ofc I value firsts. Even though we take a lot of info from ktos, people admire first clears and all the theorycrafting and testing. But that’s only taking account of 1%, maybe even less, of the players. That’s why there was so much debate over the inital founders system, but a game should emulate at least some bit of adventure and give intrigue to even people who joined the game late. Unless a game can update fast enough to keep up with what should be a healthy amount of new players (which is impossible, esp for an f2p), available content shouldn’t be tedious, boring, and almost entirely predictable, even to someone like me who basically only looked at a guide (excluding datamined drop lists) once and struck lucky with making a linkchrono during founders. Telling people “ohh you’re still in tutorial mode” doesn’t help make anything more exciting.
By “knowing”, i mean what to expect next, in the moment. What is there to expect for 280 levels? running daily saalus, daily missions, daily lower level dungeons, and uhhh putting points into a single stat + the complementary gem (which takes even more tedious farming)…dude man, idk about you, but it’s so boring I eventually stop playing the game for long periods of time without even realizing I quit.
It’d be incredibly cool if everyone put their all into being the top player, but if you expect every player, all from varying backgrounds and varying schedules, to expend enough time and energy to all that unfun grinding and unrewarding farming, it just doesn’t work out well. I like high caps, I like the idea that effort leads to pride in a a character. I like mmos where people look at geared and high level characters and think “whoa, cool, I’d like to be like that”. I like people so famous in a community, they’re recognized outside the game. But the process is so mind-numbingly boring, and ET excluded, generally skillless unless you count mdef stacking as skill. the world somehow manages to be unexciting even though it’s generally beautiful. I don’t mean to make the game completely casual, I mean to make the midgame portions of it not so awful, and the endgame content varied.
I guess you can argue that this is the nature of most mmos, but imo, tos does it worse. At first, I figured that the game was just newborn and short on content, and that it would morph over time to a richer experience. it didn’t, lmao.
also you’re definitely right, a huge component of an mmo is socializing and this game makes it easy to hate people, and pretty much has one of the most annoying communities I’ve seen. thing is, i guess devs don’t see much money in making better social aspects. i’ve requested a buddy chat, benefits for non-matchmaking parties, etc. since the beginning of time tbh and I havent even gotten so much as a response. Plus, the community likes to split themselves into two and argue to death every time something new happens, so I suppose they’re not too eager to change much.
tl;dr: unga bunga teachers always tell you to make your strongest paragraph first and last
