Wynncraft and the war against player convenience (an overdue rant)

This is a long read, so I've provided a TL;DR version below for those who want to read it.

Forgive this intro of yapping, but for quite a while I've had an opinion I've wanted to share. A problem I have with the entire philosophy of the Wynncraft team, one I've always withheld because in spite of that opinion, I've always had unparalleled respect towards the Wynncraft team and I saw them as something to aspire to so I never fully criticized Wynncraft as I would an actual full game and I always held back quite a bit.
But this update wasn't just a straw, it was a whole ass haystack that broke the camel's back all at once. It hit me like a Canadian logging truck, sending me straight to reality. What I'm getting at here is that if Wynncraft is going to attempt to exploit players like some AAA game, then I'm going to treat it like one.
Of course, I really hope to god that I have this all wrong and this really was just the Wynncraft team making a monumentally ignorant fuckup of cosmic proportions rather than a deliberate attempt to exploit and prey upon the playerbase. But for now, I feel that it's that latter and as such I feel obligated to get this off my chest.

You see, this is the problem I have with you guys. This right here. This absolute war you have against simple convenience.
You have this absolutely abhorrent game philosophy that convenience for players is somehow a bad thing, that there always has to be some kind of drawback to literally freaking everything. You don't understand in any way that the reason people are pissed about you removing slots isn't because they were all using them, but rather because simply having those slots gave players a level of freedom to make another character if they ever wanted to. An extra layer of convenience players had that you tried to take away and monetize out the ass because the players having those slots is just too convenient for your tastes.

It took you guys more than an entire decade to remove Soul Points, a system so terrible that it should go down in history as one of the worst game mechanics ever devised. Why? Because it's just far too convenient if players aren't being actively punished for just playing the game. We need to punish players immensely for dying, right? Never mind the fact that the dissatisfaction of death itself and the walk back to where you were was itself the punishment, no, we also need to strip you naked of everything you have if you have the sheer audacity to be tenacious, to have the strength of will to keep trying to succeed.
I realize of course that I'm complaining about a system that no longer exists but it bears repeating because even before it was removed they added another system in place specifically designed to make your basic gameplay less convenient:

Here comes Spellbound, an amazing update that revolutionized Wynncraft by adding the brand new ability tree. It needs no introduction of course, it's in my opinion the second best update Wynncraft has ever had. But wait a minute! We can't just let players switch freely between their subclass like literally every major modern MMO game ever made. No, that would be too convenient. So the only way we could ever dare to let players do something as simple and basic as just... change their ability tree is if we also introduce a currency that exclusively exists to make the game less convenient; where new players have little access to it and old players have way too much, it requires a long quest completion just to use it in the first place, it can only reset the entire tree and not just one node, and there is literally already the ability to set and unset nodes by clicking them built into the framework of the ability tree.

There is an obvious solution to this. One so obvious that it is physically impossible that somebody on the Wynncraft team hasn't thought of it already: just remove ability points and let players change the ability tree in safe zones, exactly like how Skill Points work.
But I wouldn't in any way be surprised if they never do this.
Why? Because we don't want the players to be able to freely buildcraft in our class-based MMO game completely designed around buildcrafting, now would we? That would be just too convenient, and we can't have that!
Wynncraft isn't meant to be enjoyed, it's meant to be endured!
The dumbest part is that for ability shards, they're not even monetized. Meaning that you can't even classify their existence as greed. They solely exist just to make the player experience inconvenient, and for no other reason.

Another example, every single thing involving horses: horse breeding to this day is exclusively based on RNG and has a better chance to give you a worse or same-tier horse than it does to give you a better one, to the point that it's universally accepted that buying one off the trade market is the better option, and horses in general have been powercrept to hell and back. But never mind that, you finally got your white horse! Now you just have to spend absolutely breathtakingly amounts of time running around on it to level it up to max level; the true difficulty with leveling your horse is finding out the best way to stay awake!

You know, I'm also a Warframe player and there are a great many things in Warframe that can be considered "pay to win" in the same way as the new Wynncraft changes. But you know what the difference for Warframe is? In spite of the problems that game has, at the very least I can say that they're actively making an effort to improve convenience without desperately needing some trade-off to their new systems. For Digital Extremes, decade-old features that actively went against player convenience are now being reconsidered, such as crafting times for example. They also actively improving the new player experience; adding a modding tutorial, improving early missions and bosses, letting players gather without a scanner, etc.
I don't expect any non-Warframe players to understand anything I'm saying here but the point is that DE genuinely wants players to have as much fun as they can, while also being able to heavily monetize the game in ways that the playerbase fully supports (or at the very least, isn't absolutely disgusted by). That is why the playerbase is so consistent: because of that unparalleled player trust that no other developer has. And I'm not saying Wynncraft doesn't improve the new-player experience, but I sure as hell am saying that Ability Shards as a mechanic actively drives new players away and literally fucking nothing has been done about it.

