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Game Team Update: Feedback Response


Arctic

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  • Aion Team

Hi everyone!

It's been one week since we posted our request for feedback, and since that time there has been vigorous discussion around dozens of topics related to Aion, all of which was individually reviewed. I wanted to offer a follow-up post to highlight the primary takeaways we had from your feedback, share a few changes we can make right now, and provide an idea our plans going forward.

Feedback Review

Let’s begin by reviewing your feedback.  We organized feedback into 28 categories to help us process the information - and then prioritized the list according to the quantity of comments and intensity of opinion. You can view a screenshot of our categories and their priority ranking here. We'll be referring to this list going forward, so it is important that it's somewhat accurate. Please let us know what you think.

Now, let's talk about some changes we are able to make (or begin making) right away.


Immediate Changes

In the future, we’d like a little more dialogue with you to make sure we’re making valuable/desired changes - but in this case the team wanted to demonstrate their eagerness to act by offering some immediate changes towards some of the problems we saw mentioned. Hopefully we made good decisions, but please let us know!

We’re making two permanent changes, as well as taking a few actions to ease the experience drought that players are dealing with:

  • Stigma Enchantment Rates: Shortly after reviewing your feedback together, the team requested an update to Wednesday’s patch to permanently increase stigma enchantment rates for +9 and higher to 30%. Thank you for sharing your feedback in this area; it was clear that 20% was a major pain point, and this was something we could easily address.
     
  • Selective Retuning: The next game update (not maintenance) will contain a change targeted at making Selective Retuning a less painful experience by reducing the cost from 160 Luna per retune to 20 Luna. We read a lot about the pains of RNG, and this was one area where we felt confident to make an immediate change. There will be other changes to follow.
     
  • Experience: Experience can be tough to come by, and the recent disabling of Shattered Abyssal Splinter (SAS) did not make things easier. We heard your concerns in the thread, and would like to offer two actions here:
    • A compensation for the downtime of 10 Experience Crystals, 10 Abyssal Fragments, and 1 Untradable Mysterious Recovery Serum Box to each account for each day SAS has been offline. We understand that some players who achieved higher ranks may have earned more, and struggled with the best solution here. We hope this solution proves acceptable for now.
    • We recently completed our investigation of SAS, and will be bringing the Instance back online this Wednesday, 7/29. However, we also read much about the experience-related challenges you face in your recent feedback. To provide temporary assistance, we are activating a +200% Experience Bonus (300% total) event beginning on Wednesday. The event will run for three weeks through August 19th, at which point we will reassess.


Looking Forward

We know this is just the beginning, but we hope these actions are an appreciable first step. In a few weeks, we will share some additional thoughts and potential changes to facilitate a more back-and-forth discussion. For the time being, we would like to hear what you think of these actions, as well as our interpretation/prioritization of your feedback.

We hope this feels like a step in the right direction for Aion. If it does or does not, please share that as well. Thank you!

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Sounds awesome @Kibbelz I appreciate you guys taking immediate action.

 

I would say that the siege times are also higher priority, but we had already provided that feedback which we thought you guys would act on, so maybe that's why people didn't provide feedback on the thread.  The communication in general has been much better the last 2 months or so, and we appreciate it.  I applaud you and @Loki for this. 

With the raising of the rates,I would like to see a BCM event like we had earlier this year in order to get Stigma Enchantment stones with good prices (like 100 stones for $50), or perhaps an event that rewards them heavily, considering it will still take hundreds to get them to advanced on average.  Another aspect I would like to see is a fail rate guarantee, meaning if you fail 100x to enchant a certain stigma, you will be able to advance it. 

 

One thing I don't see in your list is the prices on the BCM shop.  If you guys lowered prices significantly on some common items (stigma stones, enchantment stones) I think you guys would see much higher volume of sales.  No one is going to pay $5 per stone for an ultimate stone, but would probably be willing to pay $2, and 50 cents for a legendary stone.

 

Thank you,

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wow i might log in just to utilize this...

 

 

Experience: Experience can be tough to come by, and the recent disabling of Shattered Abyssal Splinter (SAS) did not make things easier. We heard your concerns in the thread, and would like to offer two actions here:

A compensation for the downtime of 10 Experience Crystals, 10 Abyssal Fragments, and 1 Untradable Mysterious Recovery Serum Box for each day SAS has been offline. We understand that some players who achieved higher ranks may have earned more, and struggled with the best solution here. We hope this solution proves acceptable for now.

