@Riley_D and the Dev team. I am recently coming back online after spending some time off due to work and equipment issues. I was off before raid release when your game still thrived and everyone was active daily. Now it’s quite dead bc everyone logs on at specific times weekly due to lack of improvement. I understand time and resources have a limit, however you have a community that backed you by giving you the donations in the first place (majority of players who quit) and they are more still willing to. But even better there are others who can provide more due to their skill in different areas. I know a handful of players that could make new artwork for you and a few more who could turn the artwork into working animated models that can be implemented in game and all they would need is credit for their work bc they simply just want to see the game get better. The community sounds like a lot of hate but it’s just a cry not for help but to let us help. Like I get y’all are a team but y’all have something bigger than a team of 6 here, there’s a whole ass community awaiting to help in someway shape or form. Hell the amount of feedback you always get all the time that’s free game testers right there. So now use that to y’all advantage, instead of saying “hey let me know what y’all think” let’s state the problem, state what y’all think is causing it and tell them to go test and you’ll get your results I promise. And that’s the smallest way we could probably help, there is people who could go so far to even code, you have Devs and GMs of other titles here playing your game instead of there’s. The people want to help so just let us help while we still want to.
I don’t think you’re understanding what I’m saying and are confused. All I was saying is more work could get done faster with more help and there is people willing to help in their community if they allow them too. I’m not talking about suggestions I mean actual work that can be implemented into the game, their excuse for having the same looking mobs is having (X) amount of artwork hours well then branch out to your community that would be willing to help there. There are multiple great artist for the illustrations and great animators who work with blender and other applications daily. I’m sorry you didn’t comprehend what I was saying. If the devs would take a work load and put it off on the willing community then they can focus on the larger issues at hand. I’m not saying give us full control I’m saying ask the community to make some ideas up, shoot it their way, and they can decide from there if they want to implement it. And yes you see a bunch of new players yet do any of them stay? Not from what I see.
Lol that’s what I get for looking at this while at work.
The worst thing a gaming company can do is let the community have control over what the game becomes
Yet I never once said they should give us control of anything. I said they should allow the community to provide for them and they can choose to implement it or not. I don’t get what’s so hard to understand about that? All I’m saying is some players who really care about this game and can actually provide beneficial data and work for the devs. I’m not saying everyone can provide beneficial things, I’m saying select people who are in this community can and I guarantee they will be willing to help. I could be wrong who knows. What I do know is if you’re not able or willing to help then this wasn’t regarding you and your input is unnecessary. But I agree with what you say, just off topic. Miss you @Senpai let’s run a shard later.
To give an example of what I mean is say someone created a “Boss” for them for whatever they want right. So what I mean is they create a humanoid or creature on blender and that’s it, at best give it a walking animation then just hand it over to them from there. There’s no control over what it does or what it’s for, it would be more or less fan art.
A second idea for if they just wanted to take fan art and then they could sculpt it based on the artwork and make a contest out of it. Set guidelines for each “boss” and take the best artwork that captures their idea. They could be put in a “Community Built Raid” and what I mean by that is they build the map and everything and the only thing that comes from us is the artworks for the bosses. Winners could even potentially name them, I would say just not after themselves.
I think what people don’t really understand, specially if they are younger, games are a business… with contracts, profits, sales, community management, roles distributed and so on. Look at the staff it’s not exactly small anymore. Everyone in a game company gets paid and if the hours you work as a volunteer amount to those of employees that would be very weird (and mostly illegal) to not pay for that.
Now what if you only peek in, investing less hours than the contracted? Well if people volunteer to do a couple models and then vanish that’s doing the opposite - integrating others stuff, code etc. is easily generating more work hours than it saves.
To help with anything you need to maintain your stuff, be available, get access and integrate yourself into existing workflows and communication structures and certainly invest time to actually get familiar with the tools and environments used (which might not be always exactly the one you favorite or know from other jobs… ).
And most likely you can no longer be part of the game community at this point, least not of any progress guild, because you got insights and infos which will give you an advantage over the rest.
