Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-7401186-20160521093529/@comment-1853279-20160625005149

Okay, I guess I'll play.

1. The quest system, in general. Being able to sort by type was nice, but it was always strange to me that you had to have a quest selected to progress in it. Some of the weeklies are also borderline insane, unless you have a good amount of time to play. (Looking at you, 50 transports.)  There are also some questionable designs on these things, which force you to take the wrong composition into a map. B44, every '4 destroyers to 1-5' quest. These aren't challenging, because there is a limit to how far you can stretch your equipment and planning, and still complete the objective. It's all up to the dice.

2. Why have submarines at all, when they are obviously the poor cousins of the game. The only times they're allowed to shine are when the developers forgot to beef up their sure-kill DD/CL ASW node enough to prevent entry, that is, by accident, or to deflect hits meant for other kanmusu when grinding for experience. Even the one map that is apparently designed for them isn't made any easier by the fact, and the submarine-specific expeditions are only non-rewarding ones meant for one time quests.

3. Low information developers. Everything that's discovered has to be done so by the players via data harvesting and laborious trials. Even when things that are apparently wrong (20.3 cm No. 2, Iowa's fit 'bonus' setup which can't be 'right') are discovered, the same non-communicative developers seem to usually ignore it. They don't really explain new gimmicks, either: Go out and waste weeks' worth of resources to figure it out.

4. On that same token, the end of Flash is basically upon us, and there has been no communication or indication that they have a real plan for dealing with it. No, forcing players to allow an exception in their browser isn't a real solution, and there is no telling when even that will be going away. Whether it's porting the game to HTML5 (seems to be the most ideal, since the back end API can remain the same), Unity Player, or whatever, there needs to be some movement on this.

Unfortunately, the cynic in me sees KanColle Android as a move away from being a browser game. When pressed, I sense they will simply stick their fingers in their ears and discontinue the browser version entirely.

5. Boss stacking has reached its logical peak, now that we've finally had a node with all six slots filled with a Princess-class enemy. Can we please de-escalate this ridiculous power ramp?

6. Some kind of informational display on the sortie map screen, as to the current status of your kanmusu, would do well to reduce reliance on third party viewers. Yet, thanks to point 3, does not seem likely.

7. Every event implementation maintenance seems to run long. That's not a big deal, it's simply become part of the expectation. What does bother me is how the Spring event has driven home just how ill-prepared the developers seem to be when they attempt anything ambitious. It wasn't only the long maintenance, unprecedented even by KanColle's standards of devtime, but the players were left dealing with the aftermath of their decisions and apparent lack of testing for a couple of weeks after.

It is either believe they didn't test these in a live environment at all, or accept that they patched in things like the E-6 debuff as a concession that the map was poorly designed and statistically almost impossible to win. Neither scenario is a good look. You either have insufficient testing, or detached game designers with unrealistic expectations. Either could be resolved with more testing, which you would think is possible, with three months between releases.

8. These days, it feels like I'm playing to prepare for the next event, the very moment the previous one ends. I'm not certain there is a good solution to that, besides more fluid map design. It does create a somewhat tedious cycle, though. This admittedly could be a fault of my having completed all my major goals to date, leaving me with only the quest grind, extraoperations, working on what amounts to vanity projects, and sanding and polishing existing equipment in Akashi's improvement arsenal.

9. Event debut drops. I'd gladly deal with fewer new ships per event, if I didn't have to spend twice or three times the clear resources and time to look for them. It had been somewhat fair, as they would usually stick the drop somewhere in the following event or two, but some recent ships have also broken that.

10. Equipment that has become practically mandatory, like the Wurfgerat, should be craftable. It doesn't have to be straight from development, but there should be a path to obtain it that isn't from an event only boat.