I’ll put a TL;DR at the bottom. Just ctrl+f to find it if you want to skip all of this.
I know. I’m almost ashamed to admit it. I just realized while reading through the myriad of flaming posts and the legitimate ones as well, that I can’t agree with the majority of what I keep seeing in these threads. That the game is totally broken or that the game is dying because a shareholder decided to bail.
I will start with that first one. We don’t know why hanabisoft is selling their shares. No article I have read has stated anything other than they are wanting funds to put into a new development. That doesn’t mean the game is dying. That means they think they can get a nice profit off of this sale to fund something else that they want to take a gamble on.
Populations in MMOS always die off in the first few weeks from the initial launch with only a few rare exceptions. Think of every release you’ve ever played. Ever. There is an influx in the first few days of players who were hyped up and thought the game was the X greatest game of X genre and played for 5 minutes and then decided they hated it.
They then go and cry about how much the game sucks. Flame the devs, the publishers, the lead artist’s cousin’s nephews son and in general act like they don’t have two brain cells to rub together. We are seeing a lot of this mixed in with legitimate complaints and justified anger.
IMC has not made the greatest choices with deciding how to handle all of the vastly differing community complaints. The actual amount of players from the start was higher than expected and they were not prepared–we were the ones who demanded that the game get released in a much different manner than planned. WE were the ones. The players. Not IMC. US.
And we need to acknowledge that some of the current situation is related to rushing and pushing the game out sooner than was planned. The plan had been to do full launch on June 10th if I remember correctly.
All this crap we’re complaining about as a whole might have been addressed before the game was available to everyone. Please think about this for a moment.
Plus, frankly–from reading the forums and reviews it’s a wonder we’re getting any new players because of how much vitriol there is stemming butthurt and not valid complaints. Or from people who seem to have trouble using google.
YES there are a lot of problems. IMC is not a publisher. Nexon is not our publisher (I’ve seen this a lot in threads lately). IMC is the developing company of our game. The recent patch is a great example of how people aren’t taking time to actually read what they are telling us.
The optimization patch–
there are still some problems need to be optimized
This isn’t the end of the optimization. A lot of these thing were done to be a temp fix while they go back and fix the bigger problems.
OR to put it more simply
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
They are not done fixing things, it takes time to find the issues at hand especially considering some of it has to do with individual PC builds. My desktop is able to play the game. Barely. It’s an old gaming pc that’s outdated by my laptop.
My laptop runs this game at a steady 85-90fps. No changing the settings or modding anything(and there are a couple of super easy ways to up your framerate if you modify your settings) and I consider that pretty good for this game with all the issues it has currently. Especially since this is a laptop. My ping is also 22. Sometimes it’s only 12.
Does this mean that the game is perfect and all of those who are complaining about performance issues are just stupid? No. It means I have a better machine than they do for this specific title.
Anyway, onto the fangirling.
This game is beautiful in a classic way. It reminds me of games like Odin Sphere that pay homage to a nostalgic style while reinventing them. This game has so many things that a lot of players are ignoring or simply not finding.
There are random tomes of lore lying around field maps that tell you about the history of the game.
There are minigames in maps like nevellet quarry 2nd floor.
There are so many hidden things. There are quests and items for them that only spawn under certain conditions. The flow of grind vs questing if is nice because every so many levels there are maps/dungeons where you can go to grind to your heart’s content if you don’t feel like questing.
There are enough quests, at least in the earliest stages, to take you up to a point where you character has enough skills to make grinding enjoyable.
There is solo content.
There is group content.
There is PvP that is broken but fun from what my friends keep saying.
There is rankings based on exploring for those of us who like to do more than kill.
There’s crafting for all classes and crafting classes.
You can build an auto attack tank wizard who debuffs/CC/whatever else you want.
And the game isn’t even half finished yet.
So yeah, I’m a fan of ToS. It’s suffering some serious growing pains, I’d be a moron to deny that. But no good game ever came to us perfect. They became great games. Over time. With effort. With feedback and with love. From the community and from the devs.
TL;DR people need to take some time to actually explore more than grinding and questing before they say the game has nothing to offer and learn to thoroughly read the dev posts before bitching that the game is dying and that IMC doesn’t care.
Note: Half-finished in the sense that there are plans for much more content, not that what is here now is half-assed. Nor do I believe the game was really ready for the full release. It’s full of problems. I am in no way blind nor denying that. It doesn’t change the fact that I love this game and am actually quite happy with many of the positive things I have seen from IMC. They aren’t perfect but they are trying and that’s a lot more than many, many companies do.
