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

...Huh? Your reply where?

 

yo i messed it up again, open the quote and check the bold

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check bold

 

The problem with the whole "professions are optional stop complaining" issue is that there are quests and pieces of content that require you to actually grind professions (looking at you, Shadow of the Beast)
Sure you can skip the quest but you are still forced to skip other pieces of content just because you didn't want to click wheat for an hour.

 

oh my god are you that lazy???? Shadow of the Beast requires level TWENTY professions...

 

Yes.
I ain't clicking wheat for an hour, just let me do the damn quest.

 

Bro it is not this hard to make quotes, idk how you keep screwing it up.

Anyways, the reason profs are bad is because there is a grand total of one single way to level them up, and that is by doing their basic task. There are occasional mini-quests but that's... it.
It is completely possible to make professions good and not mind-numbingly boring and also have them be valuable. Case in point, Final Fantasy XIV. I do professions in that game (specifically Culinarian and Botanist) and I feel like I have actual options instead of "do this one thing for 3 hours straight to level up". There's of course the basic gather/crafting you do, or there's deliveries, treasure maps, and most importantly for both crafters and gatherers there is an actual fleshed out gathering system along with the crafting system that makes even doing those basic tasks far more dynamic than anything in Wynncraft. Heck, each profession even has its own questline which is amazing.
There's also crafting and gathering questlines called "society quests" and those are awesome, I will always treasure my moogle dance emote.
All of this, and gatherers/crafters still make metric tons of money. Again, I would know because I'm one of them. All of this proves that profs can most definitely be made to be not boring and still be just as valuable to the community.

 

just like how reworking soul points was a priority, and reworking mobs was a priority, and reworking spells was a priority before that, and reworking gavel was a priority before that, and making raids was a priority before that.. wynn gets less than one major update a year, there will always be features that need fixing and some of them will always be egregiously old. i wish they did something about profs but i also appreciate them not delaying fruma another 2 years just to get a profs rework now. patience is a virtue

if salted wanted them to stay they would still be in the game lol. youre the only one out here convincing yourself that this isnt the case

you say that like its objective truth but there absolutely is value to making early game consequences matter. the system is flawed because they become a hassle to endgame players but the concept of restricting early ability tree changes isnt particularly crazy

again youre completely missing the point by shifting the narrative to wynncraft is evil and hates me instead of understanding why certain game systems are the way they are and giving genuine criticism. make a thread in the feedback section or on discord about the reasons why you think ability shards shouldnt be a thing instead of whining about salted wanting to ruin your life specifically

 

Player retention for daily rewards?

 

I'd be inclined to say it was possible, if it weren't for the fact that I doubt new players even check the daily chest.

 

I agree

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Idk man it’s right there next to the skill points and atree, and if you get a 5 day login streak, you get a few Eb and a ton of AS

 

There are countless cases of Wynncraft staff, including Salted, actively defending their existence and wanting them to stay. So yes, they wanted Soul Points to stay. But by all means I could be wrong; if you can give me another reason why Salted would just randomly out of nowhere completely take a full 180 on his opinion and decide to remove them other than because the entire community wanted them gone, then by all means I'll admit to it.

NO. THERE. ISN'T. Wynncraft isn't a single-player RPG. It's an MMO completely designed around buildcrafting.
There is value to limiting the amount of stuff you can use early on a la Monster Hunter, it's true, but Wynncraft already does that through its entire design as an MMO game (ability points, level requirements, skill points, etc). It doesn't need further limits. And speaking of which, it's an MMO game based entirely around the sheer amount of buildcrafting you can do, and yet adds a completely unnecessary layer of bullshittery preventing you from freely experimenting. And that's a bad thing.
Players should be actively encouraged to experiment to try out different builds because it's literally the entire point of the game.
Ability Shards are like if Warframe completely locked your mods the moment you slot them, and the only way you could change them whatsoever is by getting an item that completely removes all mods from all your equipment all at once. And that's a bad thing.
Ability Shards are like if Final Fantasy XIV locked your class and you had to pay a specific new currency just to unlock a new one or change into it. And that's a bad thing.
Hell, I hate Destiny, but Ability Shards are like if Destiny completely locked your subclass so you couldn't change it or any of your abilities, aspects, or fragments, and the only way to change it was to pay a currency to reset and unslot every single part of your subclass. And, you guessed it, that's a bad thing.
Though frankly if Bungie suddenly announced they were doing that, I wouldn't even be surprised, god damn Bungie is terrible.
Anyways, games entirely designed around having options should not be intentionally built to limit your options. I should not have to explain this to you.

All you are doing here is trying to set up a strawman saying that I'm just "whining" for my own benefit, and that I'm painting Salted as against me specifically, which is silly because you fail to realize that literally not a single thing in this entire thread applies to me, so this agenda you want to create just completely falls flat. I have Champion and therefore max slots. I also have endless Ability Shards from raiding. I have a White Horse already. The only thing that even remotely applies to me here is professions, the one thing I specifically barely even acknowledged.
If anything, all you're doing by making this shitty attempt at a strawman is highlighting how much I care about the average non-elitist player because nothing here that I'm ranting about even applies to me.

