We have made many changes since launch. When we starting designing the underlying systems which power Glitch, one of the fundamental design goals was that changing anything, even while the game is running, should be as easy as possible. This was because we knew that no amount of Alpha or Beta or anything would get us to a version of the game that was "done".
Glitch 1.0, the launch day version, is like 1.0 of (hopefully!) any successful software product: the very first iteration that is "good enough" for public consumption. Everyone knows that the first "really good" good version is 3.0. By that scale, we are now 1.003 ;)
Some of the changes we make will be loved by more or less all players. Some will be met mostly with indifference by current players, but will make the experience better for new players. Others will be liked by some and not liked by others. But we will make changes that are loved by many and hated by few … or even loved by few and hated by many — just hopefully not many that are hated by everyone ;)
If you are reading this, it is likely that we will, from time to time, make changes that you hate. Maybe we did earlier today, or last week or at some other point in the past. We are sorry about this. We truly, earnestly, and with the best possible intentions want to bring joy and wonder and the pleasure of good company to people, not frustrate them, or make them feel punished or cheated or duped.
But, we need to make the best decisions for the game, for the majority of players … the things which make the most sense, the things that seem right. Sometimes we will be mistaken: sometimes we'll have bad data, other times we will just goof up.
When we are mistaken, we will always do our best to fix it. And when we truly believe a change is for the best, we will stick with it, even if it makes some people mad because we think, in the long run, more people will have more fun (including, often, the people who were mad about the change when it first happened).
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We have been been nerfing a lot of stuff. Mostly, it works like this: we find dynamics in the game which create massively outsized incentives for people do something SO repetitive and boring that we can't believe they won't end up hating Glitch if they keep doing it (but they will keep doing it if nothing changes, because it is insanely profitable in the game).
For example: a player who made over 500,000 currants in a day turning milk to very, very stinky cheese while on no-no powder. Or several players who got 100s of 1,000s of XP from singing to butterflies after having consumed gurly drinks.
If we don't change these dynamics, a very small set of "optimal" behaviors will end up dominating most players' time in the game, and hence their experience of the game. And since the rewards are so big, the result of their behavior will be felt by other players in terms of inflation and distortions in the economy.
(We want to move to floating prices and reduce the number of things vendors sell, to create a more interesting player-player economy, but if a handful of players can produce effectively infinite money, that won't always work.)
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In addition to the price of cheese or teleportation scripts, the number of offers given by The Rube, the number of times you can do X action in a game day, etc., there are more complicated issues, like mining, bonuses, and places like Ajaya Bliss. In the case of Ajaya, we need to avoid having one location in the game that is "overpowered" vs all other locations (we also don't want a homogenous world, but that's another issue).
A combination of factors lead to an overpowered "optimal set of actions" in Ajaya Bliss. As a by-product of that, a great community developed where people were working together and co-ordinating, planning, discussing, strategizing, etc. We needed to break the pattern a bit and as a by-product of that, we might have screwed up an interesting emergent bit of play and a cool community hub.
The latter was definitely not our intention or the purpose of the changes. But, the lesson we took away was: we need to REALLY get moving on dynamics which give larger, co-ordinated/co-operating groups of players a reward that has at least as much (or more) in-game incentive as comparable solo activities.
We are working hard on that: most of our biggest projects now involved groups/group activities. We believe we have very good things cooking in that regard and most of our recent design conversations are about that very topic.
We also have many other features and bits of content in various states of completion (including a few in final QA, so "soon, soon") and we are looking extremely hard at all the qualitative and quantitative data we can get our eyeballs on.
During the first month after beta (we're a week in now) we know we have to be 70% "on deck" for issues that arise as we grow, scaling, support for new players, improving abuse report processes, new bugs from the increased load, etc., etc. But in the 30% we have for moving older high-priority projects along or introducing new smaller features & content, we will really do our honest best to make something that you love.
Love,
— The Whole Team