Community Report #5

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DeletedUser8627

Howdy!

A new thing we would like to implement here on the forum are community reports. We have found that a lot of the discussions about new features, the internal decisions that are made are only shared with certain communities. This of course seeming a little unfair to everyone playing this game regardless of the language server they are registered on.

So each month we would like to post in this thread the happenings, future developments or anything that will be interesting and important for you people to be aware of. Rather than having players browse a couple of language server forums, each forum will now have this information posted.

You may post all feedback in our dedicated feedback thread - Community Reports Discussion
 
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DeletedUser8627

Fort battle changes
One of the most discussed topic has been the fort battles and fort battle balancing for a long time. We have done a few changes already but neither we nor you, the active players are fully satisfied with what we did. That's why we want to continue testing new formulas and balancing changes in the Public Beta worlds. One more thing we want to do is make the fort battles easily accessible and more prominent so that new players will find them and overall more players find out how awesome the fort battles are. The fort battles are the coolest feature we have for sure, no other Browsergame has got a feature like this and it is important for us to do what the fort battle deserve: Trying to convince as many players as possible from that idea.
Our Lead Developer Thorben shared what we are working on at the moment: http://devblog.the-west.net/?p=1228&lang=en

Multiplayer Instances
We haven't talked a lot about the Multiplayer Instances (MPI) yet. Most of you will probably only know them from our Roadmap but they are a really big and cool feature that is based on the fort battle mechanics but still different and much more flexible. We finished concepts for the MPI and started working on them a few weeks ago.
So what exactly are the MPI?
Multiplayer Instances are interactive real time adventures that small groups of players can do together. Examples are Bear hunt, Stage coach robbery or fighting a bandit gang. So just imagine a nice looking fort battle map with a few NPC bears that you need to shoot but be careful they don’t come to close to you or they will hit you or a train driving slowly through the map that is defended by NPCs and you need to try to stop the train build blocks on the track or shoot the bandits driving the locomotive. The MPIs will be a feature that you can use while for example waiting for your energy to reload or while waiting for a 2-hour job to end. The MPIs are an independent feature that is a level above the actual game and we even try to make it a market-wide feature so that players from different worlds can play together.
For now we are working on a map editor, graphics and the Screendesign. Nothing is final yet though and it will take a few months before we can actually play the first Instances.
More information on that topic will follow on the devblog in a few weeks probably.

Fighting zero motivation duelers
Another problem that has been here for quite some time. We have discussed this internally so many times but never found a solution we were all completely satisfied with. We do want to change something now finally and will therefore soon split the NPC and PvP duel motivation and test this on the Beta. That change alone will not solve the problem though and further changes need to be done. One idea is to set both motivations back to 100% every night. This would mean that many consumables become useless and there’s nothing to stop duelers from permanently dueling anymore. That doesn't have to be a bad thing but something that would change the playstyle and game mechanics a lot.

The future of dueling
Talking about duels, we want to talk a little about bigger ideas we have in mind for dueling. We have worked on a prototype for an interactive duel system with abilities that can be used and a special skill tree for duels. We plan to keep and implement this idea but it's a lot of Game Design effort and needs some more thinking. On top of that we just discussed an Arena system for duels which would be an area on the map (Any idea where that could be? ;) ). PvP Dueling would only be possible in the arena, nowhere else on the map anymore except from arranged duels. Players who don't want to be dueled and KOed would be saved and duelers would have a cool place where they will always find opponents. In order to compensate the opponent loss that duelers would have for sure we want to put some NPCs on the map that are available in different strength levels. Possibly would also be to have some moving NPC bosses that give higher experience and the chance to get a rare item as a reward.
This is a just born idea though, nothing we will implement in the near future.

The main story
After we brought hundreds of new quests into the game we think and that was confirmed by many players and new users that we invited for user tests, that the story in The West lacks a golden thread. A story that leads through the whole game that tells your character's story. We are working on that and call it the Main Story. The main story will have 9 parts. Each part requires a certain character level, the last one starts at level 91. We will release the Main Story part by part (1 part every few weeks), beginning end of October.

Other stuff
-2.07 will include the Friends bar which is an interface element that shows your friends, town members and alliance members. Via the bar you can quickly whisper them, send them telegrams or center them on the map
-We are working on a concept for direct player to player trading
-In order to improve the performance of our quest system, we will probably add some new requirements (Finish tutorial quest line, id 544 or low level requirements) to a couple of quest lines.
-We are working on a cool and funny event that we're sure you will enjoy!

