Dear IMC, Developers, Kim Hakkyu and other lovers of Tree of Savior.
Firstly I’d like to say I love the game and want it to succeed, Having put in over 900 hours so far which is by far the most I have put into any game for a long time and have supported it since I first heard about it during the BETA tests. I may not be in your original target audience being a working 29 year old, but I would like to give my feedback on the game and what needs to happen to fix the vast amount of issues it is facing. Which, have put me near the point of leaving the game simply through disappointment with the lack of progress and understanding.
While I understand IMC and the development team also love the game and have listened and tried their best to please the community, (Q&A’s weekly, trying to be more transparent with the player base and we are thankful for it.) you have a long way to go in understanding what the western and international audience want from the game. I will try to list it as clearly as possible for you guys.
- CLASS BALANCING AND PATCHES
This is one area where I am sorry to say that so far, your team has failed miserably in this area. Both in understanding your player base (internationally) and in implementation of balance.
Firstly. Your international players (iToS) will not stick around and wait for you to ‘test’ patches on the korean servers for months or even weeks before they come to iToS. It is not fun to play certain classes for months while you deliver updates weekly to the korean (kToS) players while we are stuck on iToS with broken and completely unbalanced classes. While I understand your priority’s may be on the bots and performance issues - You can not ignore your players who are trying to enjoy the game and there is no reason that kToS should be able to receive weekly balance fixes while iToS is ignored.
If you want to keep the international (iToS) players interests, you will need to deliver the balance patches at the same time as kToS gets them, or at the latest a week later even if it means they come without full localization (which still gives you MORE than enough time to make sure there are no game breaking issues). We are not as patient as your korean players
To put this into perspective, we have been playing now for 2 months with swordsmen class being completely non-viable and unusable in most 250+ content, with nerfs kToS never received making them even weaker than that version. Think from your players perspective here, why would your players who enjoy playing Melee DPS classes stay and play your game, when you make no progress in fixing what is fun for them in 2 months of waiting and hoping?
This brings me to the second part of this issue. Understanding the balance issues in the first place.
While you may understand swordsmen are currently unfairly weak compared to all other classes, your team obviously fails to understand just how far behind they are - Somewhere in the range of 200-300% worse than DPS from archers or mages in high level content, while your team introduces 30% STR gain buffs and very slight skill damage buffs which actually equal to around 5-10% increase in DPS (and that is being very generous) - Meaning these buffs are still leaving the class over 200% behind the others. That is clearly a massive fail in understanding just how far behind they are. Your team may be of the opinion that they are more survivable or durable due to the bonus HP they have - However it just isn’t the case in practice, where swordsmen are actually much less survivable because even with the extra HP they have to be in close and die twice as fast because they are hit by everything.
The only way this will be fixed is adding massive number increases on their rank6, 7 and beyond classes - To put them more inline with what Archers get from cannoneer and musketeer(IE +150-300% skill modifiers with 2k+ damage values) as well as giving the base classes skills that scale (IE true multi hit skills like archers Multi-hit and changing skills like siesm and earthwave to be real multi-hit skills). Swordsmen will still have to deal with being much more vulnerable while landing these skills just from being in melee.
Myself and many others on the forums have ideas and clear cut ways to implement fixes and balance that would put them more in-line with other classes damage - take advantage of these ideas. Personally I would gladly do this for your team free of charge.
However I do praise your team in slowly understanding PVP balance and balancing that accordingly - it just doesnt make up for leaving no option for melee DPS in your game.
- QUEUE TIMES
This is a massive issue (Probably worse than the bots). While you may have introduced cross-server queues for the regions the servers are in. I STRONGLY believe you need to merge them further - at a minimum BR and NA region on the same mission and dungeon queues.
It is a frequent issue where you are forced to wait 30 minutes to an hour for a dungeon or mission once past lv130. I myself have personally never been able to do the 145 or 160 dungeon because I have not been able to find players for a pre-made and sat in the queues for over 3 hours each. Let that sink in, 3 hours, without being able to move or do anything and still not being able to form a party. It’s bad game design.
I feel you will eventually have to include BR, NA and EU into the same server queue group to even come close to getting acceptable queue times. Probably even all the servers eventually.
EDIT**
We also need to be able to join dungeon queues as a party so we can play with our friends and still search for extra players. This is a must to keep the game social.
