Hi everyone, my name is Mealworms and I’m an alcoh… oops wrong forum. I have been addicted to this game since free to play launched though. I didn’t know anything about the game before I tried it, never played Ragnarok, and never heard of IMC. I’ve got very little invested here but time. I think there are quite a few flaws that need work, but that ultimately this is a unique and worthwhile game and I hope IMC can keep the lights on for a long time.
I’ll go over a couple things first that I think I’ve got a different perspective on than most of the community and maybe help some players out here that are struggling with them. This will probably get a bit long, I hope I can make it worth your time.
On the trade restrictions:
I don’t think these are in the game solely for the sake of combating RMT, they’re much more about keeping our play time valuable. In any game I’ve played that had open trading the smartest among us have dominated the in game markets through item reselling. They generate so much wealth with this that playing the game normally becomes a waste of time compared to sitting on the auction house trying to snipe items for profit.
Blizzard realized this with Diablo 3 and their solution was to totally remove trading. I’m a simple peasant farmer and I hate playing the Auction House game but for me this killed D3. It totally removed the loot slot machine aspect that can keep me farming an ARPG for ages.
IMC’s approach is different, they’ve tried to give us trading in a more idyllic form. Trading before speculation and compound interest, before Adam Smith jammed his invisible hand up our collective Brown Colimen Flowers. Two producers trading what they don’t need for what they do. I know how painful and inefficient this can be and it requires a lot of patience to find someone to trade with sometimes but there is an advantage to this. There’s a social aspect involved, and when we know the other party generally isn’t trying to get the better of us to resell what we give them we can give much better deals on both sides. I’m not the type to fill up my friends list in these games with people I meet, it’s generally reserved for real life friends. Here though most trades I’ve made have resulted in a friend request from one party or the other and that feels pretty good.
The result so far is that the economy has been fairly stable, much more so than most of these games I’ve played. Most items are priced based on their drop rates and farming difficulty, and have remained fairly constant and fair for the last two months. It allowed IMC to build a game that, to me, has been consistently rewarding for hundreds of hours no matter where I go. The drop rates for everything besides “jackpot” items like monster gems for damage skills are decent. 1:10, 1:100, 1:1,000, 1:10,000, these numbers are all tiny when brute force is applied. The only Force in the universe that Mother RNG respects is Brute, and if you bring it here she will bestow unto you her Bounty and Mercy. Amen.
On world boss camping and chasing gear:
I don’t think IMC expected people to take this to the level they did. I understand the competitive draw though and why it’s as popular as it is, and I’m sure it’s great income for the best at it. I’ve got some advice here for those that have been left out of these groups though and feel they can’t progress. You don’t need their gear. Not for a long time. MMO’s have conditioned you to chase Shiny Purplez and Orangez, but here your gear is the least important part of your character until very late game, and there is a lot of it available for every level threshold to take advantage of.
I’ve solo’d all content in every zone up to Storage so far and I’m still wearing quest gear and 220 superior common drops that I farmed up myself. I didn’t rush for exp, I play these games for loot, and I’ve been taking it slow farming silver and rares. The content is not overtuned, you just need to scale your attributes, learn the mob AI and leash mechanics, and tackle it at the proper level due to the mitigation leveling up gives. No single piece of gear in this game is worth multiple millions of silver until your attributes are properly scaled to take advantage of it and you have the resources to socket, gem, and refine it with alchemy and enhancement.
A lot of these guys have spent the majority of their play time sitting afk and hunting bosses. You don’t need their gear but they do need your silver and materials to craft and enhance the rare recipes they’ve acquired.
On bots and RMT:
You can never fully stop this, not as long as the demand for virtual currency exists. These people are in every f2p and subscription game on the market, they’re just more visible in this world than most. It’s important to realize why this exists in the first place. People who bot these games for income are largely from parts of the world with very little economic opportunity. They’re smart, they’re not out to ruin our games if they can help it, but they’ve found a way to get paid in USD and Euros, and in the places they live that means a serious quality of life increase for them and theirs.
