Letter from the CEO - Spring 2010

rhinok

 

Source

 

Hi everyone,

 

It’s been about three months since the last letter from me, and Piggypops has threatened to steal my entire Red Bull stash if I don’t write a new one. He’s dastardly like that and he seriously covets everyone else's energy drinks.

 

As you may know, we brought on a new lead designer - John Yoo – a couple of months ago. John is really leading the charge to up the ante when it comes to EE’s design. I’m really excited to be working with him and I’ve got a lot of confidence in what he can accomplish for us.

 

John’s making a number of changes to the game, some of which may feel a little disruptive, but which we think will be great for the game. Importantly, many of these changes are to prepare the game for the introduction of PvP (more on that at the end of the letter). A number of them are going to be going in during the next patch (0.8.6 - which is not too far away), though a couple won’t go in until the patch (0.8.7) after that. I’m not going to go over everything being changed, but I’ll give you a couple of representative examples. As always, we’ll publish a list of patch notes along with the patch itself.

 

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  Items are going to be classified by quality/rarity, indicated by different colors, so that you can tell at a glance what items are worth paying attention to and which are not.
  
   
• 
  We’re doing a complete rebalance of items. The changes won’t generally be large, but there will be items here and there that get changed significantly.
  
   
• 
  We’re making every piece of armor wearable by every class. Don’t worry – we’re also changing how armor works so that some classes are more effective with it than others. We felt this makes sense from an aesthetic perspective too, since with the ability to make what you’re wearing look like any other piece of armor, anyone can already look like they are actually wearing any piece of armor.
• 
  We’ll be introducing rarer items at higher levels.
  
   
• 
  We’ve completely redone the newbie area (formerly Mushroom Isle) from the ground up. Even though most of you are well past it, you should check it out when it’s released in patch 0.8.6 anyway. It’s an indication of one way in which we’re looking to step up the quality of the overall experience.

 

Those are just some examples of what’s coming, but as you can see some of the changes involve a large swath of the game (such as the item rebalance and the armor change). Change can be scary, but think of it this way: Would you rather have us alter things for what we believe is the better, or would you rather open your front door to find a huge landshark there waiting to eat you?

 

I think it’s a pretty easy choice, so I say let’s move forward into a glorious landshark-free future where items are colored by rarity, crafting materials and dungeon tokens drop more often, and bacon fries itself.

 

I also promised, earlier in the letter, that I’d address PvP a bit more. A basic version of PvP will be out in patch 0.8.7! We’re pretty darn psyched about that. I’m actually hanging out in one of the two initial PvP Arenas now. It’s quite sweet, and I look forward to bringing the pain in it once it’s open to everyone.

 

Matt Mihaly

CEO, Sparkplay Media