Stop projecting. I'm not shifting the narrative, you are.

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I can guarantee that even if they were made for "player retention", which frankly I doubt, they do the exact polar opposite anyways by chasing away new players who want to experiment.

 

I don't really see any way that it benefits Wynncraft to make you use them; it genuinely seems like they thought it was a good idea. I disagree, but I don't think they deliberately tried to make the game worse, doubly so when it's in a non-monetizable way. I think I even understand where they were coming from; ability shards are, I believe, there to make you consider if changing your skill tree is worth it, to encourage sticking with one skill tree instead of changing it whenever another would work better, so that the player learns how to play their specific archetype well, rather than just switching to whatever is best in the moment, thus favoring a wide variety of playstyles and archetypes instead of rapid switches to the meta. Unfortunately (not really) this isn't the case because ability shards are very common because they made them just common enough that players could still change archetypes if they wanted, so once everyone works out what build they want, they just keep accumulating them. Now, I prefer the flexibility of changing my build whenever I please, so I think it's better this way, but I imagine that's what they were going for; providing a barrier to changing your build to make you consider if it was really worth it. Poorly designed but not malicious.

EDIT: I was very tired and autocorrect was very "helpful" when I wrote this, so I apologize if there's a bunch more word salad in there.

 

I don't think I ever said this outright, and I think I should have said it a lot sooner, but I don't think anything they've done that I've mentioned in this thread (aside from taking away slots and selling them back) was directly malicious at all.
I think they simply have a highly flawed game philosophy that player convenience is somehow a bad thing (which definitely seems like part of the reason they don't want players to have those slots), and they are simply just incredibly stubborn to the point that they refuse to admit something they've done is a problem when someone else criticizes them for it, even when it actively hurts the new player experience.

While I said before that they "wanted" Soul Points to stay, what I really mean is that I think Soul Points only stuck around for as long as they did because of how frustratingly stubborn the team and Salted were on the topic of removing them, as removing them would mean admitting they were bad to the people who were criticizing them and they were simply too stubborn to do that.
I say this because I think it is 1:1 verbatim the exact same thing going on with Ability Shards.
I genuinely don't think Salted or the Wynncraft team are actually foolish enough to think Ability Shards are good for the game; they made it to limit player convenience, and they are just too stubborn to admit that they should be removed because everyone hates them and that's why they're still here.

 

3 years ago

youre getting lost in your own argument there by acting like ability shards restrict the entire games buildcrafting in any way. theyre so easily obtainable that all they do is add a little weight to decision making in the early game, letting new to midgame players bask in their chosen archetypes for a little bit and experiencing the positives and negatives of each of them. ability shards in their current form only serve as an extra layer to stop new players from getting overwhelmed by endless minmaxing while also contributing to player retention. again i dont necessarily agree with the way theyre implemented and if theyre even needed but youre not gonna convince anyone just by saying thats a bad thing in bold capitalized letters

i didnt mean you specifically... i meant the way youre 100% stubbornly convinced wynn hates the playerbase leads you to fundamentally misunderstand why certain things are the way they are and makes you unable to give proper feedback. have a conversation with salted/ct higher ups in a proper feedback thread and ask them about the official reason for the existence of ability shards instead of talking into the void about how they make anti-player decisions for fun

 

Yes, and notice that it took them 1-3 whole years after these posts for them to finally be gone. Also, in absolutely none of these is Salted saying that soul points should go and explicitly says that he just wants to "rework" or change them despite them being a fundamentally bad concept. Anyone can go onto the discord and search "soul points" from Salted and see that he has more of these specific posts. I'll admit I was wrong about one thing though: Salted himself never fully defended them and even admitted once they "suck" and "aren't doing this well" specifically in response to people losing their hard-earned gear, but I wasn't talking just about Salted though. I was also talking about other members of the Wynncraft team, and I think I may have mixed up their opinions with Salted's because I remember some staff defending them like their lives depended on it.

Frankly though I find it reassuring because even Salted himself to some degree has been able to admit Soul Points were just objectively bad. But yes, all of these posts are absolute concrete proof that Salted wanted Soul Points to stay, even if he was able to admit they were bad. Which I guess means I was wrong about another thing: I assumed he only wanted them to stay because he was too stubborn to admit they were bad.
But he did admit they were bad. So, what... the fuck...??

Also,

I never once said that Wynn "hates the playerbase". I simply pointed out that they have a terrible game philosophy that they view player convenience as something bad, which yes, is absolutely anti-player regardless of intention. While I did portray myself talking in their voice in such a way as if they did hate they players, I did so as a form of ironic mockery towards their absolutely abysmal decisions and lack thereof, and as a general display of incredibly bottled up irritation.

Also also, I have already made at least one thread about Ability Shards back in November (and I'm pretty sure more than that but I can't find them in my list of threads because for some reason it stops at July 2024) but never once did any staff member respond to it. A thread, might I add, that solely exists as a suggestion directly to the Wynncraft team exactly as you suggested me to do and even as a compromise for the terrible mechanics of Ability Shards. And I'm not saying this as form of criticism to them. I'm saying this because you for whatever reason think that "make a suggestion" is in any way a solution to players being angry with Wynncraft. Yeah. I did. So did many other people.

