What happened to this game?

You might be interested in checking out the changelogs over the course of time to may be get an idea about the changes to the game.

https://www.wakfu.com/en/forum/8-general-discussions/237246-patch-history-since-2012

Welcome to Wakfu 2021.

Hi!
I am also an old-timer. And I remember how Eniripsa could make a Zombie Mark, with the help of which it was possible to play for a hostile mob for one turn. I remember Xelor calling their copies on the cells of the dial. I remember mobile arenas. The only thing I'm disappointed with is that the current developers still haven't fix bug in Trool fair and political system. But in all other respects, the game is better.
1) Some locations have new visual effects. Improved the bag last year. All redesigns are very beautiful. National islands redesigns also.
2)The game has the ability to swim!
You are too nostalgic for the past and do not see all that the dev guys have done. Siu is a great gamedesigner. I saw this after the new enchantment system and Feca revamp. Very high quality revamp in terms of balance and core of the class. Feca can be played in three different styles, each with its own unique settings in passive spells.
3) Siu also invented stele in location (thirster/shudoku) and reworked professions, making them more in demand. Resource gatherers are also important as their work is important for activating steles, which bring good income. 

Azurayin

What's with the Kamas influx? Where did the "every kama" counts feeling go? Mining? All gone?

Is it good that players should feel like beggars and not have a way to make money? I think no.
4) The developers returned the demand for low-level dungeons through the ALS system. (adapted level and associated awards).
5) The developers have combined the servers and made two global chats.
You definitely do not notice all the good that they have done. But this does not mean that the game now has no black spots.
The game definitely needs to update some systems (politics, ecology) now. The battlefield system also needs some work. I don't know if it's true or not, but some ppl say that it was made for the wakfu by someone from the development of dofus. I like in this system that now it is important for each nation to participate in this so that the nation has a territory and a bonus for all residents of the nation. It looked logical and role-playing. However, there are people who do not want to see logic in this and want pvp without everything else. The game has temples of the gods that look unfinished.
Perhaps in the future there will be new content related to the temple of the class. And we were told about a new passive system.
6) In 2020, it was important for development to make the game more accessible. Now there is only one booster and it will include heroes.
Can't you see the game has gotten better?

I was also a beta player on an older account, but my only nostalgia with the game was having to go through 3 different iterations of Zinit lmao. 

I am also nostalgic about several other features but I wholeheartedly support the Spelldeck and Levelled spell system.

I absolutely abhored Spell XP and Spell levelling.
It was straight up artificial difficulty intended to add yet another layer of grind to the game.
Back then, it was fine, because the game was actually rewarding proper skill combo allocation but that has since changed.

The days leading up to the Spell Deck update was hell for Spell levelling, especially for a non booster player.
XP grind was extremely nuts, especially during the Lv 125 - 140 range.
I have no wish to go back or remember back to that time where people have to grind Hardcore Castuc repeatedly for XP and Spell XP. 
It's just pure unfun. 

For animations : they had to dumb it down or speed it up I presume.
Wakfu fights were, on average, taking essentially 0.75 times longer than Dofus fights, and not because of difficulty btw, it's because spell animations took so long to complete  

Also there was input lag before each spell finished casting. 

Hey there!

Thought I'd chime in as I have also been a long time player since 2013! I originally joined this game with some friends on one of my childhood friends birthdays. I remember the 'end game' being Frigost and we used to struggle and grind away on those crazy mobs and pray that we would get rich from the yetch'ti'wawa pet and solomonk fragments. Fun times!

Throughout the years the game has become more refined and accessible for all. I prefer the spell system as you aren't penalised if you change your mind and you can, in theory, create endless decks and become truly unique.

I've played on and off over the years, I played throughout college and then took about 4/5 years off and have recently come back to Wakfu with a friend. We were reminiscing about the old days and what has changed but overall we love the new direction and ease and the sociability of Wakfu now. The only thing we'd want now is the same friends that we joined with to play again, but that's most likely a pipe dream. 

Wakfu was rife with 6-boxers before and now everyone seems happy to solo-box (though heroes are a thing). And the same people, and the guild I was in years ago, I am still in today and the majority of those people still play.

I understand your concern regarding the changes ruining your memories but it has been 6 years and change always happens. All these new systems like runes and heroes, upgrading items, easier crafting and such make the game more enjoyable. There's still great difficulty with dungeons and steles etc. so the grind is definitely there.

Don't get me wrong there are some things which I'm not a fan of now such as my class not seeming appropriately reworked. But in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor.

I look forward to what Ankama has for Wakfus future direction. You should definitely give it a shot, you never know, it might surprise you.  And you might like it.
 

And not a single one of you mentioned how pvp has changed for the worst smh

Being an "old timer since beta" means nothing if you're still in the early stage of the game, barely mid game.

As the game gets more complex at the later stage, you'll start to understand why animations are cut short. It's a necessary evil to allow players to perform within the 30 second per turn time limit, without actually increasing the limit (otherwise the entire match will feel dramatically longer if everyone takes 1 minute for their turn)

I took many years off before returning to the game too.

Just treat it like learning & playing a new game.
If you love turn-based strategic game, surely you wouldn't mind/complain.

" Where did the skill leveling system go " to hell, where it belongs and shall never reach the surface again.

Played since beta and all I can say is the game has gone down hill. It's still a good enough experience. Feels like alot of stuff has been cut out of it though.

A yes the "good old days" when dodge had a chance to wipe all your AP and MP and ecflip started the game with 5 random earth spells.

I have been playing since the day open beta started and the game is way more balanced and polished. Sure some things were more fancy and flavourful, but also random, unbalanced, glitchy and barebones. I like the nostalgia just as muc as the next person, but the game is definitely not worse off.

