Development Update March 31, 2020
Greetings Pyreborn!
I’m Jason Park, the Head of Development and Producer for Bless Unleashed.
I would like to start off by thanking our users for their constant support of our game through beta, head start, and our official launch. We have been receiving a large amount of feedback from our community since the game has launched, and it has played a vital role in helping us improve and stabilize various areas of the game. Our studio, in cooperation with our friends at BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment America will continue to deliver new and exciting MMORPG experiences with new updates to our player base.
I would like to cover a few major topics today. The development team is thoroughly checking all in-game issues and is making note of community feedback (And yes! We really do look at all community posts and discuss them!). I would like to share our thoughts on the development team’s original intentions vs. current situation, as well as future changes.
Open World PvP
This is probably the hottest topic right now. Our intent when we decided to add open world PvP was to create a sense of danger and excitement in the world of Lumios. We wanted players to feel a sense of urgency when adventuring, and we decided that open world PvP would be one of the best ways to do this. We felt that players would enjoy the sense of tension when adventuring even in familiar territory if it were possible that another player may come and challenge them around every corner. To discourage players from griefing other players, and ruining the fun of others, we envisioned a system where players would be punished for killing other players, and others would be encouraged to hunt players who took advantage of the system, essentially allowing the community to police itself. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we were unable to implement the honor system for launch. Due to this, an important part of the open world PvP gameplay loop is currently not present. To help combat this, and protect players who are still progressing in levels, we have implemented a safe guard for players by increasing the PvP penalties, and restricting the ability to have first strike on players five levels or more below you. We will continue to work on this system, and are working hard to close this loop. We will be making more changes to open world PvP as time goes on, and our hope is that we might even be able to lessen some of the restrictions and penalties for participating in open world PvP as time goes by.
There are also extreme suggestions of completely removing open world PvP, or creating a PVE only channel or server. However we would prefer to take a more measured approach and don’t want to rush any decisions.
Just like in the real world, we think that the best is to use rules and laws to maintain balance. There will be players who do not care about notoriety and are willing to accept the PK penalty, as well as players who will make use of the Honor system once implemented to protect other players.
Of course, we are also considering additional mechanisms for players who do not enjoy PvP. For example, an item that protects a player from PvP for a specific amount of time is being considered, but we are hesitant to release such an item before having the full system of infamy and honor in place.
We are cautiously making improvements based on your feedback. PvP is linked to many different types of in-game content, and due to this, we must proceed with care. We will continue to listen to your feedback to help determine the best direction for us to move forward.
Equipment Enhancements
Another hot topic in our communities, much of the feedback we received was that the enhancement process was far too difficult and the cost vs. success was too harsh. However, as many of you are aware, enhancing equipment is generally designed to be difficult as players go up the enhancement ladder. The trade off being that success in enhancement offers significant rewards. Based on the feedback we received during our open betas, we added an Unlicensed Enhancement Specialist (Low cost, high risk) and Master Enhancement Specialist (High cost, no risks) to address the difficulty in enhancement, but upon our official launch, it was clear that the intended design did not fit the needs of our community.
As you are aware, we’ve adjusted the success rate for all three specialists to be equal, which immensely increased the success rate of the Master Enhancement Specialist. These adjustments should assist our players in enhancing their equipment to higher grades which is vital in challenging some of our Dungeons.
The most critical aspect that we overlooked was the stress that came with a failure on enhancement. The amount of resources players lost from repetitive failures and the disappointment and frustration that followed was also felt by the studio and led to in-depth discussions. The recent patch relieves some of the pressure from the enhancement process, and we strongly agree that failure of the enhancement should not have such an impact on the player. Therefore, we are discussing further increases to success rates, or the ability to recover some of the loss when failures occur..
The Grind
There were many suggestions from our players regarding the grind between levels 16 and 20..
It was our intent that when players had completed the main story quest, along with other content such as regional quests, and the available Arena Challenges during this portion of the game, they would reach level 19 with little to no difficulty. The reason for the design was to reinforce the idea in our players to gather, craft, and enhance their equipment. This would allow them to level up by doing the additional content available to assist in order to overcome the level obstacle.
We implemented an EXP event to further assist our players in this specific portion of the game, but it was clear that there needed to be a more permanent solution to tackle this issue. So in our March 24 patch, we’ve increased the EXP from the monsters in the early portion of the game, and significantly increased the EXP from Arena Challenges. We believe that this recent change should assist our players in with the grind during this portion of the game.
Battlefield Queues
Finally, the issue of long queues for the 15 vs 15 Battlefield, Red Basin. Because the content requires a high number of players, this queue has been longer than many others. We’ve also received feedback suggesting we remove the factions from the Battlefield content to improve the matchmaking queues as this may be one source of the long wait time.
When looking at the data however, the delay in matchmaking wasn’t due to the imbalance of the teams but rather a lack of players who are able to meet the level criteria for the content paired with a mix of players canceling the matchmaking process due to the prolonged wait. The mixture of these factors is the reason why the matchmaking time is longer than others. We expect to see significant improvement in matchmaking time as more players are able to progress in the game. We are also planning to update the rewards for the Battlefield on a weekly basis to incentivize participation in this content.
If the matchmaking queue issue does not improve, we have several other options such as expanding the search criteria range or to only open the Battlefield at peak core times. Furthermore, we are also considering adding cross server play to the game in order to improve queue times even more.
Since launch, everyone at Round 8 Studio has been moved by your excitement for Bless Unleashed. We are enjoying the game with you, whether we are playing, watching your live streams, or listening to your feedback, your passion for Bless Unleashed inspires us.
Our core belief is that no MMORPG is ever a finished product, and will always have room for growth and improvement by exchanging ideas and opinions with our community. The development team is constantly listening to your feedback and suggestions and strives to bring more excitement to the world of Bless Unleashed.
On behalf of everyone here at Round 8 Studio, thank you for your constant support.
We’ll be sharing news about some of our upcoming changes and additions to Bless Unleashed as we move closer to our first major update. So stay tuned!
Bless Unleashed’s Jason Park, Head of Development, PD