For (recent) Wynncraft, do you know what a better comparison is? Destiny 2. And that's a horrible thing. Let me describe Destiny 2's updates for you:
What's this, players are actually having fun? Not in my house! Let's get rid of (insert feature that very marginally gives you faster loot), and while we're at it, let's nerf every single weapon in the game that people are using. Better yet, let's also completely lock players from using certain weapons in our new raid! Oh, but that game-breaking bug in the game that has been killing players, or cutting out audio, etc? Eh, it can always wait until next year!
That right there is the vibes I'm getting from Wynncraft right now. Obviously not verbatim what Wynncraft is doing, but it feels completely in-character for the way Wynncraft is shifting.
I could go on and even make entire sections dedicated to even more cases of anti-convenience such as professions, but I won't. You get the point.

Look. You, humble staff member of Wynncraft who may or may not be reading this. You can say all you want that "we're not against player convenience" but until you guys stop adding anti-player inconveniences and remove the ones that exist, I don't want to hear it. Until Ability Shards get removed, players get 6 slots back and not just 5, horses are improved, professions get improved, etc etc, I do not want to see you guys complaining that I'm being too hard because you clearly hate the concept of player convenience more than you hate me criticizing you for it. I genuinely believe that the only reason Soul Points are gone at all was exclusively due to the entire community unanimously clowning on them, because I still remember full well all the responses the Wynncraft team had to their removal suggestions. I remember how dismissive you guys were towards anyone who ever criticized Soul Points and Ability Shards.
Anyways what I'm saying here is, the players aren't here because of you. You're here because of the players. And honestly it's pretty messed up how inconvenienced you want your players to be.
I would genuinely love to be proven wrong, truly I would, but that's something only you can do, not me.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am sad so I am going to curl up in fetal position and roll around pretending to be a roly poly :(

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TL;DR

1. Wynncraft removed class slots because it was too convenient to have 6 slots without paying for a rank or grinding for 10 hours, and to pressure players into buying a rank (which is absolutely disgusting).
   
   
2. Systems have historically been built into Wynncraft to make it extremely inconvenient and anti-player (examples being Ability Shards, Soul Points, horse mechanics, profession leveling, etc).
   
   
3. Wynncraft needs to remove these anti-convenience things and prove that it truly cares about the players.
   
   
4. I want Wynncraft to be a Warframe, not a Destiny 2, if you know what I mean.
   
   
5. I am sad :(

 

https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/the-new-update-is-not-p2w-good-read.322154/

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god forbid a company makes money

 

I mean monetize itself like a bad AAA game that exploits players. I edited that to fix the wording seconds after posting it because I realized how it was worded.

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Also I really can't be bothered to make a full post on how horribly your thread misses the entire point so here's someone else's post to do it for me:

Also also I know for a fact you didn't read anything but (at most) the first paragraph before immediately replying cause you replied literally within seconds, which is silly. Like, I even have a TL;DR and everything, you don't have to do that.

 

ok

 

I skimmed, read intro and conclusion. You wanting all of this shit gone (below) is you literally being a madman.
1. Ability shards probably tie into Fruma somehow...
2. 5 slots is fair for nons.
3. Horses aren't for endgame
4. Profs are in a fine place. If they didn't suck, they'd make no money.

 

...Huh?

It's good to see that the Door-in-Face technique is alive and well.

And this makes their terrible outdated design okay... how, exactly?

I'm sorry, but my man have ever actually... played Wynncraft before? One of the few things in the entire game that the community unanimously agrees on is that profs are absolutely awful.

Like, my guy you're literally the Wynncraft equivalent of one of those Bungie worshippers.

 

Trying to use an in-lore reason to justify the existence of an out-of-universe game mechanic that (if we were to follow the original post) is solely used to inconvenience players is an absolutely terrible move.

Unless you’re talking about new in-game mechanics in the Fruma update itself, in which case they would have hinted to us by now. Ability Shards have been in Wynncraft for ages and Salted has already given his own reasons for them being in the game. If it was in preparation/ setup for something in a far-future update he would have mentioned it.

 

While I don't think that most of these are deliberately anti-player, and I disagree with a few of your examples ( I don't think horse breeding is necessarily anti-player for instance, just a leftover money sink from ye olden days), on the whole I agree that this is something that needs to be addressed. I do think that some friction is a good thing in game design; it gives players something work around and adds some unique personality to the game. Some things, like professions and aspect points however, feel half thought-out.

Aspect points feel like they were designed to make you carefully consider switching up your build, when the rest of the game heavily promotes trying out new things. It's contradictory design. Professions, which are theoretically meant to be the optional, grindy aspect of the game for people who like that, fit the role perfectly. The problem is that most players don't have dozens or hundreds of hours they want to sink into clicking on digital fish. The fact that fixes to this problem are sold makes that design somewhat more suspect in my eyes. I don't necessarily think either is deliberately anti-player.

The class slots thing though, yeah. I do think 5 default slots is much better than 3, and I don't think I would really mind if VIP gave the remaining 1 that was removed, assuming it is readably priced on the ingame market. However, I'm still not sold on the reduction there. Giving fewer slots to upsell on ranks just feels bad in general.

 

One thing. Professions shouldn’t be part of this, because the idea is that it would be very easy to fix stuff like AP, by your suggestion. Profs are not easy to completely rework

 

Horses, for the record, are also not easy to rework. Salted has gone on record saying he wants to update mounts in the future, though !

