Reddit seems to think so.
http://i.imgur.com/dLzV0Lg.jpg
If you look at the month the real fall out started happening with the player base, it lines up with the arrival of the team cutscene bug which locks team mates into place and doesn’t let them do anything when a team mate starts up a quest event.
If IMC could fix this ONE bug. Just this ONE. We may see a dramatic halt in the population hemorrhaging going on atm.
ITOS is full of bugs and restrictions. I doubt that the party bug is the sole reason why we had a massive drop off population last june.
You say that as if KTOS isn’t. Did they fix all these issues already in the KR version?
The party cutscene bug is just one reason.
Lets sum up some…
Channel crashing, +xx equip without potential loss, effed up pvp, fps issues, instance capacity issues, anti-rmt that is actually anti-player, bots, toxic company…
There should be more, but im too lazy to remember all of them, only that IMC is to blame for the misery.
If you want more detail, go through posts of
@IMCisGreedy
I’m not sure about KTOS but their recent server merge is a dead give away about the state of TOS there. Besides, even without the bugs, the game still has a ton of problems that turns a lot of players off.
If anyone starts the game with friends, it’s pretty much a guarantee that they will quit right away. Especially once they see that this bug has been running for over a month with no answers.
It’s a goddamn MMO where you can’t quest together in a party. Do you know how ludicrous that is? But they do not care at all. I don’t think iTOS is even staffed by humans anymore.
This should have been a top priority hotfix, but instead we got this:
All in all, IMC underestimated the importance of game polish. Many games are “released” at beta, but this game might not even pass for a beta.
There’s also a couple of really fatal decisions they made, one of it was placing too much emphasis on the main quest. The main quest line is really terrible for party play, because even if you are off by just 1 quest, you will have to wait for your friend to catch up. This means that you will make a friend today, but tomorrow, you’ll be at different levels of progression and you can’t play with him/her anymore.
IMC was thinking people would just form random parties on the fly with the suggested party tool. But that’s not how social ties form. And randoms will always be randoms and never match up to a friend that you enjoy playing with - but this aspect of game play is restricted. IMC did not give enough tools and activity that is more party friendly ouside of the main quest line. Also level restrictions & leeching prevention like you could in RO means that there’s no way to compensate and help your fiend catch up (which was a huge thing in friendship building).
To me, this may be the no. 1 reason why there’s no player retention - most of us can’t form meaningful bonds with each other, since friendship generally forms over a period of playing together. I have made like 5 friends over my short period of playing here, and none of them I was able to form meaningful bonds with because they either progressed too quickly or too slowly.
The other fatal design decision was that the content is not difficult enough. (at low levels at least, I never got to high enough level, but with the amount of hours put in I think my point is still valid) An easy content and classes with little flaws makes solo-ing the default way to play. People only party up when a content is impossible to solo. That encourages team play, and there’s too little of that in ToS. You don’t need a healer, you don’t need a support CC’er, you don’t need a tank. Don’t get me wrong, they would be nice to have but you don’t absolutely need them to progress. Some would argue that high levels do require this but such design should be built in from level 1, and made part of the gaming experience because you want to be making friends from level 1 - as it is the biggest attraction of any MMO world.
Finally, it also has a great art team and music team, but seriously… they are held back hard by the game design & game engine / code department.
I think so, the party bug might have something to do with the population drop, recently i have invited friends to play TOS but as soon as they realize the party bug they just stopped playing. i asked why and they said that they are having a hard time party-ing and solo grinding is not fun for them.
Does anyone know how to tag the mods/devs so we can maybe get some input from them on this?
You can tag them all you want, but you will not get responses.
In case you still want to do it, add @ in front of a staff member account name.
It’s simpler than you think.
People joined this game because it leaned heavily on the RO community.
People joined the game because of the freedom to build characters and theory crafting.
People joined because of the art and music.
Two months in they realized this game was poor. Very poor. In every aspect. There was a post talking about how much people loved the concept but IMC failed to deliver a playable game.
IMC responds saying fixes are coming soon.
People wait for fixes
Fixes do nothing to fix the problems, but instead create more problems.
People leave because they realize IMC can’t deliver. Even if IMC was giving it 110% of their efforts, they don’t have the competence to run and manage a game.
All games lose players, but only truly terrible games like FF14, The Division, and ToS can manage to take a loyal, excited player base, and have sub 10% retention.
Most successful games have 40-60%
I’d really like to hear their side of the story first before just calling this game a wash and moving on.
Because maybe it’s not entirely their fault. It could be nexon holding them back. It could be them being really under staffed and they’re trying to fix it, it could be personal issues in the work place making it so nothing gets done, it could be waiting on funding…
It could be alotta ■■■■. and I’d really like to hear their story, since they’ve got a genuinely fun game here. Just… it’s SUPER buggy, to the point of being unplayable.
A lot of us would love to hear that story too. But I just don’t see Kim Hakkyu sharing it to the whole community at this point. Especially when there’s still sh*t on the fan.
I’m sure it’s a good story though, and lot of unintended consequences, oversights, mistakes, plain stupidity, and a lot of sweat and tears.
He just visited the forums 2 days ago.
He still cares about the game just dunno what to say us. 
Whats his forum name. I want to tag him in this and see if a heartfelt plea to him could get him to tell us some of the story of whats going on, and just let us know that this is just a rough patch… and not how it’s always gonna be
For me it is indifferent, i do not quest in party.
My cousin and his girlfriend stopped playing because of that, they only play together.
Obviously some people left the game because of that.
I think so. Anecdotally, most of my friends stopped playing it because they’re unable to play together.
There are other bugs, but none that actually hinder play this badly.
At this point I don’t even blame the developers, if your game manages to not have one of the basic requirements (partying) of the MMO genre, and yet still manages to rack in a 7000 player average who throw money at you, why even bother, maybe they like it this way?
Wouldn’t be surprised if it became a golden standard for western releases of korean games as well.
well, that’s more of a symptom of modern day gaming where people don’t like to talk or interact with others unless they need something. besides the random clerics that give me blessing, i only spoke with 1 person outside of a dungeon.
i remember the days in conquer online 1.0 where some random guy may walk past me, then come back when he realized someone was there, speak to me for a couple minutes, then try to kill me, and i might be standing over his corpse wondering what just happened.
you don’t need groups to play, but it is very annoying to those of us who want to invite friends over to play.
