Hello everyone including ToS Devs Team!
Let me introduce myself, I live in California and I have been following this game since beginning. I love this game and I love how “International” server idea comes out. In fact that International means that people from different country join the same server and play together and compete together. This makes the game sounds even beyond amazing. I understand that some of the country might want to have their own version/company to proxy this game. But I would like you to excluded Taiwan version.
With such an amazing game you created, it is important for you to build up your game’s reputation worldwide. I don’t know any online game company in other countries, but Taiwan’s company, I understand them like a daddy understand their son.
Taiwan online game environment including 3 big major area, I will called it 3 Taiwan MMORPG cultures.
First one, botting. A lot of botting. You might ask “why Taiwan company doesn’t punish botters?” The answer is obvious, which is that Taiwan Online game company such as "Gamania (遊戲橘子), OMG, Game Flier(遊戲新幹線)) only cares about their short-term net income instead of making the game reputation better and make the game runs in long term. Not only those company listed above are lack of gaming environment, all the companies in Taiwan you can find are pretty much the same as they are.
Second one, Exclusive Version. From the past, we had our experience on exclusive version of Lineage, Tera, Maple Story, etc. When I say Exclusive Version, it means that compare to the original version, the exclusive version are normally 10x, 100x, or 1000x harder to play. The items are harder to get, the level are harder to gain. You name it. This forces players to spend lots of money to get what they actually want to, and it turned into a vicious cycle, people with real affords in game gets nothing while people with zero affords in game but invest a tons of money gets everything. This isn’t healthy for the gaming environment, instead it bring the game reputation down worldwide and not even mentioning about long term investment in this game. Also, for the Exclusive Version, Taiwan Company loves to make their version of the game to become “Monthly Subscription + Item Mall” all together. This means that players must pay subscription monthly, and also have to pay for the exclusive items in game by consuming Item Mall. That’s the only way players can keep up themselves with other players in game, which the purposed from Taiwan’s company is obvious, short-term new income only.
Third one, Hackers all around. Hackers especially from China, they loves to jump into Taiwan’s online game environment and ruin it as hard as they can. Because they understand that Taiwanese Company are lacking knowledge on handling network security part. Also, they know that Taiwan’s online game company only cares about short-term net income, instead of actually trying to grow the games and take care of it.
With these 3 Taiwan MMORPG cultural listed above, maybe you still considering ony make this game publish in Taiwan. Which from a businessman perspective, it sounds a correct direction to go for. But as a long-term investment perspective, you understand what I mean. I do know that the passion from Taiwanese players are huge, very very huge. If I have the right to decide which way to go, I will rather decide to keep the Taiwanese players in international server, instead of giving Taiwane Company any chance to ruin this game.
Even it isn’t my business since I’m going to play in International Server anyways, I still want to speak out to help the community or even ToS Devs team to understand the Pros and Cons by giving Taiwan their own version of ToS. I do believe that in Long-Term investment, giving Taiwan their own version of ToS will probably be the worst decision to make ever. And it is worth of trying to keep the Taiwanese player base in International Server and earn the money you deserved from them in Long-Term.
Welcome to join this discussion with me ladies and gentlemen. I would like to hear if anyone agree/disagree with me.
Best Regards.
Tarcis.