#WynnCraft - My college work

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

pale crown
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WynnCraft Feedback
(After 160h playing + 40h analyzing for game design college work)

I can’t publish my full study yet, but I owe the community and creators some feedback for the 200h of fun. Below is a condensed critique with proposed solutions these, by far, aren’t the only fixes, but I had to provide something for my paper and I believe these are valid suggestions..

  1. WynnCraft as an MMORPG
    A bold choice to build this in Minecraft, but it paid off. WC has:

A lively community

Crafting, guilds, world events, dungeons, bosses

Classes, custom skills, and hardcore-MMORPG depth

  1. Community Strengths & Issues
    Strengths:

Small but helpful/modded chat (rare for Minecraft servers!).

Easy to find teammates—never struggled to get assistance.

Biggest Problem: Communication (Team → Players)

Mechanics like Spell Damage, Main Attack Damage, or traits like Rally are poorly documented.

Players rely on external wikis, which shouldn’t be necessary.

Example: Rally’s Misleading Description
Current text:

"+Rally: Cleansing Breeze causes Charge to heal you for 7.5% and nearby allies for 15% on impact, but becomes harmless."

Issue:
Suggests healing happens on Charge + Cleansing Breeze use, but it only procs on landing. Players can spam Charge without ever triggering Rally.

Fix:

Reword tooltips for clarity.

Add an in-game “Advanced Stats” guide and hire a community manager with backend knowledge to better communicate future mechanics.

  1. Gathering System: A Carpal Tunnel Simulator
    Current Problems:

Flips between AFK and spam-clicking without committing to either.

Unhealthy (wrist strain) and unsatisfying gameplay.

Proposed Fixes:

Option 1: Full AFK Approach
Make actions longer/auto-repeat (like Old School RuneScape).

Pros: Less tedious, might boost profession bomb sales.

Cons: Higher server load → may need anti-AFK measures.

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Option 2: Active Mini-Games
Use Minecraft’s built-in systems (e.g., fishing minigames for Fishing, block-breaking for Mining).

Makes gathering action-based instead of whatever's going on right now.

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Crafting:
WynnCraft's crafting system is near perfect. It's incredibly rare for an MMORPG to have a deterministic crafting system that doesn't rely on paid mechanics to max out outcomes. The only issues I'd point out are:

Lack of unique traits

Bad audio feedback (too many repetitive sounds)

The existence of the durability system

Total lack of a crafting tutorial quest

Improvements that could be made:

Obviously add a tutorial quest (maybe "craft a cake" as a simple intro)

Replace durability with "crafting potential" or another system that still controls gear power

Add unique/rare ingredients that could apply traits (possibly by dismantling Fabled gear to extract weaker versions of their traits)

Improve sound feedback during crafting or make crafting instant to remove repetitiveness

Classes:
WynnCraft has an incredible amount of work put into its world building. The quests, dungeons and NPCs are so well fleshed out you can almost forget you're playing Minecraft. With so much effort put into these systems, it's underwhelming how poorly classes are designed, especially archetypes.

Example: Mages
Mage has 3 archetypes:

Lightbender (healer/support)

Pros: Unmistakable presence thanks to Ophanim's angelic visuals

Cons: Lacks grand visual spells (but acceptable for support class)

Arcanist (spell-spam DPS)

Pros: Perfectly captures the mage fantasy

Cons: Visuals could be improved (maybe a mana-scaling aura?)

Riftwalker (...???)

Supposedly Winded-based, but Lightbenders use Winded more

No clear identity or role

Comparing this to other Classes:

Archetypes need stronger visual identity since they don't have unique weapons:

Riftwalker (if battlemage): Short-range attacks with amplified visuals

Paladins: Passive shield/armor visuals (from Mithril Skin?), maybe cosmetic off-hand shield

Fallen: Corrupted skulls that grow more intense as corruption builds

Archetypes should both LOOK and FEEL distinct (currently too similar)

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Final Notes:
This text got pretty long, but I hope it's helpful to both the community and devs. I'd love to hear more about WynnCraft's future - this was my first contact with it and I had way too much fun!

celest sonnet
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One numba 2

thin cove
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You know you don’t need to spam click to gather materials right

neat shale
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if I had a nickel for every time someone posted a chat gpt generated feedback thread I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's strange that it happened twice saltroll

thin cove
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I mean, it has the energy of an AI text but the contents feel way too specific

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I’m not sure about this

neat shale
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I assume the content was human written but the actual post was put together by AI

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for someone with only 200h gameplay experience this is actually a pretty in depth & accurate identification of problems (for the most part) but the solutions are either irrelevant or inaccurate

worthy phoenix
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hey its certainly better than the other one with 100hours

neat shale
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if this is actually human written, writing a university dissertation on wynncraft is clinically insane

celest sonnet
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This might be the same guy…

worthy phoenix
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if it is im gonna look like an absolute idiot

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which is kinda already proven

patent vessel
celest sonnet
patent vessel
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There used to be an introduction to crafted items quest segment I think that’s was removed 😢

celest sonnet
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I think he did each piece of content once and afked for the rest of the 200h

celest sonnet
terse stone
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no way they called wynn WC 😭

celest sonnet
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I remember i almost quit wynncraft completely because i thought profs would be mandatory when they got added

patent vessel
celest sonnet
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Wet cat

terse stone
covert beacon
patent vessel
scenic lichen
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Can't say I disagree with everything posted

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Doesn't look like cGPT to me anyway

wild grove
stoic ibex
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what is this guy yappig about

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idt proffig requires any spam clicking its just zzzzz

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crafting quest useed to exist but it encouraged people to grind profs and made them thinkg it was required

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this guy is yapping about nothing @pulsar fog didnt go to college for game design and woul put more bru

pale crown
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Also sorry I couldn't provide better solutions to the current problems, by no means I think they're ideal. Even spending so many hours playing the game I was barely able to scrape the huge amount of content available.

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I was taught to never point a flaw without offering a solution and it was a requirement on my paper, been told even if they're not good solutions we'll at least learn what not to try.

stoic ibex
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riftwalker is just in a bad spot rn surely the reowkr for it will cook
itll just take a while to balance it since all mage archetypesd currently use winded for dmg

pale crown
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Given what the game is, I really like mage as a class. I mostly play support/tank and, in Wynncraft, lightbender is likely the better designed class, absolutely loved playing it. Excited to see what the plans are for Riftwalker and for the future of the game itself. I don't think I'll stop playing but I'll def not put in as many hours per week as I did for the last few.

patent vessel
inland adder
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Fallen: Corrupted skulls that grow more intense as corruption builds
What? it literally exactly has that
I would just like to point this out cause it makes no sense
The rest of the post I am not commenting on

granite vapor
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riftwalker problem isn't winded, riftwalker is so underused because the whole archetype is underwhelming

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wynncraft is supposed to have the best abilities the archetype can offer at the last pages, so u can make interesting but not overpowered archetype combinations

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the problem with riftwalker, is that devitalize doesn't really do anything (that should be a blue node tbh) and timelock interrupts your constant DPS with a "stronger" burst

granite vapor
granite vapor
patent vessel
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Second node got buffed

olive pilot
shell solar
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Ct, take a look at this, it highlights a lot of problems in wynn right now.

Adding on to what they said about a community manager, maybe talk to more players about prospective changes (I would recommend the older players) and also maybe talk to a few more mid-game players about it

This would ensure balancing changes like the slayer hpr nerf doesnt happen so much

dense tartan
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Awesome work. Waiting for the full paper!