Wynncraft Isn't What It Used To Be

Hey y'all.

At first I didn't want to reply to this thread because I felt i was gonna get shat on whatever I said because a lot of peeps here are angry. Some of you seem to really hate me and hate my average replies I've been doing which had me a bit confused at first. I always thought players would prefer me to answer things honestly even if I heavily disagreed with them, but I guess I need to word my responses better for that to work. Anyway, after thinking a bit I think y'all deserve a proper reply.


First of all, yes I know I /locked the thread which is exactly like some people here said we'd do. I'm doing that cause at this point no new content is being added, it's slowly turning into a flamewar and this post should answer everything mentioned.

However, before I start, I want to highlight the fact that staff never banned a single player for being critical of the game. We rarely even lock threads at their beginning when there's criticism, only when shit eventually hits the fan or we think we answered it properly (sometimes we're wrong). I'm not sure why some of you seems to think we're doing that, especially knowing this thread has been up for so long, and we even had a "i hate wynncraft" one a few weeks back on the frontpage for days.

There's so much stuff in these 7 pages that it'll take me days to reply to it all, so I'll try to answer everything I can find in the OP. Know that I've read everyone's post here. Also pardon my bad grammar, it's 2+am and I've been writing a lot for this.


Terrible Customer service

Let me start with that yes, we know we messed up lately. Some of our replies to feedback hasn't been the greatest and we apologize for that. I don't think we've been "shitting" on every bit of feedback we got, a lot of the most well written responses we got were read and aknowledged. But probably not enough though, to the point it made people feel scared any feedback they would write would get shut down. In the past days we've been trying to improve the way we take feedback in the CT. Sometimes it can feel like you get ganged up by CT because they all come out at once and aren't the most friendly. We're trying to change that so people don't feel afraid to tell us what they think. We've added a feedback section on the discord, have started having internal discussions about feedback given to us and how to properly reply to those. One thing for sure, is that we do not want to just flat out prevent any CT from replying to feedback. It would just make us overly disconnected from everything and make the community feel like they aren't listened. We also want to avoid these... shitty "PR" responses other companies do so the player don't feel a sense of pride and accomplishement in seeing fake answers.

However, please be constructive and write your feedback with good intents. It really doesn't help to receive things like "DnD IV boss is absolute shit lol" as feedback.


General State Of The Game

I... don't really think the content we released is completely unbalanced. I know what you're referencing though: crafted items. Maybe even these OP crafted items you can get by stacking powders on them. We got a fix for that coming "soon", but I don't think it's broken as much as you think. Being able to craft that thing at mid-game is hard if it's your first time playing.

Adding a new class would be cool and we had ideas for that for a while (i'll tell more later in this post), but keep in mind the challenge to add a single new class:

First, we'd have to, of course, code it and design it. By itself it's already a good amount. Then, we need to add 20 basic weapon models (which before we dropped 1.8, was impossible as we were missing space in the pack unless we made them 1.9+ only). We'd also need to make a new weapon type of every crate cosmetic weapon skins (at least 10 high quality models) Then, we need to make around 300+ weapons and balance them properly. Then, we need to update every quest reward that gives weapon as rewards, or use classes (like the new tutorial) in any way. Then, we need to add new materials/recipes or professions to allow crafting these weapons. And we gotta keep in mind the classes are very important to the story, even Bob's lore is linked to it. That'd be the easiest bit to update (ToL statues, armour stand in ragni castle, etc), but still worth mentionning.​

And if we don't do all that in one go, it means we rushed the update from the player's point of view. Anyway I'm not sure which part of that we could drop without it hurting the new class significantly. Overally my point is that it's a shit ton of work that would require almost the whole team full time attention on this. It'd be rad as hell though, I agree! We might do it in the future, we got a lot of ideas.


As for the missing content we promised a while back (gavel raids, MSL) and why it didn't happen... We never mentioned it because we really dislike making it seem like we're placing blame on others, but here's some private insight in what happened in the team during that time:

Gavel was meant to be a huge update that would change everything and introduce stuff a lot of what players were asking for. I was tasked with designing the item system and making every items (and raids/cinematics/msl), Jumla was tasked with coding and making the update possible, Grian was tasked with managing the CT for the huge amount of new quests we needed. However, we had also hired another developer to help us with other goals: to create a scripting system to allow us to make amazing quests and the main storyline. Lastly, we had Crunkle tasked with coming up with a boss and cinematic system to tie it all together. Turns out, the first developer lied to us and ran away at the last moment and never finished the promised job (y'all never got introduced to them, don't try to find who it is), or even got it into a usable state. Crunkle on the other hand, had had a great start on the cinematic and boss system to the point we were able to create content with it, but he eventually quit around the same time the other dev ran away. However, in a much more positive way, still love the guy (that's why I mention his name but not the other, who you guys never heard of). That, combined with the huge amount of issues doubling the map size and entities amount created with our systems (that's where mooman came in to help us) overworked us to the point we couldn't release the update without having to start over a lot of stuff or cut parts of it. We were also months late, we had to eventually update or risk losing all of our playerbase. The update was a relative success, but on the admin side we were massively disappointed that these issues forced our hands like that. It was our fault in some ways of course, as the owners every issues of that kind is always our fault. First of, we shouldn't have promised so much without being sure we could deliver. Second, we should have done a better job at managing to avoid this domino effect of issues.