The most the “community” can help with imo is ideas, bug reports and perhaps the one or other 3rd party tool like Js map, dmg counters or of course the whole armory etc. The more independent these are, the better.
And then possibly things like translations which already started a while ago. But even this I am curious if it really works out with volunteers. Some dropped out halfway and there’s new translations out already since the project started. Now once volunteers are gone who translated the old texts, sticking to a certain terminology etc. - and most already seem to be - that could result in a visible difference for native speakers in the end.
If the people were willing to do the volunteer work then it wouldn’t be an issue just saying. Other than that I understand what you’re saying. I get the legality’s hence why it’s voluntary work. Maybe no one would be willing to do this though I guess. If you’re not one of these people that could and would help this this does not regard you and your input is unneeded. This metris is good points but doesn’t pertain to this as for the volunteer would be aware of the arrangement.
Sadly, if there are new players coming in, it is unlikely they are being retained any more efficiently than release.
Currently daily peaks were at ~60 active users compared to 1 month after release where we were seeing ~180 players online at once.
Nice optimism though.
Whatever choices are being made, it is clear that the depth of those choices is too shallow to cause enough delight for players to come back. Here is my TLDR theory on this:
- The skinner box model approach they tried relying on for drops throughout the world and dungeons has failed (because not enough thought and emphasis was put in to correctly tuning drop rates imho).
- The quest system is largely just speaking to players and grinding which makes the experience flat.
- There are no ‘brain buzzers’ in the game (things which make you try and solve puzzles). The closest thing I have seen to a brain buzzer is figuring out boss mechanics… But alas, constant game bugs stop people from feeling passionate to solve those.
- Limited to 0 interaction models across the world with no strong emphasis put on sound.
- Animations are non existent on enemies, NPCs and no preprogrammed player animations.
- The way in which changes are being made to the game are not very data driven and largely driven by a single persons opinion. Sub optimal changes which are not big enough to appease the larger audience. I see people posting small problems… Occasionally devs will respond and say ‘okay we will fix that’… because of this reactive approach to product development, the big problems are being left out of the loop. There are so many big problems which have yet to be solved, that the older community are largely fed up and look for other things to spend their time on.
- Unfortunately the dungeon and shard level increases might be too little too late to recover an active player base sadly. Something bigger and more drastic would have to be done.
Coming from the open source (!= free) community, I totally understand and support this suggestion.
However, for it to be successful, the dev team would have to spend some time to provide a platform to receive contributions (if they don’t want to use gitlab/github/etc), to review those contributions, to comment them, to work on them, etc.
It is largely doable and could be very beneficial but would still take a lot of time to the dev team.
(And the time investment from the team on this is debatable since I doubt they will open source anything here. So contributions can’t be directly related to the core source code which reduce a lot the contributions that can be done (no contributions to bug fixing for example))
If I remember well, they did try something on the translation of the game tho, I don’t know how successful it was.
Yeah these’ so many new people’ are mostly queensears. Which stop mostly even before lv30. It’s sometimes hard to get a Raidgroup together even on the Weekends.
New dungeons? Meh most of the people which can actually do lv13-15 are gone, and not willing to come back, especially after the last changes which were made.
I really miss the time where we had 70ppl online just for a sanyael event 
To be fair, there is the hidden quest. However, I do agree to this point, as one quest chain wouldn’t even remotely justify adding a “puzzle” tag to the game in the store either.
They still have the thread, and I’ve seen some contributions before. Including a French player recently mentioning wanting to help with it like a day ago or so.
Idk about this one. I can’t tell if ‘the devs sometimes help a random suggestion or bugfix/question on the forums’ is a good indication they are not working on big data in their decisions. And I don’t have an overview of all problems they fixed and didn’t fix, but I am sceptic about them keepig all the ‘big’ problems out the loop in general. Maybe its even the opposite, because the general public doesn’t apply to a small part of the community that part feels like they are left out of ‘their big problems’. If we talking about crashing I think that is one of the few all have. But if we talk about constant desyncs that is happening waaay more often in a hardmode raid setting (a.k.a. almost no-one in player base) But maybe you right. I don’t feel confinced yet about this though.