We recently completed our investigation of SAS, and will be bringing the Instance back online this Wednesday, 7/29. However, we also read much about the experience-related challenges you face in your recent feedback. To provide temporary assistance, we are activating a +200% Experience Bonus (300% total) event beginning on Wednesday. The event will run for three weeks through August 19th, at which point we will reassess.

 

this is the best thing you could have ever done for lot of players!

 

Selective Retuning: The next game update will contain a change targeted at making Selective Retuning a less painful experience by reducing the cost from 160 Luna per retune to 20 Luna. We read a lot about the pains of RNG, and this was one area where we felt confident to make an immediate change. There will be other changes to follow.

 

over all its a small fix in a long list of fix's!!!

 

you know what i dont understand?...destiny is releasing locked vault item's as of right now...wow is releasing old vault item's...NCSOFT if they really wanted money they would release the entire game from the vault....10+ years of AION and they want us to spend our money on this gemstone crap and "advanced" skills...woohooo we get red transformation's.....

anyone remember the xforms in Evergale canyon?

anyone remember abyss flight where we could fly super fast through the abyss....

this game is no longer aion and i was willing to pay for aion!

people want AION back!

Thanks Arkaida!

 

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ty so much @Kibbelz this sounds amazing. Taking actions right away =)

About the compensation on SAS; I dont know how many ppl do x12 runs. Me as a f2p is my "best" way to get better trasnformation. So if u can make this compensation a bit more higher for player like me, it will me awesome.

Just having it back, and all the other things listed it really makes me happy; and im pretty sure lots of ppl share the same feeling.

 

Good luck, and keep on the good work =) 

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These seem like some decent first steps, please don't stop here though and keep going! The only suggestion I have is maybe add a category for New/Returning players. The game is very VERY anti new or returning players at the moment. While changes for new/returning players won't directly effect some of us immediately, it'd be nice to see players coming back or new players joining the game and expanding our community more. Thank you! 

P.S.  @Kibbelz you still are not showing up under the Dev Tracker tab. Please fix this so we can monitor your responses to topics easier. Thank you!

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I was amazed! It's been a long time since I've seen the ncwest team listen and do something that people comment on the forum! Congratulations on this initiative and don't forget to reduce the absurd difference for new players, always aim to increase your customers

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  • Aion Team

Even internally @Loki has been a godsend for helping me here on the forums, so I'm really happy to see ya'll giving him so much love <3 He deserves it for sure.

Siege Schedules are on the radar for people, but they're taking a good bit of time to implement. Hopefully the more frequent dialogues between us will make changes like this more desirable the first time (AFAIK we changed it but not to the time most people wanted?  It was right when I was joining the team)

Regarding abyssal fragments - we totally understand that some people would have earned much more, especially if they were S-rank on every character. Unfortunately, our current tech did not anticipate this outage, and there's no easy way for us to grant targeted rewards based on performance in SAS. There's no question that this would be the ideal outcome, but it would be a significant effort for the team and delay development in other areas.

With what we have, we can grant rewards per account via a survey. In the end, we made the hard choice of choosing this path. We welcome your feedback on whether you feel this was the right or wrong choice, as it will help guide us in future decisions. Wish we could offer more here.

 

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@Kibbelz Can your team please look more into the introductory level 80 experience? Most of the changes you have listed are completely irrelevant for someone returning or new to the game. Everything in the the top 10, with the exception of transformations, only benefits people already deep into later game content. Gear gap will only get more clearly defined with these changes...

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For starters, I would like to thank you and the whole team (incl. @Loki who's been also a big help) for the efforts! I really hope that you guys will stick around and keep up with being active in this community. We all need someone around to hear us, share the same passion for the game like us and actually get things done, because at the end of the day actions speak louder than words. ;3

I looked over your categories and their priority ranking, which I do like but I'm also a little bit concerned about a couple things. There are certain topics like "Hacking/Cheating" or  "Balance" (just an example because there are more) which require more time and can't be improved in a month or two to my knowledge, so I have a question for you @Kibbelz: Do you guys have a set goal time frame or at least have an idea when you'd like to "finish" off this list? I know, this is a bit of a tricky question because some of those topics require a contentious maintenance and follow ups, but I hope you get the idea where I'm trying to go with this question. ;x

Thankies for reading!

