Developer’s notes about v328

Player Growth

We spent a great amount of time reviewing the rate of how the game play for ROSE was being experienced and through all that research we found that a large portion of the content within ROSE is being rushed or sped through at alarming rates we were anticipating. From a designing point of view, moving through the game’s content at such a high rate does two things. It for one, in a way, cheats the player out of being able to enjoy this beautiful world we spent the time to create and two, makes us have to rush out content just to try and keep up with the rate it is being exhausted. The rate of exhaustion hit a point where we could no longer keep up with it and causes game play to feel like nothing new is happening and becomes stale and less enjoyable.

What we have as a goal is that by slowing down the content exhaustion rate through the above explained changes, we will be replacing with new content over time. New content that we expect will restore the feeling of progression of game play but with accomplishments of questing, task completion and other new innovative ideas that have been brought up in brain storming sessions and lunch talk.

The unfortunate reality is that we weren’t able to include that replaced content, but didn’t want to put off introducing the balancing changes because we felt that it was a bit of a necessity to help start the process of slowing down content exhaustion and selfishly, buy us some time to come up with that content so when it does you can feel the rewards for going through it.

Monsters

Throughout many of the past updates, monsters have been left behind in growing with all of our updates. Players and their abilities have progressed in their growth that monsters were less and less of a challenge. When we introduced a change to combat mechanics, monsters were relatively untouched.

This caused monsters to steadily become easier and easier to defeat, as players became stronger and stronger.

It was intended back when we first made the change to mechanics that monsters were to adopt the new mechanics. Unfortunately they didn’t get the change that fully adopted new mechanics. So that’s what we’ve done with this update. We applied monster stats to the updated design of mechanics so that game play could regain some of its challenge and strategy.
So what was done and the goal of the change was to make monsters feel a little tougher because it seemed like monsters in general were pretty much pushovers. How we went about doing it was finding how a player would grow without things like refinements or bonus stats and kept it to the basic stuff like how much HP would a player have minimally if they didn’t increase stats as they leveled. Knowing a fuller range of how player growth progressed let us create a chart and use that for monsters to know what we’re putting you up against. Now we wanted to make combat feel more like combat and not a boring chore of pick a target, push a button, pick a target, push a button. What we were looking to accomplish is that as a player, you would need to pay at least a little attention to what’s going on or it could have a bad outcome.

Situations we wanted to start seeing was, when you get mobbed unexpectedly that you feel the pressure and have to make the decision to stay and fight it out or run and regroup yourself to try again.

Ultimately we wanted to see combat mean something again and make it a game, not a chore or some mundane process that had no excitement or challenge to overcome.

Monster Experience was reduced because that is ultimately one of the major deciding factors behind how fast a player is able to progress through levels and game play. The initial amount of experience that was cut was immediately unappreciated, which we were expecting because we knew it was a pretty nasty cut. But as explained in a further topic, we have the intention of replacing much of that loss to the immediate gain from monsters and putting it in to questing. Unfortunately we found ourselves unable to provide that content in time to meet the release of the change. The reason why we went ahead with the implementation before that content was ready to be available was because in the grader scheme of things, content is still being exhausted too quickly and for the greater good of the long term life of ROSE, slowing that down now would be better for the future of ROSE.

Drops

Over the course of the year, we noticed that many items that were intended to be amongst the rare, such as blue items, were being obtained at a much higher rate than we would have liked to see. The rates blue equipment was dropping at caused them to be less special, to the point they were almost normal. The idea of rare was lost.

To address this, we took a wider look at how items were obtained, their use and effect to game play and what kind of ideal design structure we felt could let players enjoy casual play, but still reward those who wished to hunt for the best or parties who take on larger challenges.

The goal for the drop system was to make items that were seen as higher desired or game impacting, to be rarer than the less impacted or desired items. There was also the consideration for new players who may want to partake in some of these aspects of game play but were not yet able to because most of these items were only obtainable in higher level areas. Also, something that was kept in consideration behind it was a hated concept of the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, or in our case, the strong get richer and the richer get stronger. With how the ability to farm and gain items was, it left little room for new players to be able to enter in to the game and become part of the economy.

