All this time it has buggered me the idea behind the design desicions made by the current Devs. The last ones were Bane Shift, money-grabber Bane Shift who created an overpowered theme every week to keep people purchasing to stay on line. The first thing it surprised of the first days of DoG was that they indeed nerfed one strong theme (which was stronger than reasonable). Though, it was nerfed beyond recognition just because balancing stuff is an abstract term in matters of videogame desing. The next big step they made (which none of the other Dev teams ever figured out) was to put a nora price on everything so nora cost wasn't arbitrary, but something to take in account when creating a new champ. Or at least, that's what the previous Dev team made us believe to surprise us with random rune cost change. Now, the Devs seemd to be taking the part of "sharing bread" with the players. Which calls my attention because it kind of tell us that they do care about the game, but at the same time, it remind us who have the pants in here. My point is: Are the devs worried more about new release of content (themes, racials, effects/abbilities), which is something I don't really believe; or are they basically working around what they have available to make playable?
From what sok has said, he wants to get to the point where new content is the focus rather than rebalancing old stuff and making old themes runnable. I don't think we're quite there yet, though perhaps not too far off.
BUt wouldn't that be contradictory to some degree? As expansions go by, trying to boost one theme will fall into that endless abyss that is "which one?". Sure, now they are buffing Blood (Praise Sokolov for that!), goblins, and as well as other older themes left behind in the past in order to concentrate effort on the theme of the week. Based on what you are saying, then, they have a plan of keeping stuff always fresh. Meaning, that at some point expansion will be, indeed, expansions of previous and new stuff. Instead of the madness we had in the past of 3-4 expansions in a row entirely focusing on a bunch of new themes while leaving other, older and popular theme forgotten. I guess that would be nice, I mean, at least that should solve the chronic shoeboxing whe suffered during the Maljaran expansions.
I am confused. Are you saying that you feel the last few expansions have focused "entirely" on new themes?
English barrier. The idea is that there was a time in the past of this game, where for like 3-4-5-6 expansions, the Devs dedicated only to pull out new themes while completely forgetting about already existing themes.
My tought is the the Devs are launching new expansions with runes to make older themes playable (blood, goblins, salamandra, firk, sand, etc) and I think it should keep this way, at least until all old forgotten themes got buffed and playable at some closer level.
It would be good if they tried to do like with long-lived games like Magic: The Gathering. Basically, what they do is that they make a bunch of themes playable, and instead of turning the table with some flashy new theme, they create a short-lived theme, while keeping popular themes alive and with a chance to become meta just by adding new cards. For example, goblins in magic are all about cheap swarm, then they were expanded into different other themes like sacrifice benefit. Which is something I noticed they wanted to do with Vamps by creating DMZ vamps. Still, it all depend on how solid a theme becomes before the Devs decide to totally rework champions into something completely different. Which is something that can easily happen with games like this where champion's abbilities and stats can change at the turn of a hat.
I'll go ahead and ask the question I've asked previously: At what point do they say "Ok, we can't release any more runes, there are way too many already"? There ARE other ways to make money, DoG.
