Soulmancer wrote:
What is the general consensus on some of the overall positive and negative changes since I stepped down?
It's tough because the jaded viewpoints of "old schoolers" are crippling to the progress of the mod in the current day and age.
Because of the age of the mod, the game itself, the playerbase being ~30 years old with jobs/families/lives, it's no longer feasible to follow the elitist mentality of
"HU should be super hard and require 3-4 people with no lives to grind and progress together unless you play the 1 or 2 OP builds, then maybe you can solo/duo most of it after 200 hours of playing."IMO any future patch should be designed so that the game IS soloable by nearly all builds, even if it requires a lot of farming/crafting/gambling/rerolling RWs/etc. Then also have a very large increase in difficulty and XP for each additional player. These need to be so extreme that 1 person who just loads in 5+ bots will not be able to even kill trash unless the player severely overlevels+overgears that area.
The main problem with this is people abusing single-spawn of bosses, and I don't know if that can be fixed. Perhaps there's a way to make it so all players get ported out of a "boss area" if someone joins the game while also resetting the boss area itself, or some other way.
There also needs to be more incentive for people to keep playing, like skillers as slappy mentioned. More items and areas that require lots of time and effort and are rewarding.
1.6 had a lot of advertising through Twitch using big streamers to provide marketing to people who'd never even heard of the mod, and it ended up having a ton of players. Unfortunately, 1.6 had some bad errors that required resets, and this made people give up. Then when 1.7 came out, it was SO different that many more people gave up. Then when 1.8 came out, people said it was more like 1.6 but it was too hard so they gave up too.
The bottom line is if newcomers can't somewhat-casually play the mod without being a tryhard nerd who already knows everything about the mod, then every future patch will just be the same 10-15 people who play for 2 weeks and then get bored.