People NEED something to compete over in PVE

[Awoooo]

One of the biggest problems i see, is that at the moment the only guild content we have its guild “missions” and “bosses” wich in all honesty are very boring and dissapointing, the rewards are so bad that its hard to care at all on doing them, the only good ones come at higher levels with the practo drop rate, but other than that there is no point on wasting time on them and also Im tired of the same reused bossees over and over again.

I agree.

Another issue with this is that the guilds at those higher levels are very demotivated. And absolutely nothing is in place to allow newer more motivated groups of newer players to catch up in their newer guilds.

IMO we need competitve guild raids. Actual guild raids with actual hard bosses and mechanics with a rank performance system and clear time rank, etc. On the other hand pvp content cant be denied since not all the people like PVE, a good game has to manage well both kinds of players, PVE and PVP ones and offer them fun stuff to do.

The last time we tried to bring this up to IMC (admittedly a long time ago) the response we got was that they had tried large guild raids in testing but it “wasn’t fun” and was too disorganised or messy to be enjoyable. Something along those lines, I’m paraphrasing.

I don’t think the PVP scene in tos will ever take off anymore. It was never very large even at the game’s peak. There is certainly a section of the community that enjoys it, but it’s only a tenth of the size of the section of the people that play for PVE. That’s to be expected though really, it’s the same sort of ratio as other MMOs.

[lagunarealm48]

I don’t think this can be solely blamed on the debuff, or even at all. This boss mafia you’re talking about wouldn’t have kept people interested for months given the same useless drops, you also have to take into consideration the population drop, you’re also from Fedimian. I guess the only way to kind of prove this is to wait until the new drops come out and see how the playerbase likes it.

[Nekorin]

Will just merge my post under your thread since they are both asking technicially the same thing. Sometimes I do wonder will these threads/posts like ours ever get shown to the developers or not but let’s just hope for the best.

In short the something in which @Awoooo has mentioned are goals. In MMOs, players often start the game with some sort of idea on what they would like to be or achieve in the game, besides to have fun with the time they allocate to the game. Perhaps be top in PVE or PVP, or to be the prettiest/cutest/coolest character in game with the best looking avatar, or be first to own some world item or such etc. That’s the overarching goal for the player. Then the player will look in the game for sub-goals to help propel him/her forward towards their own personal goal.

When 2 players or groups of players have similar goals, like being top or 1st to do “something”, it breeds competition. Alongside with goals, competition between players is what engage them to spend more time in the game. And more time = more chances to make more money for the game company.

This is what ToS is seriously lacking at the moment, providing goals and purposes for its players.

A goal can only be constituted as valid when there is something that can be gained from it, aka rewards. Rewards can come in the form of recognition, prestige, riches, bragging rights etc. In games the gains are usually given in the form of documented achievements, titles and game items, things that a player can use to set him/her apart from others.

Looking at ToS, there is very little form of documented achievement in the game. The highest earning player stats our npc oracle provides are bot/afk farmer invested due to necros and sorcerers. Monster hunting top 3 players are tucked so deep into the user interface that most of the players don’t even bother much about it since being in the top 3 provide no rewards and such.

Titles provide little or no difference since by default player names are off for most of the players to declog the screen. We only get to see some rare title every once when we happen to press Alt key to show player names and health.

Next is on items. I love it that in ToS there are numerous ways to set the player’s avatars apart. Things like costumes, headgears, weapons and offhands. But then, with the exception of weapons and equipment, the costumes and headgears are easily buyable with real life money or from the silver market.

Things which are easily achieved will often fall short in becoming an overall goal for players.

This includes other aspects of the game such as reaching max level, or completing the build. Since these both are achieved in a matter of days due to the generous compensation, buyable exp tomes and failure to see how shop buffs affect levelling, they are hardly considered as something that is a goal, or rather now, they are just a stepping stone to other goals.