(they are also collecting alot of data with bug report tool ow which is basically gathering masses of data)
I can tell you that after working in the tech product world for the last 14 years that this is not good practice. They don’t have any ‘big data’. Their player base is not big enough.
look at how many obvious untested bugs are cropping up in the new content.
Isn’t that manual? so probably not a lot of data… But hopefully enough for them to action big hit crashes. Crashes are one of the smaller problems though. Generally a detail oriented mindset when testing isn’t present and so failures in drop rate, not thinking things through before releasing etc are still happening after 2 years…
Just to reiterate again… DAU is peaking at 60. Something is not being done correctly.
They were only reacting to player feedback (the Riley era) where you were happy.
Now it goes more general data with less direct responses your less happy. So you want them to go more into that direction because you think it is better and think your prior experience can make you not being wrong? Still sceptic.
I guess we are now in the old player forum whine era. They have to fix 100% of playerbase single person forum complaints to let that stop. Which is what you don’t want.
Also can you please stop spamming that player graph with the hope on a response? I wouldn’t be surprised I can spam you every game in existence having a downwards trend.
As I am trying to say here: I am sceptic about your certainty what is ‘wrong’ with the game. I am not saying your completely wrong, but ya I do feel and see some things in your post that makes me think your not right either. You lay it down too easy as facts instead of possible factors.
I do see you make a few more points that I have the urge on to correct or try to find out why you think this or that, but that would clutter the thread and waste both our times more then needed.
I have never been ‘happy’ with the way they are prioritizing feature additions, changes and releases. They have got some things right, but no where near enough to appease the masses.
As with everyone’s opinions, they are allowed to state their opinion. It is a fact that daily active user is reducing and I am pointing out the reasons why I think that is. It is a fact that there are many game breaking bugs that they still haven’t resolved. It is a fact that there are no actual puzzles in the game. It is a fact that they haven’t take much care with drop rates… These are not opinions. These are literal failures of prioritization in product development.
Unless you can tell me exactly what facts or opinions you disagree with, I can’t either give you evidence to make your own choice or reply with some reasoning as to why I believe certain things to be a fact.
Just to be clear… Pretty much all my opinions / factual evidence go on big Nono’s of in game development I have read as part of my job/study over the years and obvious reasons why people have either told me they quit the game or what I hear from people being angry about from countless raids over countless hours. Mostly by listening to others then researching it with numbers or some scientific study.
So feel free to challenge me on what you think the biggest problems are… I am sure we will say the same thing actually.
Sorry to necro a 3 day old thread but I felt like throwing my two cents in here, inexperienced though it may be. I had Orbus original on Oculus and played the beta for reborn. Unfortunately my Oculus headset didn’t survive it’s 2 years of age and a move. So I no longer have access to the game being on Vive now. Despite that, I do still lurk the forums cuz I get emails of recent threads, always looking to see if changes were made or if I wanted to rebuy on steam.
As for the main thread’s subject, while I always love the enthusiasm and idea of community participation in development related things, there really is a whole lot of stuff that can make it a hassle, like some have stated already. On top of rights, platform management, community management, it’s also prolly a huge burden on the dev team’s shoulders to have to reject something they didn’t think was up to snuff. No matter what that’d feel awful. On top of that it might just not be in their design philosophy. It might not sit right with them getting work for free while still charging for the game. Morals and what not. Not saying you or they have to feel that way but some people do. The whole idea isn’t an impossible thing to field but I just don’t think the project was set up for it.
