Mega Feedback thread: Game Systems are too Overwhelming

[Nubanuba]

Alright, this is something that I wanted to talk about for some time but didn’t have the will to write it all down, but as a new, exploitable, system is being added to the game (the Arts system) I think it is time to make this thread in hopes that it somehow reaches the designers of the game.

My point here is simple: Tree of Savior has an overwhelming amount of systems that push new players away after they’ve dived into it a little.
I mean, things couldn’t get much different, could they? We have such a enormous amount of systems that any new player will see the time it takes to get started into each and every one of these systems, feel overwhelmed and leave the game because there is absolutely no way that player can keep up with everything.

Sure, for us, old players, that isn’t really a problem: we have been playing the game for long periods of time, most of us take a break here and there but we, most of the times, keep a good amount of currency (blessed shards, silver, magic stones, legend cards etc) on our accounts so we can buy “the new stuff” when we come back.
Well, what happens to new players is that they come in, and they don’t see those systems in steps, they see it all at once:

• I have to buy legend gear.
• I have to enhance it.
• I have to transcend it.
• I have to farm uniques and then extract ichor.
• I have to ichor the legend gear.
• I have to gem it.
• I have to awaken it.
• I have to enchant it.
• I have to (most likely) buy more enchants, more awakenings, more golden anvil or gear (since chances of gear “spoiling” is high) etc since whatever I get first willl likely be bad.
• I have to farm set bonus.
• I have to farm boss cards.
• I have to farm Legend acessories.
• I have to get legend cards.
• I have to get a seal.
• I have to upgrade legend cards.
• I have to upgrade seal.
• I have to get billions of attribute points.
• I have to (now) farm arts.
• I have to get even more atribute points for Arts.

and all of this won’t be seen as steps, they’ll be seen all at once, and most of these things are farms that take months for you to obtain, the general feeling a player has when he sees someone strong is “it’ll take me months, maybe years, to be close to this”
Now sure, you can get semi-decent stuff halfway through, but the game does a very good job at leaving the feeling that the more you get in terms of progression, the more you have to progress to feel satisfied. Sure this is awesome to incentivize whales to buy TP Shop items, but in general it pushes players away which end up pushing the whales away too (what point is there to being an OP whale if theres noone to show off to?)
This isn’t even a thread I am doing for myself, as I have a lot of stuff in the game, but adding more long-farm extreme-RNG-based systems such as the new Arts system is a flaw, and we all know they’re only being added so Selection boxes can be sold in the Leticia’s shop.
Most of these systems only exist so stuff can be sold in leticia’s cube anyway, I’d even say EVERY one of these systems only exist so “a new form of skipping the grind” can be created.
I even know a couple of players personally that quit the game after their boruta seal failed to upgrade to lvl 3. I mean why add a restrictive random % chance for a player to randomly lose 1 billion worth of silver in mats for no reason at all other than to sell something in the future to ignore that chance? You know whats worse? Is that some of these players even could afford to lose 1 billion silver and still not be that much hurt economically in the game, but its moments like these that “click” for the person: This game isn’t worth playing. You randomly lose millions of silver trying to extract ichor, trying to enhance items and so onwards, this happens all day and these things are just made to make players feel frustrated, nothing else.

I think its time to review these systems and focus on making the game more fun, as more people playing means you’ll get more players and therefore more whales. Right now the game is just filled with redundant powercreep systems that do nothing but widen the gap between player power, thus pushing potential newcomers away.

[Lil_Puddin]

I found it clunky and tedious. But it was easy to understand once I figured it all out.

The terms they use are also not so great. And the different ways of accessing the systems is where the real problem lies. “Sit down to access this content instead of just clicking something on the UI or character info UI. You need different types of material to perform the same action on different types of equipment instead of just changing the number requires. You need different types of items to craft or different types of materials for the same class.”

In games like MS2 or DFO, you basically just need 2 resources to upgrade any type of gear or recalculate added stats. If those games had the card/gem system, they’d probably just combine card+gem enhancement (EXP) items into 1 resource. The less types of resources required for character improvement, the better.