---

So it boils down to weapons and equipment (items), which can be used as rewards for players for strive for. With good items as rewards, players will be willing to fight world bosses, farm for days and weeks, or traverse dangerous dungeons to get them. And this breeds competition should the item be really hard to get and is limited in nature since gaining the item itself would mean setting one apart from others.

Personally I do think that itemisation is one of the foundation pillars of what makes a great game from a mediocre one. This should be one of the key priorities of the game after the damage rework.

Let us look at the state of itemisation in ToS… hmmm.

[dogos]

I dont know in your server, but in mine there was never a “competition”. The bosses were monopolized by 2 guilds 24/7 (They are still monopolizing right now the “best” bosses), there was no strategy because they can come anytime and crash the channel to reset the timer. I think you ignore 90% of the playerbase who can only dream to be lucky and snipe a WB.
The removal of the debuff only means that the same people will just not need to change the char to get the next drop…

[pollitochikn]

Will just merge my post under your thread since they are both asking technicially the same thing. Sometimes I do wonder will these threads/posts like ours ever get shown to the developers or not but let’s just hope for the best.

I wonder the same… after the last Q&A some of my guildmates lost interest in the game when they read about the “sports” stuff, lots of them quited the game already and to be honest would be nice if they anounced realistic stuff that they are planing to implement, at least that would give us some hope.

[lokyfall]

i don’t have the energy to read what everyone else wrote [it’s 5 am] so just after reading your post.
the debuf has helped many people to participate on world bossing against guilds that hunt them down not letting other players ever getting the chance to experience that feature of the game.

as it is, i like it the way it is now [even so the competency is still sort of there, it just made it Harder for the competition to Overkill it against Regular players.

but i am not against a constructive idea on how to give an option to competitive guilds :o …
certainly not.
i also like the idea of giving Players a Reason to go world exploring and doing something in all maps in general for a good reason. since there are many maps the game never use again after just finishing the quest and exploring the map “per character.”

also… i remember a long time ago i wrote something about This on patch notch comments.i regret not saving what i wrote now, i still think it’s worth reading but i think nobody read it.
it was about 4 or 7 paragraphs long on how to make maps useful again.

[Adeodatusv2]

On the other hand pvp content cant be denied since not all the people like PVE, a good game has to manage well both kinds of players, PVE and PVP ones and offer them fun stuff to do.

A good game focuses on either one and leaves the other one in the dust.
It would be honestly better if there was no PVP content at all in TOS or just some free fun thing withoutout any spoils obtainable for participating.
Games that give out things/essential things for doing PVP are pretty badly designed if the primary focus is PVE.

PVP games should be battle games/team battles like e.g. Battlefield,Half-Life,Overwatch. Especially games with a story should not make the people with a common goal whack each other for any reason.

Competition is what makes games really bad in the first place. People will have easier or harder times depending on their Class/Level/gear, which makes competitive content highly unfair and unrewarding.

Unless IMC decides that every Class across one Rank (e.g. Priest has the same output as Krivis,Peltasta,Quarrelshooter,Pyromancer and so on) has the same possible DPS output, this competition will not be fair and a cruel thing to do to the players aside from the already enforced level 315 equipment wall/transcendence/anvil luck/Practonium RNG/etc.

Instead of competition to make the already very unfriendly atmosphere even nastier, I believe the game needs community collaboration content to create a better environment for every player and give everyone the oppurtunity to achieve something/partake in the achievement process.

[“Khemet, a tale in the desert” is/was a really good example of how a MMO game can work without competition and with community collaboration. You could learn and do everything by yourself, but it was also possible to make some of your achievements/buildings accessable to the community, e.g. if you crafted a board to dry tiles, you could give it to the society so everyone could use it to dry their tiles.

The goal of the game/season was to collaborate to fulfill the request of the Pharaoh.]

This should include everyone and not be focused on guilds/parties alone, as every single player is part of the community and needed to continue the game service.

