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[ Suggestions ] The Biggest Problems with the game

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  • Registered: 2017-07-24
  • Topics: 11
  • Posts: 9
On 2018-01-18 06:55:47Show All PostsDescending Order
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This is a list of the biggest problems I see with Naruto Online. These things are the biggest barriers to the game getting better in my opinion. I'm not sure if anybody will ever read this, but I like the game enough to give this one shot. I hope this helps:


1. Pay-to-Win

This is the biggest and most fundamental of problems. Pay-to-Win monetization doesn't work. There's no dispute over this in the gaming community. All games (without exception) that sell progress for money end up catering to the people who pay as an alternative to playing the game. What kind of incentive is there for you (the game developer) to make the game better when you make money from people who pay their way through the bad parts?


Sell aesthetics, capacities, permanent but limited quantity upgrades, reserve currencies or allow trading or do literally anything other than directly selling power. Pay-to-Win is the bottom of the barrel.


2. Luck

You've allowed luck to become more important than player choices. Your game engine is very versatile and good, but when battles are determined almost entirely by random critical hits, random combos, random control failures and random procs, there's no game, it's just a casino. Randomness isn't okay when the effects are too important, like chaos/immobilizing an entire team, etc. You're denying players the importance of their own actions, and it ruins everything.


Remove the luck aspect from mechanics that are too important, like status effects and dodging, and give players back their agency. Battles are already complex enough. They don't need randomness to create fake variety.


3. Patches aren't frequent enough

When I say "patch" I mean, fixing bugs and imbalances. Nothing is going to be perfect when you first add it to the game, and you won't always know exactly what is going to cause problems. You need to be constantly fixing things. I'm not even talking about anything specific, I'm talking about your overall policy of... pretty much never modifying anything after it's released. This is bad.


Be agile. Look for little imbalances that you see and apply small changes once a week. Nothing will ever be perfect, and the game will always change, and that's the point. You can't act like everything is perfect. The best way to keep balance problems from getting out of control is by staying on top of them.


4. Power Creep

Power Creep happens when you aren't coming up with new ways for players to get stronger and instead fall back on bigger versions of already existing things like "More Damage!", "More Chaos!", "More Healing!".


Just use your creativity to expand the game in directions it hasn't gone before. There's also such a thing as "not growing power too much at once", which ties into my number (3) up there. For example, you don't need a ninja that can immobilize an entire team every turn for players to want to get it. Maybe half the team instead? You get the point.


5. Engine Lag

Especially when playing with or against other players, there's a large delay between when we use a mystery skill and when it actually happens. This makes it impossible to use interrupts or other mechanics that require precise late-turn timing, like Deidara's mystery skill. To make it worse, your ninja will sometimes proceed to use their mystery skill as their first action on the following turn rather than on the turn you wanted it to be used, which is often worse than not using it at all. The reason this is a big deal is that it further denies the player control that they need.


I assume this is a latency related issue, but a lot of other games have no similar issues, so I assume it's solvable.




This post was last edited by Khalixxa on 2018-01-18 06:55:47.
  • Registered: 2017-07-24
  • Topics: 11
  • Posts: 9
On 2018-02-02 04:39:17Show All Posts
12#

For every problem that is "too difficult to solve", there are examples of other developers who have somehow managed to pull it off, often times many years in the past that can be easily referenced.


I'm not blaming anybody, but it is what it is.

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