I don’t think they’re doing much damage here. People who buy currency in these games, first or third party, will always get ahead fast, and that’s ok. What happens in most games though is that they get so far ahead and have such a large impact on the market that those of us with more time than money can never catch up no matter how much we play. I don’t feel that’s happening here. The restrictions and gameplay are structured in such a way that end game should remain available to anyone who puts the time in. I hope anyway.
I know the bots are annoying when they’re in zones you’re trying to farm. Level up past 200 though and they’re pretty much non existent.
I hope that advice can help some of you look at the game a little differently. We definitely need more content, no developer can push it out as fast as us hardcore no-lifers can consume it, but I feel in following the meta and rushing for exp many people missed out on what this game has to offer. If you’re the type that has been taking characters to rank 7 and then starting over because the quests run out do yourself a favor and take your favorite build and a few friends and go explore these later game zones past Cranto Coast. Ignore your exp / hour unless you find a good alternative leveling spot. Do the hunts, mess with the minigames if you don’t mind them, farm some silver and scale your attributes. Bring some crowd control to deal with these nasty mage mobs, and some loot skills for extra drops. There’s worthwhile content out there, it’s just loose and unstructured after 232. It’s designed as a literal playground for farming. It’s not for everyone but I’ve been having fun exploring it.
As if that wasn’t enough of a wall of text already the rest of this is for IMC, hoping they can reach a wider audience.
You guys have built two games here and stitched them together pretty well. From the complaints I’m seeing out here now that I’ve taken the time to look up from the game though, the audience for one of these games is put off by aspects of the other. You have to play hundreds of hours before you start getting the big picture.
On one hand you built a deep, compelling character and party building RPG that has got me hooked. It has elements from all my favorite games. A beautiful aesthetic reminiscent of SNES classics like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana, as well as the depth, scale, and customization of the old PC RPGs like Wizardry, Wasteland and others.
I didn’t see that at first though. I saw a quest railroad. I don’t like most modern MMOs and haven’t played many since Ultima Online. The only reason I got past the first zone was because I could teleport back to a quest giver after finishing the objective. Even then though, before I saw the game for what it was, I was at a loss the first time my quests ran out. I didn’t realize the scope of the world map or that I could hop over to Klaipeda and run through all that stuff to keep progressing. I know for my next character I’ll be able to skip any quests I don’t want to do, go from one good grind spot to the next, and still enjoy the process but it took a long time to realize it.
On the other hand you have much of what makes modern MMOs compelling to people that enjoy them. Anyone can log in and quest for a bit, queue up and do some dungeons, and log out feeling that they made some progress. I think they’re probably put off by feeling the need for very expensive gear that they have to grind ages for, even though it isn’t necessary that’s the game they’re used to. Also matchmaking could be a bit better, the group content requires a healer if not a tank for the most part, requiring one for a game to start might help. That might make queues take too long so I don’t know. I know that getting grouped with a bunch of non-healing supports or glass DPS with no crowd control is pretty rough though. And when a first time player tries to do a mid level dungeon and gets raged at by these animals for not taking pelt on his swordsman, he’s probably done with the game.
I’m not sure how you’d market this to reach everyone who would enjoy it and I think a lot of this will work itself out as better English information becomes available and the meta shifts around a bit.
My other major suggestion to reach and retain more players is that you need to add more community and social functions. I know there’s some, like party search and what not but those systems need better tutorials. The guild system is intriguing and fine as is but it is not enough for many of the types of players that come to these games. They will not be willing to spend a hundred hours or more before they look to make a group of friends to play with if they didn’t start with any.
Whether it’s in game public community chat channels that don’t need megaphones to have conversations in, or the official endorsement of some kind of third party community hub like Discord, I think some improvement in this area would have a large effect on player retention.
That’s about all I’ve got. If you slogged through my rambling here I hope you found something you hadn’t thought about. And thanks for the game IMC, it’s not often I find a modern one I can have this much fun with.