With the 2nd iCBT now having closed, I want to finally do my duty as a beta tester and actually give feedback. You know, the reason why IMC did all of this in the first place.
Something about me: After getting my beta key in one of the later waves, I joined on the Gabija server and played a swordsman to 200. Before various exploits became common knowledge. I did some boss hunting, some mercenary missions and a few hidden quests. I saw most of the game content, I believe, and was often partied with various people and classes. I also have some experiences with other MMOs, RO 1, WoW and more.
Now, on to the actual content. First of all, I want to say that I really liked this game and enjoyed it to a great deal. Probably played it way too much, too. It is difficult for me to nail down what and why I liked this game. It is probably a mixture of, well, everything. The game principle being different from the āusualā MMOs today, the varied classes, the richness of the game world, the way you are encouraged to actually interact with the community ingame due to the lack of something disruptive like a raid/dungeon finder, probably more than a little RO nostalgia and more things I didnāt even mention.
Nonetheless, I have more than a few issues or areas I could see improvement in. It will probably sound overly critical or worse, but please keep in mind that I genuinely liked the game and think the developers have done a great job so far.
Issues I deem objectively important and disruptive to most people I met:
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The various injections/exploits and quite frankly. the whole vulnerability by keeping a lot of things client side. This needs to be made vastly more secure elseā¦ well, I donāt think Iāll have to point out how devastating it would be for the player base.
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The Market and vanishing itemsā¦ I can not overstate how vital fixing this is and making the market reliable and foolproof. Without a more or less solid ingame economy, no MMO can keep a decent player base interested, I believe. And as long as the market is a feature of the game, it needs to be fixed and made reliable. This has not happened during CBT, but honestly. Thatās fine. Itās CBT. I would be quite disappointed should these kind of issues persist in the next beta, though.
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The chat system. Currently, it is a big mess. Having it auto-scroll to the bottom with each new reply makes reading up on anything you missed ādifficultā. Whispering seems to be broken half the time. Party-/Whisper-chat getting wiped clean upon map/channel change is also annoying. Furthermore, Iād like to have a button that allows me to quickly reply to the last person that whispered me. I would also like to see a zone wide shout chat, and configurable chat tabs so that I can for example display whisper and party chat in one tab if I want.
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World Boss behaviour. Most world bosses, with the exception of Elleganos, simply ābreakā from time to time. Usually, when lots of people attack them. They simple stop moving and attacking, or only move and use fire pillar in the case of Necroventer. Necroventer especially has done that with only 3 people present. Naturally, this makes fighting world bosses less than challenging. Also, the spawn behaviour is often erratic. We had situations where a world boss did not spawn after itās regular 4h, but spawned after 8h instead. Sometimes, spawn seems to break completely especially for Elleganos. Then, channel crashes seem to interact oddly with world boss timers, too. I hope youāll find a solution for handling such happenings consistently and predictable else it might put quite some people off of boss hunting.
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Overall, stability, lag and performance hopefully get some improvement too. Especially the fight against Cerberus in the 190 dungeon who spawned a large number of adds was madeā¦ interesting, due to FPS drops or disconnects.
Things I subjectively disliked or had issues with:
This is all mostly subjective stuff, but I suppose it is also part of beta feedback. Some of the bugs reported here might be grounded in my hardware and operating system, but I believe to be above average equipped there.
(I-3770k, 32gb ram, Win7 Professional, GTX 680, 100/10 mbit up/download connection)
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I have been regularly experiencing major delays/freeze screens during equipment change, especially mid-combat. Most of the time simple opening the equipment or the char info window is enough to produce these.
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Iād really like the option to assign my controls and keys the way I want, but I suppose that is already part of future game builds. Or so I heard.
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Controls often feel clunky. I have never been able to manually switch targets by using āTABā. Not once.
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UI doesā¦ strange things. Activating a statue warp or speaking to an NPC often needs at least two tries. Another bug that was already reported, I believe.
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The monster behaviour isā¦well, not to my taste
This is entirely subjective of course, but monsters often seem half asleep, very slow and ponderous. This of course is part of the current āgame systemā I believe, but itās not really something I like. It does get somewhat better in the higher level areas we had access to, so kudos for that. -
some of the quests and areas seem to be disconnected or randomly scattered around. I got the impression that this was mostly due to missing content though.
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I do like some of the Hidden Quests but some of them seemed to random and inaccessible. For example, the Hidden Book in Mausoleum 4F. Only appearing at random times, times which also vary and are unpredictable (?) seems to be a bit much to me. Other quests seemed like a lot more work than they were worth. Gathering 300 Drake Horns for a +1 Str example.
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On the other hand, as far as rates or the balance of grind vs quest is concerned, I do believe that the exp we had in this beta would be significantly too fast for a released game, even before double exp got enabled. You often breeze too fast through zones and quest storylines for my liking. I also am in the strange position to actually like grinding. I am not saying all quests are bad and should be removed, but fewer, more meaningful quests with more memorable characters or storylines would be an improvement in my opinion.