Please keep in mind that this is a rough overview about internal happenings in our team. Most of it is not final and subject to change. We want to openly communicate such stuff better in the future; this works only if you respect our decisions and what we plan for you. We are excited and looking forward to your feedback!

This above message was from our Lead Community Manager Joony. Understand that The West will always be an evolving MMO game. With all MMO games, there are changes made and more changes made and even more changes made. Some (Which we have seen in the past) have been liked and some disliked, it's the way it works. As much as the company tries to accommodate all player idea, considering the losses (if any), it is not always possible to appease everyone.

With that being said, you are going to find some very interesting ideas being posted in this thread. Some of which you may welcome and some of which you will firmly decline. But remember, this is not your game, you have only been provided an opportunity to play this game. How you play it is simply up to you. We also are not asking you to like everything that InnoGames bring to the players, this is the reason why we have a forum. But the forum does not mean you may come here and flame new ideas. We will always welcome your feedback if presented in a manner that is acceptable to both other players and staff on this board.

I do hope you enjoy the community reports that are presented to the public each month.
 

DeletedUser8627

Community Report #2

We got the most feedback on the duel arena idea. Since most of the feedback was negative, we pushed the idea back and will rethink it before we present a new concept for it.

We have also talked about changes in the fort battle and told you we will try and bring the planned changes on the Beta as soon as possible. Sadly this takes some more time because we found some weaknesses in our planned formulas and had to change a couple of values and calculations. This is still a very important topic for us and we talk about it nearly every day to find more weaknesses and tweak little things. I'm pretty sure this will come to the Beta servers in a few weeks.

We also divided the duel motivations into two but will activate this change on the Beta worlds only to see how it changes the dueling behavior.

Also, we received a lot of feedback on the friendsbar after we activated it on the servers. We found a couple of improvements that we want to do in order to make the friendsbar less space consuming and more useful for you guys and will therefore deactivate it for now until the improvements are finished.

Our two focus features at the moment are the Multiplayer Instances and the Level cap raise which brings us to the second part of the Community report.

Multiplayer Instances
Last month we introduced the Multiplayer Instances to you. Our editor is now nearly finished and only needs some more tweaks and usability improvements. We started to work on the actual battle system already and when I walked in to the developers office last time they were discussing and drawing complex sketches of how a bear could turn and how his field of view should be. They were thinking of ways to let the bear only attack in the front and no people standing behind him so that he would have to turn around before attacking. It seems to go a good way, there are a couple of graphics for the new fort battle already as well and it all looks very promising. I can't wait until I'm allowed to share some first screenshots and graphics with you. We will try to do a devblog post soon as well.

Level cap raise
In one of the many meetings about ideas and concepts we came to the conclusion that raising the levelcap would not only give high level players something to work to again but also help with a couple of other issues. So we decided that this is one of our next priority stories. We thought about what we need when raising the level cap and beside quests, new jobs and new achievements, we thought the most important thing would be new items. But we quickly remembered that even at the moment we don't have all items for the area between level 50 and level 120 so that it wouldn't make much sense to create >level 120 items now. Therefore the first step will be to create all missing items up to level 120 and make sure they are all well balanced. We already created 279 new items for that purpose (By the way: There will be trapper hats too). In order to balance the whole item system we needed to change a lot of items that were in the game already. Especially the neck items got some changes. They have never had a level requirement and even the coolest ties and golden necklaces could be equipped at level 1. Now they will all have a level requirement as well. Also there will be many new fancy and named items and especially those of you who are collectors and seeking for the most valueable and rare items will have lots to discover again.
There is a couple of more changes that we will inform you about within the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

New Quests
We all love quests, some are cooler, some are not as cool as others but quests are generally a positive and exciting thing to play. So we will continue implementing more and more quests within the next months. There are a couple of quests in the pipeline already that only wait for their start date to come. "Letters from Nowhere" and Main Story 2 has just started and there are many more Main Story parts to come. Furthermore there will be a very special quest line for mid- and high level players starting in November that I'm sure you will enjoy and that's not all. We have a lot more that we can't wait to present you with and that will make our translators sweat like oxes.
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Misc.

  • We're working on a new fancy forum style for the newest version of our forum software vbulletin 5
  • We are working on concepts for a new game startpage
  • We're taking a look into the Traveling Fair Balancing to make helping with the construction more valuable
  • A couple of new crafting recipes are gonna be created soon
 

DeletedUser8627

Dear Community,

Today we are going to publish the third Community Report and again share some insight on what we've been thinking about, discussing and developing in the past 4 weeks. As all the previous reports everything mentioned below is not a final plan and is subject to change.