And on the real reason why I wanted to chime in; (On the discussion of whats wrong with the game.) I was always a casual player and barely even did a dungeon or two, but I kinda felt like maybe the non hyper focused data driven hard core players might want a voice at the table. As all I ever see on the forums are really specific and often well debated. But of course theres only so many ways to say “We’re unhappy.” And I guess you could point the burden on both sides; the players and the devs. On one hand it’s art; someone had a vision and this is what it is. One the other hand if the art is bad or no one likes, it no one will view/experience it. It’s a fine line to walk between accommodating the myriad different camps of people who flock to the game and their own vision/desire for it. If they’re always only listening to what we want where would be the fun in making it? I think for me; I just wasn’t as entranced by the entire game itself. I’m quite picky, and have a hard time lending something my suspension of disbelief. I’d never call it a bad game, but the art style and simplicity just didn’t sit well with me. But these are subjective things. That’s prolly a plus for many people who are fans of the game. This is first gen-ish of VR games afterall; some of us just want more, and some of us are willing to make do. Never been a fan of ultra realistic 16 billion K hyper graphics, I’m more about style.
From my point of view; the lack of desire to play/rebuy the game is more in the archetype of the game rather than all the nitty gritty details. I only really played warrior and didn’t quite agree with the combos. Felt weird and unnatural. I understand, however, that if I could finger track 3 fingers then do some jumping jacks and tap my sword to unleash some super combo, that would be a heck of a thing to try to debug and get right from a development point of view. I had trouble with combo recognition just with the basics. It got better over time but still, if even that had issues, it’d be even more of a task to get something more involved to be consistent. Not to mention tracking all of that serverside and what not.
Its simplicity I think is also what made it work. Even though I don’t like it. I guess all of this messy unorganized post is me trying to say there just wasn’t enough native depth to the game’s mechanics for me to latch on this time. I just personally didn’t have enough fun to keep playing. There’s no one specific thing that would have made it more fun for me. If I could be happy playing something I designed I’d go do it. But that’s kind of the point of playing someone else’s game; you didn’t make it. I’m an author, and I see no point to reading my own books. I wrote the damn thing, I know what happens. There is great natural fun in experiencing what others have made. Kinda the point almost of art. I know that there are more things I can enjoy than not enjoy. I can only quantify what I didn’t enjoy. As for what I could, the sky is the limit. No excuse not to say something is bad when ya see it, but also no excuse for it to be the end of the world. We’ll learn from mistakes and some may even get inspired to correct them. It’s all a process, isn’t it? From fire to the steam engine. Think about the disparity of the controls way back when in console gaming. Eventually, we all found every way NOT to do them and kinda settled on an unspoken standard (Ya know, like X/A being jump and Triangle/Y being reload etc etc) I’d imagine VR is going through that sort of stage now.
I see in the forums we’ll hear more from those whom the game DID appeal to, and who see a point in speaking on it. Personally, I don’t dislike the game, I think I’m just silently hoping this same team or some of them make an Orbus 2 or something years down the line. Not a popular opinion in defeatism to just throw my hands up and say that Orbus Reborn is hopeless, it’s not that I don’t think it can be improved for you guys who still like to play; I’m just understanding that my desires were outside the intended scope of the game. Which is on my shoulders. Just wanted to throw my perspective in here. Sorry for the long unorganized post. Though, I suppose I should point out that even though I don’t play anymore, I still liked the concept and potential enough to at least check around once in a while and speak my mind. Even if I didn’t like it, I still think it did enough to progress the industry for the VR MMOs to come.
You seem to have great thoughts and from the first paragraph I like it, but would you mind summarizing it up? Most people aren’t gonna wanna read 6 long paragraphs.
I know for a fact that if Rec Room had not allowed people to make their own rooms, it would most likely be dead by now. Instead, the player created rooms are making the game thrive.
So even though this is a completely different game, it might be worth trying. Allow players to make their own rooms and see what happens. I cant really see any negatives. At worst, most wont attempt it and it will go nowhere, but at least its an interesting addition to the game. I would start simple, allow people to make their own houses or something. Then progress (just like rec room), with simple coding, making their own NPCs and dungeons. Possibly even making their own classes within their dungeon. And then the devs of the game can potentially work some of it into the actual game.