Most MMO developers love to boast of their amazing feedback loop with their community. Most of the time this also comes across as little more than marketing fluff with little to no substantive evidence that any attention is being paid to players comments or concerns.

In a recent news post on the official Skyforge website, the developers decided to address the community’s feedback from the CBT’s openly which is something we don’t see nearly enough these days. Sure, the occasional newsletter, forum post, or Facebook update might touch on bits and pieces here and there, but it’s rare to see developers respond so directly or with as much depth.

We’ve put together a summary of the Skyforge developer responses below, but would also encourage you to check out the full post over on the official website.

Developer Responses

Standard Run Animations

Apparently some folks haven’t taken well to character run animations, though I personally feel that the ability to adjust this during character creation is a vast improvement over the typical stock animations we see in most MMOs. Still, the devs are taking this feedback to heart and will work on adding in updated animations later in the beta.

Client Optimization

As is common during beta testing, the developers have been working on improving both client stability and frame rates for a broader spectrum of systems.

Looting in Combat

File this one under nice to have, but nothing truly earthshattering. Some folks would like to be able to loot during combat, so the impatient among you should see this become an option in a future update.

Weekly Limits

This is really the biggest piece addressed in the official post. While I personally haven't found this to be an issue, there are loads of MMO gamers out there that spend insane amounts of time in a single game over the course of a single week. In our hands-on impressions from the first CBT, one of our readers even commented that this is the single reason why they’re not interested in playing Skyforge long term.

Meanwhile, without adding in artificial time sinks like most MMOs, developers do have to find ways of keeping power levelers engaged so that they don’t bitch and moan about not having enough endgame content available at launch. This is sadly all too common with the entitlement generation, though to be quite honest there are some gamers who you will simply never be able to create enough content for, even if you have 1000 devs assigned to the task.

Since the vocal minority has taken up arms to express its displeasure with weekly advancement caps, the Skyforge team has taken some time to really dig into the issue. There are some very well written bits in the full post, but some of the highlights include:

“All-round success in a game built around constant progression is impossible. The absence of progression limits do not imply total equality. It merely guarantees the total supremacy of a select few. It feels good to be one of them, we can't argue with that, but seeing them from below is much less fun, especially when it takes a considerable amount of time for most players to reach the same spot where the top percentile of players have already found success months prior.”

This continues with some excellent thoughts on the disparity of relative power based purely on time spent playing in most MMOs:

“We want to leave some room for competition among successful players and their Pantheons. But we’d prefer to shift the competition away from one that is disproportionately impacted by how much time you spend in-game and instead have it focus on your efforts at planning your progression route to ensure you are developing your character in a way that is most efficient and optimal for your playstyle. In the end, the top players will not necessarily be those with a lot of spare time on their hands, but those who allocated their progression resources most efficiently.”

Repetitive Content

Given that the CBTs have offered a vertical slice of what Skyforge has to offer, it remains to be seen just how much repetition of content will factor into the bigger picture at full release. Either way, we’ll be seeing some adjustments made in this area moving forward as the CBTs progress.

Classes

Good news for melee players, changes are being made to the damage mechanics to help improve melee viability. Based on my somewhat horrible experiences playing PvP during CBT1 as a berserker (not much fun being CC’d to death repeatedly by a map full of cryomancers) I’m excited to see how this plays out in future updates.

Even More

There is a ton of additional information to be found in the official news post, so be sure to check it out when you get a chance: Developer Responses to Skyforge CBT Feedback