It’s important to point out that the Combat Update wasn’t a Content Update, IMC wasn’t even expecting that large of an increase in population that came. The Combat Update’s objective was to address most of the fundamental flaws, and allow IMC to create further content that could be balanced properly, which was impossible given the old system. This update was never meant for a large, long term increase in population, it alone never had the necessary ingredients for it, balance alone is far from enough, it doesn’t really matter without content.
That’s the real crux of the matter, content. The Combat Update for all of its flaws was a big step forward, and a positive thing. More classes, builds, and playstyles became viable allowing for any current content to be played, and more importantly, future content. The primary problem we’re faced with now, is a lack of content. The Gacha and Leticia cubes don’t help, but they’re far from the central issue, the existent balance problems are less severe than before, and in general, bugs, exploits, and bots have decreased, and hook64 continues to wither.
Despite all the flaws TOS has, it’s obvious that there are tons of players waiting to play, the Combat Update demonstrated that. The issue is content. We need a more varied and rewarding levelling process, less daily focused content, more equipment, accessories and items to farm for, more collectibles, gimmicks and achievements, better guild content, non-combat focused content, social content, and so much more. We really need more of everything. Players came back, but there was nothing fulfilling to do, it just wasn’t fun enough. IMC has to play catch up for their early release decision. They now have to fix legacy issues, still balance a large amount of content, create/fix content that should have been on release, and continue to release new content at a reasonable schedule. I still believe IMC has the ability to eventually complete these tasks, but it’s a time problem. They may very well make the best MMO in existence, but how long will that take? Maybe they’re just adding more padding content until R9 fixes everything, but I doubt it, R8 isn’t even finished yet. I’m very unsure of the future of TOS. IMC has shown a fair amount of potential in the past few months with the Combat Update, the events, communication improvements (some of which is soon to come), but they also demonstrated recurring problems that have yet to be addressed, like the DPK exploit, still not enough communication, and contextually slow content release, (as in content for the past and next fews months will be at a decent speed, but compared to what’s needed not enough), along with new balance problems albeit fewer balance problems.
IMC must improve further, and must communicate with us more. This isn’t an ITOS issue, it’s a TOS issue.
