Beyond expectations indeed. It’s good that this is getting explained since the recent announcement seemed absurd without knowing this background. Well, it’s still absurd, but at least there’s a reason. Not many companies talk about what’s going on behind the scenes, so getting to hear about it makes it more interesting to continue watching this game’s fate unfold.
"First, we would like to explain why we had devised the 3 month Exclusive Access plan.
The main concern we had with the Steam launch was whether we could provide a stable service upon release to a massive international audience.
There are numerous factors that can cause instability, but we anticipate that one of the main causes would be a higher concentration of players than we expected. Many unprecedented problems may affect the servers and creating waiting queues to counter this would merely cause inconvenience for everyone. Furthermore, intrusion of numerous bot accounts would also bring detrimental results to the server and the community.
We thought that the best way to provide a much more pleasant and stable gaming environment would be to estimate the approximate amount of players before the massive international release. This would prepare us to respond ideally as we gradually increase the player base."
? Sounds like they stated their reason right there.
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Really? This non-appology actually convinced someone?
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TL;DR version:
hkkim: We are not at fault if we planned badly, took bad decisions and whatnot, but we are trying to improve. About the DLCs, if you don’t want it, then it was not made for you, so don’t buy it. About Julie, she left on her own, but our current CM looks like he doesn’t care but we’re confident he is doing a great job.
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That didn’t come until AFTER the announcement of the founders pack 3-month plan, which was NOT accompanied by such a description of their reasoning.
The only time IMC ever explains what they’re doing or why they’re doing it is when people call out their BS. This is further supported by the fact that Mr Kim himself felt the need to make an appearance in this very thread.
He answered our prayers. Which I’m actually thankful for even if it’s not the response I’d like to see personally. It took other games like Path of Exile a while to come out of their shell after denying and ignoring most things to come into good standing with the players. Now the developers come onto the podcast and handle things on a personal level too.
to you :3
Thanks for replying. I appreciate the care shown.
@brandoncotten
Comparing children dying to a cult VS issues in a game. You need to rethink them priorities. o~o There is a not-so-fine-line between them two.
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I guess you are not that tolerant. The game has been on for only a few months, it has yet a lot to grow. I’m not a white knight, I just know that some things are not that easy to fix.
Sometimes I get upset too, specially with those spamming bots on the cities, but I’m going to wait and play and see what happens.
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Yes, I obviate the communication and the answer of tickets simply is reached alone 12 days of wait. Wonderful it isn’t?
In my view the two big mistakes that imc have committed were:
1-Opening the server earlier than predicted, it caused the big part of problems that everyone have complained here.
2-The lack of comunication, made a lot people (including me) think that the game was forsaken, and nothing was being done to solve the problems.
But if you see for another point, they worked hard to attend the bigger aspirations of community. They offered an early access much more accessible for everyone, who couldn’t afford the first prices. Opened new servers to improve game latency. And the developers did an awesome work in relation to the classes design and customization of your character. To finish the game offers the same opportunities for both paying players or not paying players (the most important factor for a quality mmorpg). And although they delay to answer our tickets, all my tickets have been responded.
So if you ask me to evaluate the imc work in tree of savior, I would give a 8/10 grade for them. Let’s trust in their work, we waited so long for play this game, so now we must be patient to wait they solve all these problems.
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Thank you for replying Mr. Kim! Just your reply alone sparked hope for me to continue playing this game and will be more willing to bear with problems we are currently facing.right now.
As you can see, people are happy or at least a bit contented just by this single reply you made and people now understand on what are the issues you’re currently facing. This just goes to show that communicating with us players is very important and it would be best if the community managers were to be a bit more active.
Again thank you so much for replying!
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Honestly though: community managers are largely very unhelpful if they are just acting as messengers, it lures developers in to a situation where they can just claim ignorance on account of a lazy CM, for one. For two, it acts as an arbitrary “middle-man” obstruction in our communication to the devs.
Real community managers are given up to date information on core issues that they can address as they see fit on the forum. Actual in-depth information at their disposal.
As of yet, most of the community manager relations so far for ITOS has been “I’ll check with the devs” or “We’ll let the team know”. This is unsatisfactory and serves to have a way to placate the community rather than legitimately address real issues.
Keep your CM’s full of information they are at liberty to dole out on core important issues, giving them clearance to a deeper layer of knowledge, and then we’re getting somewhere.
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I actually totally agree with this, but it’s sad we rarely see it.
Swordman buff PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE !
Isn’t it awesome how people just copy A PART of a message… the part that, as incomplete as it is can prove other people wrong… instead of copying the WHOLE message that would give a totally different meaning to everything?
I’ll just copy it again myself as a whole… i’ll even “highlight” the part that changes the whole meaning of it for you:
"First, we would like to explain why we had devised the 3 month Exclusive Access plan.
The main concern we had with the Steam launch was whether we could provide a stable service upon release to a massive international audience.
There are numerous factors that can cause instability, but we anticipate that one of the main causes would be a higher concentration of players than we expected. Many unprecedented problems may affect the servers and creating waiting queues to counter this would merely cause inconvenience for everyone. Furthermore, intrusion of numerous bot accounts would also bring detrimental results to the server and the community.
We thought that the best way to provide a much more pleasant and stable gaming environment would be to estimate the approximate amount of players before the massive international release. This would prepare us to respond ideally as we gradually increase the player base.
