Xendran
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As great as promises and ideas are, ideas themselves are cheap. What the players need first is to see that there is someone on the ED team actually capable of actually bringing these ideas together in a streamlined, easily expanded upon, cohesive, and enjoyable combat system with elegance and depth.
Longer fights ARE necessary though. Also, longer fights and more diverse skill trees would also allow you to hide skill trees.
The reason you can't hide skill trees now is because you need to know what build your opponent is playing since you're going to die in a minute and a half anyway.
If you actually have 2 - 4 turns of seeing how they're playing, you can figure out their build before they pull out their big combos and play around potential plays.
The revamp this would require to actually be good enough to draw in new players would also require more skills on each class, as WELL as removing all overlap, and even then you'd struggle unless new classes were also added.
Defence and Resistance system has to be completely redone, so every damage number in the game also has to be redone.
Damage and effects on skills have to get a mana standard to help balance skills to a standard.
Skill Cores should be released frequently and with very diverse effects and true synergies with each other, enough of them that your core loadout is just important in making your build unique as your stat distribution and skill layout.
Weapons also need to become unique again.
You can see what i mean when i say all of those ideas are "cheap". They're easy things to think up, claim to want to do, say are good ideas etc.
Actually implementing those ideas well, that's something that the ED playerbase will never trust the current developers with which means they won't be as likely to spread the word about the "New ED".
I'm also concerned that these specific issues are being put toward the community, because this game is way past "what do the most vocal forum users want". The fact that it's being posted in threads like this make me concerned that the Developers do not realize that it's not about what your most vocal forum members want on a forum this miniscule, it's about what makes sense, what has worked in the past and present for other games (especially turn based games like Hearthstone).
Needing to increase the length of matches? That's just a fact of life that needs to happen for ED to actually survive and appeal to people who want actual strategy in their fights. Some things, you just have to ignore everyone that's complaining and just fix. Good example being the 10x HP/Damage/Mana update that fixed the rounding issues.
So then I ask: Who among the ED staff is capable of streamlined mechanical design and balance? There is nobody on the team qualified for it as of yet that we know about.
We know that neither Titan, Nightwraith, Rabblefroth nor Charfade can head this up. All of them are specialized in other fields, and the game has shown over the years that they simply cannot take the time to re-specialize into mechanical design and balance.
This means they need to not only spend time and resources on pushing this update, but even more resources hiring another body for it as well. Are we really confident that this level of resources is going to be spent on a dying flash game from pre-2010?
Seems like an unwinnable situation here. The amount of money they would have to spend on a product that has relied on whales in an attempt to re-popularize it while remaining on a dying platform is likely more than would be allowed to be allocated to the ED dev studio.
Remaking the game in Unity is a potential, but they then have to figure out how to handle existing accounts and inventories. This has an even higher cost than the previous option, although it is the best option.
Not hiring and attempting to revamp the game with the current team will simply not have drastic enough changes to do anything but cause ED to hemorrhage money from it, which encourages them to continue their microtransaction style in the way that they have.
Then comes the issue of communication. There's no way any of the players would feel confident with such large scale behind the scenes balance changes unless Development Manifestos (akin to how Path of Exile does it) were posted, because we simply do not trust 2 programmers and 2 artists with their time already being spent on other important tasks to be able to also handle the job of a dedicated mechanical designer and balancer. Their minds are in general not going to immediately be going to balance when they get home at night and start thinking about their project again, so they aren't going to have many unique ideas or epiphanies about balance or combat when their mind immediately goes to something programming or art related.
Also, nobody can blame them for their mind going there, that's what they specialize in which is exactly why they should stick to it and not spread themselves thin.
The unfortunate part, though, is the developers do not seem to realize this fact.
Knowing what you don't know is an important part of ensuring that you bring any product to its highest potential quality.
The current devs don't know how to balance. That's fine, they don't need to, they are already talented and specialized in their own fields. What's not fine, however, is not accepting the fact that design is not for everyone and that you can still have it be YOUR game even if someone else is in control of the finer details of the combat.
The hole they've dug themselves is deep, and escaping it is a very expensive feat.
If they manage to do it, and do it properly, I will be very impressed and likely give this game another shot.
Like thousands of others that came before and after me though, here's the ultimatum: Hearthstone is free to try, turn based, not laggy, and also on mobile. Convince me that my time and money should go towards this turn based game as well, and not just Hearthstone.
You can't compete with the visuals or polish because of your engine alone (not even considering the size of Blizzard), so if you don't remake ED in unity then focusing in very strategic combat is the way to go.
Remember what the original age group was for this game?
Sure, we don't have to bring the art and story content back up to that level now that it's been lowered to a more age 12+ area, but think about the age group that:
1. Would benefit most from a mobile port
2. Often has 10-30 to minutes to kill in the morning and evening (and would probably rather spend it on 2 - 4 interesting battles with "LOL DID THAT REALLY JUST HAPPEN" moments, rather than playing 5 battles in 5 minutes and getting bored for the rest of the bus ride)
3. Would prefer more strategic gameplay
4. Is the largest
5. Has their own money
Don't want to alienate more casual or younger players who don't necessarily want strategy? Separate casual and ranked play. Eventually they will simply become good enough to switch over to ranked, and become better at prediction, logic, and problem solving as a whole as well, encouraging more well-thought out discussion and theorycrafting on the forums.
< Message edited by Xendran -- 9/8/2015 4:33:22 >
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