"Challenging vs Casual" - A matter of every video games. How do we react to it to help IMC?

[thanhnguyenpp]

Before I start I’d like to apologize for two reasons: first - English is not my first language so some of my sentences may be difficult to understand, second - I will use some examples in real life and in other games which relate to the matter that may offend some readers.

To begin I want to explain why there are two different ideas “challenging” and “casual” in gaming. Let imagine there are two players who start playing video games like two persons who are growing up in a virtual new world which they don’t have any ideas about yet. One person grow up playing difficult games which need a lot of time and practices to achieve his goals. The other person grow up playing games to relax and have fun chatting with his friends. Time passed, both of them fell in love with video games and decided to spend more time playing. But the ways they react to video games are different. Why? It is because they learned two different ideas from the video games they played and accepted those ideas as their basic concepts when they think about video games. If anyone who has been interested in gaming industry for a long time, this may explain to you why Counter-Strike players always say Call of Duty and Battlefield are for “casual”.

Let ask yourself a question: does what happened to those two gamers above also happens to us human beings in our real life? Yes!!! sometime when we see an idea, we pick it up and then use it in the rest of our life without even notice it. This is why we have different people with different thinkings and you can’t avoid it or prevent it from happening. It is just human’s nature.

In this new era of multi-platform gaming, more and more developers take “casual” as their main goal to make new video games because it is easier to get more subscribers, but “challenging” is a must because it represents a very healthy electronic sport for young people. This becomes a very big challenge for IMC. So what should we do to help the developer to build a better Tree of Savior’s community? I would advise my fellow ToS players, what ever characteristics you have, try to look at the problems (not lags and bugs) of the others in a more helpful way and try to solve those problems together with IMC to achieve the best results. Don’t be like “This is OK for me and some other guys so it should be OK for you too, keep it this way!!!” or “That boss (or class) is hard, I don’t want to think about how to proceed further, please make it easier!!!”.

[fecono]

IMC shouldn’t do anything about this.

They should just keep creating their vision of a good game.

Sure, feedback is important and if feedback is useful for them they should use it.
But they shouldn’t cave in to every little demand someone might have.

After their vision of a game has been completed those who like it will stay, while the others will move on to play other games.

Yes, there is such a thing as listening too much to your community, it will eventually make your game really shitty because as it turns out 80% of the people playing your game are ■■■■■■■ retards

[LilArsenic]

Sadly, Fecono is right, a lot of people playing games are retarded.
Look at Wildstar, people kept saying they wanted hard content, 40 man raids and such, and look how that turned out.
They should keep to there guns and do what they wanted to do.

I still think reagents should not be in the game or make the buffs from them last longer but I will get over it.

[lans1234567890]

They need 2 take ideas from people giving good ones.dont start nerfing the “to hard” things or buf the “to weak” classes.this going no where and at best be a 50/50 thing.

[exdarklight]

Let professional game developers do their job. Game players are not developers and don’t have access to the heaps of information that allow games to grow and prosper.

How I would do it is through 2 branches of play: story and side quests. Currently, ToS has one branch of play. The story. The side quests in ToS are leaves sprouting off of that one branch. If I want to play “optimally” I would have to do every side quest as I play through the story. Why? Because backtracking is obviously bad. Why would I want to come back to do a lv10 quest at level 150?

Currently, the game pushes the story quest down your throat. When my first character got a story quest bug, I had to quit playing that character because I could not progress down the only branch of gameplay the game offers. Recently, the bug fixed itself so I returned to it.

When I start, normally, the story is the way to go because it’s designed to teach you all you need and basically hold your hand. It’s great for casual players. Thus the story quest should be designed with the casual audience in mind. It is possible for the game to start you off with exclusively side quests while saving the story for later, but that’s not the approach ToS is doing, and it would be too much to switch paths now.

Side quests should therefore cater to the more experienced players. They should be very out of the way of the story, so that they can be performed later, with friends possibly. The rewards should not cater to the casual audience either. Especially because many of them are completionists and want to do everything along the way.

For example. make a difficult party quest that has multiple difficulty options for a wide level range. Make it the only way to get gems (instead of just farming chests by switching channels in the crystal mines). This way, an experienced player could begin upgrading his gear early if he wanted to. When I say “difficult” I mean, just hard enough that people are able to write a guide on it. Casual players don’t need the small stat boosts to progress, while experienced players (who tend to be min-maxers) like the optimization strategies of upgrades.

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@LilArsenic
Ammunition isn’t something I like having in games either. Why do you think archers don’t have to buy arrows? Repairing equipment is pretty much the same as restocking on ammunition. It is currently the only thing forcing players to return to town, aside from ammo or as you say “reagents”. Having one main thing to keep you returning to town is good.

• It gives you a break from gameplay so you don’t get burnt out.
• It reminds you to go pick up attributes which are very convenient.

If you have more than one thing to do when returning to town, it becomes a chore, not a reminder. This excludes optional restocking: like potions. You don’t need it to play, but it helps. Similarly, you don’t need equipment to play either; it helps. But ammo… well, you actually can’t “play” if you run out of ammo. The skill is unusable.

Flavor-wise, yes, a Diev is going to need wood to carve. But archers also need arrows for his bow and S.Reiter needs bullets for his gun. There’s a fine line to draw here.

My suggestion is: For classes that need ammo, provide them a way to obtain that ammo through gameplay. For example: A class could have an attribute that gives mobs a small chance to drop ammo. A class could have a skill that produces ammo if you defeat an enemy with it. Of course, you have to match the effect to the flavor of the class and its skills. I have no idea why Stone Shot is the way it is right now.

However, Stone picking for QS is currently a horrible skill. Why? It’s because they use it for one skill: Stone Shot. Whether or not Stone Shot is good, that’s not fun at all. You can make it better by giving them plenty of other skills that use stones. However, if you did that, you’d just end up with Monk from Ragnarok Online and his Spirit Spheres. If QS wants to keep Stone Shot, Stone picking needs to go. Otherwise, I’d just make 2 new skills for them, or move some C2/3 skills down.