Has anyone else noticed all of these promotions recently? The deluxe starter package.... The return of the rose regalia.... The year of the horse... And I'm pretty sure that we'll be seeing the forever love puppy mask in a few weeks.
Valentines made me think of this. Thoughts? Is SK trying to rake together some cash for something?
Just seemed a little odd to me, not spacing these promotions out with other kinds of updates, such as the gunner update. But I suppose they have their hands full with that.
Honestly I think they should focus more on new, more interesting content than cosmetics. Yes it's their revenue, but I don't want this to become Team Fortress 3. Hell, the costume armor could have been made into a 5* shadow plate armor for example.
I've said this in a different thread (not that I expect anyone to look it up or read it), but feature/system updates can happen pretty much separately from promos, since artists and programmers can work on different things at the same time; costumes and reskins take so much less time to make than designing/implementing whole features so they can finish those on the side in time for whatever promo they want.
Don't forget they're also working on the arcade redux and new T3 boss strata along with the gunner update. Those will take a lot more time (the arcade redux is like, changing the mechanics behind the original form of the game; the t3 boss strata will be 'content'; the gunner update will add more items and possibly change some existing guns' mechanics)... so they'll have to be released when they're at a finished or stable state.
Those take a lot more time and can possibly even affect each other - who knows if some of the new guns are intended as T3 boss token items? How does a T3 boss fit in the current rotating gates? Will they need to redo how the gates and stages work together, are they waiting for certain features for level design pieces for the T3 boss strata? They have a bunch of different things changing at once (..? or possibly prioritized a different way), so rushing any of those is no good.
A lot of the stuff in the promotions are easy to churn out. At least in comparison to updates.
You have costumes. Their purpose is a costume. Not much to work on their other than what it looks like. Or, if you already have a model for it (say the regalia) then all you have to do is add some color.
You have the Gunner Update. There's a lot to work on there. You have to come up with designs (for some of them) and you have to work on the mechanics of them. Things like how much damage they deal, what the charges are like, how much resist the armours give, the bonuses they have, plus a lot of the behind the scene things we don't even know about because we aren't developers.
Oh look. One requires much more effort than the other. You can't put some promotions on hold simply to space things out evenly. It's like pushing back Christmas because you haven't eaten all the leftovers from Thanksgiving yet. It's easier to come up with costumes before "deadlines" than it is something that deserves many hours of fine tuning.
"Oh look. One requires much more effort than the other. You can't put some promotions on hold simply to space things out evenly. It's like pushing back Christmas because you haven't eaten all the leftovers from Thanksgiving yet. It's easier to come up with costumes before "deadlines" than it is something that deserves many hours of fine tuning."
That flashed through my head for a moment. Makes sense.
Done work:
-Undress snarb
-Undress biscotti
-Undress trojan
-Undress desna
-Undress ....
To do list:
-Undress gremlin
-Undress lumber
-Undress zombie
-Stick double plume to butt
What I'm afraid is that SK will start to be more like TF2 - a lot of cosmetics, but with little to no content updates at all. Not to mention that cosmetics could potentially degrade and eventually ruin the aesthetics and artstyle of the game, which it has already happened on TF2.
I'm still waiting for the gun update, but I don't have much hope on it because reasons...
Thinking about it now. I have never actually minded all these promos. As a matter of fact the main reason I grind FSC so hard is to make enough cr/ce to spend on these promos. To be honest if promos didn't exist my existence in Spiral Knights would mean nothing.........
*clears throat*
Gunner update sounds amazing! Stop hating on it!
they actually did the same thing from missions to the announcement of battle sprites I believe. there's nothing to worry about, just a game changing update.
At least they care enough to give us this instead of just leaving us hanging waiting for the Gunner update...
That's more than I can say for some MMO's.
/clap Three-Rings
The way I look at it, they're using they teams that aren't working on the major content updates to spit out a few promos to keep the income coming in while they get to the meaty stuff. Like the people that design the armor art... and the one person who changes the color of textures.
I don't really have a problem with OOO trying to make money, it's how they like to go all out on a single, enormous update instead of spacing it out more with little updates.
Then there's other things...
I understand that creating all the new content for the Arcade Redux and the Gunner Update takes a lot more work than a lot of us can truly comprehend.
I also understand (thanks to Seiran) how the art team can create the models and recolors for promos independently of the programming and design team. This one especially since it seems to be their biggest source of income thanks to folks like Njthug.
But what I still can't understand is why some of these new promo armors, some with brand new unique models, can't be given stats and implemented as full armors of some sort.
Or why OOO doesn't adjust existing armor stats so there's some semblance of balance between them all.
Expanding the arsenal and implementing some of the promo armors as actual armors may be more complicated since there's creating crafting recipes, putting them into the crafting machines and vendors, and giving it proper stats.
But considering that they did it for the Apocrea weapons, which are far more complicated than armors since they have more in-depth mechanics and they also created new particles and visuals for them, why is it so impossible for them to just make some new armors?
Hell, they don't even need to be properly balanced, what with how they "balanced" the Chaos set. Just try new buffs/debuffs and damage resistances. See what players like and take their feedback from it.
Have a ton of variety out there not just in visuals, but in statistics as well.
Then there's just changing the existing armors so they're more balanced with one another.
It's seriously just changing a few variables on them, variables that should be nowhere near as complicated as creating new weapons or have adverse effects on other areas of gameplay. It's something that I've seen devs do over the course of a livestream.
Just why is it so difficult for them to adjust simple numbers? It really makes me think that they built a lot of the infrastructure of the game really sloppily, making it so that they can't change things easily without breaking other things.
Than again...
OOO may surprise me yet.
Maybe they're actually balancing all armor sets in some way while implementing the new Gunner Armor.
Maybe they're rewriting a lot of the game's code so these changes can be easily made in the future.
Maybe that's why it's taking them so long.
Still bugs me how they didn't get on that until almost three years after the game's release...
>You have the Gunner Update. There's a lot to work on there. You have to come up with designs (for some of them) and you have to work on the mechanics of them. Things like how much damage they deal, what the charges are like, how much resist the armours give, the bonuses they have, plus a lot of the behind the scene things we don't even know about because we aren't developers.
Models and icons for all of the guns there since November. I really doubt it's that hard to Ctrl+C Ctrl+V stats (really, you think they will be any different aside typing from existing gear?) unless they've done it in really bad way. Artists made since November enough for promo-stuff to make in-between promos missing gunner armors. Unless they decided to actually completely redo everything - your gunner update could been released forever ago.
...Now imagining the OP as the kind of person who'd suddenly be amazed around November/December at all the holiday events and sales.
Some things just have their time in the calendar, like Lunar New Year (Year of the Horse), Valentines day events, Halloween, Winter, SK anniversary... etc.
What's wrong with promotions? Energy prices have gone down from a little over 8k down to 6.5-7k because of people purchasing these optional things.
F2P MMO games always need to find a way to make their money (you know, to keep their developers hired, to keep the servers running), and promos are a great way to get money while offering optional, non-skill-tampering content to people who are into costumes or merchanting.
There's nothing wrong with it :|
I'd rather have more promos than a forced paywall. Looking at you, Radiants.