 

absolutely ridiculous thing to say when wynn is a billion times better at this than DE lol. both are very similar in that theyre built on antiquated game design decisions and slowly phasing out of that as updates roll out, but when you consider their respective scale wynn has been pushing out necessary qol features much more consistently. and im not even gonna mention the pre-reb era for warframe

wynn does have a lot of inconvenient features but the majority of them arent born out of a desire to be anti-player, its purely because they lack the resources to fix things both conceptually and technically. shifting what should be rightful criticism of the original decisions to "wynncraft hates its playerbase because they dont have infinite budget and manpower lol" is entirely unhelpful

 

I could understand you saying that current horses are the way they are because of a lack of time and resources, as well as professions. But I would still argue that fixing these things needs to be a priority because of how old and outdated they are. Soul Points however may have been an old system but your argument does not hold for them because the Wynncraft team genuinely wanted them to stay. I again am fully convinced that the sole reason Soul Points are gone at all is because the entire community was almost completely unanimously against them. But they're gone, so I digress.

You cannot look me in the eye and tell me that Ability Shards were not created solely to be an inconvenience to players. Ability Shards aren't some super old feature that existed before the Ability Tree, they were added in the same update. And the actual functionality of being able to unset ability points is, again, built into the interface of the Ability Tree. So there is literally zero excuse for them to exist. You can't say they make Wynncraft money because they're not monetized. You can't say they provide a challenge because they're actually easy to get, they're just in extremely vague and specific loot pools for no discernible reason which is why they actively drive new players away; because specifically new players are the only ones who don't know how to get them, and therefore the only ones who have this massive struggle being able to experiment with their build in a game entirely based around buildcrafting. But if you take all that away, what you're left with is an incredibly stupid and poorly designed mechanic that doesn't let you change just one thing, it forces you to reset everything.

So I ask you, what the fuck is the point of Ability Shards other than to be an intentional inconvenience to the player?

Also, again, they literally not even a week ago just tried to scam the playerbase by taking away free features just so they could sell it back as paid content, or otherwise force new players to commit an absolutely ridiculous and unreasonable grind just to get it back.
By all means, explain to me what part of that is not anti-player?

 

I'm gonna say it, I actually liked soul points. It actually meant something when you died, now /kill has just become another way to quick-travel.

On the topic of ability shards, I don't think it's crazy to say that player decisions should have consequences instead of being able to instantly change your mind at no cost. The only annoying thing about ability shards is the menu to actually use them.

 

The punishment from dying is failure and the need to walk back to where you were. Losing your gear in a game designed around buildcrafting is the epitome of how not to make a game. This is like if Destiny destroyed your weapons when you die, or if Monster Hunter destroyed your armor when you die. It is nothing short of terrible game design, especially when you consider that Wynncraft actually has a greater punishment for dying than Destiny; when you wipe in Destiny raids, you get to retry that encounter. When you wipe in Wynncraft raids, it kicks you out and you've now wasted your rune.
And that's not criticism, that's just me pointing out that there very much is a punishment for dying, even if it can also be exploited.
If you come up and tell someone to pick one of these two choices: one of the worst game mechanics in MMO history, or a somewhat less meaningful death and exploitability, then there's a very clear obvious answer what everyone is going to pick.

Again, Wynncraft is a buildcrafting class-based MMO game. It is absolutely crazy to say that there should be consequences for buildcrafting in a game entirely designed around buildcrafting.

 

This Twitter exchange says it all:

 

Literally exactly this lol

 

Walking back to where you were is barely a punishment unless you like playing Wynncraft wearing Statue all the time. And you only started losing gear when you were on your last 2 soul points. If you kept dying doing something that much in that short of a timespan, maybe it's time to take a step back and rethink your strategy.

Also buildcrafting is not the only thing to do in this game. There are many, many people who just morph-slap and call it a day, or just steal someone else's build. There's also Wynnbuilder which let's buildcrafters tinker with their builds as many times as they want.

The penalty is around half an LE and maybe 10 minutes of your time. The average Destiny raid encounter takes around 10 minutes. I think the penalties are pretty equivalent here.

 

It's literally the same punishment for death that every single other game has. There doesn't need to be any more and the sheer idea that there should be is breathtakingly silly, let alone that punishment being to destroy your hard-earned gear... in an MMO game.
Getting down to 2 soul points doesn't make you "rethink your strategy", it pressures you to simply stop playing the game and punishes you in the most unreasonable way possible if you do. I shouldn't have to say this, but if a game mechanic is specifically designed to make you not play the game, then it's bad game design.

It's the entire point of Wynncraft. Wynncraft is a class-based MMO game directly based around buildcrafting. It does not matter whatsoever if there is technically more than that. This is straightup like saying that because Warframe has more than just the Warframes, that there should be consequences for using them. No the fuck there shouldn't.

The average Destiny raid encounter doesn't cost you any currency for losing nor does it kick you out of the raid. It just makes you try the encounter again. You are directly pointing out that the penalties are not equivalent.

 

i messed up the quotes horribly just look for my reply in it LMAO