Anyways I looked up Salted's own opinion on Ability Shards and I could only find one; his response to people's aggravation was that "you gotta commit" which is literally the exact opposite of Wynncraft's entire point as a video game. Wynncraft as a game is entirely designed around making and perfecting your own build by experimenting so locking you out of that experimentation goes against every single thing Wynncraft stands for. So this is most definitely him defending Ability Shards on that front and no mistake.
That being said, this conversation with him happened in March 2023, several months after Spellbound. If his opinion on the matter changed, I sure as hell can't find it anywhere but I, again, hope to god that I have it wrong and they'll come to their senses and remove them. Cause they have no place in the game whatsoever.

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They absolutely do not do this and in fact do the opposite. I have helped so many players and so many of them have complained about the exact same thing: "why can't I change my abilities?" So I have to direct them specifically to where to get them and the quest they have to do and their response, again, is the exact same thing: "why do I have to do all this?"
New players want to experiment. They're not in any way worried about minmaxing because they're simply discovering the game. I know this because I actively help them. There is never in a million years ever going to be any situation where a new player is "overwhelmed" by the ability to change their tree. Skill points exist, and new players aren't constantly worried about minmaxing those either.

Ability shards are easy to get. But they are also a complete and utter inconvenience to the player. Why? Because they force you to reset your entire tree to change one single thing. And yes. That's a bad thing.

So my question is, if they drive players away, and they're easy to get, then what is the point of them existing other than to be an inconvenience?

 

The death penalty in vanilla Minecraft is losing all your stuff.

Well, the idea is that you would rethink your strategy before you get to that point. If you already died to the same boss/dungeon/whatever 4 times in a row, is a 5th time really gonna make a difference?

What about doing raids, questing, guilds, boss fights, lootrunning? Making builds is definitely a major system in the game but by no means are you forced to tinker around with builds endlessly. You can just morph slap or hop on Discord or the forums and steal someone else's build. Or just go to Wynnbuilder and tinker there. Buildcrafting is not the "entire point" of Wynncraft, buildcrafting just makes you better at the actual content in the game. But like I said, you could just ignore the system by morph slapping or stealing someone elses build.

Half of an le is nothing. The time penalties for both situations are the same. It doesn't matter if Wynncraft kicks you out of the raid, if both situations only cost you 10 minutes in time lost, then the penalty is the same. If half an le and 10 minutes is the end of the world for you, then stop running pubs and get some people together to have dedicated raid group.

 

I mean the average death in MMO games, and most action RPGs in general. Minecraft is a survival game, and the average death in survival games make you drop your stuff.

Yes, that's called perseverance. Something you are specifically supposed to not punish players for.

You're describing activities. Aka the entire reason you make builds in the first place. And it isn't just a major system, it's the main point of the game. You play what you want, how you want. You build your character in whatever way you see fit so you can do whatever activities you want however you want to do them. That's how Wynncraft works, and yes it is the entire point of the game. Yes there are some people who are lazy. But they are still using a build, regardless of how simple it is. Of course you're not forced to tinker your build forever, because the game allows you not to. Cause again, the whole point of Wynncraft is the freedom of buildcrafting, whether you want to make more than one or just stick with one, or hell, even if you don't want to make one at all and just use whatever you have. Having that freedom is the whole point.

It is not the same situation. It doesn't matter "how little" the loss in Wynncraft is upon death, you by definition lose more than Destiny. That's my point. It's an objective fact. Hell, for Destiny even outside of raids, in non-darkness zones you can just respawn 5 seconds later in the exact same place or can have someone else revive you right on the spot. As I said, Wynncraft has objectively more punishing death than Destiny does so the idea that it's not "punishing" enough is silly. It's not the only example either; Warframe lets you revive yourself right on the spot several times per mission. Final Fantasy XIV lets other players revive you just with a temporary debuff. I could go on, but I'm running out of MMOs here. The point is, there is nothing wrong whatsoever with the death penalty of Wynncraft. It doesn't have reviving, it doesn't respawn you in the same place, and it even kicks you out and takes your rune if your team wipes in a raid. That is perfectly reasonable.

 

i literally send you a screenshot of multiple messages of salted saying he wants to rework soul points several years ago and youre still trying to convince yourself hes wanted them to stay this whole time, like what are we even supposed to say at this point?

yes that is literally all you can do about it. giving them feedback and time to fix issues is all you can do and no amount of impatient clamoring will make them fix inconveniences within the game any faster

i just gave you the reasons why theyre in the game, you can go nuh uh that's not true all you want but there isnt one objective solution here. and again im not the one that needs convincing, i dont disagree that the game would be better off without ability shards but i can understand why they exist

 

the idea seems to be so far that Spaghetti man is angry and thinks that Wynn is deliberately annoying players, mav thinks that non paying people SHOULD be inconvenienced, and everyone else is trying to calm spaghetti down and explain that some parts of Wynn might be annoying, they are not intentionally malicious.