Xendran
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EDIT: I'm sorry for yet another wall of text from me guys, I swear this post was a third of the size before I started editing it.
I guess I can't help but turn these posts about games into pseudo-essays because of how much of a large portion of my free time I spend studying game design and applying it to my own projects. Sometimes when I'm writing these textwalls I gain some new insight about why things are the way they are, so I guess that's handy.
There's so much detail to go over with the history and design of this game after spending over half a decade playing, deconstructing, and analyzing everything about EpicDuel.
TL;DR: No longer having a promise of improvement is the truest killer, more than anything else. More than lack of community involvement, more than however much they do or do not care about the game.
We loved beta because every week it was better than the last, so we were able to focus on the fun aspects, because any issues taking away from the fun were expected to be fixed.
Today, we have the same broken core mechanics, just with a shiny coat of Omega paint and a near-guarantee that none of the problems with the game are going to ever be fixed.
Unfortunately, the issue of improvement could have been avoided if the game systems were designed in a cohesive manner that allowed focus to go into adding new skills to increase variety, instead of constantly applying bandaids over and over and over to broken systems (rage, focus, agility, homogenization of resource generation, skills that are strictly better than others because the *class* is weak otherwise, etc.). This would have greatly extended the lifespan of the game.
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@Satofu: That's an example of what i mean by it being a bad credit sink. Boosters were a fine addition as a concept and item, and they added to the battle, but any time you didn't have them you felt like you were not actually playing your build properly.
This leads to the situation before where players have to choose to either lose far more than usual to get their credits back, or stop playing the real game to go fight boring AI oppponents and get credits back.
A good credit sink is the exact opposite: There's something that's an addition or enhancement to the base play that you want to do, but drains your credits.
How do you get more credits when the sink drains you? Actually playing the game. PVP. With your real build at full power.
Now if we were assuming the game wasn't dead and this battle mode wasn't broken beyond belief, Juggernaut is a perfect example of a missed opportunity for a credit sink.
Think is they ALMOST got it.
Make silver skull cards cost way less, but be consumable. Then add rewards specific to juggernaut mode.
Boom, credit sink. You want those exclusive rewards? Play juggernaut.
Ran out of credits to play Juggernaut? Play 1v1 or 2v2.
There's no encouragement for you to stop playing the game here, like there is with other sinks that ED has had.
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Honestly far more than either of those (community feedback or care) , it's because EpicDuel does not have a game designer on their team.
Design is a specific and intense role, completely separated from artist and programmer. One that requires you to spend your time actively learning and continuing to improve on it.
It's a role just as intensive as programmer, and just as vital because a bad game will fail the same way a broken one does.
One that ED's devs do not have the time to dedicate an equal amount of time to as their "main" role. Then to further muddy things up, this role is being further split between team members.
This inherently means gameplay comes last, regardless of the intentions of the creators.
Their skillsets prioritize every other aspect of the game, which is why epicduel looks fantastic and is programmed wonderfully for a flash game, but is dead regardless.
That's also why the artwork and coding has improved so much over the years. ESPECIALLY the security. Epicduel was horrendously unsecure and trusted the client for an insane amount of things including attacking without the server checking whether or not it was your turn back in beta. Now, the artwork and coding is great because they've spent all their time working on improving those skills. The gameplay has only felt worse and worse over the years, because their game design knowledge has not been an actively developed skill.
That has stayed the same, and our expectations of what makes a good game have only gone up. There are a lot of problems that we didn't care about back in the day because the game was enjoyable, and held the promise of "the broken parts will get fixed", so we looked past the issues and focused on enjoying what we had.
Combine this with what appears to be no real cohesive set of standards in regards to "What makes a class", "What makes a skill", "What is HP worth compared to EP", "How much access does Build X have to tools A B and C compared to other classes" etc. and of course we have an inconsistent feeling of battle. There's this mishmash of skills designed aruond different standards, mechanics that exist only to balance out another broken one instead of fixing the original problem (Rage. Literally the only reason this stat exists is because raising flat defense values like you do in this game is broken by design), and formulas behind the numbers make no real sense as to why they are the way they are.
Now take all of that, which already is asking for a game to inevitably die, and add to it a battle experience where every single instance of RNG in the entire game is so strong that the most common outcome of a single instance of RNG occuring automatically swings the match to a nearly unwinnable state. There are core design philosophies and decisions behind ED that very clearly show this lack of having a designer on their team. Even extremely basic things like how multipliers in this game are in the wrong place in the forumula (unless it is intentionally imbalanced). Things that cannot be fixed without redesigning the entire system because of the way it would affect the game upon being changed.
It doesn't matter how much you do or don't care about something if you simply do not have a person available with the qualifications and skillset to design it correctly.
When I think of a concise way to put all of this, the problem with Epicduel's Past & Present is that: The present is the past, with all the same problems it brought. It just has a shiny coat of Omega paint.
We loved the past under the assumption that it would keep getting better, and that existing issues would be fixed. That confidence that anything serious broken will get fixed in the future makes it far easier to look past problems, because you knew it was just a temporary thing. You were focused on the good parts, since the bad parts are gonna be taken care of... Then we found out it wasn't temporary.
I recently came back onto ED for about a week, and took another serious analytical look specifically at how the game feels to play, ignoring the community aspect. It feels like beta.
I'm not kidding at all, and you know that I was a super hardcore beta player. I'm not just saying this as someone who just joined the game being like "nah man game is just like it was back then".
Really though, the way i was designing my builds was far more reminiscent of beta than any other phase, especially with the maxing of "New Passives" (skills that generate more resources than they consume).
A lot of you say you want to go back to beta.
Tell me an update version of beta you specifically want, and, in terms of raw game quality, why that beta update is a better pick than the other update versions of beta, or today's version of omega.
It's not gonna fix your RNG, it's not going to fix your build diversity, it's not gonna fix your class imbalance and it's not gonna fix your core design having inherently broken aspects.
We loved beta because it was always getting better, it was being tweaked to give us a better experience each week. THAT is why we loved beta. That is why we cannot look over the exact same flaws in Omega that we were able to happily push aside in Beta.
< Message edited by Xendran -- 9/18/2016 13:02:27 >
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