Tree of Savior Forum

IMC Hates ToS, Confirmed

General Discussion
#1

How else can you explain these weekly maintenances? Take a look at the important highlights from the past month of patches.

June 7

  • Companions will now look in the same direction as your character when close by, and face towards your character when far away.

May 31

  • The Yellow Gazing Golem icon will now appear as intended (Adventure Journal)

May 24

  • Included new loading images

May 17

  • Fixed the problem of expressions not being printed after getting on and off of a companion.

Not to mention this is the only game I’ve EVER played that when I buy an item from cash shop, I DON’T RECEIVE IT LOL. Still waiting on that btw, after several days. But fear not, they give a nice reply stating that they are already looking into it. Oh wait, this is like the same answer I’ve heard in the past 10 tickets I’ve sent concerning DIFFERENT ISSUES. (we’re looking into this, we don’t know anything wait for future updates, etc. etc.) No real answers. No progress. No customer service.

I’ve listed the ACTUAL patch notes that they WOULD give us if they didn’t HATE ToS.

June 7

  • Team Battle League has been implemented.

May 31

  • TP is now purchasable, and REDEEMABLE (we won’t steal your money). Stat reset potion has been added to TP shop.

May 24

  • We’ve fired our online support android, and hired a human being who is capable of giving concrete answers and dedicated to assisting customers.

May 17

  • Server transfers are no longer taboo. We realize that every other game ever created EVER for INFINITY EVER, has these. We copied their ways but it was hard. They are available to purchase for $10.
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#2

Yeah they must have either a very inexperienced programmer working for them or an experienced programmer who got handed really horrible code to work with if he/she can only fix/change like 2 things a month lol.

Programming can be difficult, sure, but if you’re skilled and have been working with the code for over a year like these programmers have been, they shouldn’t need a month to make like 2-3 changes to the game.

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#3

I think it’s unfair to say that IMC hates ToS. It’s Kim Hakkyu’s dream project and he certainly cares a lot about it and they are working hard on fixing the most important issues, it just takes time.

You can be sure they are prioritizing fixing the issues with TP purchases. In fact, if you looked at the news again, many are actually about it.

The small fixes they throw in additionally are just things they could easily update without any merge conflicts.

You are completely ignoring the big things they added. Like optimizing the animation code for less lag, adding guild neutrality, halving the token price. They certainly prioritize things that are important to players.

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#4

I think people are always going to feel that whatever IMC does is not good enough until IMC actually addresses the major things about this game that make it unfun, tiring and annoying. Until those things are addressed, no one is going to feel like they are doing anything, even when they do do things.

That’s the problem here.

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#5

There are many issues though. It can take months to improve them all. What’s the point of complaining about it every day. And we don’t know which ones they even want to improve except for those that have been already acknowledged by them. And saying so mean things about IMC certainly doesn’t encourage them to do anything for us. It will just demotivate them.

#6

Unfortunately it’s part of the gaming industry. You quite literally need thick skin if you want to get into this industry. If you are going to cry and get demotivated by criticism and angry consumers it’s best to choose another career.

I know I sound like an as-shole saying that but it’s an absolute fact and a reality. No amount of trying to talk reasonable or calm is going to stop angry mob gamers from doing what you’re seeing on these forums if the company isn’t making proper choices and, hell, even if the company is making proper choices you will only have a “majority” of positive posts but the hate will still exist anyways, just not as bad lol.

#7

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

#8

Maybe they do it like how other game companies are doing?

Manpower not enough since the game has been released and the “boosted manpower” during development are either axed/shifted to other projects?

#9

From where would moar people originate? I did not find the country of Moar on wikipedia D:

I always hear the people are spectacular at everything though.

#10

That’s what happened with FFXIV, it’s why Heavensward has been such a letdown to the gamers. I even unsubbed 5 months after that expansion was released. Things really went downhill.

I see 2 choices for IMC right now:

  1. Get things done faster and more efficiently with less bugs.
  2. Overwhelming majority of gamers move on the next set of games to be released and Tree of Savior is nothing more than a memory of what could have been to them.
#11

Unfortunately it’s part of the gaming industry. You quite literally need
thick skin if you want to get into this industry. If you are going to
cry and get demotivated by criticism and angry consumers it’s best to
choose another career.

Humans aren’t that strong. It is a big issue for all game developers.

