(Almost) One year after Tencent

[Szczuku]

Hello, new thread. Don't worry mods, I'm not trying to stir up trouble or encourage hatred. This is just a thread for you to see community's opinion.

So, given that Klei will most likely be relaxing through January and the nearest new content will probably arrive in February, I think this is a decent moment to make this thread.

So dst has gone through 2021 without stuff people were most worried about in January- we didn't receive any new in-game currency like 'golden spools', no purchasable lootboxes with random rewards, no 'wait 4 days or pay to speed this up' garbage.

When it comes to gameplay I'd say that this was a pretty average year for dst, maybe even good, considering some of QoL changes we've received. When it comes to lore and story writing however, I am a little worried. RoT ended seemingly out of nowhere in the middle of its story and Klei has completely belittled Them.

In my opinion Eye of the Storm was the worst dst update of 2021. While celestial crown and Alter's reveal were nice, the story completely flopped and most of the concept art that didn't make it looked more interesting than what did make it.

But what do y'all think?

[Duck986]

I'm worrying about game's difficulty - it becomes easier and easier with every update, and it loses it's charm of "uncompromising survival game".

Looks like Klei are targeting younger and "more casual" audience so more people can play their game without quitting in a few hours.

[Ohan]

Definitely agree with you on eye of the storm... 

have they officially confirmed that EotS is the end of RoT? Would be a huge bummer i think if the lunar arc is really over least of all because of the lousy state of the moon storm and celestial tab and crab king. 

Other than that i think theyve done a really good job overall with the content. YotB was huge, waterlogged, march qol, midsummer, terrarria collab, wolf refresh were all great as well.

They couldve given Wes some more fun silly things imo considering the scrapped concept art.

Webber refresh was nice but i still really dislike the nurse spider model lol 

Wanda was a great addition too thematically speaking even though shes not my cup of tea, i think her weapon is still overtuned. 

But again i think theyve done great job overall. May DST continue to be successful enough to keep getting updates for many years to come 

Also i meant to vote for 4E not 4D. 

[l0rdgumby]

The thing is that none of what happened this year (direction wise) is arguably caused by Tencent's purchase. Whatever Klei is doing is based on how they want to run their own studio assuming that Jamie has kept his word. If this post was just about how Klei was doing this year that would be okay, but otherwise the title and one question put Tencent under this pressure as a scapegoat. If Klei is doing something that people don't like, it should be directed towards Klei.

From the OG forums post: 

Quote

What’s going to change? 
There are some boring accounting changes that we will need to adjust to. Other than that, I will continue running the studio as before, with no changes to staffing, projects or other operations.

 

[Cheggf]

Final answer doesn't seem very useful unless someone is manually looking at every single person and seeing which the previous votes were for. I think "If you voted positively..." and "If you voted negatively..." vote options would have been better.

[reallychina]

1 hour ago, Duck986 said:

I'm worrying about game's difficulty - it becomes easier and easier with every update, and it loses it's charm of "uncompromising survival game".

Looks like Klei are targeting younger and "more casual" audience so more people can play their game without quitting in a few hours.

This, difficulty is a joke now. Scale bosses already

[ArubaroBeefalo]

2 hours ago, Duck986 said:

I'm worrying about game's difficulty - it becomes easier and easier with every update, and it loses it's charm of "uncompromising survival game".

Looks like Klei are targeting younger and "more casual" audience so more people can play their game without quitting in a few hours.

i hope they rebalance the game by adding scaling difficulty.

is a bussiness and a game that is dropped by many so isnt a rare thing that klei adds appealing things for noobs. Just take a look of what mods are the most used, gamebreaking mods like extra slots, +99 stack, combine status, etc

"through the ages" when?

[miao miao]

My only worry with Tencent was the data collection and not wanting my information to be sent to them--as far as I know Klei's privacy policy hasn't changed since the purchase so I don't think that it's a problem.

I think the current direction of the game is expanding it to have more stuff to do, no matter how tedious that stuff is, but at least we are getting updates and character refreshes and slowly developing the lore. The updates over the past year were interesting and the crossover was really exciting, but like everyone else is saying, the game is getting too easy. Chaos, suffering, and pain are what make this game fun, that's why I like that you can spawn the Eye of Terror on random people in a server

I do wish that music played a bigger role in the game, though, because I feel like there isn't much variation in the music besides the occasional boss fight. I loved the music in DS Hamlet and it was really cool to have the change of music when entering the jungle biome--I wish there was something like this in DST. Don't get me wrong--the current music in DST is awesome, I just wish there was more of it.