The only thing i will personally miss from the early days is gettin punched in the face by ogrest at lvl 10

 

Granthese|2021-01-20 07:26:40

And when dungeons only had "normal" and "hardcore" and you had to MAKE KEYS to get inside! Ah yes, those were the days.....

in fairness, the keys made leveling handyman a breeze. 

One point people don't seem to get is it's RESTRICTIONS (rules) that makes a game , not FREEDOM. If you can use all spells on the hotkey bar, you vastly lower the creative strategies that people think up of because you can basically do anything required of the situation. It's when you're prevented from being able to do everything that you have to coordinate with other players or specialise in a function (DD, positioning, support, healing) to overcome an obstacle.

Otherwise, let's face it, the development team has to think of SUPER creative puzzle bosses that can still pose a threat to players, and they are only human and there are only so many gimmicks you can use to confer invincibility to a mob, while not trying discourage playstyles (melee, AoE, need for positioning or healers, etc, certain classes's spells, etc)  

That's why the spell deck system is a GOOD move for a TACTICAL game. If you have infinite MP, whats the point of linear spells? If you have infinite range, what's the point of positioning? It's restrictions that makes a game rewarding, because it's fun to come up with strategies that either lets you overcome the obstacle, or develop builds/sets that let you bypass the obstacle. Besides, who likes the idea of messing up their character just because as a newbie, they were not informed enough to make a judgement of what spell is good for what situation? Grinding spell level is just a skinner box tactic that frankly, the professions system is already heavy enough in.

And MANY things are changed in the favour of a less toxic environment. Freedom for planting of trees used to be a thing but was removed because of the griefing that resulted from high level players planting trees to block newbies who don't have the level to cut down the trees and were gated out of an area, or worse, locked in. And when Kwismas trees came back and allowed this, what do people do immediately? Grief by planting trees around the Treechnell dungeon to block newbies from accessing the dungeon (note that this is just a recent thing in 2020), because there's a cooldown before people other than the original planter can cut trees and it's faster for griefers to plant new ones than for others to cut them.

Do you think a micro-cosm where people band together to defend newbies would really form to counter the toxic playerkillers that bully them in a world of open pvp? A guard system was originally made to incentivize this, but it still failed in the long run. What kind of developer would let this kind of toxicity fester and discourage new players from joining a game? How would it be able to sustain itself without new blood? How do you balance between casual players and hardcore players? Are casual players not worth catering to just because they dont' have, or are unable to put in more game time?

The development team makes decisions with a reason. There are balancing, fairness, financial, gameplay and future-proofing rationale behind every change they make. There are very little times when players have a better vision than what the developers have in mind. Development teams change members as well, which may result in the different vision, causing certain changes to be reverted or made.

As a player, learn to observe and appreciate what is good, and give fair criticism to what isn't, but don't think the developers will necessarily listen to you, because they have a whole community of players with different needs and wants, most of which are conflicting, and a game to run.
 

 

Azurayin

But, what happened to this game?

It got better

Moved from a sandbox to more of a themepark, new game designers produce less elegant class mechanics.

While a lot of major things got gutted from Wakfu that feel disappointing a lot of good was also added in it's place.

It's just that it took multiple developers and several years to get us to this point which is extremely unfortunate. When Wakfu was first being advertised it was advertised as an MMO with roleplay in mind. A vast open sandbox where the community drives the game forward, players minted their own kama to fuel the economy, you could control the ecosystem and make monsters go extinct etc

While all of that was great and sounds amazing on paper it was honestly probably a bit too ambitious for Ankama to pull off. The constant change in developers/the ideas that those developers brought to the table did not help matters much either. As much as people want to complain and whine about the things that Siu has done to the game (myself included) it can't really be argued that he hasn't done A LOT more good than bad. 

To avoid trash talking the dev team too hard and getting on flatops naughty list again i'll be vague in saying that some of the early developers that Wakfu had we're not exactly community driven when it came to decisions with game design. It became less about providing the playerbase with an experience that was enjoyable and very clearly was about defeating the playerbase. Constant punishments for creativity when it came to ultimate bosses or world bosses before that - massive reactionary nerfs to classes leaving them unusable for years until the next dev dusted them off. 

You can't just look at the very few intriguing or positive things that launch Wakfu had without also acknowledging the laundry list of horrible things that came with them. Keys, mines getting reset every maintenance, players cutting off areas of content by griefing via the old pvp system, the complete lack of gear for most build options because of elements being predetermined on new sets. 

There was an entire period of time during wabbit islands release where everyone was forced to run air/fire builds on most classes because that was the best gear that was available at the time. How is that "sandbox"? How is that better than what we have now? I had to use 125 gear while most people were using 140+ gear because I insisted on playing an air/water masqueraider when everyone else was air/fire.

Does the lack of roleplay elements and old spell animations suck? Yeah. But that doesn't mean that Wakfu hasn't improved significantly.

I miss some some old spells and animation too T_T

When you come to battle there is your incoming animation you could see every time long time ago.
Cool and funny animation. I lough every time when iop slaps his face down xD
But now you can't see yours. You see your teammates animations but not your char's.

May be it is just switched off and you can tell me how to turn it on?

I actually am happy they made the spell deck system, I disliked it at first as well but over time I've come to understand the old system was garbage.

I understand now that how I felt at that time and how you feel now is just a stagnated idea of returning to a game you enjoyed in the past, that feeling of nostalgia you want back. Come back and play for a month, you'll find that you enjoy how wakfu is now more than how it used to be.

Although I'm not saying Wakfu's completely great yet, there's still so much stuff that needs fixing... so much stuff.