As such, we decided that launching different types of Founder’s Pack sequentially would be the most realistic option after researching other cases in the past. However, we thought that Founder’s Pack purchasers for other games were not receiving sufficient benefits from the Early Access. Thus, we decided to increase the Early Access period. This decision would also allow us to have enough time to stabilize the servers and adapt to international service before opening up to the mass public."
Let me repeat it again:
“WE THOUGH THAT FOUNDER’S PACK PURCHASERS FROM OTHER GAMES WERE NOT RECEIVING SUFFICIENT BENEFITS - THUS WE DECIDED TO INCREASE THE EARLY ACCESS PERIOD”
Do you want a translation of it? here you go: “when we planned an headstart for the game because of the server issues that we aknoledge there are we planned a much shorter time… but after considering that we wanted the founders to have more benefits compared to other players, we decided to make the headstart three months”.
It can’t be clearer then this… of course they knew about the server issues but they made it EXTREMLY clear that the three months of headstart were to give founders more benefits and not for the server issues… and they even managed to write that “they INCREASED it” making it clear that the original plan was to have a much shorter headstart time and that the time was “increased” compared to the original amount of time… and they did know about the server issue even before of that.
So nope sorry… what they did was say that “the servers have issues” followed by “we needed a much shorter time to solve them but we increased the time to give more advantages to the founders”.
They need 3 months to solve server problems? then they write “we need 3 months more to solve server problems”… not “we increased the headstart time to three months to give more benefits to the founders”.
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Don’t even.
Don’t. Even.
D o n ’ t . E v e n .
i wanna dual wield 2 bananas as a c1 fencer
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I just really want a short spawn time >_> + server stability
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Spawns need revision for sure. Tenet Garden is the example of how the spawn system in this game works and it’s horrendous.
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So from what I can tell is, that you are fearing not to get enough money out of the whole situation the game is in right now.
I can fully understand why the community manager quit. (Might also be because of …well I mean your name has ‘‘kim’’ in it right? not to go into detail here)
People who go along with your words now, are simply naive and are definitely greenhorns.
Good job on that part. But If I was in your place @hkkim, I would’ve waited to post something like this for another month or two.
That way you might have gotten a chance to milk us even more.
IMC is trash and whoever says anything different, hasnt been on beta.
I am not really aware of how the korean version is doing, but from what I’ve heard is, it is already dying out.
The same is now happening to the western version.
Just take a look at the steam charts which is clearly proving this point.
The game had the most player base at the first day of ‘‘founders servers’’ (Rip off servers to be precise)
And roughly one month ongoing.
Now the game got free to play even, and the player base did not even increase / got higher than rip off servers were.
And it will be decreasing more and more over the upcoming months.
The question is of course why it is happening.
First of all it is because IMC has proven way back in the past on beta and even on the korean version it seems, that they are incapable of managing stable servers.
Second of all it is because IMC isn’t capable of fixing a lot of major bugs which should be fixed as soon as possible.
Third of all it might even be because of the major lags in towns or around field bosses.
If 20+ people start to fight a field boss, the game is starting to lag so horrible, it isn’t even funny.
And the system requirements you state are bullsh*t.
It does not matter if you run a 20 core processor, since this game only supports single core in the first place.
It also won’t make a big difference if you run the single core at 4,5ghz or 2ghz.
The lags are real and will remain real.
So the first thing you should have done if you truly loved this game, you should have developed the game for the time we are living in and not for a time like 1999 - 2005
And trust me dude, you earn more money from a working, stable game than from a game which lags nonstop even on mid to high end machines.
Also when the rip off servers opened, there were the same bugs happening as we had on beta.
There were market issues (suddenly items which decide to disappear) and more.
There were dungeon issues (entering a dungeon) even now on certain dungeons / instances it exists (Saalus Convent).
You are still able to modify / mess around with the lua scripts.
Surely the extreme modifications were fixed such as getting endless of lv. X cards but not everything at all.
Server stability issues which happened on beta a lot and happened on the rip off servers we paid for as well.
There are a lot of ‘‘minor’’ bugs as well which would let you lose interest in playing the game anymore.
I have a couple on my mind but this isn’t the point now.
About the DLC thing.
Since you have gotten quite some money out of the founders ehh…Excuse me I meant rip off servers, you could have used some of it to hire people who just implement a item shop with capabilities of buying TP with real money.
Do not blame steam for any of this. Other devs using steam are also able to have it working. Example would be Trove or Smite with a proper system.
Easy fast and smooth.
Just play with open cards dude. You are just whining cause you fear about your money source will be depleted and the amount you earned from all of this isn’t enough compared to the developement cost.
And I definitely have the right to talk this way, because I am one who also paid you for at least two months of food.
I could have fed a whole kindergarten in africa with all that money.
Just saying.
Anyways the point is that IF you seriously wanted to have a smooth game experience, a nice enjoyable community, you should’ve communicated with us properly way back in the beta already.
A lot of us have / had a lot of great ideas to improve things, reported a lot of major bugs which didn’t get attention and much more.
Also lot of us love the game itself for real. The artwork, the classes, the atmosphere and last but not least the epic music.
And I loved this game as well ever since beta and only spent money because I expected the game to work after beta.
Because a full released game SHOULD NOT have such huge issues as this one. (No game is bug free that’s certain. But like I say they aren’t all minor issues on Tree of Savior).
So sh*tstorm me all you like guys it won’t change my opinion and my facts as well as reality.
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