[BezKa]

So far Tencent has kept their hands off Klei it seems. As long as they don't change that and stay away from any artistic and game direction decisions we can probably deal with it a bit longer. 

I still hope Klei somehow cuts the ties at some point, but they got to eat too so it's not for me to say. 

[Picklesaurus]

I just woke up and my mind read the 4th question wrong, It excluded the word tecent and I thought it was only asking about my opinion on klei, which is the same it has been for a long time: I like them. About tecent's deal with klei... I don't mind, Klei seems to have remained the same.

[Maxposting]

Same, I kinda still don't like it and I didn't like it before.

 

We could also have a poll about n e w h o m e.

[BezKa]

10 minutes ago, __IvoCZE__ said:

Same, I kinda still don't like it and I didn't like it before.

 

We could also have a poll about n e w h o m e.

Make one, you can save yourself some time by not adding any positive options

[dish-order man]

I like this kind of research thread very much. It's good to see the general attitude of players in the forum towards these issues to make sure i'm not a lonely island in the game.

I just joined the forum this year and have been playing in other communities before. Such close contact with the game developers is a very novel experience for me, especially seeing that many opinions of players are adopted (or rejected).

 

 

IMO, I am very satisfied with the content and frequency of this year's DST update in the in-gameplay aspects. The most satisfied one is the texture's HD reset(through two individual updates) and Weber's refresh, and the least satisfied one is the eye of storm. I think the eye of the storm has no sign of ending ROT at all. As the same gatekeeper(or something like that) like AF, Ag cannot be compared with it in terms of sense of oppression and epic. I always think ROT should not end at that time.

 

 

In non-gameplay aspects, there are some issues I am worried about. It is mainly divided into three parts. The first one is the server problem. It is difficult for players with no experience in server building to build a server whose Ping is very low. I have seen many players give up this game because they can't play smoothly with their friends on one server.

The second one is about lore. DS is an IP for nearly 10 years, but the exploration of lore is still focusing on quoting characters' check words. Klei should release some new puzzles, especially at the end of ROT. I think Klei may fall into a strange stage of unwilling to provide clues in promoting the development of the plot.

The third one is about monetization. Earlier this year, the non-standard(i mean illegal) profit earning method that the Myth Words had taken place in selling characters' skin were put into the forum for discussion. When everyone agreed that it was "illegal", Joe didn't do more to handle this. I think this connivance is a kind of damage to the community environment, which will form a very terrible consensus on the community that Klei can't manage: "the built-in charging QR code in a mod is a reasonable behavior". What's more, some people will try to verbally attack those who are unwilling to pay for it, calling them "whoring for free".

 

 

Then i will talk about the attitude towards Tencent. As a Chinese, I clearly tell you that Tencent is an investment company generally disliked by everyone(not only game players) in China. I don't think it deserves to be called "game developer", because most of its game works are obtained by endorsement and investment, but when it comes to investing in other companies, Tencent is a very excellent investor. As far as I know, Tencent rarely participates in the internal decision-making of game designers. What Tencent likes to do is buy those talented game developers and let them make money for him. The well-known company ROIT has been fully acquired by Tencent, and the route has not changed greatly. Generally speaking, I think this is not a bad thing for game companies and players. Tencent generally does not modify the route of games that have been running for many years.

In CN communities, the complaints about Tencent mainly focus on the monopoly and the arrogant service attitude, the less service content provided and the higher price caused by monopoly. I saw someone mention data collection just now, but  I don't think this is a problem to worry about. Since Tencent's data collection is mainly reflected in the real-named mobile phone number and IP address. According to the principle of machine learning, it generally collects data about your game and shopping preferences, and pushes you the most appropriate advertisements through long-term observation. Since players here generally don't use other products of Tencent series, I don't think this is a problem players in this forum need to worry about.

 

 

Finally, let's talk about my expectations for DST next year. I hope Klei can add more "ground-sea" small ecosystems which is similar to mangroves to the ocean, so as to fill this empty ocean as soon as possible. I think the content of ocean is too little compared to its huge volume.

[Hornete]

Whenever I think about this year I find it kind of unbelievable that we got Wanda, who is to me the most well designed character Klei has ever created, in gameplay, in visual design, and all the other aspects(lore, writing). And we also got what is to me the worst update in the entirety of RoT, that being Eye Of The Storm.

