Inquiry About Race Customization
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@therippyone said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
@gothix yup. The big issues are "what do they do" and "what are their powers" - with Lion and Alligator, you round out (potentially) the 6 stat Affinities for the Beastmen, making it hard to support a 7th, unless their transformed power is notably different
Isn't that kind of OCD? I don't see how "they have the same role as another race" overrules "it would be awesome to have rabbits". Make them an exact stat clone for all I care
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As to being OCD - I suppose you could call it that - but it's the sort of OCD that helps keep a business running. A new race option can bring in interest and funding, but often that's only true if it's well made or interesting. The point isn't "this would be awesome" - which it would be - it's "is this idea worth spending 10,000 Euros on to make happen" - the approximate cost of the Lich "race," (form, evolution, whatever) and something we can thus use to ballpark a new race model, with all that entails. If it's just a re-skin, I'm not sure the answer is yes - the re-skin will be cheaper, since you don't have to spend time beta-testing things like how the new abilities interact with the skills and other races for balance (since a re-skin would use old, already balanced abilities). but I think a lot of the costs are related to the art assets - modeling, rigging, and animating - so I'm not confident that the cost will be that much less. While the cost is higher for a full new race, the interest in having a new way to play should create a significantly better response, assuming the race is interesting in the least.
Honestly, if you want the bun, I'd say convince the Devs to give up on the gator - the two are being discussed in a similar way, and the brainstormed ideas for the rabbit match the assumed role for the gator. and why would the devs want to invent the wheel twice?
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It would be really cool to have variation
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@civ2011 I'm figuring to go pure Beast, since I personally can't stand PvP unless I'm in a VERY specific kind of mood. Not sure which particular sub-race I'll lean more towards yet.
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@warpuppy said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
@civ2011 I'm figuring to go pure Beast, since I personally can't stand PvP unless I'm in a VERY specific kind of mood. Not sure which particular sub-race I'll lean more towards yet.
think of PvP as "Highly Advanced AI" mobs.
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@therippyone said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
As to being OCD - I suppose you could call it that - but it's the sort of OCD that helps keep a business running.
Only if the business is founded on a poor and railroaded design to begin with.
Look at how clumsy and whimsical Smash Bros. is and it's one of the most popular fighting game series of all time, even as it keeps adding more "boring swordsmen" and Echo Fighters (explicitly cloned characters) every game. It's at heart a casual game and this has done absolutely nothing to alienate its minority hardcore playerbase - rather the opposite, actually.
Even if Rabbit was somehow a flop amongst hardcore players - despite absolutely zero reason to believe that it would be - Fractured is currently strongly attracting casual players who normally dislike MMOs for being too meta-based and practical. This is exactly the situation in which alleged vanity races such as Rabbit are most feasible economically and it would be pretty stupid to pretend this advantage is not there.
Your arguments against a hypothetical clone Rabbit must pretend that this is a game largely dependent upon hardcore players and that hardcore players won't care about Rabbit - neither is true.
@jetah said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
@warpuppy said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
@civ2011 I'm figuring to go pure Beast, since I personally can't stand PvP unless I'm in a VERY specific kind of mood. Not sure which particular sub-race I'll lean more towards yet.
think of PvP as "Highly Advanced AI" mobs.
This only applies to cowardly players who target such weak victims that the fact a player is behind the character doesn't matter (which will not apply in Fractured)
You're also forgetting that NPCs lag once and consistently (server<->client) while other players lag twice and inconsistently (client<->server<->client).
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@fibs okay, your statement that this game has a different sort of player basis is accurate. It doesn't change the financial burden placed on the devs, and it doesn't change the financial duty they have, to themselves, their company, and us, who signed over our money to support all of this, to spend that money wisely.
Since they've already said they want to do at least 2 more animals, they believe the risk is within the bounds of reasonable action. If people convince them that one of those 2 should be a rabbit, that's fine. The budget for it is there, the pro-rabbit folk just need to convince the devs that that is how it should be spent (That has yet to be done in any concrete fashion, and is thus where I suggested the pro-rabbit faction focus their efforts). I said that before. And you don't seem to disagree on that point?
Ergo, I assume you comment on a different sort of player base is a counter argument to my concerns about making the rabbits a 3rd new beast race, or a re-skin. Either of these would be an unbudgetted expense at this point, which is why I was less confident about their viability at this point. I'm not opposed to any 3rd new beast race or re-skin, as such, I'm saying that the devs need to see enough interest to take the risk of spending money on it (that they probably don't have right now). The financial costs, and the risks of doing "something more" with a limited budget, are real things, regardless of the nature of the player base, and I'm not sure what bearing the nature of the player base has on this particular point. "We have more casual players, and thus..." what? You still need to pay the artists and potentially the programmers for the extra time, no matter who is playing, and you still need to test everything to make sure it works properly. Am I wrong?
And I'm not particularly interested in whether such a skin would succeed or fail with any particular segment of the player base - I'm saying that the devs need to see that there is sufficient interest to know it won't be, before they invest in the effort, at this point.
I suppose you brought up segmenting the player base as a way to refute whether the 3rd new race would be more viable than the skin. While I admit that I don't have any hard numbers available, I am fairly certain that the cash sink involved in either would be significant, and that the skin wouldn't be less costly enough to match the shown interest so far. I do think most of the costs are relate to the art assets, and those are the same in both cases. Statistically, having a new way to play has been a better driver of sales, in my experience. I may be in the wrong in this case - but there is currently nothing to show that, one way or the other. I'm not saying you are wrong, I am saying that no one has any clues, and the devs can not work without that information. Trying to convince them of anything without some hard numbers is going to be difficult. We probably need to run a couple polls to see how much we as a group would be willing to spend, and do some basic multiplication to show what that would bring in. Hopefully the devs could then definitively say "no, that's not enough" or "yeah, we could do that for that sum" and we'd got on with this.
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My first character is going to be an angel, next one a lich, then finally an abomination. I'm very interested in the transformations.
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@fibs said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
@jetah said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
@warpuppy said in Inquiry About Race Customization:
@civ2011 I'm figuring to go pure Beast, since I personally can't stand PvP unless I'm in a VERY specific kind of mood. Not sure which particular sub-race I'll lean more towards yet.
think of PvP as "Highly Advanced AI" mobs.
This only applies to cowardly players who target such weak victims that the fact a player is behind the character doesn't matter (which will not apply in Fractured)
You're also forgetting that NPCs lag once and consistently (server<->client) while other players lag twice and inconsistently (client<->server<->client).
I'm not seeing the correlation between advanced ai and cowardly player though. advanced ai could decide between fight or flight, easy or hard targets, something a player would do.
