Well, this isn’t my good bye, I’m not quitting. But I’m not playing as much anymore. I expected some core changes in IMC design philosophy, but those never come. So yeah
This is not a doom saying as well. The game won’t die that easily, it will have its loyal fans and might still be changed for the better.
Here goes nothing.
I won’t talk about usual stuff like visual or audio.
The game was designed to be really good at the start. If you pay enough attention, each map get a diverse group of mobs, each is weak to certain kinds of attack and strong against others. Mobs HP scales nicely with character power. Even the density is fine. It was good. WAS.
Mobs HP and power grows dramatically after the first 200 levels, for no reason. This creates “power creep”. If you don’t understand what that is, it is the case where damage and HP get inflated way past their starting level.
Maple Story suffers from the same issue, where the game started with 10k damage cap, and 250k HP boss. Now it has 100m damage cap and 250b HP boss. Yes, that is 10000 times more.
Currently, TOS start with around 50-100 damage attack and ending up with 50k-100k, which is 1000 times bloated.
Big number is good you say? I like big numbers too. However, that makes many early circles obsolete if they don’t provide independent utility. You don’t want to use earth wave or heavy shot at rank 7-8 content, because they are pointless. You want stuff like swift step, quick cast, pain barrier or safety zone. Those are not dependent on flat numbers.
Why is that bad? Because it limits the builds you can pick, it also limit the skills you want to use. I mean why use skills like steed charge or pistol shot when you know they won’t get any better?
Then to the next problem.
IMC likes the shutdown philosophy. Block shuts down physical attack. Flying shuts down magic circle. Plague doctor shuts down status effect. I can go on with the list.
But the bottom line is they want the game to be rock-scissor-paper, where rock always loses to paper, and always beats scissor.
It’s a nice concept where everyone is OP and no one is. However, there are a few flaws to that:
- PvE isn’t designed that way (not yet? or never? I don’t know). For example ET mobs are fire element, bye pyro. Homing magic mob = bye evasion char
- PvP is horrible, because you can’t choose your team mates, or your opponent. You can’t do crap if you are rock against paper.
- There are not enough players to fill the balance trinity. If there are fewer people play papers, rocks will dominate, and scissors will suffer. Then scissors will switch to rocks, and then whole game is just rocks vs rocks.
Replay-ability is also a problem.
I liked questing the first time I play. So many quests to do, so many stories to read, so many regions to explore.
I still like it the second time I play. I missed so many things on the first time. There are so many chests I can open now
And I still like it the third time. There are hidden bosses, hidden quests that I missed.
But on my 4th char, screw questing. Power leveling is much better. Why spend time on those bot-plagued fields when I can leech off a high level warlock?
The time spent vs exp ratio is all wrong with low level quests. If you do all quests it takes you 2-3 days to reach level 100. If you leech it takes you 6 hours.
And there’s no short cut, nor incentive to do quests as well.
IMC is trying to encourage people to play more characters by introducing team level bonus. Yet they are also trying to discourage people playing by character bound items, limited lodge slots, expensive attributes and the massive grind even at early levels. I mean you need to kill 1000 mobs to gain one level at 120, not even half way through the game. That isn’t right.
And then there’s this issue with game stat. Honestly, CON is the only useful stats. INT and STR are useless with new items and circles. SPR is only used by support clerics, and that is because they have nothing else to put stat on. Same goes for DEX
If IMC still wants to make STR/INT relevant, I can envision them doing the same thing as Maple Story: adding % bonus stat option to items (transcendent already add CON %), and they need big options to be even competing with weapon damage (I’m talking about 500% bonus). But that add more to the inflated damage problem as well.
Well, that’s the end of my random rambling.
Let’s hope for the best.