- RMT AND THE MARKET / TRADE RESTRICTIONS
While I have not been held back to badly by these restrictions - one thing does have to change. That is the ‘maximum’ and ‘minimum’ price limit for items in the auction house. Currently we are forced to either sell items well below the price they are worth or trade them for talt (which isn’t viable a lot of the time especially when it needs to be millions of silver) or way to high a value (Dilgile).
The above change should, technically make it easier for your RMT scrips to detect fraudulent transactions on items, because they will be priced more ridiculously, while not restricting your player base from selling their items to each other.
The market is punishing players more than the RMT traders in its current state and just is not working.
The second point here is how you are trying to deal with bots. You need to ban the people BUYING the silver just as much as the people selling it. If the RMT companies do not have enough people left to sell it to, they will have no reason to bot in your game in the first place.
Also players are more likely to quit (good thing in this case) after being banned for buying silver and losing all thier progress. Where as banning RMT bots does not deter them - They don’t care about losing accounts in a free to play game.
The third point here - You NEED some active GAME MASTERS / ADMINS. Even one per server who goes around actively banning bots and exploiters - even if the bans are only temporary until investigated further. Removing them from the game actively so real players can use areas.
As an example, on every server, on every channel you can go to dina bee farm and demon prison and see the area full of bots and people scripting auto-potions to farm AFK with their summons overnight (exploiting). Even one active GM visiting these areas daily to remove them would greatly increase the play-ability of the game for many. Even giving them increasing ban lengths each times they are caught (24h / 48h / 7 days / permanent) to make sure you do not ban legitimate players for lengthy period’s of time.
Once players realize there will be consequences, you will see them stop doing it.
- PERFORMANCE ISSUE
While you are clearly aware of the issues, the one the majority of people are frustrated with is the performance when there are many players in the one area, such as world bosses and PVP - Focus your performance enhancements on these situations, the rest of the game runs relatively fine even on low end machines.
- ADD ONS
While you have been clear for most of us, the wording leaves a lot of grey area when it comes to Add-ons for the game. I can tell you now, the majority of your players use them (And to be honest, they are doing a better job than your team at improving the game, sorry to say 
).
As I currently (and most) understand it. Add-ons are allowed as long as they do NOT automate any game play or give a game play advantage (IE cheats). If they are just displaying information in the UI that is available in-game or on fan sites they are OK. IE listing if items are used in a recipe or collection in their UI description.
The grey area here is if it is OK to bind keys to certain functions like turning attribute’s on and off without opening the skill menu. It’s not automated nor a game play ‘advantage’ as such but simply convenient and something that always should have been available.
- Having and Active Community Manager
If you truthfully want to make your players happy and feel like you are communicating with them, You need one of these who actually understand and can explain what the community wants from you guys. Currently you are doing your best (thank you) but it is quite clearly it is hard for your team to understand what the international community wants in comparison to what your korean community wants - which can be quite different.
- Weekly Q&A
Please. Make a forum area or thread where we can place the questions the community wants answered so we can vote on them and like them so you know which questions we actually want answer for or the whole process will just lead to more frustration as you answer things the players are not even interested in.
Take advantage of it, this is where many of your more experienced and helpful players will leave idea’s and report problems with the game - not your forums. So get someone on the team over there reading it just as closely as you do your own forums.
- SERVER LOCATIONS
While this does not affect everyone, it is an issue for a lot of the world. Currently, for Oceania and a lot of SEA, the SEA server gives worse latency/ping than the North American servers do, because of the country you chose to host it in, Singapore. If you had placed it in malaysia or western Australia, everyone on SEA would have had access to pings less than 100. But as it stands over half of SEA and all of OCEANIA are stuck with worse ping to SEA than NA. Obviously you couldn’t have known this - not being from the region, but it is an issue for them.
While this is likely near the bottom of your priority’s, it would be nice if you could place them in better locations.
REMOVED Regarding relocating of US servers.
- Conclusion
If you got this far, I’d just like to say thank you for taking the time for reading this. Hopefully some of this will be addressed by IMC in the future. However my hopes are not high - while I am thankful they are trying I still feel like they do not understand the international players at all, which is a huge disappointment.
TLDR
I love the game but Im very disappointed in the lack of progress and understanding of what we as a community want from the game
EDIT**
Forgot to mention party queueing and auto-targeting summons bug which is game breaking at the momment. I also missed a ton of other issues, but I feel I covered the base ones.
