The Skyforge site has been updated with a massive post by the development team that discusses the most salient points of player feedback from the first rounds of closed beta testing. The post discusses major issues and how the team plans to respond to each and / or gives the reasons behind the feature being deployed as it is.
Topics include:
Run Animation - the team is working on new variations of the run animation and cycle to answer the claim that it looked "weird".
Client Optimization - the client has been optimized with 30% improvement in FPS. The system has been redesigned to detect automatically, new settings were added for compatibility and other useful information.
The ability to loot during combat will be added.
Weekly limits - the team is working on finding ways to ensure that weekly limits are both challenging yet not punitive to players who feel that forcing achievement infringes on their leisure time. Developers are looking for ways to assist players who join the game later in catching up with more experienced and advanced players. The goal, they said, is to give players more and more ways to develop and progress characters and how that will happen will be detailed in a future post.
Beginning content will be pared back as feedback has indicated that future phases should have "substantially less content at launch". Open Beta will give more adventures to players sooner. In addition, the team is taking a hard look at the combat difficulty of the earliest stages of the game. For future release in CBT, players can look forward to finding "impossible adventures" once a given prestige level is reached.
Melee players are concerned with the proclivity of combo interrupts when an enemy dodges or moves. It is a feature that the team is looking closely at and is constantly fine tuning. As yet, no viable solution has been offered.
Players concerned with being unable to dodge all attacks in the game have been informed that this is a planned mechanic to ensure that high-dexterity players do not have a significant advantage over other classes. As a result, dodge is a limited resource by design.
PvP balance is being looked at, especially the complaint that Finishing Attacks in PvP look like a "cheat" due to how fast an enemy can be killed.
The Orders System is undergoing change:
- Adepts will no longer require payment for services but a limited number can be hired
- Adepts will no longer increase player stats
- Adepts will have their own profession-based stats
- Mission resources are being changed
Prestige and group play are also receiving some attention. Players were concerned that they could not play with friends of different prestige levels and due to the inability to set or know the adventure difficulty. To that end:
- Group prestige requirements are being removed
- The system to determine the difficulty of adventures is being tweaked
- A PvE version of Looking for Adventure is being added with the selection systems being overhauled
- PvP matchmaking is going to be adjusted and other barriers for matchmaking are being removed
Read the full (and VERY comprehensive!) article on the Skyforge site.
