Originally Posted by
Celestrata Bloodsong
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Sure, I can try to clarify this separation between publisher and developer a bit more. When it comes to changes in the game, we as the publisher have varying degrees of requests to try to make the game better for our audience. As explained before, we don't have full control over development -- what we do is make suggestions to XL for features or changes that may be better for you guys. Sometimes those suggestions make it into the game, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes those requests are large, while others are smaller changes. A good example of a large change made to the game based on one of our requests is our version of the costume system. The original system was completely random stat generation, and it also featured set stats on specific costumes. In this manner, players had zero control over what stats were generated and some costumes that were sold were definitely better than others, so you saw them on more people. We wanted to avoid those pitfalls. In specific, we wanted to give players an idea of what they were getting on a costume, and still allow them total freedom in wearing what they want, even if that was just the existing armor they had on without a costume. Thus, our version of the costume system was born. XL made the fine details of that system, sent them to us, we said yes, and it was made for our version of the game. A smaller change? Not going to the new ancestral system that required players to get scrolls to unlock ancestral skills, and instead maintained the existing system we had. XL actually made that suggestion for our region, and we said yes to it because it felt more fair to new players and those who didn't shoot up the ancestral level path in time. So, let's get into the nuts and bolts. Before we jump into any development, be it monthly updates or major updates like Maelstrom, there's a period of time where XL sends over what they want to do in a specific update, and we review all of the documentation, suggestions, and major items. These include things coming up for the store, events, new systems, etc. Sometimes XL suggests immediate changes to systems off the bat, as noted above. Other times, we make suggestions based on what we see in the game, or make suggestions on what we hear from the community. A big part of this period is sometimes looking through community discussion on a specific update (as we know some of you play on other regional servers) and we also look at those communities too to see what their major issues were. That way we can better understand what the update is and how players are reacting to it. After that discussion period, XL's NA/EU team goes to work to build the update for our version of the game. During this time our translation team begins applying the work they've already been doing to translate the new stuff added to the game, and we begin to see our new text in-game, as well as new features get added in semi-regular internal builds. After that, we get the release candidate build which our QA team does a release notes pass on, and you guys get to try out on the PTS server. And, of course, after that, the update goes live. Really, the meat of the "control" is in that discussion period for the update. Again, pieces of it could be really large, or they could be really small changes. Sometimes XL makes the suggestions to change things based on their own experiences, and sometimes we make those suggestions early based on player feedback or our data. But it's important to note that not all of those suggestions make it into the game. Sometimes we try it and it doesn't work out the way we thought. Sometimes both XL and Trion don't agree on a specific change, so we leave a system as-is and look for player feedback to guide us. Sometimes we can't make a change due to time or resources, etc. So that's the general development process. Now, on the specific service side... honestly that "control" is limited. We can start global events, we make changes to the marketplace to add new items and sales, we of course have GMs who help players out on a customer service level. But it's nothing like "we can jump in and immediately tweak this specific drop rate on this specific monster." I usually have to laugh a bit when players talk about a ninja nerf hitting a specific drop rate -- we don't change those on the fly, and the only way they can be adjusted is either through a global rate change or a specific update. For the droprates on things like crates, we mostly leave that stuff to the development team. Sometimes we don't, of course, when we get player feedback. Lunarite is the most recent case of that, where we lobbied really, really hard to get those rates changed. That involved talking to a lot of folks at various levels in XL to try our plan and see if it improved things for players. It also was a passionate push from people like BigDataDude, who really lead the data charge on that, and Khrolan, who performed most of the discussions as it was a major change to the game. If there's any other questions, I may be able to get into things a bit deeper, but that's the general high level view of how things proceed.
