Since the community was in uproar from the changes made to the mana in RoM, Runewaker decided to actually listen to it’s playerbase and they rolled back the changes they made. Here’s the news post from the RoM US website:
As most of you are already well aware, we released the 3.0.3 Patch a couple of days ago. With the patch came some serious changes to how mana functions in the game. These changes were implemented with the good intention of better balancing the game. However, after seeing the community’s reaction to these changes and seeing how the change affected the live game, we have decided to reconsider the thinking on the issue.
We have rolled back those changes with a hotfix patch and server maintenance late last night. Sorry we did not give any advance warning for this downtime. We wanted to fix this immediately, so our offices in Europe updated the US servers before we could post news about it due to the high priority of this fix.
To help you better understand the thinking and intentions behind these changes we have a statement from Runewaker’s Vice President of Business Development Tony Tang. You can read the statement and discuss your thoughts and ideas on the forum here.
Thank you very much for all your excellent feedback. We greatly appreciate how much you care about Runes of Magic and the outpouring of concern over the past few days shows us what a truly great community we have here. Please know we don’t take that for granted for a second. Please keep the great feedback coming. For now, we hope you all can go get back into the game and have some FUN! It is the weekend, afterall. Game on!
Cheers,
~ Lazlowe
And also, here’s the official statement from Runewaker:
Hello Runes of Magic Community.
In regard to our latest Patch 3.0.3 and the change of spell casting cost I want to give you an explanation about the reason behind all of this.
As many of you are aware, the spell cost has been changed with Patch 3.0.3 from a standard single value cost to a new formula. The new cost is a combination of a base cost plus a percentage of your total mana pool. The percentage can vary between 1% to 6% depending on the spell. This is not a class specific change as it does affect all spells (it does however affect magic users more).
Our reason behind this change was that as the game lost a lot of it’s previous challenge with a mana pool outgrowing eventually the cost of spells, therefore causing no small amount of our players having “infinite” mana pools. Once you no longer have to be afraid of running out of mana by not drinking a potion or waiting for the cooldown from drinking a potion, an important part of strategy in the game is being removed.
That would just result in spamming spells without the need to decide when to take that special potion and basic strategies of deciding which spells to use on which targets first would no longer matter. For example: some healers were able to spam group heal constantly without the need to watch their mana anymore at any level of difficulty.
The next problem caused by this old system is to decide how to design new content and still being able to offer you a worthy challenge. Do we design for the average players who will have to watch their mana or do we design for the super strong player base who does not need to worry?
After carefully evaluating all possible new methods our final solution was to introduce a percentage cost into the spells. This would ensure that players would have to watch their mana supplies and cast with some strategy in their mind. Players that have a larger mana pool can still cast more times than those who have less.
Thanks to the feedback of the Runes of Magic Community and Frogster we have been able to shape the game in the past and hope to continue this way for the future.
We are convinced about the logic and need behind the new way how to manage mana cost, but we have decided to take back the changes for further evaluation. So until we have finished improving the scaling system of how mana will be reduced we will restore it to the old ways.
Sincerely,
Tony Tang
Runewaker Entertainment
VP Business Developement
It’s nice to see that a company listens to it’s customers and actually react quite quickly. I think the idea was good, maybe it was implemented the wrong way, but the basic idea was really good if you ask me. High level mages and priest could just spam their attack or heals and never wonder about their mana. It adds a challenge. I hope they take the time to revisit the system and put it back in the game, it would be really fun, and I probably would start a mage or a priest, juste like the old times!
And to those who raged quit, see you ingame!