[Awoooo]

I can’t speak for your server, but if your server is like that it’s because you’re disorganised and they’re organised. If you want to beat them, get organised.

Refusing to compete properly is the reason they win. They’re not magically better than you, they’re just organised.

Join or make guilds to properly compete. If other players are organised, grouped up, guilded, and working together better, they are playing the game better.

Competition is what makes games really bad in the first place.

@Adeodatusv2 I struggle to comprehend this argument at all. Beating other players of a game is the end goal of 99% of games, the exceptions being puzzle games like Jigsaws, Rubiks cubes, single player card games.

Competition is the point and reason people play almost any multiplayer game.

If there is no competition you can not expect players to perform any activity once they’ve defeated it once(got the reward).

There’s no point to making a jigsaw puzzle twice. There’s no point to beating a rubiks cube more than once. The only reason people might do that is because they’re competing for faster and faster speeds, which has turned those non-competitive solo games into a competition that has made them last forever and ever.

I’ll say it again. Making a jigsaw puzzle is fun and enjoyable once. If your rivals beat you at making that jigsaw puzzle however, defeating them is a challenge that can occur over and over and over again, where the reward is simply beating the other side, not the drops, not the challenge that you’ve already beaten many times before. This is the reason competitive pve is valuable. It continues to last.

Heck. People even used to compete in tos for story/game completion due to the adventure journal until everyone had multiple alt characters that they needed to put time into that weren’t contributing. Even the mundane task of crafting every item in the game to +10(or was it 5?) became competitive to get the points it gives.

Slowly but surely everything competitive in tos has crumbled away, and that means players have no reason to continue playing once they have done the challenge once and gotten the reward from it.

As for toxicity. The game mechanics aren’t going to change the personalities of the people on the servers. I’m really sorry that toxicity is an issue on whatever server you’re on, but that’s a product of the people playing on that server and won’t change. They will still be awful people. Fortunately on Fedi we’re blessed with everyone being incredibly nice. They won’t stop being nice because we have competition, because their personalities won’t magically change. They will play to win, but playing to win isn’t toxic. I really recommend just blocking toxic people.

[artemisgames01]

I hear black desert online is pretty competitive with open world pk.

[Awoooo]

Did I write something misleading that made you think the thread is about pvp? I apologise if that’s the case.

[xinronyr]

I personally don’t think competition should be IMC’s current focus, unless they make real raid content where items dropped are bound to account. Then, PvE groups could “compete” to see which group finishes their sets first.

[nfprivaron]

Just let’s wait for WB rewamp at least.
Totally agree with OP tho, there is no life in MMORPG without decent and harsh competition between guilds. And it’s more about not letting your enemy to get smth than even getting it yourself. But I would insist that PvE competitiveness by itself means nothing and absolutely useless. It should be a basis for PvP competitiveness. You hunt down WB, deprive anyone else from getting items from WB and then use this items to destroy your enemy in GvG/PvP. PvE for PvE is very silly. What will you do with all that items? Fap on them while sitting in Klaipeda? No, you want to burn and pillage your foe. So, in my opinion, PvE competitiveness has to be directly connected to PvP competitiveness. I hate Ragnarok references when talking 'bout ToS, but the main reason PvE (all aspects) existed there was to fuel you and your guild for PvP. You don’t want your enemies to get items from Belz/Lab MVP’s, you want to have that items yourself and only for yourself. And so on. Of course there will always be people who will PvE hardcore just for fun, just because they love PvE. But their number is always very limited. The vast majority of people in MMORPG will tryhard in PvE to get advantage in PvP. It’s a simple and golden rule.

You enemy is gearing up while you are sleeping - that should be the moto of the MMORPG. It seems like IMC is desperately depriving this game of competitiveness, as if they are afraid to lose casual crybaby players, who would not be able to compete with hardcore players => whine and quit. That was one of the reasons they disabled GvG.
Even in TbL - you get nothing but for ego boost for being top-ranked, and that’s not really smth to tryhard for. TbL items are mearly for show off - no particular value to help you dominate over enemy further.

