I would like to let you know how you are frustrating a lot of your player base. With each expansion, the boss cheats get more insane. For the casual and younger players this makes completing the game much more difficult. You need to quit designing instances for wizards with the best gear. I understand that many wish for a challenge, but you need to realize that not every player gets the best gear and has mega pets with the best talents. How can players with menu chat even manage with the strategy and cooperation needed to complete one of these instances? I'm not against having a challenge, and I don't even mind getting defeated if I mess up, but these new instances you have dreamed up are crazy. There's a difference in being defeated because of our own fault or an untimely fizzle, and in being defeated before you even get to wave your magic wand. Sure, cheating bosses were fun and challenging at the beginning, when the cheats were simple and few in numbers. You had to do this to challenge players. Now, it seems you are using cheats as a crutch rather than out of necessity. At most, an instance should take a couple hours, but unless you have a good team that thoroughly knows all the cheats beforehand, these can take dramatically longer. If you want to maintain the challenges you have already, then you need to make the higher level gear more easily attainable or given as a quest reward. This latest test realm has only confirmed to me that the direction you are taking this game is only going to increase this frustration. If you really want an adult MMO, make one, but you shouldn't be doing it with Wizard101, a game you rated ages 10+ and consider kid-friendly.
Instead of following what you laid out with your initial game offering, you seem to be throwing stuff together with no regard to consequences. You introduced critical and critical block, but then you decided to make gear in hoard packs give critical to wizards less than grandmaster. This has led to having to increase the difficulty of entire pre-Celestia worlds to maintain the challenge. All of this is your own fault. It seems to me that you simultaneously want every wizard to succeed and fail at the same time. Find some way to analyze the impacts of new additions to existing content, get gear stats and their item cards to make some sort of logical sense, and come up with a much longer reaching vision of the future of this game than you've had the past few years.
I'm already getting a bad feeling about the future of this game from the recent update to include optional in-game ads. I doubt that I will continue membership on my two accounts after my current annual subscription expires. I will reserve judgment until after I see how this latest test realm translates to live. I've seen you do some great things, but the bad is starting to overwhelm the good. So, it's up to you, KI, where do you see this game going?
I so agree with you. I miss the game that I started playing all those years ago. I guess us family type players just aren't good enough anymore. KI felt it had to make Wizzy appeal to the hardcore to keep profits flowing. Maybe this is true. Idk, only KI knows. All I know is that I never would have signed up for this game if it was the kind of game it is now.
I have spent over 4K on all my various accounts, and yes, I am a crowns player that bought the whole game on several accounts. (I am able to post because I have bought crowns within the last 30 days) I was thinking to get a sub anyway for the added benefits, but after seeing the crazy dungeons that they are adding, I am not interested. I agree with you that future worlds are only going to be more of the same. The kind of gear that will be needed to handle future challenges is getting almost impossible to acquire. I am not in a position to run a brutal instance over and over again just for the CHANCE that I might get a piece of gear that will be very much needed in the future.
My wizards are now in retirement. I have bought up through KR. If the mood strikes me, I might take the rest of my characters through there. Most likely, I will just decorate houses until I get bored of that, then leave. I made this decision because I really don't see things turning around at this point.
Its really too bad that I got alienated in this way. By now, I probably would have spent another 4K on this game. I truly loved it. But these last few years, the game has changed from its original vision IMO. I have spent less and less on it the more disillusioned I got. I know I'm not the only one.
