'Mini' rant

[TeaCup]

Okay ill start with a few figgures…
Currently this game has ~1200 players per week, and its been fluctuating, meaning that those arnt regular players, that is people who have played, didnt like it and left. (Ps, just a few of the games i looked at that arnt even advertised averaged 30k plus)
During the months of regular updates, that number was ~7000 and was relativly consistent on increasing. Then DQ2 started.

My theory would be that people put up with that the game was hard, tough s**, but they wanted to know what new was going to come, what could they make that do.

Now ill ask you to try this: make a new account/ character, start from scratch, how long does it take you to progress far enough that you can make decent builds relatively quick, and how slowly does that progression go? Pretty tedious…

Okay problem addressed. How do we fix this and gain from this? Well we need something for those early players, maybe a longer tutorial, some instructions of sorts. Rewards for leveling up their character; crystals, mythstones. Play time milestones, maybe 10, 30, 60, 180, 300 minutes the player recieves one of every crystal/ mythstone so that progression is soo much faster initially.

Now just to stop us late game players abusing this you might need to re-work the exp system since i can get a character from 1 to 99 in one run…

Now for us late game players… i have 500 of every crystal all the way to citrine, but nothing from amber upwards. Just from game knowledge ive learnt, i can make a character design in 10-20 minutes, but then have to spend days collecting resources to actually build it.
I would suggest either buff crystalline dramatically or re-work the crystal system: instead of every 100 floors up to 500, certain crystals stop spawning, change it to every 200 and remove cap.

Dust: god damn this is hard to get hold of, im averaging 25-35 per floor and im looking at an unlock cost of 6000+, THEN ill need to buy it over and over again until i find an adequate piece of gear.
Thats 200 maps, each takes me ~3 minutes to clear so 10 HOURS of farming just to unlock the damn thing (eternal loop of epiphany, and yes ive tried unlocking it for a loooong time now)
Simple fix, sell it like gold, people dont like it, farm for it. £1 for 1000 dust? You have £30 from me instantly

Okay ill leave it there, i know your working hard at making dq2 and sorry to say but most of your hardcore fans have left this game and you know it, not to mention that the game is so difficult to get into initally that there arnt any new players coming a long. Im just proposing a solution that will bring back the popularity, and will give you devs some nice funds to go towards dq2, youll be able to hire more workers and get the game banged out much quicker. Please, save a dying game :’( i love it too much, and seeing people go around forums complaining that they dont know this/ that, its heart breaking to be honest

[tdaniel]

Thanks for the feedback as well as the thoughtful suggestions. We appreciate the fact that you just didn’t “swoop and poop”!

We have been very upfront with the fact that the technology that we used to make DQ has been deprecated and abandoned long ago (not a choice we made willingly). The few updates that come out now are to keep the game in line with google/apple/amazon requirements for support.

Each time we do an update we have to dust off old tech that was not engineered in a way to support the current versions of Android OS or apple iOS which causes so many problems that I end up breaking more functionality than fixing (see the current iphone update).

So…there is a quick explanation on why we shy away from updates for DQ1.

We have worked internally and talked about doing some quality of life updates for DQ1, but each time we do the amount of resources we need to pull off of DQ2. If we do an update for DQ1 it will be before we release DQ2 and it will focus on fixing as many things as we can in one go since it will take a significant push from us to get the updates completed.

I also think your numbers paint an unnecessarily “bleak” picture of the number of players we have each day (it does however support your point of making it easier for new players to get started). I don’t know if you are just using the YouTube search results or forum activity (most of our players do not speak English), but we had 1200 players logged in…over the past three hours…on our smallest platform.

Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts, we appreciate it!

[TeaCup]

Dont get me wrong this post wasnt to depreciate the game at all, its great! And after downloading and trying out some of the older patches, you developers have clearly put in the effort, because the game has changed A LOT. As for the numbers, thats just from game launcher… its probably rather inaccurate but yea, it was to support my point about the new players finding the game difficult.

[tdaniel]

no offense taken at all! I just wanted to pay you the same respect you paid us and give you a thought out response instead of a “high five” or “thanks!!”.

If there is one thing we learned from DQ1 more than anything else its to “plan for the future” when we are working on DQ2. We do not want to put our next game in the same position as DQ1 where we are dependent on another company to support some piece of tech so we can continue to update our game for our players!

Cheers!

[Golem]

I have to admit, even though a friend got me into DQ and gave me some pointers, I was still a little intimidated by the game when I first started. I think using Crystals was my biggest fear for some reason. I think new players who have never played games like DQ might have trouble with the idea that they have total control of how to Craft their Equipment. until players learn the basics of DQ, it can be kind of hard trying to figure out what to do early on. the only game I played that was even close to this one was Neverwinter Nights. so I ended up going back and forth between this game and another one for about a year. I didn’t do much except delete characters while trying to figure out if I wanted to play Wizard or Rogue. but I found the DQ Forum and got all fired up with Patch 3.0, spent some on DQ, and now I am having lots of fun. (between updates and then a cancelation of the other game, I started spending more time with DQ, which I was never really able to give up.)