Oooh... boy... Eye of the Storm. Every update in RoT I generally liked. Yeah i've got gripes with lots of pieces content throughout RoT. Crab King, Gnarwails, The Strident Trident, Fish Food, Salt harvesting, the shadow war, dust moths. But I still generally liked the majority of the content in these updates, The remarkably expansive ocean fishing mechanics, the one of a kind NPC with Pearl shedding a little bit of "humanity"(She's not human, but ya'know what I mean :P) as the events of RoT transpire and how these events actually affect the creatures and people of the Constant, Malbatross the first RoG-like boss in a LONG time, The Archives and Grotto are SO cool thematically and I can't get enough of them. Again, I still liked the majority of these updates.

Eye of the storms? I don't enjoy the majority of the content in Eye of the Storms. I'm only really a fan off the Celestial Champion, and maybe you could argue that's a large piece of content, though for me I don't like to value raid bosses and "epic" fighting as many others in the community might. I find the moon storms, the piece of content that you'll be interacting with most of the time to be the majority piece.

So, there's a lot I don't like about Eye of the storm, but what's the thing I most dislike? Well, the moon storms are all just a set up for the Celestial Champion. There isn't really anything you get out of the storms themselves, and that really saddens me. This entire new weather event caused by the giant living moon, but we don't get unique items and crafts out of it. We just get a summon for the boss. Nothing else you can do with the Charged Moon shard, the moon gleams, the statics. We get a bunch of new unique fantastical items, what the heck is infused shards? What are they infused with? What makes them different from regular shards? But they aren't explored and we don't get any unique crafts or other uses from these. Quite literally the only use I see out of the moon storms besides summoning the Celestial Champion is grabbing yourself a mutant bird to get rot and rotten eggs out of. Did I miss something? Surely there has to be something I missed, but I really can't name anything else besides the CC fight and the uses of the mutant birds.

The arc ended and we still only have three crafts with shards, all of which were added in the literal first update of the arc which was over a year ago. Only two of those crafts have real functional use(Sorry Moon cratered turf, you're cool but you don't have any actual functional use ) This entire arc focused on the moon and yet it feels like A New Reign gave us more moon related crafts and uses.

Let's also not forget about poor Willow and Woodie. These characters were just left in the dust during the update and nothing was done to help them out. You wanna use one of Willows major perks in the moon storm? Sorry, can't have that. But Wendy gets to keep Abigail. I can not imagine playing a character who straight up loses one of their perks in certain parts of the game. Woodie has to either do the trick with bush hats/slurtle armor or constantly go into cave entrances if he doesn't want to be screwed over by the storms.

I could probably go on and on but I wanna stop here. I hope the moon storms can be improved upon some day and I await the next arc. I was really really happy to see the spoilage changes to Charged Moon shards. I would have heart attacks because I'd be forced to have moon shards with like 10 seconds of spoilage left and I better hope I wouldn't fumble when getting them into the siphonator or heaven forbid you have to go to the storms again, so I really appreciate the change of the spoilage from 90 seconds to 1.5 days.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

29 minutes ago, Hornete said:

Let's also not forget about poor Willow and Woodie.

and how bad is the crown with maxwell when summons minions and weeber due low sanity...

im with you that was so disappointed to dont get anything new from the storm, vert dissatisfied.

atleast im glad they changed the spoiling time from thee materials, that makes the storm farming actually very fun for me and i would love to have more excuses to farm that materials because i really like to have a new late game weather. I hope they added more mutants like mutant frog rains or the unused gestals to make it more interesting

[Duck986]

7 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

I hope they added more mutants like mutant frog rains or the unused gestals to make it more interesting

I'm still waiting for that Sealed Portal in Ancient Archives to become working and useful

[Hornete]

14 minutes ago, ArubaroBeefalo said:

and how bad is the crown with maxwell when summons minions and weeber due low sanity...

Oh man I forgot to talk about that. The power gap between some characters using the crown is really wide. It's okay for some characters to use some items better than others, but for some characters it's so easy to keep sanity, and for others it's barely usable....

