Ahoy everyone,
We appreciate everyone's feedback here on the Copperhead nerf. Constructive feedback is extremely helpful in development and is always valued.
I would like to shed some more light on the team's internal thought process behind the balancing changes, and why the changes are paramount to the game's future.
Right now, we are in the middle of a pivotal moment in our project's history; almost all existing POTCO content has finally been re-implemented back into The Legend of Pirates Online. Over the past two years, we have been reviewing existing areas of the game and identifying what it is that we are going to implement next. One of the largest issues we have had, however, was that the core aspects of the game were incredibly unbalanced.
When we tried to sit down and think about a new feature we could implement, we ended up getting blocked because it would have created some crazy unbalanced mess. We were tunneled into what kind of new content we could implement, and this led us to ultimately decide to just fix the core problem outright and rebalance the game.
Previously, upgrades did not make any sense; many weapons were absurdly more powerful than others, with entire weapon types often being completely worthless because of overpowered alternatives; additionally, skills + damage calculation were in a poor state, with most of the information being told to the player on the skills page not even being accurate to what you were actually getting. By establishing balance in the game with ship upgrades, weapons, skills, etc, we have created a boilerplate to grow out into new expansions.
Additionally, it is worth noting that there were some bugs exclusive to our game that bugged Copperhead in particular. TLOPO's Copperhead prior to the nerf was not the way POTCO's Copperhead was. TLOPO's was OP from the start and was not representative to how POTCO had it. Our nerf returned Copperhead back to a similar state it was in POTCO.
We have put extremely careful consideration into the balancing changes we have made, and while we understand the frustration with an upgrade not being as powerful anymore, we need to think about the larger picture here and where the game is going next.
When we are working on a balancing change, we have discussion for them held in channels accessible to all TLOPO Staff. Ideas are discussed in detail and large quantities of feedback are provided to us. We have several extremely vocal staff members on both sides of the Copperhead argument - in favor and against. We include every voice on our team to contribute to these discussions so we ensure that we are balancing the game with a fair representation of the community, every player should and does have a voice representing them.
Remember, we are a fan-made remake; we are community members just like you. We play the game every day, we interact with the community as much as we can, and most of all: we stay grounded in our roots. We get impacted by the nerfs just as much as everyone else does, but we need to remember that it's building up for what's coming next.
To further put the balancing into context, we have several unannounced major expansions in the pipeline that build upon the game's original methods of upgradability. We have been striving to balance the game to ensure that every upgrade, weapon, and skill has a purpose; and doing this we are also implicitly making these items, upgrades, and skills more desirable and engaging. Our primary goal is to make the game more entertaining and engaging; and in game design, games that have overpowered weapons often become boring faster than those that don't.
Every change we make is influenced by where we're going next. At this time, we do not wish to comment about the upcoming content because it is not yet finalized and would be premature to discuss it, but hopefully this can help put the controversy with these balancing changes to rest.
Because of this, it is unlikely that further major modifications will be made to the Copperhead upgrade. We are happy where it is for a reason, and the above should help put it in better context.
"The future depends on what we do in the present." ― Gandhi