Update on the November CR

We announced the level cap raise last month and since then worked on many Game Design topics like new jobs, new items and new quests. Most of the graphics for the items and job locations have been finished already and we are confident we will be able to release the level cap raise this year still.
Also, Main Story 3 has been released and 4 is being translated at the moment. We are happy to get so much positive feedback on the Main Stories and therefore have finished almost all parts of it already. Still, we want to keep the plan to release them piece by piece.
Furthermore, we mentioned the new forum style. All main screens have been redesigned and it looks pretty neat already. We are waiting for an update from vBulletin though (v. 5.1) that is supposed to fix a bunch of bugs.

Multiplayer Instances

Besides the level cap raise we are still focusing on the Multiplayer Instances and were presented with the first playable instance just last week - the developers did a fantastic job. The first Instance is the Bear hunt and besides a bug that made the bear behave more like a rabbit because it was always running away from the players it was already a lot of fun and when you read this the bear will be a terrifying deadly grizzly...
We are preparing to show you some pictures of the MPI soon so that you can see what it will look like yourselves.

Duel protection

We had a long discussion about how to save players from being dueled if they don't want to be dueled without taking away too many targets of the duelists who chose this direction for their character development. With this concept all players could be dueled, no matter if they belong to a town or not. For us this is a good step because we don't want players who are member of a town to have a disadvantage that townless players don't have. Also we thought it might be worth a try to let players not only duel in a specific duel level range but on top of that, all players that have a higher dueling level. So how can players protect themselves from being dueled? Dueling is an important part of The West and also something that players should not be able to avoid without a noticeable disadvantage. We chose the Bodyguard system that many players have suggested already as well as a solution for duel protection. Bodyguards can be hired only by town members and will fight all duels instead of your character. As long as your character is under the protection of the bodyguard you won't lose any HP from duels. The bodyguards stats are a mirror of your stats and equipment so that he will always be exactly as strong as your own character. Activating the bodyguard brings a couple of disadvantages though. First, he will take 25% of all the money you make while playing as a fee. Furthermore, the money you lose for paying the bodyguard has to be at least $500 a week. This means that you have to play actively that you make at least $2000 a week in order to be able to pay the bodyguard (All numbers are of course just examples and not final yet). Also the bodyguard would go away and be blocked for a few weeks if you start a duel while the bodyguard is active.
While we do like the general idea, we did not go further with it because dueling the bodyguard of a player is a very different gameplay as dueling the player and it would take away some strategic teamwork like raiding a town and just KOing everyone.

Shop

After comparing a lot of numbers we have decided to completely switch to the new Shop layout. We will not only just switch all old shops to the new layout but also add a couple of nice new features like a search function. We also want to integrated the Traveling Salesman into the Shop to make it better visible. Furthermore, the long timers like Higher Energy and Automation will be moved from the Premium page into the shop. More news on the Shop switch will be announced soon.

Bond limit increase

The last thing for this month's report is a discussion about the bond limit. We discussed some pros and cons of increasing the limit and while there is no final decision whether we will increase the limit or not there is a good chance you will read about a change in one of the next Changelogs.

Thank you in advance for your feedback and ideas!
 

DeletedUser8627

Dear players,

It's the first month of 2014 and we hope you all survived the New Year parties and well rested as we go into the new year.

We want to use this day to present you the new Community Report which will be different than the previous ones. Since another year is over we want to seize the occasion and take a look back at what has happened in 2013 before giving a short overview about our plans for 2014.

It is getting more and more important for us to keep you in the loop and to share our plans, our thoughts and the reasons for what we are doing with you so that you understand our decisions, have time to write feedback and help us with the development of our great game!

Recap of 2013
2013 was an exciting year. The West 2.0 is nothing new anymore, we got used to the new graphics, to the new interface and all the new features but 2.0 wasn't the end of our plans for The West. Last year we changed core mechanics of the game, did a lot of balancing improvements and added cool new features. Of course we also did some bad decisions, had to adjust, rework or even put back some features after going through your feedback but that's totally normal and how it should work. We do listen to your feedback and we want to take the right decisions based on what you recommend whenever possible.