After this happened, we decided to chill out a bit on the scope of what we wanted to do, and to do things more deliberately and properly. We got JP on board who started working on a very powerful scripting system, and we started testing new quests (grave mistake being the first one) with it to get used to it and improve the system until we got what we think is good enough for our MSL goals. We decided to improve the old outdated content as they hadn't aged very well with the Gameplay update (and if some of you recall, the community was pissed at us for reasons i don't remember, we felt we had to do this update for them), and with Corkus we tried to make more deliberate and condensed contents. Then we had to deal with Jumla stepping off to go to uni which slowed things down a bit until JP took over as head dev.

Anyway, all that to say that we didn't just jebaited y'all with these gavel promises, and we haven't just been lazying it out after that. It's a bit hard to tell, but we're still slowly working towards these goals, but after learning a lot from Gavel's mistakes we want to make sure to not repeat these again.


I know we keep repeating it and it feels like a bad excuse, but working on a game truly is a lot of work that can't (or at least, shouldn't) be rushed. There's a lot of, pardon my french, bullshit that happens behind the scene which sometimes forces you into bad gameplay decisions (as many of you have been trying to tell me lately lol) or just prevents you from ever reaching goals you had set. And unless you're a dick, you can't put the blame on everyone else all the time and you end up just eating the shit players tell you without being able to reply openly to it. And in the end, we have only one dev who codes most of what's making Wynn work, and one guy designing and managing stuff. We have a gigantridrabillion millions ideas in how to improve the game, or the new content we want to add, or the new features we want to add, but we're limited to doing them one at a time (most of the time, we can indeed work on some content and features simultaneously). We think raids would be awesome (especially the way we wanna do them), we think a new class would be super fun and feel refreshing, we think MSL would be super rad and explain a lot of the lore things some have been wondering about, we think housing could be a chill experience for the more social people, we think the game needs more end-game content, we think PvP would be really cool if we manage to improve the game slightly to make it work, we think having more spells or a spell tree would be super fun and allow more customizations... and so on. And it's not because I mention something here that it's coming anytime soon, but just to show that we have a lot of ideas, we listen to a lot of suggestions, but holy fuck is it time consuming to make stuff.

Mythics
I think what I'm about to say will be felt in the community more in a few weeks (or months), but here's what we think: we think mythics are really cool in the way they feel powerful/unique and are very popular, but we also think we messed up by making them so rare. The whole game is designed to make sure you can complete everything without mythics, but clearly it's not how the average player thinks. We actually had a solution for this in 1.18: crafted items. In many ways, crafted items can be more powerful than mythics. That's done purposefully. We can't make mythics less powerful or more common without opening the ultimate gate of hell from the community, so instead we added an alternative. Sure, it's a lot of work to craft something that is as good, but it's possible and doesnt overly rely on RNG. Over time, we think crafted items will become more common and will slowly replace mythics. We were a bit afraid of saying that out loud because it might cause some panic price drop in mythics. But worry not! They'll still be useful and have the advantage of having no durability, they just most likely won't be the ultimate goal every player seek.

CSST/Dungeon Bombs
I aint 100% sure why everyone act as if we made millions from CSST or dungeon bombs. I don't like talking about that stuff, but here's a fact: bombs and crates don't even come close in revenue as ranks do. Dungeon bombs aren't even in the top 3 most sold bombs. I think it LOOKS like we're selling a fuck ton of them, but it's because those that do are very vocal and active in how they use them: it's advantageous to shout and get as many people as possible into your CSST party. We took a while to fix the issue because of two reasons: with our current system, if we wanted to push a XP nerf to dungeons, we had to push EVERY config files we had and we were too late in the next update to do something like that (lately we've updated it to allow us to push items and ingredients alone. cool stuff!). And when we could do it, we were hesitant because we didn't want to punish normal players working for their keys with shitty unrewarding XP. That's why we prefered to fix it by reworking the dungeon to be more time consuming (and in general, more fun).


Community

That's the part I'll disagree the most, hopefully you understand my point.

Peeps aren't using the shoutbox because we got Discord, which is now the main way many people interact. "Cults" are still there, just not in the same way you're used to. And yea, people become the profile post police too much lately, you're right on that. I think you're experiencing something we eventually all go through: the community is changing without you. I've been through that many times myself. When I was 12, I was very active on a french game making community and it was heartbreaking to see it change at the time. It still managed to have an active community, but it felt lifeless to me compared to what I was used to. It's not necessarely bad, but it definitely doesn't feel good. Then the same thing happened when I was 15 on a game community, and even a bit on the CraftedMovie community after.

I'm not saying what you feel is invalid and false, but just that it happens constantly and it's kind of the way things go. It'd be better if everything stayed the same and your friend were all as active as they once were, but it just cannot. Even the CT itself go through changes to the point it feels there are different "periods" of it depending on who was there at the time. I've kind of always been there, so I see it change overtime constantly and it feels odd to watch that happen actively without being as much inside of it as I used to.

At this point, the way I prefer to see it is that you had a great moment before in this community, to the point you're noticing the changes to it. It doesn't feel as great anymore, but at least it once did, and that's better than if it didn't.

...
Aaaah and comon man, at least follow your own rule about people calling others asshole ;D It's a thread about your worries of the game right? No need to do that.



ANYWAY, I hope that answered some of you guys' worrys. That thing took me 2 hours to write and got way too big. We apologize for the way we responded to feedback lately, and we're working into improving on that. We've also been listening a lot and plan to push a patch eventually to fix some gameplay issues with the update. Don't hesitate to give feedback (good or bad), we won't eat you (anymore)!