[Beginning of explanation - drop below the “End of explanation” to see the proposal]
I’ve heard both sides of the story. I’ve heard the side of players who want circle/advancement resets and players who don’t want them. I’m on the former side of the fence, so you will notice some bias in this proposition.
Before I mention the proposition, I will first address the issue of “value”.
A character has value the moment that character has something that belongs to it and is lost when the character is deleted. In the case of Tree of Savior, a character’s value is from their adventure log (achievements, exploration, crafting, etc). We’re beyond lucky that there is no required crafting skill to craft items, or the concept of value would be much more skewed.
There’s also a lighter sense of value when it comes to items that are untradeable, or items/currency that are too difficult to trade without the requirement of a token. Before one would consider deleting their character to reroll, they will likely purchase a token strictly for the sole purpose of trading items to another character they plan to keep.
There’s also the case of time. Time has value to it, whether you want to agree to that or not. To a hardcore player, reaching level 280 is “easy” and just takes a subjective “short amount of time”. To a casual or normal player who likely doesn’t have much free time, it could take them months before they reach 280.
So we’ve identified that characters have some semblance of value to them and that each person will treat this semblance of value differently, but since we’re all trying to enjoy the game with our characters of choosing, I will assume for the sake of this argument, that the average player values their characters greatly.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, we need to identify the problem at hand.
Someone may not be happy with their build for one reason or another. Those reasons could include:
- Not having fun with the build
- Lack of understanding that selecting and confirming a class advancement completely locks you into that choice.
- Bad information from the skills/description given from a class
- Lack of information on how skills interact with one another
- Not having a meta build, or a build that other players identify as strong
- Having a build that many other players identify as “newbish” or weak to which you struggle to find groups for grinding/etc.
- Having a build that works differently [in a bad way] due to balancing/changes
- Simply wanting a change of pace with the character
There could be more reasons, but I think these are the most popular ones that I’ve seen on this Reddit and/or have heard people talk about in the game, on Twitch, etc.
I honestly believe that only a few of those reasons are reason enough that some form of advancement/circle switch/advancement should be available, but the solution may not be easy.
IMC may not have an immediate means of making this available, and they may be on the fence about doing so in the first place because of the argument that players would simply make a very fast leveling build, level up to the max level, then switch to a build that would normally be hard to level. In my opinion, I don’t think this is an issue, but I’m being open-minded about this because its possible that I’m biased since I don’t have a Pardoner/Alchemist/Squire.
Ideally, we want a solution that maintains interest for players that want to change their build [for any of the reasons listed or any reason, really] without invalidating the value they’ve gained with their character.
[End of explanation]
My proposal is simple: save the state of the level/experience that character was at, and then reset that character to level 1, job level 1. They will gain 1000% increased exp from cards/monsters until they reach the saved point.
This preserves the value of the character, while also allowing the player to explore a different route with their class.
Just because the character gains 1000% increased exp from cards/monsters doesn’t mean they will level 10-11 times faster than before. It might only equal out to being 3-4 times faster because it’s very likely that they have done most quests/exploration/monster hunting already. This solution is “easy” for IMC because it just means an entry in a database of the maximum level the character was before the reset happens - this way, if the player messes up again before they reach their max level, they can opt to reset to Level 1/1 again and no change aside from the reset needs to be made. No need to reset any adventure-log stuff or quests. And in my opinion, attributes shouldn’t be reset either, but obviously are only active if their conditions are met.
The solution is “easy” on paper, for IMC, and provides a means of resetting for the player.
[“Beating you to the punch” questions]
Q: “But this means players can simply level up as some fast-leveling class, reset to 1/1, then level as a crafting class within their base class job with 1000% increased experience”
A: Maybe so, but it works the other way as well. Someone that doesn’t feel like doing crafting anymore can reset to 1/1 and go a dps build or something exciting with their character to make doing some adventure-log things easier for them.
Q: “No!!! Players should be stuck with whatever build they chose because I ENJOY THE GAME THAT WAY AND THEY SHOULD TOO!!!”
A: Except it’s wrong to assume everyone enjoys being stuck with a build that doesn’t work out for them, and want an option to change it while retaining the value of their character (whatever that might be).
Q: “Stop acting so entitled!!!”
A: I could say the same to every hardcore player that thinks advancement/circle resets shouldn’t be a thing. If we want to retain player interest in this game, we need to take the concept of value seriously amongst all kinds of players, not just the hardcore ones.
Q: “This is a bad solution. The one I propose is better, because–”
A: I already said it’s an “easy” band-aid solution for IMC to implement. Very little requires changing aside from saving the state of a character’s exp/level and a Level 2 buff that grants increases the experience gained by 1000% up to that exp/level point. However, if you do have a better solution, please do reply with your idea :3
[End]
