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If you’ve been following 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blue Protocol closely, it’s likely you&ജrsquo;ve heard of the problems the game is facing in Japan. Following an “emergency livestream” hosted two weeks ago by Bandai Namco, over 50 percent of players claimed they were dissatisfied with the answers provided with regard to class balance, microtransactions, and the overall weak endgame grind. There are a number o✤f issues with the game, including the restrictions of Adventure Boards making grinding un-fun, confusing class decisions (are there tanks and healers, or not?), and issues with the viability of the different skills. That’s without even mentioning the gacha mechanics that act as the overall foundations.
We sat down with Franchise Lead Mike Zadorojny at Gamescom to gain some insight on what Amazon is doing to assi💫st Bandai Namco before its glo🎉bal release next year. “We’re working closely with the team at Bandai, using our data resources to provide lots of detailed player feedback,” he tells me. “We want what the players want. We want players to jump into the game at launch and want to play.”
Amazon plays an interesting role in publishing Eastern MMOs - we saw this with Lost Ark, scaling up the game to be playable across NA, EU, and South America. How much it can actually impact the development of a game is more difficult to gauge. “We want to keep th🧔e experience as authentic as possible,” Zadorojny says, “That means following the vision that the developers have for the game.” But when that vision isn’t viewed as especially great by existing players 🦩already is when problems start to appear.
One of the standout issues raised by Blue Protocol players in Japan is the excessive nerfs to powerful builds. Rather than strike a balance by buffing other classes, Bandai have𒈔 decided that certain builds are too overpꦅowered and slashed their viability significantly. These sorts of tweaks can leave players feeling disenchanted - if none of the builds feel fun to play, why play the game at all?
It’s an issue with developer vision in general - the idea that devs have an idea of how a game is meant to be played, but when you deliver that to the players, it should ultimately be down to how they react to the gameplay. Flexibility is key, otherwise it’s a bit like banging your head against a brick wall. How much i💙mpact Amazon can have on these decisions before the game goes live globally are yet to be seen. More players mean more feedback on a much larger🌞 scale.
It’s also interesting to watch from the outside at just how much of an impact Amazon publishing Eastern MMOs has had on the attitudes of players in said regions. To use Lost Ark as a case-study, we saw some Korean personalities and players start to push for better RNG rates for honing after mass complaints across the West. It’s a reckoning that is inevitable - MMOs in particular have always been designed in a certain way in places like Korea and Japan, with a sizable grind and gacha mechanics. Black Desert Online is another example. A fantastic game with some innovative mechanics, but marred in the west because of its multiple premium currencies and extensive grind. Amazon finds itself at the centre of this change - constantly trying to balance player expectations on ജboth sides of the world. It’s a heavy burden, but one that Amazon seems to be embracing.
Merv Lee Kwai, who represents Throne And Liberty, an MMO that Amazon is co-leading with NCSoft, told me that they’v💙e taken note of the feedback following the launches of New World and Lost Ark. “This is a game that we’ve been able to apply that learned feedback from players. We want𝓀 this to be fair, to have fewer microtransactions, and a grind that feels rewarding.”
M﷽erv told me that NCSoft, based in Korea and well-known for their MMOs laced with microtransactions, has been super “willing” and “understanding” of the changes that have been suggested by the team at Amazon. It has folks at AGS that specifically handle the💝 discussion around MTX and how attitudes have differed between Western players and Eastern players for many years. This is a sign that things might slowly be changing.
When it comes to Blue Protocol, I am slightly concerned that this is all happening a little too late. It’s already out in Japan, and receiving very mixed feedback from players. When the issue extends beyond RNG grind of crafting gear and premium currencies, and into things like actual gameplay issues, we’ll have to wait and see what sort of impact Amazon can have on the development of the game. Everything I played at Gamescom was great fun - a solo dungeon and world exploration - but I feel like I’ve had a very curated view of the game so far. I won’t really know or understand the issues that the game has 💛until I’ve got my hands on it proper.