Then there’s skill usage… In DFO, skills that require resources - which are all powerful skills - a single type of resource is needed. Clear cube fragments. 1-5 fragments are used per skill. They can be traded to any class and are universally useful regardless of the character you play. They are easy to obtain and only cost money if you choose to buy them from other players. In ToS it’s easy to get the materials, but they are obtained from NPCs and are generally only useful for 1 or a small amount of classes. They also cost money, albeit a low amount, and usually cannot be farmed (reasonably). Not all classes need special resources to use skills. It’s just so extra/clunky for no real reason.

[Winterwood]

TS really nailed it. One thing that pisses of new, returning or event current players is the sheer amount of character upgrading they have to do just to be on par with the latest trends. Imagine all the time, effort and resources one needs for just one character. Not to mention that we have to periodically change some classes in our build in order to be relevant - which sounds really bad not just because of the costumes (e.g. zealot, BM etc… i don’t want to do minesweeper on another char again) but also because of the upcoming arts system (we don’t know its transfer-ability yet).

But then again this is also not a unique thing in TOS. i have played other games wherein gearing and building started out as simple and then got very complicated as time goes on.

[Tankhime]

I think a big problem in general with everything here, is that it’s both very huge and thrown at you all at once. As with any game that basically starts at “max level”, you get bombarded with an intrusive amount of things to do all at once.

Everything on this list is barely even required at all until you’re around max level. Monsters even in CM are just laughably easy until then, there’s no midgame in this mmo at all.
That’s definitely going to force a feeling of overwhelming content, because you’re already avoiding the things that are available early on until they’re needed the most.
Another two problems imo is that there’s a huge amount of rng involved, and their way of teaching about most of these things ingame is… mediocre, at best…

I really shouldn’t preach my opinion in your thread, but:
If midgame actually had weight and endgame had less weight as far as progression goes (faaarrr stronger early game enemies, and far less rng in general), and these upgrades were eased in over time, it would balance out and not feel as overwhelming.

New players would be introduced to these things more slowly, allowing them to get more accustomed over time.

But it yain’t gonna happen. I can admit it’s a fairy tale idea. So much would have to be changed and added for it to work.
Some things at the end of pve to make it worth the ride, pvp along the way at lower levels for people that like that, etc… etc…

If anything, the other solutions would be to remove some of these systems, but players still won’t be happy with that because it means a loss in damage/other.

Or lessen the rng factors, but… lol like that’ll ever happen anyway.

[lastea]

This is what I mentioned in the survey as well.

Too many new systems being implemented within a short time frame that are huge time sinks and involve a lot of randomness in regards to rewards, which leads to frustration. At the same time, old systems are being forgotten, even though they could be very interesting from a theorycraft and gameplay standpoint, if updated regularly.

[kurth_corpuz]

too bad, the devs wont listen.

[Nubanuba]

I forgot to mention but they even increased the randomness/made most of these systems hard/longer for you to progress into them

[mathias_cronquist]

That’s one of the biggest problems in deed, there is no time to have fun, just to farm and RNG and whale and queue for unbalanced pvp that is almost inexistant

[Alkaid]

This same feeling has been in the back of my mind ever since Transcendence was introduced. I don’t play regularly, but have tried to keep up with updates as much as possible in hopes that the game would improve with time, and at one point some of the game design decisions felt so inconsistent I couldn’t be bothered to hope anymore. To make things worse, many times I’d check a patch announcement, only to see a new Leticia cube edition floating with (too) convenient rewards there.

[apolloagcaoili]

For starters, needs a rebuild in equipment system.

Too many equipment are ignored because they aren’t end game gear. It’s a shame because a lot of low level gears had nice effects, and we saw a lot of different variety in weapons before. Now everyone is rolling the same velkof, savinose and soon to be varna series, and it’s lame coz there’s no variety. Just make all equipment ichorable, so at least the legend items will have variety because of many ichor choices and it will keep you guessing what ichor the other players have

Also, give them all ‘growth’ properties (stats adjust to char level), so casuals can use the weapons they want without any need for ichor while also not terribly gimping themselves, and can have FUN without worrying too much about their endgame gear while they slowly try to figure that out

[Nubanuba]

back when I wrote this I didn’t even know we needed 150k+ atributes to be able to train the RNG Arts it probably took months for us to farm