Hey Dev's

[Inubis]

Sup! (About PS3 Version)

I am just a lowly IT consultant who's been playing MMO's since the launch of titles like EQ and Runescape. Eventually moving up to many, in my opinion, good MMO's over the years. I understand that at launch MMO's typically suffer from a wide array of issues, especially system stability which result in a lot of DCs (disconnects) or server errors. I get it, no one is perfect and trust me I have taken enough programming classes to know how easy it is for bugs to exist which is why I do not program. On top of that I also understand that when your developing cross platform you can/may end up stretching your resources thin. I want you to know that I understand! Just in case your uncertainty of my understanding is unclear as I am sure my opinion is very important to you. (I am very sarcastic, but its a playful sarcasm)

That said, the point of the post is to address some key issues or "suggestions". *Statement Redacted: In fact I would call this a "suggestion for suggestions". I want you to take every single suggestion you receive on this forum and throw them away. Literally after reading this just select all then press delete, including this post. Now let me tell you why.*

First) You have a great game premise, the character leveling system (EGO) is way more complex than most people give it credit and has so many different build variations that I cannot see any type of player being left out. I see so many amazing potential builds to try out whether it be a healer, assassin, tank, it all seems to be possible (I personally am experimenting on high DPS builds for PVE).

Second) Here is the "but", your game is broken. I am not entirely sure if you have realized it, maybe something was lost in translation but it just doesn't perform well. While I understand the launch issues, this game is rapidly approaching it's 1 year mark and I can barely get into a group let alone spend 4-5 hours raiding without getting DC'ed. Its kinda BS. I am all about Bossing, Partying Up and going on Raids/Events (whatever you want to call it). That's just my thing and yes the bosses need to be more numerous and could use some additional variation but lets not get ahead of ourselves. Before you even consider any suggestions for enhancements you need to implement a system that is going to track our DC's and why they happen... Then you need to patch it.

I do not have any DLC's and have not invested any money into your in game store and I wont until I can get a stable connection. Your talking to a guy who has thrown roughly $2,000 into MapleStory (yes i know its insane and this is not an embellishment I am actually embarrassed I put that much into that games cash store). Trust me there are things I want in your in game store like the DLC's and a Raptor in every color... plus several outfits.

While my income may be disposable I sort of feel like its wrong further investing any money in this game because in a way it is like telling you "it's ok that I get booted 8 out of 10 times I enter Warmaster" or try to start a co-op mission. That my map is bipolar and sometimes loads but other times does not, or my HUD feels like randomly disappearing, or my car decides I am no longer worthy to ride in it so it goes all Harry Potter Flying Car on my *** by throwing me out then cloaking. Ya know I get it that you will never be able to prevent 100% of bugs or "random glitch occurrences" and at some point, someone is going to end up falling through the map into an infinite blue sky. To that I say "**** Happens" but we're at a point right now where these occurrences are frequent and predictable and that is the problem.

I apologize for the length of my post, any grammatical errors and its overall "wordyness" but I hope in some small way I can impact the direction this game is going because I would really much like to play it and hope that the community can turn itself around.

Thank you,

Inubis
IT Consultant
Ninjitsu Practitioner Wacther

You will receive an invoice for this consultation in 1-2 business days. JK, consider this pro-bono.

[barbzilla]

First off: Why delete all suggestions if you think the game sucks? Wouldn't the suggestions help to make it a better game? I mean, bug fixes should be a priority, but modifying content and adding new content is what keeps people spending money.

Secondly: $2,000 dollars on Maple Story?!?! How, why, did you buy stocks in the game? I'm only kidding, I am a little confused, but what you do with your money is your business. I do agree with you on refusing to buy DLC or make in game purchases until the bugs are worked out, however...

Bugs: I honestly haven't experienced a single one of the bugs you have listed, and I started in Alpha (granted I took an 8 month break). The only persistent bugs I've experienced are; A: Triggered events failing to trigger (I.E. Enemies spawning for a quest, or friendly quest NPCs failing to continue on with the quest once the trigger event happens), and B: The Nvidia card issue causing everything but the terrain to disappear when you sprint or boost (which, honestly, isn't a major issue). Of the two, only one is game breaking and needs immediate attention. That said, I play on PC, and I didn't see any indication of your system of choice in the suggestions, so it may just be a difference in platforms.

Grammar and Verbosity: Honestly, I think your suggestion was well written, although a bit confusing. Outside of the bugs and deleting suggestions though, I agree with you 100%. The game had serious potential and could have gone very far, but it is currently being held back by lazy programming and porting issues. I have this feeling that they are only programming one set of patches, and then porting the patch to the localized language for each system (which never works the way it is supposed to).

Consulting Fees: Normally I have a strict policy of requiring a percentage of the consultant's fee when I give input on their suggestions, however since you decided to do it Pro Bono Publico, I will have to charge you a set fee of $100 per response. I could be persuaded to wave the fee for a good sparing session however.

Your Welcome,

Barbzilla
Entrepreneur and IT Specialist
Mixed Martial Arts Practitioner (Focused on Muay Thai currently)

[Hei]

wtf are you two idiots on about

[barbzilla]

wtf are you two idiots on about

Well with a few short lessons in reading comprehension, I'm sure you will be well on your way to figuring that out. Thank you for taking the time to read my response.

[Inubis]

Barbzilla
Entrepreneur and IT Specialist
Mixed Martial Arts Practitioner (Focused on Muay Thai currently)

We can work out some kind of deal. Please note I only watch people whom are practitioners and not an actual practitioner myself, so the sparring may be a little dull for you.

