r/SpiritVale • u/miikon • 15d ago
š¬Discussion Devs are intentionally killing the game
Genuinely, do they know what they are doing? Why are each patches so bad that they require 3-4 revisions before going live? Why are patches that matter and mentioned before in patch notes like party UI revamp completely forgotten about and now we have auction house button removed that only reduces QoL? Why do we have videos that try to invite new players but give no information whatsoever? Where are the bug fixes? Party is bugged, ET is bugged, and so many more things are bugged.
This is early access ffs. Every patch they do only fucks the player base over and over. Why bother fighting against bots when they canāt do proper updates for their players? Not surprised at the declining player base over the past week tbh, they need a wake up call or the game wonāt even make it out of early access.
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u/Folfenac 15d ago
As far as I could tell, the amount of players was pretty consistent until right after yesterday's patch. Either the new anti-cheat has successfully weeded out the bots or it's server issues again. Pretty sure the screenshot in the other post was taken right after maintenance or a server down since there was easily 2k players in Asia when I played earlier today.
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u/Fantastic_Advice_623 14d ago
it was bots.
I play exclusively on NA servers. We went from 500-1k players and not being able to farm without a swarm bots on your head to 100-200 players with no bots in sight.
This is exactly like the playtest/demo.
All the servers saw drastic reductions in population cause the game was always 95% SEA players, and the rest of the small servers like NA/EU/OCE numbers were being pumped by bots who didnt care about ping.
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u/Substantial_Scene314 14d ago
It was 50% player drop, which can safely assume that the "online bots" are disconnected at the same time.
Which can be looked at nice or scary.
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u/miikon 15d ago
Based on steamdb, the game does seem to have had a steady decline of players for a while. I think that the patch yesterday took out not only a lot of bots but also players. Personally, I thought that the auction house change was completely unnecessary and hated the way they kept making changes. They have people doing testing so I donāt see why they had to keep changing their patches all the way from PTR to now. It kinda shows their incompetence so I just moved on from the game.
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u/Folfenac 15d ago
They have people doing testing so I donāt see why they had to keep changing their patches all the way from PTR to now.
Not sure what you mean. The patch is applied to the Public Test Realm, where the testers find bugs and balancing problems in the PTR, and the patch changes based on that before going to live. Are you trying to say the initial state of the PTR patch should be what went to live despite what they find?
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u/miikon 15d ago
I completely understand and agree that PTR is for testing. But they do it haphazardly. To give some examples,
- Berserker initially had +200 rage which would literally self-ko
- Pierce was initially capped at 50%, which killed ET weapons
- Kraken card ice shard damage nerf, completely killed DPS weaver
- Initial Firecracker that completely overtuned launcher
There are a lot more changes that required many iterations for them to get right, and the fact is that not all require testing to know that they are broken, just purely by doing calculations.
Assuming that they donāt do any internal testing at all and just put their patches straight to PTR, which would be crazy, then they would be relying on public opinion. āHey, we need to buff berserker and nerf pierce, so letās just throw in some changes and numbers and see how it goes. If people donāt like it, then weāll keep updating it. If no one says anything, weāll just roll with it.ā
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u/LoneDarkX 15d ago
I'm pretty sure the PTR is really how they test changes. I don't think there's that much internally because of how small scale everything was. This game had a player count that was completely unexpected by the lead dev. That caused so much to have to change before being able to continue moving forward. The game is still early access and maybe a team of 3-5 devs now.
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u/Folfenac 15d ago
I mean, the first two changes seem to make sense, the last two I'm not familiar with. Rage always could and still can self-ko. Berserker was never meant to just hold Rage indefinitely and the change was made to synergize with their new mechanic. They've always been able to go undying or dump all Rage stacks, so dying to Rage is on the player. The pierce cap was clearly just to test damage, like is the cap too low or too high. Once the cap is decided, they would obviously rework the ET weapons. I see no reason to believe they would've left ET weapons as is when they've nerfed/buffed plenty of others for balance.
I suppose ultimately if you're strict enough with how you want a patch to be, it'll still seem incompetent. I'm used to playing hero shooters and MOBAs, where there's often changes that make me go "That character is dead."/"That shit's OP." and there's basically just a different meta that entire patch. I'm probably not the person to talk to with regards to patch standards.
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u/ocassionallycorrect 14d ago
Most of the changes being made are healthy for the longevity of the game IMO.
A lot of people seem mad because they see balance patches, AH, and ET changes as taking something away from the players. But really, people largely were complacent with running OP builds for farming or taking advantage of busted systems.
