Discussion on balance changes to sweeping.

This post summed up all my feelings exactly. Big thank you staff for getting rid of the sweeper mules. I know its not the popular opinion in this thread, but there's a lot of players out there who agree with this.

 

Make an official community poll instead of protesting/counter-rebutting aimlessly. This back and forth between community and staff will only serve to make staff look bad since the community itself is amorphous and can never take fault.

 

This implies you think ML is and/or should be run through a direct democracy system. Which is not what it is, and not how it should be. People as a collective want many things that seem great in the short run and will vote and decide against their best efforts.

 

I never implied the community poll would affect decisions. However, a poll would be good to show on a larger scale the community's discontent of said decisions.

 

Anyway, back to the sweeping change.
I think it is ok for us to respect the change and see where it brings us in the near future good nor bad.
But the meso should be patched to make it at least invisible to non-killer, like a quest item, the QoL of gameplay with all those blocking meso is just.....bad...

 

We actually had a tespia server (test server) in the past. Players could apply to be a beta tester the same way they can apply to be a staff, and the selected group of players had access to tespia. The problem was that the players leaked the info on the potential changes, which were confidential. ML staff team is very serious about private information like this, so the tespia program ended and that's why we don't have a public test server.

Now, you could argue that the staff team can open tespia to everyone so that there's no confidentiality involved. However, I think that's not up to us to discuss. The staff team has their reasons to keep things confidential so they would need to consider among themselves whether they can open it to the public or not.

 

I just personally think it's hilarious how one person smega'd last night "revert sweeper changes", followed by a few smegas that were in agreement. Obviously they had satire in them, as many smegas do. I would imagine the point was to spread awareness that the changes are not liked. Pretty sure a bunch of those people got smega muted, along with my one buddy who basically just said "I LOVE MAPLELEGENDS" in the middle of the spam, he got smega muted as well. I don't really remember anyone smegaing more than once. Basically just a way of telling the whole group to shut up and not talk about the changes via smega. Lol.

 

If can work if the test server has the proposed changes and it is open to the public to test. There is no insider information involved since the players will be testing proposed changes and nothing is confirmed. It is just data collection for staff. For example, staff can choose to test multi mage farming. Give testers a few mages and a mu mule and set quests for the testers to hit.

 

I’m not sure what you want. We will have discussions on feedback on all changes, whether it’s minor feedback or a riot. We monitor all changes that are made.

How you manage to assume we don’t have discussions before making changes is pretty beyond me. I hope you can see how staff get frustrated when you say these things after they’ve gone through months of discussion then imply they’re lazy when we are all doing this part time after work, and still having daily discussions on everything.

As -ovv said, if your goal is to make staff look bad, you’re doing a great job. Staff can’t do right in these cases, because the community can do no wrong. Staff have the impossible 3 way task between deciding whether to be lighthearted (and be told they’re trolling), lash out in frustration (and be told they’re unprofessional), or stay stoic and reassure we are working on it (and be told we don’t care and don’t listen).

Respect goes both ways, and just because staff are (rightly) held to a higher standard, that should not give the community space to attack them personally, or their work ethic.

the staff have been known to revert changes (like the no SE crit changes to NL). But this is not going to be a knee jerk reaction and we need to discuss it. Constantly smega’ing or calling out staff will not help. We are trying.

 

I think the biggest gripe people have is how obvious some of these impacts would have been that were so easily overseen. It’s nice that you guys spend so much time prior to releasing changes but basic oversight such as this just makes it seem like the people who are discussing these changes are borderline incompetent or not discussing the right/proper things. This is not my personal opinion; I’m just sharing what I believe the frustration stems from.

For a lot of people who have been playing this game for a long time and have the most experience/are most impacted by these changes you don’t really need to test the changes to know what’s going to happen because you already have so much experience with the mechanics and what not. I think a lot of the reason why you see so many frustrated players is because the entire staff team consists of casual players who seem relatively clueless and do not have a good fundamental understanding of the intricacies/core mechanics they are changing.

EDIT: I myself am a pretty casual player and am just stating my personal opinion through observation. If I’m way off base feel free to correct me. I’m completely open to new perspective/being told I’m wrong.

 

That is the thing though... this whole thing about "so many frustrated players" is a farce, it is just a small vocal minority who just smega everyday about reverting sweeper changes and they all just keep agreeing with each other. I'd like to see the stats on the large number "frustrated" players because I am not seeing a large amount, this doesn't even affect most of the player base.

 

sounds alittle similar to twitter sjws

 

I did not participate in the smegas and only saw it happen one time. The entire player base QoL was affected by this change. I don't even have a mage or a sweeper and I am frustrated with this change. Your generalization is unwarranted. If you took time to go through the thread there are quite a lot of people who are bothered for different reasons. Ask people in game if they think the change made the QoL worse or if they think it looks nice with buggy looking mesos all over their screen. Record the data of all the people who say they like it that way and tell me it outweighs the number of people who dislike it.

 

i sent too quickly i hope no one saw that pls forgive for the notification

This is a really good summary of the confusion this balance brought to me. I think at the core, people want to believe that staff has a well thought out plan for all of the changes, and they considered many different options. But to deliberate for months and come up with /this/ seems incredibly odd and out-of-touch. As I trust that BT is competent and has the server's best interests in mind, that's why I feel like more information on why this change was chosen over other options would clear up a lot of the doubt that is brooding due to the hush-hush nature of the bigger picture that keeps getting mentioned. It's like if my boyfriend gave me a penny for my birthday and said "don't worry, something better is coming ." It would be hard for me to trust something better is truly coming when I got a penny at the start.

It literally affects every player who parties with another character as you are not able to loot mesos in a party anymore. Plenty of people that don't even have sweepers have thrown in their two cents into this thread and the balance change thread, myself included. I think you are choosing to see the opinions that confirm your biases and ignoring the ones that challenge them.

 

1) Smegas have happened more than one time. It happened enough times that it made me temporarily mute smegas (Thank you staff for adding that)

2) "The entire player base QoL was affected by this change" - That is your opinion and now you are making a huge generalization. Take your own advice.

3) Nothing is unwarranted, we have a forum here where everyone is allowed to speak and offer their opinions. But if you want to talk about facts, show me these people that represent a large portion or majority of the playerbase who were using sweeper mules. I won't hold my breathe because it won't happen and even if it did you would find its a very small percent.

4) Depends on the people you are asking. If you are going to ask the vocal minority of sweeper smega spammer brigade that all upvote each other posts and agree with each other with planned out posts in private discords then of course you are going to think everyone agrees with you. There is a bubble outside of that believe it or not.

You can literally apply these words to yourself in regards to confirming biases. I think you said the quiet part out loud. By the same token you are only choosing to see the opinions that confirm what you think about the sweeper mule changes being bad. I party with people all the time and play this game daily and it will literally have zero effect on me. That doesn't mean I have zero empathy for people who created sweeper mules or understand how it will effect them but sweeper mules are just icing on the cake of people who have become spoiled to play the game a certain way, it was never a fundamental part of Maple to begin with. It is just a 1st world problem.

If it bothers you that much that you cant loot mesos in a party anymore then maybe you can add support to the suggestion of having the mesos not appear on other player's screens that dont kill the monster so you dont feel like you are not "sharing" the mesos.

Sidenote : You have to feel pretty good about a server when one of the hot button issues is whether or not the sweeper mule bans are a good thing or not. Speaks highly of how well everything is running on the server. Like I said, 1st world problems.

 

You seem to be the vocal minority here, tbh.

 

The forums have never been the majority of the playerbase btw.