This post was primarily for the Dev's and I did not really expect it to be read. I apologized for any grammatical errors because I wrote this at around 3 am and was a tad frustrated. I should also clarify why I feel the deletion is necessary. Have you ever developed anything? Weather it be a simple program, I personally held a job working in HTML, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, etc (you know the easy languages). I am asking (this is in no way an attack, i usually come off aggressive and do not mean to) because being in IT yourself you may be familiar with such a scenario.

When the people your developing for constantly want suggestions or additional enhancements implemented it can steer you in the wrong direction and "take your eye off the ball" leaving you prone to producing bugs. I know from experience. Sometimes you just need to completely disregard them to be able to straighten out the bugs and that starts with shutting down suggestions/enhancements and literally just asking "what isn't working", then obviously properly tracking the situation. Now perhaps the deleting all the suggestions remark was a bit extreme but as I say, "go big or go home!" At the end of the day they really shouldn't be focusing on the suggestions IMO but rather just debugging the entire game.

The bugs I have experienced I should also mention are limited to the PS3 and the sole reason I own it on PS3 is because I pre-ordered it along side several RL friends who intended on playing the game as well. (I was hoping it was cross play because I really do prefer the PC but alas it was not) I also recall seeing the menus and feeling it was pretty console friendly. Now these errors are not just experienced by me, my friends but also my entire clan. On PS3 all of those issues are pretty common. I've considered making the jump to PC but again don't want to own multiple copies until i know the game is playable. I've checked out Rift and that seems to work just fine so I really don't know what the deal is with Defiance aside from your comment about laziness. I even thought that perhaps they want this game to fail because somehow they got suckered into developing it.

Finally about my $2000 investment in MS, man you have no idea how I felt after I added up everything up. I played it since Global Launch and if you haven't played it it cost real money to respec. At the time you could only respec one skill point at a time. On top of that I had numerous outfits and should note that outfits expired and had to be re-purchased... I was also very lazy, the game had no fast travel so I'd also purchase a lot of teleport rocks... At the end of the day I was young, fresh out of school and just landed a good paying IT job and had very little responsibilities. I look back and wish I had taken a nice vacation instead.

[barbzilla]

snip

Okay, with everything in perspective now, your original post makes a bit more sense, although I still don't think deleting the suggestions would be a very good idea. To answer your question about having developed something; yes I have, multiple somethings in fact. I have a number of webpages floating around out there, some small programs for windows (mainly just from my college programming class's final projects), and I'm currently working on an Android game (that I will likely port over to the PS Vita at some point). Now, with the exception of the Android game, I didn't really have to deal with suggestions, and even with the game, the suggestions are few and minor. That said, I think suggestions are an integral part of continued content once a game releases.

When you are trying to keep a game up to standards, keep people interested, and keep the game relevant, it is very hard to always have an answer for the things that pop up (especially when it comes to complaints and criticisms), and it is awesome to have those suggestions to fall back on for ideas when you are designing the upcoming content and changes. You don't necessarily have to use the suggestions, but often the solution they suggest is coming from a view point that you may not have seen yet which enhances your understanding of your product and how it interfaces with customers.

Example: You are getting a lot of complaints about the chat system in your game, but you have a vision for how you want everything laid out aesthetically and that has left you drawing a blank on how to rectify the complaints. While you are reading through the suggestions you find one that suggests placing the chat in a separate interface. Well, obviously you don't want chat to not be visible while playing the game, or people wouldn't see messages until they got the urge to go to the chat screen, but it does give you an idea. You keep the base view window where its at, and keep the general layout of the main screen, but you remove the functionality from that window. Instead you go ahead and make a separate screen for the full functionality for chat. Now you have eased the complaints about having a clunky interface, yet you still have the look and base functionality intact.

As for the PC version of Defiance, it works fairly well. If you are fine with Defiance outside of the bugs, then you will probably enjoy the game on PC, as the two are the same game. The bugs we encounter on the PC version, are generally just annoyances and not game breaking (though every once and a rare while one will pop up). Plus with the price of the game being so low, you can get it for a steal on Steam when they put it on sale. So, I'd consider talking to your buddies about switching.

Also, I made a suggestion (just under yours on the suggestions forum) to move the game on to a F2P model. You should probably check it out and let me know what you think (or show your support). If the game moves to a F2P model (will the base game fully accessible for free), then you can play on whatever system you want without having to worry about buying separate copies.

[Inubis]

I actually really like the F2P idea, and seconded your suggestion. Which does slightly contradict my previous statements on suggestions. However I do get what your saying and enhancements are important to the future of the game my point is it's meaningless to enhance something with so many bugs (in the PS3 version).

So I will redact my deletion of suggestions statement and just advise the Dev's to please put more effort and resources into debugging the PS3 iteration of this game. Even if I decide to move to PC, there is no reason for such a lousy version of your game to exist.

[barbzilla]

I actually really like the F2P idea, and seconded your suggestion. Which does slightly contradict my previous statements on suggestions. However I do get what your saying and enhancements are important to the future of the game my point is it's meaningless to enhance something with so many bugs (in the PS3 version).

So I will redact my deletion of suggestions statement and just advise the Dev's to please put more effort and resources into debugging the PS3 iteration of this game. Even if I decide to move to PC, there is no reason for such a lousy version of your game to exist.

Come on, you know that you want to join the PC Master Race. I'll tell you what, we can wave the previously stated fee in exchange for you purchasing the PC version of the game and playing with me. Too add the cream on top, it would alleviate all of your PS3 bug woes.

[Inubis]

Come on, you know that you want to join the PC Master Race.

I am part of the PC Master Race I just like to mingle with our lowly console counterparts. Much like the Ancient Greek God's mingling with mere mortals.