Edit: This post received a response from the IMC lead developer, which you can and should read here if you agree with any of the points in my post: I Love Tree of Savior; I Am Leaving Tree of Savior
My response to his post is here: I Love Tree of Savior; I Am Leaving Tree of Savior
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I’m a founder who purchased all of the available founder packs, including the two discounted packs. Total Cost: $130.00.
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I have two characters above level 200, a 243 Cannoneer and a 203 Oracle. I love the core game to death, it’s fun, addicting and even with the issues that it has, there is so much potential for it to be great.
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I am one of the most tolerant gamers you will ever meet. I can put up with a great many problems, and it takes a LOT to rattle me or get me upset enough to start complaining or bashing a company beyond a few jokes cracked here and there.
Having said those three things, and having put more than 500 hours into a game that I still do love, and still feel offers an amazing gameplay experience, with today’s patch, I can’t possibly continue to ignore what’s going on here.
IMC you have done all of this:
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Implement absurd restrictions to try and stop goldsellers and bots which only hurt real players without affecting goldsellers or bots in the slightest. Remember, goldsellers and bots exist for one purpose. To sell game currency, and to cheat their way to get it. They have unlimited time, effort and incentive to dedicate to circumventing your restrictions. Real players don’t. They are frustrated. Many have or will simply quit.
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Set out a release schedule for the game for 3 months staggered early access, and then listened to the community, going back on your plan and instead releasing a one month early access. The servers were not ready. Commander Load Fail crashed things left, right and center all through early access. Now, nearly two months post-launch, the lag is STILL intolerable with no end in sight. Stability isn’t even a pipedream at this point, especially for the SEA and SA servers who can barely play the game, because in 2016, it seems that you have contracted with a company who can’t even provide basic DDoS protection for your servers.
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Announced free to play and then pushed it back two weeks because the game wasn’t ready. You held multiple 24-hour maintenances to manually accomplish server transfers, a task that other game companies can automate in 10 minutes. When the game still wasn’t ready you launched free to play anyway with even more devastating restrictions on free players. The free players came, and the servers crashed, spluttered and crawled again, even harder this time.
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You launched free to play with all of the restrictions on free players, without any method to let those free players purchase TP to alleviate their restrictions. Now that you have finally released your absurdly overpriced one time DLC packs that BARELY include any TP, about a third of your potential customers have already quit.
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During this entire time, you have refused to communicate with your player base on ANY level, including issuing cut and paste, irrelevant responses to support tickets, ignoring almost every keystone community issue as if they didn’t exist, and issuing patch notes weekly for bug fixes that could have been accomplished by one intern working part time. Are you working on something big? Is there a reason that none of the kToS patches are being pushed here? Do you even PLAN to have the kToS patches applied here? Are you doing ANYTHING? We certainly don’t know.
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You take weekends off in a 24/7 customer service industry, leaving your product non-functional to entire subsets of your (paying) playerbase for DAYS at a time. In any other industry, your company would be bankrupt, shut down, your CEO and anyone in even the most remote position of authority would have their jobs nixed.
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You FIRED your community manager for doing what she was supposed to do. And you replaced her with a soundless, emotionless void.
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When paired with all of your other problems, including but not limited to:
bizarre, constant lag, disconnects, abilities misfiring, chat randomly being eaten by the ether (and while we’re on the subject, the Orwellian chat filter that would be out of place in a children’s game, much less one with blatant sexualization, panty shots and etc.) characters getting stuck, players being unable to get into dungeons, or being kicked out of dungeons once they are, the constant goldseller spam, bots camping high level grinding areas pushing legitimate parties out, world boss monopolization, lack of rewards for pvp, the glitchy market limit system, lack of meaningful rewards for pve (weeks with nothing but talt), class balance issues, item balance issues (arde dagger and cafrisun best in slot for 200 levels for -every- class without fail), the unsustainable economy (~10 high end items with absurdly luck based cost-enterprising, and the diminishing demand/cost for materials, creating a compelling reason for players to buy from goldsellers who are ever-present), poor translation, artificial grind walls and newbie traps, and glaring lack of social features (even a guild requires a rank 7 character to create), and many others I am probably forgetting:
It is clear how you feel about this game. Which is to say that you don’t. You have no industry awareness whatsoever, and this is coming from someone who has played numerous F2P games in the past, from the likes of Nexon, Webzen, Aeria and etc., all companies who are notorious for their poor customer service. You somehow manage to project even less of a positive image than they do. Incredibly, this is the first time I have ever actually felt like I enjoyed playing a game more than the developers enjoy making and maintaining it.
So why with all of these issues have I continued to play, and why am I done now? Because no matter how many issues I think the game has, I can deal with them if I believe the developer cares and is working on fixing things. I played FFXIV (the original) which was one of the most poorly received MMOs EVER, because I still liked the core game, and because Square-Enix acknowledged their mistakes and decided to try and fix them.
With the release of these DLC packs for $30 and $35, it is apparent that you believe you deserve the cost of a AAA game for putting forth zero effort. You do not market. You do not improve server stability. You do not communicate with your players. You do not address major game issues. You can’t figure out how to implement the purchase of your own cash shop currency. You can’t hardly claim overhead worthy of those prices, because you have nothing to show for the fruits of your labor over the last two months. You simply give no shits about Tree of Savior, beyond hooking the 1% of whales who will pay any amount to rule the roost in a game that is 5% good game, 15% Nostalgia and 80% catastrophe.
So here you go, IMC. You want to know how to take a straw and break a camel’s back, and alienate even a calm, loyal player who paid you the maximum allowable for even a SIGN that you even INTEND for this to be a competently run game at some point? Look at your own actions over the past 60 days.
I’m done, and whether or not the white knights left will rush to defend you against this post is of no concern to me, because I know that even they have their breaking point, and if I’m at this point, I’d imagine it isn’t far off.
