Lately it seems like IMC is back to improving the game which gives me some hope to throw in suggestions for the game again because there are still some things lacking for real long time motivation.
The Situation
- It is, in my opinion, fun to go through the whole quest and storyline at least for the first time.
- Then you start gearing yourself, which is indeed unnecessarily nasty many times due to a lot of known reasons but these are problems which are in my opinion not that important at the moment. But gearing oneself should and is fun here and there so this is at least not a core problem for now.
- Then you reach the endgame and this is where the real problems begin.
The Endgame
In the end it only comes to 2 things in the endgame
- Fun
- Challenge
There are always different kinds of players but I am pretty sure that in the end it always comes down to these 2 topics and both are actually very lacking in the endgame when you are mostly done gearing your favorite character.
Fun
Typically having challenges is fun already but apart from this, believe me or not, there are people who actually just want to login after a day’s work and just want to have some fun. But what is there to enjoy actually?
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People enjoy getting something they like. Most if not all people enjoy getting something which means that sometimes just adding a token of gratitude adds some fun for players.
And this means events real ones. In my opinion we had good ones. Take the first day of the broken Thanksgiving event for example. I brought together people it was somehow fun. Ridiculous indeed but it kind of worked. Give people a reason to meet up and actually do something like building something or reaching milestones together which gives players something they like in return.
And god please no Talt because this makes people often unneccesarily sad. Progress stuff like Silver Anvils, Awakening Stones or gladly accepted I think or how about something completely different like parts for housing. -
Housing people have mentioned this here and there. In a cute game like this with really good artstyle it is nice to care for your own characters and build yourself something like your own location.
And the core concept is already here and by this I mean Guild Towers. Personally I mostly use my tower just for having a working teleport station as statues are annoying and often blocked by random people.
But what actually could be done is for example give the guild hangout means of customization which can be unlocked by doing guild missions and guild boss raids. This way the useless Talt reward could also be removed from guild missions. And imagine everytime the Guild leader “unlocks” (visits for the first time) a new dungeon, or the mission outpost, earth tower, saalus etc and through this gets the option to recruit this npc to the hangout such that people can easily queue from within the hangout and also just from the guild window. This shouldn’t be too difficult to add to the game especially given you can already queue TBL from everywhere - why not queue or enter dungeons the same way?
With this concept it leads to people forming groups/guilds or join existing ones which should be the core principle of an mmo.
I also see the downside of this as towns would lose many shops or afk players that at least gives it the picture of a filled game but I don’t think locations will completely die out this way because everyone without a guild will still gather there and might lead them to form new groups.
Challenge
I guess apart from the casuals who like to enjoy some fun many players are seeking challenges and also seeking and clearing those is fun again!
But there isn’t much. We have.
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Fantasy Library.
To be honest it’s fun to clear it one time and read the story behind it. It’s actually a very nice designed dungeon but in the end after doing it a few times the gameplay is boring and it’s completely unrewarding to do it.
Fantasy Library should be a progress dungeon because of the time based gear checks. That means you should get something to progress if your group is able to clear the dungeon. In my opinion a good and quick way to fix this would be to add silver and blessed shards to the regular boss drops and not to the cubes and add 315+ materials to the boss cubes.
Running 290 dungeon rushes for an hour is dead and stupid and this could be a good alternative. Like giving the first boss 200k silver drop and the second one 300k and both bosses drop a random amount of blessed shards.
Trust me, people would start looking for new groups to clear this dungeons which is imho really nice. -
Uphill defense.
Yep you read right. In my opinion this gamemode is one of the best additions the game had throughout the year !
But the first 25 levels are boring. What Uphill needs are difficulties selectable difficulties for different rewards. It’s mostly used to get Keista Potions and Gem Abrasive. I think it’s fine to keep these as rewards but how about increasing the rewards while removing all the useless trash (attox boxes, not useful potions, etc) when clearing a higher difficulty.
I mean we even have an Uphill Ranking. Would be nice if one could even get more Uphill points and PVP points for clearing higher difficulties.
Just multiple levels (which have to be unlocked one after another) and the higher the difficulty the more and stronger monsters spawn and also a higher rate of Bosses appearing because this is so much fun everytime it happens.
And then give drops and exp to the monsters and bosses. I guess drops and exp were removed because of problems but now that we have the multicore optimization it should be added. This would add so much fun and motivation to clear Uphill defense. Just please! @Staff_Yuri @Staff_Amy please hand this idea to the devs that would make my day.
Personally I would even clear it just for fun without rewards if the challenge is there and I am sure I am not the only one. Uphill is similar to Tower Defense, a game style which hasn’t died out for ages for a reason. -
Earth Tower.
Some might say this is the only endgame we have. At the moment that’s quite true because it’s the only real challenge with gear progression as reward there is. I won’t touch the class balance/damage problem here as it is a known problem that because of the system their isn’t much of a choice when it comes to classes for ET. But there is an important improvement:
Time. Challenging the Earth Tower is fun. But in my opinion 20 floors take too long. And I observe on Fedimian a huge increament in people going for higher ET floors and looking for parties to do so when the ET Tokens got ingame.
Simply the option to try to challenge new floors without having to redo (by then boring) floors people have done a dozen time already is fun, especially if people trying to do ET do not have a lot of time each day (after work for example).
Even if the devs think that tokens now would take away the challenge which is true. It would be a nice idea to have to option to select between 21/26/31/36 after having cleared 40 once meaning once you have proven to be able to clear ET you can freely select the floors for gear progression.
I think this would be a good deal. -
Guild Battles
I leave this one open for now until we see what comes next week. But take into consideration:
The server populations aren’t big. That’s fact. And the way the game engine works I guess it’s better this way. But this means that 15vs15 is far too much. So better change GvG to organized 5 vs 5. Like TBL but with the bigger GvG map and without random parties.
This way there will be competition at least more than before. It would also prevent big guilds from feeding through alt guilds are there will be more small guilds in the queue because even without 5 people you can go in with 4 without having a huge disadvantage like fighting 12 people as 4 which was the main point of small guilds to not even touch the GvG button.