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Class Feedback: I mostly feel comfortable with giving class feedback for the Peltasta and Hoplite classes. The Hoplite seems to be a solid class, shining against bosses and lacking somewhat in ānormalā gameplay. I wonāt even mention pvp, I have too little experience there and it doesnāt seem to be a finished system anyway.
What is a bit strange about the Hoplite, at least in current content, is that a shield is justā¦ not very interesting for it. An elemental dagger, and say, the Cafrisun armour set, are just such a big damage increase that they almost always seem preferable. Even during world boss fights, without any vit, I would feel comfortable equipping a dagger and low level leather armour and not fear for my survivability. I am not sure this working as intended. Another issue are the long CDs of the Hoplite; maybe giving him overheat on Pierce or shorter CDs can be considered.
The peltasta on the other handā¦ Peltasta 1 is āfineā. It offers some basic tanking tools, mostly, the ability to equip a shield and hold ācā. Swash buckling works decently. Guardian isā¦ entirely useless except for its attribute. Umbro blow is not a bad skill for its level, but seriously lacking compared to some of the tools other classes have available at this point of progression. (most obviously, Highlander of course)
High Guard isā¦ quite frankely, worse than useless. It offers miniscule benefits at higher levels and major disadvantages. The amount of block added is just not useful enough, the Umbro Blow attribute does not make up for all the damage you lose (yes, +330% on Umbro Blow is niceā¦ it still means all your other attacks and skills hit for barely noticeable damage). Actively using ācā to block damage or to just avoid attacks by moving is almost always superior to High Guard. This skill needs a serious buff or some reworking, maybe of the whole ātankingā/blocking system, in my opinion. It is also quite strange that Evasion seems to work against many magical attacks. But that is probably not working as intended.
At the moment, Peltasta circleās 2 and 3 seem like a waste.
- Game balance, Stats, scaling and classes. Theyā¦ honestly, feel unfinished and partly like place holders. The classes are varied and interesting, but in practice their abilities are often not very ādefiningā. The linear stat progression is not āexcitingā for a gamer. There might be reasons for it of course (easier balancing, for example). Still, something like treshold points were every x points of say, Str, you get a somewhat noticeable damage boost would āfeelā better. This is entirely subjective of course.
I am also not all that happy with the rumour about classes becoming āobsoleteā at higher rank, say, your starting circles in archer for example not having much effect on level 400+ or so. But quite honestly, that hardly seems to be true. Some early classes do seem to have abilities which probably can not fall of even in late game. For example, the full block Peltasta can use with ācā, or the āStabbingā of Hopliteās (if youāll count them as early circles). Other classes/skills seem to fall off hard.
Which brings me to the problem of purely additive damage from skills, and how that interacts with crit from dex, etc. Or how the damage and defense formulaās I believe this has been discussed at length in other threads in the forum, though. I merely want to state that, I, too, am not confident that this is a good mechanic.
Finally, the state of ātanksā and the āstaā stat in game isā¦ attrocious, at best. Quite frankly, for a swordsman at level 200, sta is not needed for any of the content. This includes tanking. I could leisurely tank the 190 or 200 dungeon without spending a single point on sta and still pull whole rooms of 20+ more enemies. I did use a shield for tanking, though. World Bosses were not overly dangerous to me either, even when not using a shield for the boss fights. Also, at the moment dungeons can be run entirely without a dedicated or even improvised tank. Maybe lowering swordsman base HP but increasing how much HP they gain for a point of sta would help. Also, Iād like a system where sta would actually offer some kind of damage mitigation, and not just only an increase of the HP pool. Of course, changes like those might require significant modifications of the game and its balance so I donāt know how realistic it is to expect any changes there.
Overall, I hope that the designers have some more plans here and just did not implement many of the things they are planning yet. From what Iāve seen so far, that seems quite likely and gives me good hopes for the future of ToS.
- As for the art style and BGMā¦ again, this is entirely subjective but still part of a proper feedback I guess. I did actually prefer the more anime-style graphics of Ragnarok Online for example and donāt care much for the somewhat āwesternā or more realistic seeming influences in ToS. Still, it is made well and with great care so I am far from actively disliking it. Regarding the BGM, Iā¦ honestly donāt know. Some of it is fine or even good, but some other just seems to ātechnoā for me, and I donāt like vocals in my BGMs at all, they break my immersion I guess. On the other hand, many people I spoke to really liked it so I am probably in the minority there.
Well, speak of wall of text. I feel for the poor community manager who might have to read all this in my broken english. Anyway, I want to once again point out that despite my plethora of issues, I did like this game. So it definitely has potential, at least for me. I also want to thank IMC for giving me the opportunity to test this and hope you people can find the time and energy (and well, money) to bring this game into the best possible state before release. However long that may take. Iād prefer a refined and finished product in a year over a slapdash release in a month, so to speak.
In this vein, I wish IMC and the Developer team best of luck with the game and hope Iāll be able to participate in the next test or an upcoming release and meet the many wonderful people I met ingame once again. We all had a great deal of fun, I believe. So thank you for your efforts, IMC.