It’s not a “list of design decisions that I personally don’t like”, it’s a fact that IMC has throughly nerfed the content people enjoy doing. They nerfed one of the early grind spots like @Goldie pointed out and you even recognized it.
They nerfed monster card albums since they introduced it. First they nerfed the drop rate in the following week, then they changed them to drop only inside hunting grounds because people were still droping albums during crafting materials farming sessions. More recently, on the korean servers, they made bosses summoned from card albums not drop their cards with 100% chance anymore, now they’ll either drop their card or a 100 exp enhancing card. I don’t participate in card album events organized by the players (I open them with my guilds), but every week I see many people in the shout chat doing it and people have fun with it. When we get that update, it’s going to be a little frustrating for players.
While there are many silver sinks in the game, they’re constantly nerfing legitimate ways to farm silver. Before the dungeon rework, a single DG170 run would reward you with 330k silver, now we can get up to 220k per run. At least it’s worth to do it in a party instead of soloing, but still, it’s less silver. And since people are doing DG300 every day to get their daily income, IMC is going to put diminishing returns on silver rewards based on the difference between your character’s level and the dungeon’s. Open maps also give low silver if you farm actively. Only Necromancers farming AFK with macros enjoy silver farming (as anyone can see by checking it on the Oracle Master).
The lack of effective action against bots is another example that makes things less enjoyable in this game. The current character progression is mainly based on item grinding (enhancing attributes come last because lvl 60 is enough considering cost efficiency, so you don’t need to get lvl 100 attributes that early), so you could make good profit in the market, but it’s hard to compete against bots. They don’t get tired from long farming sessions and they’re responsible for the drop in the prices of pretty much all items with high demand. So what else can players do? Well, they farm Blessed Shards by spamming Saalus runs or running around with a SR on lower level hunting grounds. It’s a bit too late to take care of this issue, but if IMC still cares about it, it’s time to put account creation restrictions. Trading restrictions for new players are meaningless when it’s so easy to make a new Steam account to put up your gold seller bot or a Necro macrobot in Solitary Cells.
The Get Ahead event is another factor that harms the gaming experience in ToS. Fact: it makes players skip a large portion of the game’s content, they reach the endgame with little experience and knowledge about the game’s mechanics and how other classes work and the game turns upside down when new players have to shift from a very fast progression to the item grinding wall in a very slow pace in the game. My personal experience: I used to tell newbies in my guild to participate in the Get Ahead event so they could catch up with the oldest members in the guild to play together with them. They got bored really fast and all those players quit. Then I started telling people to think twice and maybe leveling up in a slower pace could be more enjoyable, but they always end up falling for the temptation to reach lvl 300+ in just a few days.
(Ugh, I already wrote a long essay) Well, finally. You may disagree with my points, but all those bad decisions or even their lack of action is making people play ToS less. The game has improved in many points and it’s a lot better compared to the Jan-Feb period from last year, but the player behavior changed a lot since then as you can verify by crossing data CCU and Total Population. While the game was worse last year, logging in just for your dailies became the norm between the majority of players, so they’re spending less time on ToS compared to before and IMC is at fault for this. So yeah, that’s why I believe they don’t like when we’re enjoying playing ToS and why I believe they’ll also make it difficult to get gold coins for the current event.
“Nonsense”, “dumb”, “outrageous”, “obviously false” and “preposterous” aren’t friendly words.
You’re calling me a troll just because I called you one? Nice tu quoque falllacy you got there. Here’s a definition of trolling:
Now please stop your personal crusade against me. Everyday many people post negative opinions about IMC and yet it’s after me you’re coming at just because you still resent our failed discussions in previous threads.