#166 - Jan. 22, 2014, 1:36 p.m.
I’d like to shed some additional light here since I actually made the change to the summoning items.
First of all, I’m sorry that you guys are disappointed with the change. Unfortunately, we knew this was going to happen and we tried to come up with a solution to mitigate the disappointment as much as possible.
Here’s some facts about the circumstances you may find interesting:
- the change was made mostly to address the Fire Elemental Powder and the Ogre Pet Whistle since they cause the most problems. Other items were modified because they had the potential to become problems.
- these items are not the same as pets that the player professions can summon, for these reasons:
- the items had no cooldown, meaning that the summoned creatures are effectively invincible and can always be alive assuming the player has more items
- there’s no limit on how many different items you can use at the same time. Meaning you can have both the elemental and the ogre pet simultaneously
- unfortunately, the creatures were not specifically designed to the constraints we have on pets in general. They are way more costly than your average ranger pet. In fact, they are exactly the same as the versions you fight in the open world which is what makes them so powerful.
regardless of balance, the change was definitely made to address the various performance concerns that arise from allowing unlimited uses of the item by everyone in a map. Both the client and server are affected by having the extra creatures around.
the need for the change was identified months ago. Many members of the team were adamantly against making the change because they knew it would destroy a popular strategy.
Given all of that information, and the introduction of two brand-new world events, something had to be done. Ultimately we decided with the cooldown approach because:
- we did not want to debuff/rebalance the potency of the creature resulting from a single use
- we did not want to completely eliminate the use of the item in large events
- it was not possible to clearly and cleanly message why the item would not be usable in large events or when there are too many nearby
The end result was a hefty cooldown, which honestly could have ended up being a lot longer.
Although we do our best to anticipate issues with various rewards designs, occasionally something goes unnoticed until it becomes a large problem. As customers, you probably witness less than 1% of these rejected designs. Of that small percentage that slip by, an even smaller percentage end up needing to be changed. Nothing ever gets removed because it’s fun. It just happens that fun things can sometimes get in the way other people having fun—like an item that cripples an entire server and causes everyone to have skill activation lag.
Tons of ideas get filtered out by discussion, data validation, quality assurance, and performance reporting on development branches. Most of them are good, fun ideas that we just can’t reasonably support. We’ll have to share some stories in a happier thread someday. For now I’ll be happy to answer any additional questions you might have on this topic.
