Developer Blog 4 8 25

This developer blog will be the first one to be organized and broken down into sections that are easy to understand and see. For those of you who don't want to watch my long winded rants, this will be easier to pick out the parts of the update that you care about. Further, I'll be able to supplement the videos I make with more details and images that explain the thought process in a bit more detail to be a bit more.

To kick this one off, I'll be going after how I've been feeling first and why I've been M.I.A for so long now. As well as the future of Alfheim and my new seasonal server project that is going to be alongside this one.

My Health

First off, as many of you already know my health hasn't been the greatest. Physically I have visited the hospital 4 times in just a couple month span with two of those times being pretty scary for me until I knew what was wrong. Thankfully, nothing is seriously wrong with my health, but the issues that did come up made me realize how much I had sacrificed to keep working. A lot of my health issues are not outside my hands, but are a direct reflection of how little I have taken care of myself since starting Alfheim.

In 3 years, I've basically not taken time to take a break and tried to barrel through everything to achieve my goals. I would do whatever it takes to get things done in a reasonable time. Sleep was for the weak, eating healthy was a myth, and taking time for myself was simply not going to happen. The end result is what I found out the hard way. Physically my health got terrible and mentally I eventually burned myself to a crisp and needed a break to recharge myself.

The thing is I love Alfheim and I do love the players. I do want to achieve all the great things I set out to do and I do want people to have fun. Genuinely that will never stop being a goal of mine and no matter how many other things I do in life, I think I'll always have a soft spot for this project because it opened me to the world of game design and seeing people have fun with it has been a joy like no other.

That said, its time I find the right work life balance and that means not sacrificing myself in a way that is unsustainable. After all, it does no good for the players if I'm mentally and physically unhealthy and can't work. So with that, moving forward, you may see more breaks/lulls where I don't work when I need a break. Or maybe instead of those 12 hour days back to back to back to back and then spending a day sleeping, I'll actually stop myself after a normal day of work.

Now, no one should feel guilty as all these mistakes are my own and I hold myself accountable as an adult for not taking care of myself and allowing myself to get to this point. But I just wanted to make it clear that I'm not giving upon Alfheim despite taking a much needed break to recharge myself recently. I'll be right back at it now that I'm feeling better and there's a lot more to come still. But we'll get into that more in later sections of the blog.

For those of you worried about my health moving forward, I'll be taking care of myself but I'm also fine otherwise. Most of my issues are being taken care of as time goes on and the physical pain that pops up sometimes is becoming few and far between. I'm ok! And if anything starts to happen again you can bet I won't sacrifice my health to the point it got to recently.

Community Management

So this was a hard pill to swallow for me. But one that I had to. I'm not good at managing a community in general. I'm the type of personality that simply wants everyone to get along, yet when they don't my response is to get frustrated and shut everything down or overreact. This in turn has not been healthy for the community, so I've more recently began a shift in how we do things internally that should help us. For one, I will not be involved in much of the personal conflicts when possible. This leaves the more level-headed parts of staff to kind of pick up the mantle, but they've done a pretty good job of it. Mind you, I won't be NOT interacting with any of the community when it comes to needing help resolving issues, but the point is I'll be trying to let others handle it where they can.

Seeing players conflict is like watching your children fight. It's never fun and you really just want to foster an environment where everyone has fun together and enjoys this wonderful game we know and love. That said, I've also been wildly inconsistent and at times polarized in how I should handle things. Sometimes I've been far too reserved and other times I've been far too harsh. It has led, rightfully so, to a lot of people feeling unwelcome in our community or feeling the need to leave. Ultimately, that is no one's fault but my own. My inability to do what needs to be done and handle it properly falls on my shoulders so I take blame for that.

I should have identified much earlier how poor I am at dealing with conflict, but stubbornly I wanted to force myself to learn for the sake of leadership. Part of being a good leader is being able acknowledge areas where you are weak and letting others take the charge so you can focus on where you are strong. And this is one of those cases.

Seeing the community rip itself to shreds has been one of the most heartbreaking things for me to watch. After all, I can take all the criticism in the world about my designs. But seeing players leave because of feeling unsafe or unwelcome is simply tragic to me. I am hoping by being cognizant of this flaw of mine I can improve upon this aspect and by leaving more of it to the people in our staff who are good at it, we will improve and make our community better with time.

For now, all I can say its a bit too late for some of you, but for those of you still reading this?

I'm sorry.

Project Phoenix

So now with all the sad out of the way, let's get into the first part of our immediate future! Our new seasonal server! Ken has begun work on the RWC mode this weekend and its coming along. How long it will take we don't know yet, but we do know as stated previously its a complex system. This will come to Alfheim first for bug testing mostly since I am well aware there isnt a lot of PVP players on our server left if there are any at all.

RWC will be a key feature for the new seasonal server in EVERY season, so that's why its being so heavily prioritized for Alfheim. So don't worry we're not shifting to PVP focus for Alfheim, it's just part of the process.

Project Phoenix, the name of our new seasonal server project will be a server that I feel is more in tune with the needs of most of the larger casual community of RO. RO is not a game that is very sustainable long term and it suffers from people needing to constantly start over because it gets boring once you reach the end game (since there lacks an end game).

