Developer K put up the patch preview.
…and it’s a giant image. AGAIN. WHY. WHY. JUST WHY. WHYYYYY.
For a tl;dr version already translated by Varun/Jeezus:
As usual, Fabulous and I will be providing the full-text translation to convey Dev K’s meaning for a bit more context on the upcoming changes.
T/N Seems like he wrote his name, but titles aren’t important, right?
I have been away for quite some time. How have all of you been? I’ve been busy without any breaks, but I’ll start today by apologizing. I am sorry that I suddenly skipped my promise [T/N referring to monthly posts, May was missing]. From now on, I will not skip my dev notes, but if I do, I will not wait for the next one.
I’ve said it before I think, but writing dev notes is not difficult. However, I have had to deal with planning the content for each patch, and most of the feedback was actually a curse. I mean, it was true that I needed a lot of mental strength. I don’t mean to use so much energy and needing rest, but I want you to know that a dev’s work always comes with a lot of psychological burden.
In fact, since April, DN Studio has had a lot of important things going on internally, and I had to do a lot of work. Now that things have settled on my end a bit, I’ve been able to do my job again, and I’d like to tell you what’s going on, but I hope you’ll understand a bit that I won’t be able to tell all the company-wide things that are not related to me. All I can tell you is that the two months of work was a good thing, not something bad.
To summarize, there has been some urgent work required at the company and project level, and so I spent all of my energy there, with none left to write dev notes. It was an excuse at the time, and I should have been more dilligent about it. I’m sorry that I wasn’t.
I’m sorry that I didn’t post anything. I’m going to continue to improve and get better.
Let’s start with the story of Labyrinth.
Labyrinth is the content of my passion, which the developers have worked on for a long time, and it is the primary content that draws the current attention and uses most of our developer time. To be honest, I cannot deny that there is a lot of technical debt and bugs (T/N YOU DON’T SAY). It is also the most influential content in the game, but while there are a lot of things that are planned, there wasn’t enough consideration about the gameplay loop and the basic functionality of expanding difficulty when it was released. In fact, there was a conflict within the development team when we launched, so without going into details, I thought it would be better if difficulty was the primary expansion from Labyrinth. (Hoped for full functionality). After getting better at playing with the first patch, I thought I could improve the rewards plan and detailed a proposal. As a result, I had more issues with gameplay than expected, and I think that most of the planned features are not so much in addition to the difficulty expansion functionality, so I will try to find out what the problem is in detail and how to fix it in the future.
First, if you want to talk about Labyrinth, you can’t help but also talk about the equipment tiering system. In fact, the tier system is part of the core reward loop in Rebellion, and is the most demanding growth gradient in the overall game. The biggest mistake I made in the first half of this year is that I delayed the release of a new tier for a long time. It is a very natural story, but if the growth in tiers is blocked, the game gets into a weird state. Tier growth is the element that deals with the most fundamental progression in game, and if you get stuck then you have even more reason to go do Labyrinth.
I don’t know why, I wonder why I left it at tier 2 for so long. Now I see the details.
First of all, I made the Tier 2 patch in Nov 17, and I could see it providing growth for the next two months. Then, we would open the next tier in Feb or March. However, in early 2018, we suddenly decided to launch Dragon Nest M, rather than release tier 3. It was clear that Dragon Nest M would also bring in new players into the regular game. In the end, I thought that opening a new tier at that point would create a huge gap between new players and existing ones, and I thought that existing players would still enjoy Labyrinth even if there was no new tier. As a result, I made a mistake because I was overly conscious about new users and existing users.
As I said above, tier 2 Calypso was released in the latter half of 2017, and at this point we were developing Labyrinth, but did not reflect the rewards plan. In fact, Labyrinth was developed separately from the growth of tiered equipment, and there’s a limit to how much we could increase the rewards due to the increased difficulty of content. I don’t think it would be better to add as many rewards as we can, but the players who already finished their Calypso sets had already established overwhelming marketplace dominance, which at the time of the Labyrinth update was the biggest issue. I was in a situation where I could not put the rewards in an agreeable way. Besides, there was a problem that the [Clear Rewards Chest] screen was not affected by the difficulty level, so the rewards felt worse.
Is Labyrinth challenging content that is constantly pushing maximum difficulty? Or is it farming content that you want cleared at the appropriate level of difficulty? I feel it is ambiguous in many ways. I would like to converge the challenge and farming goals in the Labyrinth project. If Labyrinth is the norm, then we don’t need to play much every day, and the rewards would need to be much higher as difficulty increases. The influence of tiered equipment enhanced by the rebellion stones should also be greater. Generally speaking, the overall rewards and play requirements make it lean more towards farming. However, if you look at the balancing, it looks like a challenge. It is a difficulty configuration that pushes you to want to constantly grow in pursuit of challenges.