But let’s wait for WB and TBL rewamp. Maybe they’ll realize then, that the only aspect of the game, that can allow ToS to survive for years is GvG.

[Sensate]

which players were spying on other guilds, strategising and theorising the best ways to track bosses, and strategising party compositions to defeat rival players.

You mean just using an older private addon prior to the world boss tracker and using discord bot to track how many people in any of the world boss maps? Sure.

[dogos]

I will not try to convince you since you appear to not have been impeded of killing a boss 20+ times by people crashing channels…
But from what i see, what you really want is a refreshing and different GvG content, not a PvE one. PvE content has to consider all players including solo, small parties and normal guilds. If the content benefits 5% of the server it demotivates the rest as the social inequality increases to a point where a player cannot perceive a progression in the game.

Also, there exists many types of competition in a game aside of KSing mobs/bosses like the examples you gave (story/game completion, crafting, completing collections…). In my opinion a direct competition game is only succesfull when its fair (look at MOBAs and team shooters success). Again, i can assure you that the majority of the server population haven’t done any of the challenges the game gives

[soldatazur]

That would have the opposite effect. I still wouldn’t be able to motivate anyone in the guild to come and do that activity because there would still be no competition to it.

You don’t need motivation or competition if you know you will have a reward just by participating to the fight. As artemisgames01 said, it works perfectly in GW2. But yes, there is no competition if everyone can have a reward. Between a guaranteed reward and a only top DMG reward, what is the best for the population ? Competition seems obvious, but reality shown among a lot of other MMORPGs is pretty far from the obvious conclusion.

[nightrain_scy]

Lets see how the revamp

But I also suggest that we can have a time trial for dungeon run, the fastest team will earn 5 boss cubes per week for example.

I also suggest we should do something like GW2 karma points, whatever you do in game you earn karma points to exchange certain items or materials. With this, players can do whatever they like game at the end they can trade with NPC most items (untradeable) by karma points.

[Adeodatusv2]

I struggle to comprehend this argument at all. Beating other players of a game is the end goal of 99% of games, the exceptions being puzzle games like Jigsaws, Rubiks cubes, single player card games.

When I talk about competition being bad in the case of MMORPGs, it’s usually due to the exceptionality of rewards you gain from competing in those games. Some games e.g. give out cash items or even real $$$ for competitive events, others have really overpowered items locked behind competition (e.g. godlike items and/or MVP cards in Ragnarok Online). However,if there is a lack of balance at how these competitions work, they are unfair.
E.g.:

• if you have a bad internet connection, you’re out.
• If your client is broken/bugged,you’re out.
• if your skills are bugged,you’re out.
• if your Class is too weak to compete in strength/speed, you’re out,too.
• if you have bad equipment, you’re automatically out of a lot of competition,too.

I don’t see a problem in general competition like e.g. War of Emperium to calm down some peoples e-pen!$3$ while whaling and meta-bandwagoning their way through every game, but it’s not fair to give players too much of an advantage if they just abuse the game instead of having fun, leaving the people who want to have fun in the dust.

Competetive players are a minority in games like TOS and a majority in other games, so I don’t know why the game has to cater even more competitive content that does nothing for most of the people instead of events/content that caters to a better community and willingly cooperative gaming experience that is fun for everyone.

If I want to compete, I do it by playing Battlefield or Overwatch,not by playing a community-based game like RO or TOS <_<

[Reilet]

PSO2 has literally zero competition at end game and it’s still extremely strong in JP (10 active servers).

Endgame is literally getting 1% stronger gear (or other fancy looking weapons) and the massive fashion it has.

So saying competition in pve is needed, while nice, is not necessary.

[SMoRuCho]

This game will never have interesting endgame. It’s been too long already. Since 2015 release in korea it’s been two fricking years and none of the core gameplay issues are addressed.