Gnoll Difficulty | Patreon Weekly #237 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons, the last week has been almost entirely spent getting the beta for v2.3.0 out and evaluating/addressing reports from that.

I’m planning to try and release a Shattered Secrets next week, but there unfortunately won’t be an Audio Q&A this month. With the holidays right around the corner I’m not going to have a good time to record one. I might try to do January’s Q&A a bit closer to the middle of the month to shorten the gap.

Gnoll Quest, Poll Results, and v2.3.0 Tweaks

Firstly, let’s go over the results for Patreon Poll #48:
Difficulty: 2/5 (a bit easier than crystal caves)
Fun Factor: 3.9/5 (a bit more fun than crystal caves)
These results are pretty much exactly in line with the general feedback I’ve been getting from other players via email as well.

I’m really happy to see folks enjoying the new quest, as the crystal caves was already extremely well received. As for why, I think it’s down to the general interaction of the gnoll quest involving more positional hazard attacks than the crystal one, but they’re also easier to avoid. Dodging stuff is fun, so players are enjoying the quest a bit more.

In terms of difficulty, I chalk this up to two things: experienced players are more likely to be able to dodge attacks, and therefore have an easier time, and also I probably just under tuned the quest a little. Damage and ability uptime were notably higher in development, and I scaled some of that back in testing, it seems I probably scaled it back a little too much.

One thing I’d also like to note is that this poll had much lower participation than usual, with only 10 patrons voting at all. I appreciate that I didn’t give you guys a lot of time to play the alpha/beta before voting here. I’ll try to be more careful about timing for these sorts of feedback polls in the future.

In other news, I’ve been making various tweaks and adjustments aside from just evaluating the quest. There have been a bunch of bugfixes, including fixing a couple nasty freezes and a serious problem with the wand of corruption, but things have otherwise been fairly stable. The majority of reports have been for minor things, such as inconsistencies in the new floating text icons.

I’m finishing most of that up now, and so while I’ll be busy with personal stuff over the holidays, I’ll hopefully have a little to report on the fungi quest variant next week or the week after.