Labyrinth makes no sense to be a challenge based on its rewards, and I have had to increase the daily FTG many times. In fact, because of this, I have to play every day at a difficulty that can be cleared quickly, but I’m tired of the excessive number of runs.
First of all, we will be releasing Forest Dragon in June and open Tier 3 and 4 at the same time. Of course, with the increase in tier cap, the process of getting a new player to Calypso will be streamlined. For this, the increase in rewards in the above-mentioned items will not be a sequentially-increasing amount with the floor, but rather an additional drop chance is generated from the 30th floor and up.
Currently Labyrinth does not have the ability to be much of a challenge because it requires too much repetitive play even with compensation improvements. Even if it were made to be challenging, players will become exhausted because of repetitive runs. In July, we will be adding a challenging form of Labyrinth to pose an immense single challenge and grant a superb reward. Of course, the same nest can be boring, so I will continue to add nests to Labyrinth.
Even when we add the challenging level, the existing Labyrinth still needs to be run repeatedly, so I plan to add a boosting feature that will burn through your FTG faster for a small fee (scheduled for July). You can play normally, but if you don’t have as much time, you can opt to use the boost to make it go faster.
T/N This part is kinda hard to translate, but it seems like an option to burn more FTG to get more rewards so you don’t need to spend as much time every day
The mercenary system is an old system that’s been used for a lot of things, but has many issues. The biggest problem is that the mercenary collection grows and only permits repetitive, unchanging gameplay. Other rewards were planned, and from the beginning of the project, I had been considering how to grow it. However, I have not been able to maintain it due to various internal reasons. The feature itself obviously has a lot of room to improve, which we have planned.
The overall situation for the mercenary system is to be closed first, and then explain the addition of the legendary mercenary expedition in June. This is not meant to improve the variety in the mercenary system, but is a simple addition of a gold sink.
A brief overview of the legendary mercenary expedition is that, as usual, you will find a legendary mission after exploring as normal. If you sign up regular unique mercenaries, the change of success is almost 0%. If you hire a legendary mercenary by paying 15,000 (T/N: Seems fishy, will need to confirm at patch) gold, the rate goes up to 95%.
The mission rewards are a pouch containing a random plate with FD and a pouch containing a random legendary dragon gem.
With this mission, you get the chance to acquire endgame items that are currently rare in the server, and decrease the excess gold in circulation.
Meanwhile, I’ve increased the gold limit by 10x (T/N that’d be 4.2m). Still, most of you aren’t getting enough gold to pay the commission, while others are just getting a lot of gold.
The present situation is caused by various complex factors, so it will take some time for a fundamental solution. I am using this as a short-term supplement before the fundamental solution.
Why was there a sudden drop in bulletin announcements? Actually, we have already finished preparations for the Korea conference, but we suddenly ran into an issue and have to delay it. I do not think the game is ruined, and as I said at the beginning, I understand it was for good reasons. I will let you know when there’s a new decision made.
After the Green Dragon update, there were a lot of people wondering about the future of Genesis accessories, but now that we’ve been talking about the evolution of Genesis accessories, I have come to the conclusion that it is too weak.
Initially, they played a very important role in long-duration content because it is a kind of farming that can be done by anyone. However, if we extend Genesis again, it will be too inaccessible for new players and needlessly complicated (I honestly think that farming so much is bad gameplay).
I think this decision will increase the number of users selling Genesis accessories on the market, and that those who keep their Genesis won’t be in a bad situation either. So don’t be disappointed. Internally we are talking about item rewards that can be used to advance further in the upcoming new farming system. I am also a person who wants to take a gentle appraoch, so I understand it is important to preserve the value of Genesis, so please wait for it.
Wow… I had a lot of things to say (T/N yea you did, I’m dying translating this). First of all, I’ll wrap it up here. I was disappointed because there wasn’t much content updated in May. Everyone knows that I was preparing Forest Dragon.
It will be a great boost to write messages to our developers who are pouring their energy into making Forest Dragon. It has been a long time since I last wrote dev notes and it was painful because I don’t write much, but now I feel like I’m back to my original spot.
It will be much more peaceful in the forums without the dev notes, but it seems to me that the devs are alive because of the devs that are reading the dev notes. I have written these notes for a while, so lets go something something I don’t feel like translating this - Vahr
Take care of your health during the summer heat, and we’ll see you in Dragon Nest. Fight on!