[QuartzBeam]

Uh, I don't even like Klei. I'm here for Tencent.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

4 minutes ago, Hornete said:

Oh man I forgot to talk about that. The power gap between some characters using the crown is really wide. It's okay for some characters to use some items better than others, but for some characters it's so easy to keep sanity, and for others it's barely usable....

yeah, wigfrid still the queen meanwhile "mediocre" characters doesnt benefits from wearing it if they dont spam sanity food which is kinda grindy in the long run

kinda funny how people ignored the late game nerf to wolfgang with his sanity nerf. And no, i wont adopt a critter any time soon, i prefer to keep my sanity rather than wolfgang's xD

 

1 minute ago, QuartzBeam said:

Uh, I don't even like Klei. I'm here for Tencent.

are you farming social credits? x)

[HowlVoid]

I didn't see people make a lot of noisy for change when eye of the storm dropped. I did see people say that it was a great update and they liked it though.

This why you need to say something when the chance arises not after the fact. There were a very small amount of posts asking for some changes to the crown, but that was it. I was actually under the perception that most people liked eye of the storm, probably goes for Klei too 

[Hornete]

Just now, ArubaroBeefalo said:

they dont spam sanity food which is kinda grindy in the long run

While it wouldn't solve the problem. I've always wanted an alternative recipe for royal jelly that's essentially a sanity version of jellybeans. I'm playing Wanda a lot and i've no idea what to do with the royal jellies since jellybeans are useless for me lol.

I know there's forget-me-lots, but idk soothing tea I haven't really found that great personally

[ArubaroBeefalo]

1 minute ago, HowlVoid said:

I didn't see people make a lot of noisy for change when eye of the storm dropped. I did see people say that it was a great update and they liked it though.

This why you need to say something when the chance arises not after the fact. There were a very small amount of posts asking for some changes to the crown, but that was it. I was actually under the perception that most people liked eye of the storm, probably goes for Klei too 

there were many topics talking about the lack of recipes with the new items and how bad was the crown with some characters

never is too late, just see how they changed the spoiling time after many months

1 minute ago, Hornete said:

While it wouldn't solve the problem. I've always wanted an alternative recipe for royal jelly that's essentially a sanity version of jellybeans. I'm playing Wanda a lot and i've no idea what to do with the royal jellies since jellybeans are useless for me lol.

I know there's forget-me-lots, but idk soothing tea I haven't really found that great personally

i eat them raw for sanity x)

[HowlVoid]

I also want to say that when people are discontent with an update they are often told to shut up. Opinions that challenge Klei's design choices like boats, refreshes, and updates in general are viewed negatively even if people come up with valid points. 

I hope people can be a little more open with different opinions that challenge their own and not just what is the most popular opinion at the time. 

Just now, ArubaroBeefalo said:

there were many topics talking about the lack of recipes with the new items and how bad was the crown with some characters

never is too late, just see how they changed the spoiling time after many months

Yes, but I still mostly saw people being happy with the update. Maybe it was because a lot of people didn't think it would end so abruptly.

I also though we would get another update concerning more lunar stuff but we didn't. It was a very abrupt change in direction. 

[Szczuku]

54 minutes ago, Hornete said:

were added in the literal first update of the arc which was over a year ago

Wanna feel old? Turn of Tides was 2 years ago. RoT took 2 years to 'complete' due to character reworks/releases, qol and miscellaneous updates.

The update chain itself consists of 7-8 updates. Take that into consideration. The entire RoT arc would only last 7-8 months if Klei decided to focus purely on it.

Klei has introduced so many cool concepts- living moon, mutated animals, animated plants, moonstorm, Ancients worshiping 'the moon', moon crafts... and yet they haven't done anything with them. They all only lead to CC fight, nothing more... well there are some random uses like turf crafting, slow thulecite regeneration and useless bath bombs

[Erineyes7]

Midsummer Cawnival and YOTB really just don't vibe with me regarding the artstyle, It just doesn't work...

I wasn't a fan of the Wes rework, his stats being the lowest isn't a fun challenge to me, seriously I feel bad for Wes mains and their 75 hunger.

A certain rework that I won't mention for hope of not derailing the thread was not good.

Eye of the storm had almost no new content despite it being a season finale...

It feels like every other update is something I've got problems with...

5 hours ago, Duck986 said:

I'm worrying about game's difficulty - it becomes easier and easier with every update, and it loses it's charm of "uncompromising survival game".

Looks like Klei are targeting younger and "more casual" audience so more people can play their game without quitting in a few hours.

The problem is that even then, the base game is so difficult for most players so adding "easy" content won't even reach the players that need it.