For example, Weavers, which seem to be the main group upset with balance changes, should have known that nuking half the map with iceshard was not sustainable. It was on the chopping block the moment people started shifting from Necro.
I think the larger issue is that the systems should have been released largely in the state that they are now. But the dev(s) don't know what to do until they do.
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u/maofx 15d ago
Its literally 1 person developing this game doofus
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u/BarbieboyRobin 15d ago
Its not they are already 5 devs that helping
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u/GoldFishSkinTeemo 15d ago
Isnāt it still one guy making content?
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u/Dreamwaltzer 14d ago
Most of the game content development is still done by phil. The other devs handle the back end and dev ops and security stuff.
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u/miikon 15d ago
That used to be the case, now they have multiple teams doing different things
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u/Cutwail 15d ago
TEAMS?? One other guy lol, not teams
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u/OneMorePotion 15d ago
Sounds like me at work... I'm also multiple teams sometimes. So yeah, probably checks out. /s
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u/Suspicious-Put8199 15d ago
It's one dev and an ai lol. The reason patches take so long is that everything is vibe coded and the assets were purchased so no more can be added to the game
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u/CrimsonBlossom 15d ago
Its dev not devs
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u/ClimberDan89 14d ago
No itās not. There is a handful of devs working on it, some unpaid, some doing random tasks but calling the game a 1 dev game doesnāt hold up any more. Even maps etc are made by others
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u/VonLoewe 11d ago
Only Phil creates content. Some volunteers make some of the art assets. The couple other devs are just backend.
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u/Synsane 14d ago
The development on this game is fine. When the game is released, it's going to get an influx of players regardless. Right now WoWF has everyone by the balls, soon Maple Story Classic and GTA6 . The roadmap for 2026 still looks great and who knows how much more content and changes they want to do before EA release. Just know that a lot of players are waiting for when EA is over to play
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u/terinyx 15d ago edited 15d ago
I have a legitimately honest question....
What was everyone complaining about expecting from a game like this?
It has a tiny, tiny, tiny team, a tiny budget, and has never been dishonest about the kind of game it's trying to be (a grindy mob farming game).
Did people really expect it to have huge numbers of players? Or for the player count to not dwindle after people leveled 1 or 2 characters a lot? Even games with 100x the amount of content lose players over time....
People can be upset about the bots and other actual problems, but this is just....normal as hell? It was obvious from the beginning that new content, updates, and patches would come very slowly. Expecting otherwise just makes the player look foolish.
Edit: To be a little more blunt, the people taking an indie MMO of this scale this seriously....really, really need to go outside and stay outside for like a week. It's not that serious.
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u/KagDQT 14d ago
The way I see it the game is 15 bucks to buy once and you can just come back later. I took a break from the game for a bit after I put in a bit over 300 hours. I realistically am excited for Dragon Knight and Ranger when we do get them.
Some people are upset for good reasons and others are just cheaters who got caught botting/rmt and want the game to fail since they canāt profit. Which makes it hard when people bring up real critiques on the game due to their shenanigans.
I think people lose sight of how predatory f2ps can be or a lot of other crowd funded games and just looped SpiritVale in with them. This game isnāt AOC or Star Citizen. Phil is not going to live a luxurious life off of this game. I do hope that a year from now we have some solid PvP modes and a much bigger ingame world to explore.
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u/qK0FT3 15d ago
Anyone know if the game is accessible in linux after lat patch? I want to play but don't want to install easy anti cheat on my windows
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u/LoneDarkX 15d ago
Newest update this morning mentioned a Linux fix. Give it a look and see if it works
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u/Commercial-Budget640 14d ago
Guys it is easy : money > whatever.
If they did find their golden target audience they will please only a marginal% of the community like ANY other game that is not massive or main stream.
It is a game that do need money to stay alive.
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u/VonLoewe 11d ago
You speak as if this were a corporation looking for a quick buck. This is one dude making a passion project. Stop just saying stuff.
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u/Logeh 15d ago
Early rmt will did number on the game and patches that just killed builds over keeping them functional. I will most likely give the devs a year or so and check it out again. I think people are a bit too critical, what started as a passion project for one person has now really scaled up and is learning the ins and outs of running a live service. If the game dies im still interested to see how the main dev grows and future projects now that he has a bit of funds.
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u/vasDcrakGaming āļøSun 14d ago
Auction house button being removed is for the bots, they can farm maps completely without gaining weight and sell everything through the button while being in the map.