The first big update in 2013 was to version 2.03 which brought many little improvements like the Video Ads, the "collect all" feature on the market or the job progress bar on the map, right above the character. The core features of 2.03 were many chat improvements and the map markers. Especially the chat as it is now a very complex and well working tool that even though it was controversially discussed in the beginning is liked and used a lot more now.
Probably the biggest change last year came with version 2.04: The job system change. We collected a lot of feedback on our planned changes for the job system, introduced different concepts to you and tested different versions of the system on the Beta servers before coming up with a good compromise solution that works pretty well now (We will change the rewards of the 15 sec jobs soon though). From 2.04 on there were only three job durations to choose: 15 seconds, 10 minutes and 1 hour. Active and especially new low level players can quickly progress by doing the 15 seconds jobs without having long breaks in the game flow while players who don't want to click every few minutes still have an option to bridge the time with 1 hour jobs.
Also in this update we introduced the notebook and the quest tracker which is now a feature that no one wants to miss anymore. Instant crafting, a new login bonus and a big rebalancing of crafting, quests and many more core elements made 2.04 to one of the most important updates of 2013 and one of the updates that brought the game a huge step forward. Because we don't want to lose any players anymore just because they didn't log in for a couple of weeks we also deactivated the inactivity deletion of characters with 2.04.
With 2.06 we implemented the Blackboard for easier town joining which we thought and still think is a very important and useful feature that we want to improve further in early 2014. Furthermore a new tutorial made it into the game that we now know converts a good number of more newly registered players into long-time players and therefore was for us and for the game another very important step last year. Many town forum improvements and other small features rounded 2.06 up.
2.07 was the last big update in 2013 and brought a big content boost into the game. Not only 280 new items were implemented but also existing items were rebalanced so that the item progression in the game is, after having added manually balanced items over the past 5 years, is now smooth.
Furthermore a new friends bar was implemented that allows to quickly access your town members, alliance members and friends, see their progress and send messages to them. The feedback on the friendsbar wasn't only positive in the beginning so that we adjusted it and implemented many community wishes and we still want to work on it and consider your feedback to improve the bar even more where possible.
Another big thing was the events in 2013. There were three big events for Easter, Independence Day and the Oktoberfest and many more small events like on St. Patrick's Day, Valentines Day, Towel Day and many others that brought limited special content into the game and gave variety to the normal update schedule. We like the idea of having events in the game and want to keep doing this in 2014 but will analyze the past events and go through your feedback again to see what we can improve to make them better for you.
But 2013 was also the year of quests. We started implementing the first parts of the Main Story, tens of other new quest lines and many many more are prepared already and are just waiting for their activation date. We received a lot of positive feedback on the new quests and especially on the Main Story and definitely plan to keep going this was in 2014 and implement many many more quest lines for you.

Plans for 2014
There is a lot more we plan for 2014 than more quests and improvements to the Blackboard, balancing and our ingame events. Our team is currently working on a Roadmap after all Community Managers of the 20 different language versions went through all of your ideas on the forum. We sorted them and filtered out the ~100 best ideas which we are now internally discussing to see which of them we can implement next year. We will try to bring as many of them into the game as possible because this is one of our main focus points in 2014 but of course we have our own ideas that we want to implement too.

You know two big things that will come with 2014 already. The level cap raise and the Multiplayer Instances. The level cap raise is almost finished and is currently being tested internally. It will come to the Public Beta worlds very soon and we are looking forward to your feedback. This will be the first big update in 2014 and we are very excited already.
The Multiplayer Instances are a completely new feature that takes a lot of time and requires a lot of new code to be written but you could see the first map on InnoGames TV already and we are making good progress. So hopefully you can test the instances soon too. We are of course planning to create many more maps for the MPIs.
Furthermore we want to take a deeper look into Speed/Event worlds that run a lot faster and have a clear goal from the beginning. Also we want to keep working on our new interactive duel system, on fort battle and crafting improvements and many more stuff that we will show you as soon as the Roadmap is final.
Our plan is to present you the Roadmap as soon as it is finished and discuss all the features with you so that we can collect your feedback right from the beginning and answer your questions to give you a look on the whole picture.
We are looking forward to this year it will be as exciting and we hope you all will stay with us on this great journey. Thanks for all the support, help and feedback. Keep it up! :)
 

DeletedUser8627

Howdy!

After an exciting time with Roadmap planning, the Valentine's Event and preparations for other important upcoming features, it is time for a new Community report. Especially because there weren't many big updates with long changelogs, it is necessary to give you an overview on what is happening here. There is a lot of cool stuff coming up and we're very happy and excited to share it with you. As always, please ask questions about the introduced features, we are happy to answer as many as we can.

