What do the community actually want

[Lee Sy]

19 hours ago, Well-met said:

Every decision of klei indirectly affects all future updates. If you work on wendy for another half a year then it's another half a year of not having better biomes.

So do you think the delay was caused by Wendy or Wendy players? May I remind you of something about 2024 roadmap?

Even though they released this update to the official server before Christmas, they still failed to achieve the goals they set at the beginning of the year.

Only 3 skill trees for half year, it's also caused by community? Why do you guys tend to spoil Klei endlessly, they should make such a skill tree on 11.22 instead on 12.13.

What's the problem with Klei this year? Don't you feel the difference?

[thesooz9000]

15 minutes ago, Lee Sy said:

So do you think the delay was caused by Wendy or Wendy players? May I remind you of something about 2024 roadmap?

Even though they released this update to the official server before Christmas, they still failed to achieve the goals they set at the beginning of the year.

Only 3 skill trees for half year, it's also caused by community? Why do you guys tend to spoil Klei endlessly, they should make such a skill tree on 11.22 instead on 12.13.

What's the problem with Klei this year? Don't you feel the difference?

The problem is that this beta has been one of the most indecisive ones yet,  especially the wendy/walter skill trees, people have been asking for alot of changes, and you have 2 camps of players who want the skill tree for wendy to go in a certain way, and others who want it to go a certain way, and klei is trying to listen to feedback and suggestions.

[MisterBilly]

It's mostly ruckus that seems to be caused by veteran hyper-souls gamers who are so good at the game that any buffs trivialize it for them, versus hyper-casuals who would struggle even surviving as Wilson, accentuated by a popular character who is loved by casuals for being rather easy to play.

 

 

[Koomin]

8 minutes ago, MisterBilly said:

It's mostly ruckus that seems to be caused by veteran hyper-souls gamers who are so good at the game that any buffs trivialize it for them, versus hyper-casuals who would struggle even surviving as Wilson, accentuated by a popular character who is loved by casuals for being rather easy to play.

 

 

One of the main issues with Wendy is that she is often seen as a great beginner character for people learning the game, but is actually a horrible choice for it.  People hand their friends Wendy because you can survive as her very easily and they don't want them to die, or they try out characters alone and find that they survive much longer as Wendy.
She is for sure great for learning how to survive the non-combat parts of the game, but is terrible for learning combat.  This is a pretty big problem.  

What generally happens, and I have seen happen with a number of friends, is:
- Player starts playing as Wendy because of how much she trivializes basic survival.  Abigail takes care of basic combat and provides light, and also provides monster meat and healing.  A lot of people even stand around the sisturn for minutes straight so that they can avoid shadow creatures.  
- Player tries another character after a bit, but dies pretty fast in combat due to having never learned and now having to engage in it.  They don't enjoy the experience because the skill floor suddenly dropped so much and they don't feel as capable as when they played Wendy.  It feels bad to suddenly go from living years to dying to hound waves, and a lot of people also don't like appearing unskilled on servers with friends.  Player goes back to playing Wendy.
- Player never engages with or learns combat.  All of the mobs in the game that are meant to be introductions to kiting and combat mechanics just get removed by Abigail.  For instance, hound waves are supposed to help train people to learn kiting, but become irrelevant.  I recently joined a friend's server and found that it was the second autumn but none of them had ever crafted a weapon because they had two Wendys on the server.  When hounds attacked all 7 of them just ran to the Abigails.
- Without learning combat mechanics, the player can't defeat most bosses, and can't learn how to effectively manage Abigail to do so.  There is no way to learn this skill unless they take the plunge and try a different character before coming back to Wendy afterwards, or risk death without Abigail, but both experiences feel bad.  They feel like they should be able to defeat the bosses.  They have spent hundreds of hours playing the game after all.
- Player is upset that they see other characters defeating bosses while they can't, and decides that Wendy being weak is the problem, not realizing that the issue was that they just never learned combat mechanics because of everything Wendy provides.

The point of this is a few things:
1. Explaining odd views of balance on the forums: Often the point comes up that people shouldn't comment on balance unless they have tried the character.  I think a big issue with the current Wendy discussion is the opposite.  A lot of players have never really played a character that isn't Wendy.  This results in them not knowing what an appropriate balance level is because they have wildly inaccurate opinions of other characters' power levels, not having played them.
2. Explaining the polarizing viewpoints: There are very different opinions on Wendy because of the above issue.  Some people have never learned combat and just played Wendy, and think she is weak in combat since they never learned it. They really want her stronger.  Others have played with a bunch of characters, learned combat, and come back to Wendy to find her pretty strong.  They don't want their experience with her ruined by making her overpowered.
3. Request for new game options from Klei: Klei really needs to find a way to fix Wendy's issues with preventing people from learning the game.  Posts on the forum about never learning to kite after thousands of hours mirror my experience with friends that started as Wendy, and I can't really blame them.  It is really hard to swap to another character when you start with Wendy, and is a reason so many Wendys flood public servers.  Something like making a menu option to boot up a server with easy to parse ways to spawn in bosses like deerclops to learn and practice kiting (not the current way that doesn't work for consoles and requires obscure pc commands that most people don't know)
4. Skill tree critique: The current skill tree should have a focus on fixing this problem, not making it even worse.  There should be skills that encourage people to learn and engage with combat, rather than the current ones that encourage letting Abigail be an undying menace to the constant and dps queen without any fundamentals, ignoring this whole design issue.  This was a great opportunity to make a skill tree that slowly influenced the player to particular with and learn combat as they invested points, and change a character that creates problems for beginners into one that helps them learn the game.
5. Explaining people requesting that Wendy's downsides be removed: Downsides are fun for players that jump from character to character.  It is fun to play Wortox and have to rely more on souls for hunger and sanity, then swap to Wormwood and have to rely on alternative healing methods, then swap to Wurt and have to try out a new set of crockpot dishes.  It keeps the game interesting and provides new play experiences.  However, if you just play Wendy only, downsides feel bad.  You perpetually have something you are worse at that everyone else, and there are no new experiences.  Fixing the above issues would probably help fix this too.