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.
Contents
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
Timeline
Project Phoenix is being prioritized for now as we need to get it out as soon as possible. That said, I won't rush it and I will need time to not only develop it, but properly promote it and get the word out as well. Refining my rough ideas right now will also take time. So as always, I won't have a timeline, but it is prioritized. I do want to finish it sooner rather than later though so I can immediately go back to my true vision which is Alfheim.
The Future of Alfheim
After taking a MUCH needed break to rest, I'm recharged and just about ready to delve into game design once again. That means more stuff for you. I've been inspired mentally for awhile, but the body was not really cooperating. The immediate future will be polishing up A4.4 which is just the mini ant-hell content. RWC will actually be pushed up to before A5 because we need it mostly for bug testing.
A5 itself will be on hold temporarily while we work on Project Phoenix but given the simplicity of Project Phoenix compared to Alfheim I would not expect to be away from Alfheim for too long! When A5 comes back I'll be entirely focused on the expanded reworks and potentially other class reworks since I feel thats what people enjoy the most.
I'll talk about this a lot more in my video but my game design philosophy has shifted a lot during my a break. I'll be focusing a lot more on player creativity and freedom than I ever have and thats because of my experiences playing games. I do not want to rant about that here as the video will be a better place for it.
Rather, I'd focus on what we actually have planned for Alfheim moving forward.
A5 and Class Updates
This is first my immediate focus. I want to update ALL the classes as I've always envisioned. I've gotten a lot more efficient at doing A LOT of it myself especially client side so I need a lot less help from Ken to do these than ever with Ken only needing to do some minimal source changes to help me out. This means its finally feasible for me to actually get through them after all this time. and that's my goal. In this section I want to go over some of the design goals of each update and some of the ideas I have as teasers moving forward. Keep in mind, anything other than expandeds may be a bit away. (I'll add only a few of the other class ideas I have at the bottom with a divider to separate the ideas that are more set and those that are merely ideas.)
1.) Taekwon Ranker expanded update is removed and Star Gladiator is now a hybrid of the original design and something new.
2.) Taekwon's stances are updated:
-Tornado Stance makes auto attacks/kicks do splash damage
-Counter Stance works like a riposte and blocks all damage for a time and lets you counter for burst damage if timed well.
-New Stance called Titanic stance that does increased damage the less health an enemy has. (finisher)
-Falling Star Stance for more auto attack focused builds that scales hybrid physical/magic.
3.) Star Glad gets new stances in addition to the Taekwon adjustments:
-Solar Stance will be defense pierce focused
-Lunar Stance will be a stealthy stance that lets you weave in and out of combat as well as apply burst damage when exiting stealth.
4.) Star Glad loses Heat as an active buff, but retains it when fully ramped up with a new skill called Chain Kick fury that allows you to basically go absolutely ham for 10 seconds in a way that is likely stronger than current Star Glad for that window. (their limit break)
5.) Star Glad's EXP buffs are for self only now and significantly nerfed.
6.) Star Glad's Damage shifted from arbitrary stat passives such as Hatred into new passive skills that buff the kicks/stances from Taekwon making Star Glad stand out from Linker as a physical melee damage dealer.
7.) All Soul Link's removed entirely in favor of one universal link.
8.) Soul Ascetic gets a new skill called High Leap that is instant cast, fast, but works on a charge system. This skill, unlike Leap is free targeted meaning you can choose where to jump instead of having to face a certain way.
9.) Talismans reworked from previous preview,s now simply apply an effect when you and a partner hit the same target. (still only one talisman buff at a time)
-Blue Dragon recovers both members SP and grants speed pot speed.
-Red Phoenix recovers both members HP and grants DEF/MDEF pierce.
-Black Tortoise grants damage reduction and increased healing from items.
-White Tiger Grants ASPD and After Cast Delay.
10.) Soul Unity makes all skills that you use on your linked ally also affect all other party members for a short time. (longer cooldown so situational usage)
Tentative Ideas for Non-Expanded Classes
11.) Assassin Cross's Meteor Assault marks all targets as wounded and knocks them back 9 cells, sonic blow can blink to all wounded targets within 10 cells and lowers the cooldown of sonic blow by 75% if it does so.
12.) Creator can concoct using regular ETC items on the fly to create new spells that are spammable and situational. Offensive elemental spells, defensive and offensive buffs/debuffs, etc. Strength is based on the grade/rarity of ingredients used. Concoctions last for a duration so no need to grind out mats for ages or run through them like water.
13.) Whitesmith brings its little mech floating robot thing from renewal that adds consistent damage to auto attacks/skills. Shreds defense and increases damage to the target for the Whitesmith specifically making it better for longer sustained damage on the same target.
14.) High Priest gets an AOE protection limit break that reduces all incoming damage around self by 90% for a few seconds and heals the party after for 50% of the damage they did take both HP and SP.
15.) Dancer gets a limit break buff that makes the target's single target skills become AOE instead for a short duration or amount.
16.) Bard gets a limit break buff that makes the target's single target skills double cast for a short duration.
17.) Sniper can mark targets with attacks/double strafe and then unleash Falcon Assault on all marked targets for significant damage on each marked target. (falcon assault is more bursty rather than spammy)
18.) Sniper gains Fear Breeze, their warg from 3rd jobs, and can cast warg strike and falcon assault with combo timing while auto attacking. (prompts pop up is the vision). Additionally, they can capture monsters that can also be part of this same play pattern. Blitz beat is still passive damage in addition to this.
A6 And the End of Major Updates
Now don't panic reading that title. A6 will be my magnum opus and final update and while it that seems rather close in numbers patch wise, the truth is this update is so unbelievably massive in scope it could very well be YEARS before I finish it.
The truth is I've wanted to design my own game for awhile. And I've basically been secretly writing a story and designing it for Alfheim for awhile now. But first things first! We have to do ALL of the above before we get anywhere near doing this and then this alone will take ages. Part of it is on its way already, but the scope is simply massive.
So that said, I wanted to reveal that this update will be our last "major" update once its finished. A6 will have 17 + unique contents that are all mostly larger in scope than anything else we've done. It will be my attempt to give RO a true end game and give you all something to work for with a true "final boss" of the game to boot.
So that means needing art, maps, etc. And all that will take a lot of work. So be patient while we work on this.
After A5, Project Phoenix and more, you can expect me to try to do easier to do lighter contents that are more in the vein of traditional RO to keep you guys busy while I work on it. Things like the Ant Hell update releasing soon.
But this update once its done will be where I "retire" from the RO scene other than renewing Project Phoenix and doing light content updates for Alfheim. This means only small scope stuff once A6 is done since at that point I'll have completed all the class updates, finished my story, and offered all I have to give to the community.
All that will be left at that point is an occasional mini content update and events for you guys still around at that point.
Again, don't panic, the end is not anywhere near and even when it "ends", it won't really end. It's just changing.
Thank You
Just wanted to add this at the bottom, to thank you to all of you who have stuck it out and not jumped ship after all this time and despite my very obvious shortcomings as a server owner and leader. I appreciate each and every one of you, yes even those of you who throw shade at me.
You guys are why I do this and I love you guys even when you express discontent. I just wish I could do more, but there's only so much I can do. Thank you for your patience and as always if you have any questions please feel free to hit me up in discord.