On Alfheim, we seek to resolve that through adding in end game content. However, this takes A LOT of time for each content update and is honestly a lot of work. Worse, the amount of money it takes to hire map makers, and pay ken is quite high so in order to sustain this we're doing a secondary project to fund our mainline project of Alfheim. (which will always be where my heart is)

That said, let's talk about a few of the core features that are decided on for myself for Project Phoenix so people can have an idea of what kinda server its going to be. I'm bringing a lot of what I've learned from Alfheim, both successes and mistakes alike to shape Project Phoenix into what it will be.

Core Design

The current ideas of Project Phoenix will be as follows:

1.) Resets once a year and wipes everything, with only custom content gears carrying over to the next season. (with caveats I'll explain later)

2.) Each season will have a unique thematic that defines the season and playstyle that lasts the entire season.

3.) Each season will be progressive with 3 segments: Initial Launch, Custom Content Introduced, and Fully Unlocked.

   -Initial Launch- Will be vanilla content with the thematic custom changes introduced.

   -Custom Content- This will be the halfway point where new custom content/gears/drops are introduced for that season. There will always be 2 custom contents each season, with one being lesser in scope and one larger.

   -Fully Unlocked- This will be irrelevant for the first season, but in future seasons will be where your gears from previous seasons become available and all older custom content becomes available to play again as well. 

4.) No trading, dropping items, both zeny and items.

5.) Full Individual Loot for ALL clients.

6.) 10x Rates across the board to account for the fact it is a seasonal server, but to make sure it isn't completely lightning fast.

7.) Unlimited Resets from anywhere to greater allow experimentation for the custom themes. (normally I hate resets, but this is necessary for seasonal)

Now now, I know there's some concerns here on probably 4 and 5 that are gonna raise some eyebrows so let me try to explain this as best as I can.

First off, by limiting trading, dropping of items, etc. you can balance the game more around FUN than worrying about how it will affect an economy that in my experience, gets broken no matter what server you are playing. This means I can add in higher drop rates that players found fun on Alfheim, as an example without worrying about the long term unhealthy effects.

Secondly, I am well aware that this will cause a lot of issues with getting items on characters that are well...not built for farming. So the individual loot for all clients solves this. Since zeny can only be used to purchase items for one's self and there's no trading or dropping items, I don't have to worry about the inflationary effects of it. This will encourage everyone to always play together as there's not really a downside to playing together anymore in any capacity.

Further, this means I don't have to worry about monitoring individual loot "abuse" in that since there is no trading, players will be free to do what they need to, to get items for their characters.

Now, none of this is set in stone and is subject to further design as there are some issues I'm already forseeing. (such as groups demanding all their duals get in parties, etc since they want their priest to get a drop etc.). So this may change from all clients to still 1 per master, but I would prefer to lean the other and perhaps do other things like higher cap on party numbers, etc.

To put it simply these are just my base ideas for now and where I'm thinking/leaning. I want to design a server that gets people to play together without feeling a detriment similar to alfheim, but also doesn't hurt the economy in the process.

We'd be adjusting things like MVP drops to have an exchange rather than drop rates like on Alfheim since I feel randomly getting a skull cap in a party on a character you didn't care about might just be triggering instead. All of it is going to be refined before release and you can be I've considered everything there is to be considered by then. But for now wanted to show the initial thoughts.

Season 1 Design

The season 1 design for Project Phoenix is going to feature Secondary Jobs and passive support skills the two pillars.

To start, you'll be able to freely swap between your jobs with an NPC in the main office at any given time, and assuming we pull it off, it should rememeber your Base Level for that Job and the Job Level for that job. Yes, you will have to re-level each job. To get around some shenanigans what we will be doing is not allowing you to swap jobs until you've "mastered" your first job you started with. So if you become a swordman and then a Knight you'll have to 99/50 it before being able to choose a second job to learn.

When you swap jobs, that will be swapping your PRIMARY job. Which means you can be whatever you want as a primary job. As you level up a primary job you'll also be learning permanent support skills from that job. Each job will have 3 basic support skills and 1 ultimate support skill to learn. You will then be able to equip any 3 from any job you want and 1 ultimate from any job.

Further, you will also be able to choose your primary job and a secondary job. The primary job is obvious, but the secondary job is simply going to give you access to all the skills from a secondary job that you've learned when mastering that job as a primary job. (i.e. if you make a grand cross crusader as primary, when you set it as secondary you will still have those skills. if you want to change that you'd have to set it as primary and change the skills)

Lastly, there will be NO expanded jobs as they are honestly going to be problematic overall, but to make it fun we've decided to do an extra passive support skill called EX skills. These will have a handful of skills that are based off of things expanded classes could do with the most noteable example being a skill that will let you soul link yourself.

As you'd expect this set up means no trans classes as the meta for that would be rather...stale with everyone going Assassin Cross as Primary or Secondary for physical job as just one example.

If you're interested in my rough raft for the support job skills you can few my google doc here but keep in mind that this is a very early rough draft and subject to change.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c5tEDNL-P3dhvs2iSYa4UTz9zlv0i0H4M0lMt1ey6NY/edit?usp=sharing