You might be interested reading for example this article: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.de/2014/02/why-indie-developers-go-insane.html

#12

At this point, I would like to see the balance changes from the current ktos implemented as soon as possible. Some of those changes are super game changing for certain classes and builds, and would go a long way in maintaining interests in the game for many players.

#13

I’m speaking from experience Rya. I was part of the PR and a programmer for a game project in the past. I watched and replied to an endless stream of gamers btching and moaning about everything and no matter what you gave them more people took their place to btch about something else.

Except it didn’t bother me. It is what it is.

#14

You must be pretty strong then if it didn’t bother you, because many game developers suffer heavy under it.

#15

You don’t sit around and focus on it every day. You give everything a quick read through like once a week, if that, toss a reply to the person’s post with the most constructive criticism and with the most consumer likes every now and then so people know you’re doing something and you focus on your job instead.

That’s really what it looks like IMC is doing here.

#16

That’s what do on the outside. But I’m talking about your inner feeling. If you read criticism on your game even if you try your hardest, you start losing to have fun making it and eventually don’t wanna work on it at all anymore, even if you can still be strong to the outside and force you to keep working on it.

#17

Depends on how emotionally involved you get in the project. AAA companies treat it all like business but an Indie Dev is usually motivated by passion and that leads to feelings of sadness and self-loathing when they release their dream game only for the consumer market to take a crap all over everything they did over every little detail.

I don’t usually get emotionally attached to a project as a programmer but I can understand how a game designer / artist / writer could get that way. It’s actually a better practice to hire at least one person to just sift through the forum community and relay messages back to the development team so that they aren’t forced to sift through vitriol and cancer every day by entitled gamers who have no idea what they even want.

I usually suggest to anyone who wants to make games to not get too attached to the project and to basically, “Brace yourself” on release. I work very fast as a programmer which is why I keep criticizing these tiny patches. After a year I would know the code of the project really well if I was working on it 8-5 5 days a week for a whole year. I feel like poor management decisions are slowing everything down to be honest.

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#18

There will always be naysayers and people who are unhappy no matter what the game developer does. Can’t satisfy everyone as each and every player has different preferences and outlook to things. But I can say it is really hard to sift through all the hate comments and still emerge unaffected by them. Can feel the hardship of game devs even though I’m in another sector of the IT industry.

#19

We are talking about IMC here. A company where the CEO himself is game designer and lead programmer. You can be sure that it’s only a small company where everybody actually cares a lot about the project.

Also I’m not sure if you worked on an MMORPG, but the code complexity in one in usually a lot higher than your usual RPG. Also don’t forget that kToS and iToS have two different code bases, so they need to manually merge all the changes from kToS to iToS. Probably means a lot of effort to resolve those conflicts, but at least it allows them to address issues from international players (whereas other companies just copy whatever Korean servers get and international voices are pretty much ignored).

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#20

Has nothing to do with the code complexity. Code is code, you get handed something, interpret it and work it into your project. But yeah, whenever they need to bring something from Korea to here, they need to basically translate everything from the code to the textual information they are giving us in the game to the voice acting (at some points). Then when all is said and done they need to apply the netcode to everything new they just added and then run internal testing to at least TRY to give us a non-buggy patch release.

I’m also sure that Nexon has some sort of a contract agreement with IMC about how fast they are allowed to give iToS releases compared to kToS keeping kToS ahead of us by a year or longer artificially. (Poor business decisions as I’ve suggested already).

It also doesn’t help that half the things the players here are annoyed with and upset about are also in the kToS game like the trade restrictions and such. Those are things that are not going to go away anytime soon, in fact they will likely be here for years to come. (Also falling under poor business decisions).

This is part of the criticism by some people calling ToS a ‘cash grab’. That term means any company releasing a half as-sed project, using PR and slow releases to keep enough people paying while you delegate your staff to newer projects keeping the older projects at bare minimum production costs. (At this point, without proof, it’s merely speculation and conspiracies)

So with all of this in mind, do you remain optimistic? Do you think IMC is working too slow regardless of any ‘excuses’ on their behalf? Do you think a small company should be afforded protection from harsh criticism even if they take years to get anything done?

I’m not really a fan of business politics as you can probably tell. Certain kinds of business politics tend to turn anything that could have been ‘great’ into something worthy of my toilet and a flush no matter how amazing the artists/musicians/programmers are. And free to play MMORPGs seem to be riddled of bad business politics.

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