Actually I can deny this
One of the worse mistakes you can make as a designer (and I am assuming you're a designer if your hanging out in the level design forums) is to assume that "everyone" feels the same way as you do. A small but vocal group of people on a gaming forum does not constitute "everyone". We made this mistake back in the early RO days. There was a feature in the game (I can't remember what it was) but "everyone" on the forums said they wanted it changed. Every time there was a poll 90%+ of people would say that they wanted it changed. So we listened to "everyone" and changed it. Guess what happened. As it turns out the real "everyone" (as in the masses playing the game) actually liked it how it was ORIGINALLY before we changed it. There was outrage in the general RO community, and a rash of people coming to the forums to express that they loved the feature the way that it was, and wanted it changed back. As it turned out about 90% of the people playing the game liked it and didn't want it changed.
So what was the problem here? How could the forums have been so wrong? Two reasons:
1) The forums generally represent less than 1% of the playerbase in size (in the case of RO2 its probably less than 0.01%). In other words, way less than 1% of players ever even post on the forums, so you have an extremely small sample size.
2) Players almost NEVER go on to the forums to let you know that they like the status quo. You won't get a rash of people dropping in to say "you know what, I just wanted to say I love everything just the way it is". It is the nature of the internet the people usually go to the forums when they have something they want to gripe about, or have changed.
So what is a designer to do in this situation? How do you sort the minority gripes from the true problems? Well first off you have to be quick to listen, fast to investigate, but slow to change. What that means is listen to what the community are saying, investigate and get some good data, but let things ride for a little bit to see how they are truly going to flow out. It also means getting out there and playing the game with a lot of different people on a lot of different servers. If you always play the game with the same set of people, you'll always end up with similar results. So you have to jump around and test the waters.
A prime example of this was RO:Ostfront. When we first released it there were some maps that when it first came out were ALWAYS won by the same team. There were outcries on the forums about how unbalanced certain levels were. Then within a couple weeks of the launch as people learned the maps, what routes to take, where to go, etc the balance of some of these maps shifted completely in the opposite direction with no changes from the dev team. So to sum up on this point, sometimes the initial reaction from a group of players isn't the correct reaction, and as they learn the maps, gameplay, functionality, the balance or flow can change. So you have to be a little patient to see how things play out.
So with all of that said we are looking into some tweaks to countdown as in some cases it works great, and in other cases it is not working out as well as we intended. Anyone who ever spent an entire hour stuck on the first objective on Berazina in RO1 knows that a system like this was needed. It rewards the defenders for playing aggressively and forces the attackers out of their hidey holes eventually. But as I said, we're giving it a couple of weeks for people to get used to all the new gameplay mechanics before we start rashly changing things but there is likely some changes coming.
Finally, and most importantly, the great thing about an SDK is that the power is in YOUR hands now to experiment with all these things. Try taking lockdown out, adding features we didn't think of, tweaking values, etc. If one of you all make a mutator or mode that EVERYONE (the REAL everyone) just loves we'll probably adopt it as official
So go forth and show us what you can do!
![[TW]Ramm-Jaeger](/data/avatars/s/0/2.jpg?1568638684){kind=avatar}