P.S. I would give you a "Like" on your post, if I could, but I suppose your tags and permissions are not all set yet, same as appearing in the dev tracker!

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First of all,  I appreciate that you kept your word in terms of responding to our feedback. This has not been typical, we've had too much "NCSoon".

Secondly, thank you for the changes that will take effect regarding stigma enchantment rates. The selective retuning is WAY overdue and frankly is too little,  too late for me at this point. The compensation for SAS  is better than getting nothing but less than I normally got - but at least there's an EXP buff.

But wait- You see, I don't agree with the the prioritized list of issues. I'll give you an example or two - are skins really a higher priority than the siege schedule? not for me personally, nor for almost everyone in my legion. No one has quit the game due to the lack of skins but they have stopped due to the siege schedule. Same thing with prestige.

It would be interesting to know how you can judge "intensity" - some people will put there comments in size 36 font using bold red txt, others will be equally passionate  about an issue but will frame a logical argument, hoping to sway people. Even the numbers that express a problem isn't necessarily the best way to weight the priorities. Class balance is a good example - if someone mains a sorc  in this patch I would not be at all surprised if class balance it way up on their list. For other classes it may well  be lower on the list. If however someone mains a sorc and class balance isn't addressed- well their enjoyment of the game hasn't been addressed at all.

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42 minutes ago, Kibbelz said:

Regarding abyssal fragments - we totally understand that some people would have earned much more, especially if they were S-rank on every character. Unfortunately, our current tech did not anticipate this outage, and there's no easy way for us to grant targeted rewards based on performance in SAS. There's no question that this would be the ideal outcome, but it would be a significant effort for the team and delay development in other areas.

With what we have, we can grant rewards per account via a survey. In the end, we made the hard choice of choosing this path. We welcome your feedback on whether you feel this was the right or wrong choice, as it will help guide us in future decisions. Wish we could offer more here.

 

In the past NCsoft has given blanket wide surveys where in 6.7 they did it for enchantment stone where using 1 ultimate, 1 legendary, 1 ancient you could get compensated for 5 ultimates, 10 legendary, 25 ancient enchantment stones.

Instead of 10 abyssal fragments you should modify the rewards to 300 abyssal fragments for each day missed which is equivalent to S rank on 12 characters.  Just modify the number, no need for targeted compensation.

As for arena of discipline Luna rewards {CC} Cyan said on May 15th that it was high priority for the development team to give compensation for February to May, yet you have put it low on the priority on imgur. There has not been one public word about this since May 15th, when are you gonna address it?

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  • Aion Team

@Anjo-KT This is good feedback. I will say that the team's current initiative is improving experience for "existing players", which I mentioned at the start of the feedback request post. But I get a sense that not too far from now we may be looking at the new player experience thanks to recent positive developments in Aion.

@Rapier-DN You're not the first to mention Siege Schedule being too low on the list. This is why we're discussing :) I'm glad you mentioned it. The Luna rewards is not an issue I was around for, but let me check with the team and see if that's a low-hanging fruit.

At the end of the day, I do my best but I hardly have a science, and that's why I check w/ you all. There are some Deep Learning softwares out there which companies have attempted to utilize (including ours), but I've found that so far, they are much less effective than estimate/revise/iterate.

 

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  • Aion Team

@Nyali-DN I personally expect this list to be more of a living list. We will continue to try working on issues on it, but new issues or concerns will appear (caused by the removal of others, or game developments, or other factors). I would like to "keep a pulse" of how we can help make the game better (from your perspective) at all times. I hope the list is never empty b/c then I don't think I'm collecting issues/ideas from you!

That said, if you meant everything on the list and nothing but, I'd just have no idea how to begin estimating that. There are so many devs, and so many unidentified solutions... I'm a single employee on a massive team. If there's an overwhelming interest in this question, I could see if the team could spare cycles to do some estimates together, but I personally don't expect that to be the case. Primarily b/c those estimates would take time from actually doing the dev work which I'm not sure enough players would want.

Not the answers you may have hoped for, but I hope they give a little perspective from our side of things!

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33 minutes ago, VLessa-KT said:

@Kibbelz I do 12 SAS every day = 300 abyssal fragments/day. And u giving me 10!!!!  Where in world its a decent compensation? 

When did u get compensation? I'm still waiting and if it is only 10... that is laughable and goes to show you that the people who run the game don't even know how it works.

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