Producer Letter #3 - 2017/08/25

[KnD-announce]

Dear Knights,

It’s already time for a new Producer Letter! As of this writing, our first AMA (Ask Me Anything) session took place on the public KnD Subreddit, so we wanted to take this opportunity to give you a short recap while it’s still fresh in everyone’s minds and also inform those who could not take part.

First of all, a big thanks to everyone who joined! There were a lot of questions and they all felt relevant and interesting. We hope we were able to address your main concerns through our replies, which you can find written in bold under most of the questions. If you want to read everything, here is the link.

What struck us the most - in a positive way - is that the same questions / concerns came back in the majority of submissions. It is positive in the sense that it gives us a clear indicator that points us in the direction of what we need to focus on in priority. It was good to see that your feedback is in sync with a lot of our own analysis and impressions that we gathered during our gameplay sessions and we are of course very thankful for all the support that you guys showed.

Now for the more concrete stuff, here is a non-exhaustive list of what was asked the most (in no particular order) and a short comment from our team:

New campaign (new area + quests)
It is definitely something that we want to do. We are still discussing what we would like to do on there. When we look at the development roadmap, we feel that some more features that can ease and improve your gameplay would be faster to implement. That is why we put those features in priority but do not worry, we started working on new area.

Reduce armor crafting time
We are aware that the crafting time needs to be updated as we are releasing new armors. We are currently working on this and are still stuck on the testing phase, but we are confident that we will make it happen!

Optimization of Armorsmith UI (more filters etc.)
Yes, we have the optimization of Armorsmith UI on our radar. It won’t happen anytime soon but it is in our development roadmap.

Revamp Epic Boss & Arena rewards
Agreed that we need to bring more incentives in the Arena for players to compete. We already added some changes in the rewards and there is still some room for improvement. One of our main goals right now is actually to evaluate the Milestones and Rewards we are giving out in all the events, Epic Boss and Arena are high on that list.

Revamp of Spider, Enchanted & Boss chest
This is on our list to-do and we already started to work on this.

More ways to obtain Rings and Amulets
Agreed, we need to find a better way to release those jewelries to players who missed the event or who get the armor later on. We added this topic on our discussion list.

Bring back the Hunting Ground Event
When Gree handed the game over to us, the Hunting Ground event was not fully functional; which is why we have not been able to run it since then. We do feel like it is a good event though and so we are looking into being able to run it again.

Fix the bug with the Free Gems video offer
Unfortunately, we need more time to fix this issue. As a matter of fact, we are aware of this issue and we are working closely with the ads video provider to remedy the situation. Please bear with us!

Power creep in general is a problem
The power creep is a constant topic of discussion among our team. There is one part in me that says: “Well it is a core part of the game.”, while the other part is frantically trying to figure out a way to counter the effects that a strong power creep will inadvertently have. If players take a break from playing right now, it will be very hard for them to get back into the game and they will likely be stomped when they come back. We have recently taken some first steps to remedy this by giving out some better armor for simply logging in and I want us to continue our efforts in this direction.

Auto second ability for Pets
Auto secondary pet skill is on its way! The feature is currently being tested. It’s always tricky to give an expected date, but it will be part of an upcoming update if everything goes well with testing.

Once again, these are just the more recurrent questions / concerns. If you want more details, we encourage you to read the whole AMA which is linked above. One of the issues that caused some heated replies that we wanted to highlight separately was being stuck on a certain level far into the game. The reply we gave was misinterpreted so let us clarify here: we are aware of the issue and we have been investigating quite a bit. The current assumption is that it could be tied to the fact that the game is running a 32bit client - but note that we are not certain. Having been unable to provide a fix that works thus far does not mean we will just stop here. We will continue working on it and will update you as soon as we have concrete answers.

Before we wrap this up, three topics:

1. We need to address an issue that is currently happening on Heroic Mode. It has been reported that some players exploit a glitch to boost their Heroic Mode damage, hence earning better rank in the damage leaderboards. We are aware of this issue and will offer compensation to all players who took part in the event, as we understand how unfair it is for most of you. In the meantime we will investigate this issue and try to have it fixed as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding.

2.We wanted to update you on our recent proposal of changing event times to ensure better support in case of arising issues. We received a good deal of unhappy responses and based on this feedback, we have since decided to keep the event times as is for now. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

3. We are aware that the Guild chat is not displayed correctly on NA and that the Guild War points calculation is off on the event that started this Friday at 12 PM CEST on EU. We are working around the clock to get this fixed as quickly as possible.

That should be it. Thanks a lot for reading!

Until next time!

Your KnD Team



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