Update on the last Community reports
We combined the last Community report with a review of 2013 and a first overview of our plans for 2014 before we published the final roadmap for this year. Now, after the first months of 2014 have passed, what has happened so far and what have we achieved?
Earlier this year we brought a big update with the level cap raise, many new items, jobs and quests. The first players have reached level 150 already but the majority are still busy with collecting items and experience points. Also the Shop rework is almost finished. There are automatic discounts on the weekends that are also highlighted in the interface and there is one last change missing that will be announced soon.

The biggest feature on the Roadmap for this year are the Multiplayer Instances and they are also our main focus at the moment. After many meetings about the view and design of the MPIs we have come to a decision and will have an isometric view as a default of all MPIs. The isometric view looks much cooler and makes the MPIs look like a modern feature that is fun to play. The top down view we use for the fort battles at the moment offers some advantages as well though that are most important for strategic fights like the fort battles are. This is why we decided to build the whole frontend on a platform that allows us to have two different views so that we have the possibility to let the players switch views or at least take a look at a strategic top down map to get a better overview.
The Server part is almost finished and also with the server structure we didn't take any compromises and built in a 'nice to have feature' that allows us to run MPIs independently on the world so that players from different worlds can play one MPI together. This way it should be possible to find players to join an Instance even on small language versions.
We're aiming to have a first clean playable in a few days and as soon as our frontend is on a level that it looks cool (We have spent most time on the Backend side so far) we will share screenshots with you and of course we will also share a playable version with you as soon as we can.

Game Master fort
We gave you a first glance at our Game Master fort in the last InnoGames TV episode already but I still want to sum up what that feature is about. In the middle of the map you can see a new fort, Awesomnia, with a special map fort graphic. This fort will be used for fort battle events that, compared to normal fort battles, have special settings. We developed an Admin Tool that allows us to do a lot of cool things like custom join requirements, limiting the number of players per side and custom awards that the winners of the battle will automatically get. The most complex tool is the join requirement editor. There we can restrict the players who are allowed to join fort battles. This way we could for example have a fort battle of 10 level 150 players against 100 level 10 players or an adventurers versus soldiers battle or a combination of both. We also have the possibility to limit the attendees to certain towns or alliances so that we could organize special fort battles for them.
The first events will start soon or have started already and we're looking for more ideas for exciting fort battle events from you.

Speed worlds
Now this is a topic we have discussed about internally a lot over the past few years but have always put back because of technical and GameDesign issues. We have always been very excited about the idea of having speed worlds or event worlds for The West but we never found the right approach. Because you, the players, have been asking for this so often and for so many years, because we still love the idea and because we want to start new worlds more regularly without stealing players from other worlds. We want to make the speed worlds real this year and they will be our next big feature after the Multiplayer Instances. At the moment our Game Designers are busy working on the concepts and we set a few details already: One speed world should run for around 1-3 months. Each speed round will have a goal to reach. The goals will at the beginning be pretty simple like reaching a certain level, winning x duels or finding specific items. Later we will also add multiplayer objectives like x town points or holding a certain number of forts. If we see that there is interest and you like to play on speed worlds we will extend the goals to more complex ones and will organize fun worlds like "Last man standing" which means battle it out and the last survivor wins. Of course we'd need to adjust a few game mechanics for that but this could be a lot of fun!

Forum style
The first version of our new community forum (not town forum!) template is finished. It is based on the newest version of our forum software, vbulletin 5.1, which is much more secure and provides a couple of new features. The most interesting part for you though will be the new design. Our old forum design is very basic. A few colours here and there, custom emoticons and a "nice" header. Our new forum will look much cooler, moderner and more attractive overall without losing the simplicity and clearness. We are still testing it to make sure to find missing template adjustments and errors but we are trying to update the Beta forum in a few weeks so that you can see and test the new forum style.

Friendsbar limit
As you know there is a limit of how many players you can invite as friends in the game. This is important for events like the Valentine's event where you got an advantage from having many friends. Unfortunately, there was a way to get around the limit because at the moment it only checks when sending a friendship request. Still, when accepting friend requests the limit was not checked so that you could accept friend requests even though you had 100 friends already. This will be fixed with the next update meaning that those players who have more than 100 friends+open friend requests will lose friends or requests. The system will then automatically delete friends based on when the friend requests were sent. The last sent requests will be deleted until only 100 are left. If you want to reorganize yourself before that update feel free to do so of course.

We are looking forward to your feedback, questions and ideas. Let us know what you think of these topics but as always: Nothing here is final and we might change our plans and concepts still. That's why we are especially looking forward to your input.
 
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