, and is VIP! (Remember, it gave permanent double XP back in the day). This basically motivated me to really start leveling (This was also around the time quests released).

To make a long epic tale short, around level 63 was when we were on equal ground, and I passed him and hit 70 a while after that. It was all in good fun.
Unfortunately, as time passed Tom began playing less and less, and eventually stopped playing somewhere back in 2016- Oh, I just checked his profile and it says he was last on 10 hours ago as of writing this...

I think part of what got me truly invested was that "rivalry", and around that time was when I also joined the old old forums, and really began getting to know the community. I remember when high-levelled players were absolutely ticked about low-levelled players raiding the jungle's loot chests. (If you didn't know, back then the contents of a loot chest were affected by the area's level, not the player or mob's level)
I remember seeing suggestions to deny any players under level 50 from entering the jungle!

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Oh, so you started meeting people from the community long ago. Usually new players don't go outside the game, to the forums etc.
Do you think the Wynn community has changed a lot since the game's release?

Yes, it has definitely changed, a lot.

However, like nostalgia, another thing I've always disliked is when people say that a community is "bad" or "going downhill" (Hell, I just don't like the term "going downhill" in general) I know it's all opinion-based, but you wouldn't believe the amount of times I've seen people try to assert it as fact.

For those who have known me for a long time, I'm sure you've seen me say something like this multiple times:
"If you don't like the game anymore, why not leave instead of coming to the community to s*** on the developer's work?"
(I'm in an interview might as well be professional about it!)

This was said by the (admittedly brash...) owner of Dwarves vs. Zombies. At the time it was nice to see a counterargument against people using nostalgia as an argument. It inspired me so much I used it multiple times.

... Sorry, I got a little off-track there.
Yes, it has definitely changed, but I still think it's doing pretty great. I won't deny that there are stinkers, but I think there have always been stinkers ever since the earliest days to now. But even then it's one of the best (and longest) communities I've ever been apart of. So good that I crossdressed for it.

Also, the reason I do hate nostalgia so much mainly comes from years of having to see thousands of comments of people whining about the "old days" on the internet. That or it just could be my "autistic tendencies".

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So we've talked a lot about your interaction with the community, but you also have some threads, and about them what caused you to take an interest in the inner workings of Wynncraft, such as builds and game balancement for theories such as the melee damage one?

I think 2 things mainly:

As I've been growing, Wynn has been growing as well. As I've matured I've began to show more interest in the kind of stuff you see me talk about now.
When Gavel released, it truly introduced so much more discussion on the inner works that pre-Gavel ever had. The "inner-workings" of pre-Gavel were Assassin being insanely broken, lifesteal and mana steal being affected by spells like Arrow Storm and Multihit, and... That was about it.

I guess as time passed, the massive amount of inner stuff added with Gavel really got me interested. And was one of the reasons for me creating a certain thing in Google docs...

Oh, I forgot to mention. Somewhere in late 2017 I was invited to a discord, an item discussion/meme hell discord, containing various known buildmakers like LarzLapiz, thot pocket, +more (HI LarzLapiz!), including a couple IMs. As I participated there more I truly began to learn more and more about the inner workings, even more than what I already knew of.
I was invited there because they thought I was interesting. I think a part of the reason was that "increasing the general difficulty" of the mid-end game thread I made a while back? (I'll have to ask Giga later)

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So what you like about game balancement are items and build making then. So let's talk about the recent changes, we are having many item changes. What is your opinion on those changes? Are they breaking many builds or is everything still the same and those didn't affect much?

I am probably one of the biggest supporters of the changes made to the items (Not even considering that I'm in a discord with nearly half of them... Or maybe it is?). I've approved of basically every item change, the only one that irked me at first was the removal of Diamond Hydro Ring/Necklace's water damage, but after a while I got used to it.
Since Corkus, I've had to change, and sometimes remake my builds due to the changes made to various items, but honestly it's something I've never really minded doing. If anything it breaks the mold, and I kind of like that.

Overall, I like the changes and I would like to commend the item team for bringing us out of the dark hole of multihive and rainbow slap. As far as I know I think the only big balance change left is to deal with Water and Rainbow's tight grip over the meta.