So what has been done is items were divided in to a rarity system, where the greater the item’s impact to game play had, the higher up the tier of rarity it was placed. After that, a level range was set so that also as players reached higher areas, the levels of impact would also progress so that it wasn’t solely on rarity.

Now after establishing how items were to be associated by their rarity, we established rates of frequency that tier of rarity were accessed by monsters. We naturally felt reasonably, the harder the monster the better rates of rarity would be allowed.

Since we previously established monster classing and stats, rarity was assigned based on the monster’s class of strength, so better rates would come from more difficult combat.
How item rarity was broken down:

Common: Crafting materials, low rate chemicals and catalysts, the HP & MP quick restore items and items of that nature.
Uncommon: Basic armors and jewelry, Mythril Drill, slightly better chemicals and catalysts, standard equipment refine items (bindrunes, etc.) and some simple [1] gems.
Rare: Basic weapons, Blue Armors, Orihalcon Drill, better chemicals and catalysts than uncommon, unique refine materials (Ancient Scarabs, etc.) and some other [1] gems.
Ultra Rare: Blue Weapons, Adamantium Drill, highest grade catalyst and chemicals, some [2] gems.
Epic: Epic/Unique style equipment, Aurum Drill, other [2] gems
Legendary: stuff even better than epic, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves as this is future plan still in the making.
How those rarity tiers were assigned to monsters:
Basic Types: high rate of common, low rate of Uncommon
Leader Types: low rate of common, high rate of uncommon, low rate rare
Captain Types: low rate of uncommon, mid rate of rare, low rate of ultra rare
Sub-Boss Types: mid rate of Uncommon, mid rate of rare, mid-low rate of ultra rare
Kings/Boss Types: high rate of rare, mid rate of ultra rare, low-mid rate of ultra rate

Bonus Stats

For a good while we’ve been hearing that certain pieces of equipment were more powerful than others. In the beginning we took it as personal preference, but then we started noticing that certain pieces were being brought up more frequently than others, which then lead us to look deeper in to those stats and why. We then also began to research the trends behind what were the most desired stats and why.

One of the goals of the rebalancing of bonus stats was to help level the playing field of their effect and their desirability. So again, we looked at the player growth and created another chart to view and see how bonus stats were in relation to player growth. An additional goal was that though bonus stats help make a player stronger, we didn’t want to make it so that a single piece of equipment would cause complete dominance over others. So, stat types are applied differently to certain pieces of equipment than others, rather than having flat bonuses on all equipment depending on their level range. For example, you would get a bigger bonus for attack speed from gloves than you would from shoes if both have the same bonus type applied to them. Another example would be getting a bigger Max HP bonus from chest armor than you would a headgear. This was to help create the idea of looking for ideal pieces for stats you desire and split the overpowering act of stacking a single stat, unless you truly wish to push that one stat. The overall bonuses you could achieve wouldn’t cause this over-stacked, overpowered result which is what we were recognizing to be one of many causes feeding the issue of players being stronger than we wanted to see. This affects both the rate that players were exhausting content and areas of PvP where one build dominates over all else. We would like to see each build have strength, but not without a weakness that another could use against them so that there’s always a pro and con to think about.

The vicious cycle

All that said above, the vicious cycle was found to be that monsters were easy to defeat. Once defeated, the high rate of rare equipment and amount of bonuses on that equipment would then make a player stronger, which then made the monster even easier to defeat, which the monster would drop more gear, which made the player stronger, which. . . well you get the picture.

So we had to devise a way to make this cycle not be so vicious, but still remain rewarding because ultimately yes that is the natural cycle of playing an MMO such as ROSE. To make this clear, it wasn’t the cycle we wanted to stop, it was the speed and amount of strength that was gained with each stage of the cycle. The ease of obtaining better equipment made a player immediately stronger, the bonuses on the equipment made the player even stronger where it eventually just would hit a plateau because there’s nothing better to get, till you hit a level range, which with the amount of experience you gained wasn’t a very long wait.

So we slowed down the cycle by making monsters have a little more effort to kill, the equipment they drop be harder to get and the bonuses that the equipment gave have appropriate bonuses for their level range. Granted the bonuses weren’t all reductions, which put some power back to the player and that’s alright because we knew that these bonus allocations were set to the right amounts for their level and with that intent, help players have more choices in where they wish to place their strengths or cover for their weaknesses.