Embers Adrift puts a stop to its content compression plans after player feedback

Last week saw Embers Adrift begin testing of a “content compression” adjustment that would see the MMORPG’s max level lowered in order to get more people grouping together and make every level feel more impactful — all while not squishing stats or changing the required amount of XP to reach each level (and thereby making each level take longer to earn). Apparently the idea was not met kindly by players, so Stormhaven Studios is cancelling its plans.

Confirmation of this about-face was shared in the MMORPG’s latest weekly broadcast, as executive producer John Gust appears to barely hold back his disappointment as he repeats many of the content compression’s benefits, especially in a group-centric game that doesn’t have a large number of players — a problem that Gust argues isn’t something the devs have control over. He also believes that initial reactions missed the point of the adjustment being proposed instead of set in stone.

Even so, he does admit that the feeling of fighting through levels in order to get to a new character milestone has its appeal and empathizes with the “strong reactions” that he believes arose because of players’ “trauma” of developers ruining beloved MMORPGs, even as he admits to some frustration with the pushback.

As for how to solve the issues that content compression was intended to address, there don’t appear to be many answers yet: Gust says that keeping the game in the state that it’s in would be detrimental and that simply increasing its GEL mentoring system would make the game about power-leveling and not about the journey to cap, while community manager Elloa pushes back against adding level scaled zones, as the studio believes the “feel of progression” is important to the game; she also says that most tweaks proposed by players can’t be done as swiftly or as easily by Stormhaven’s small team as content compression can.

Gust does say that content compression may be revisited sometime in the future, particularly if Embers puts out an expansion, but ultimately listening to community feedback will be the studio’s guiding star, and that feedback clearly said “no.”

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