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I like the word meta. Has the Wynn item meta changed a lot since Gavel or has it been pretty static and for people who don't know much about items (Like me), what is the current item meta?

If I remember correctly, during the early days of Gavel, % and raw spell would stack together. Weapons like Pure would do 20k damage meteors. This was shortly changed
But there was a far more insidious meta... +Tier attack speed.
I'm sure you know that +tier attack speed increases your attack speed, but it does not affect the spell multiplier of a weapon. (The attack speeds have different spell multipliers so that super heavy weapons don't dominate the meta)
But back then, it did... Unintentionally, I think it was a bug.

Basically, an Alkatraz that's been boosted to super fast attack speed could do uppercuts that did over 100,000 damage.
I'm not joking, this was a real thing.

This was fixed in the gameplay update, but soon after that creatures so heinous finally showed their faces after hiding for so long... Multi-hive and Rainbowslap.
Multi-hive is self-explanatory.
Rainbow slap for those who don't know, is a community created term that describes the action of using a Mythic in a Rainbow-centric build, "slapping" that Mythic onto a set of items. Primarily that of "Rainbow tank" builds using non-Rainbow Mythics. This also coincided with Multi-Hive for truly nasty combinations.

So yeah, the Wynn meta has definitely changed, and for the better I'd say. It's not perfect yet, but we're getting there. Maybe someday all the elements can truly live in harmony?

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The game has many items and there are many ways to get a good build out of them. What do you enjoy specifically about the creativity or developers/CT and the community itself?

For the community, It's more of a personal experience really. Being able to talk to various members, CT members, etc. through the forums, discord, etcetera. I guess you could say it's brought me where I am today. So many various things have happened in the community that it would take forever to list them all and I'm lazy. But let's just say it's part of what the experience is in the first place.
To an extent, a part of that experience has come from the post-Gavel item system, mainly the IM's work on the items and the community's reaction/mindset/feedback of various items.

It's about how the system itself works and all the technicalities surrounding it. It's like a well-made pizza, many different "elements" (no pun intended) are constantly at work to deliver a pretty nice pizza, AKA a pretty nice item system. Creating the concept for a build, and seeing that it could actually "work" is only part of the fun. The other fun part is talking about the items in general, and any notoriety that may, or used to surround them. In-jokes, "memes", you know the term. (Pandemonium!)

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I have manyyy questions to ask but unfortunately it's time to end this interview! Thank you for answering the questions and congrats on Fw!

What's important is not the fact that I've been playing Wynncraft for a quarter of my life. What's truly important is that Waluigi better be a playable character in the new Smash Bros.​

This concludes the fifth interview of the 5th season of Featured Wynncraftian!
Message me if you have any feedback to give.
The next interview should be in around two weeks!
Here you can find previous Featured Wynncraftian interviews: Interviews.​

 

Nice.

 

Wait, you played wynn for a quater of your life = you 20?
I thought all here were little kids pretending to be big adults

 

It's that and big adults pretending to be little kids


which sounds a lot worse now that i think about it

 

congratulations !!!!!!!!

 

Congratss ! Now all we need is a FatCat one

 

congrations
you done it

 

LOL

 

!!




Cruuk so old

 

congrats cruuk, now finish ur trial

 

Spoilers

 

cool



















































but where's jp?

 

yeah Rob is quite pissed to a lot of people in DvZ, mostly because they all say "WE WANT AN UPDATE" and then when he releases one, he gets quite a bit of hate
not gonna lie, the Hero Update (last one) was quite meh, as it made nisovin pretty boring to play (from like a 5 spell wand to a 2 spell one, and a buffed, red-colored emerald bow) and removed the ability that made krungor incredibly fun to play
but the previous ones werent nearly bad, i liked the implementation of the SoS as an emergency weapon, not to mention he nerfed it because... well... it was true it was quite op, same for the dagger, it was stupidly strong so he nerfed it, but then people complained about Elven Dagger getting nerfed

And thanks to all that mess, now DvZ is going to close in a matter of months
glad i still have the entire summer to play soo much that ill eventually get bored at the end
but its clear his message ended up working, as now DvZ went from like 400 people at once to about 20 at much in a normal day, in case of weekends or a day without school or work, it raises up at much 70 people, but it never goes over that