First of all, I haven’t played the game yet. This post is made as an answer to the various skill reset threads I’ve seen popping up recently, since I’ve been interested enough in the game to take a look at the forums.
If you can’t stand the fact that most of the following will be almost pure assumptions (based on my previous knowledge gathered from playing many mmorpgs and seeing many games come and go), leave and let it die a peaceful death. (scroll down for the TL;DR)
In the world of (free) mmorpgs, what I usually see being sold in cash shops revolves around enhanced functionalities (additional stash space, marketplace reductions/bonuses, character slots, etc) Game bonuses (Extra gold, xp, drops etc), Do-overs (character looks reset tokens, skill reset, stat reset, faction changes), Guild or clan functionalities, and various cosmetic microtransactions (also include mounts).
The thing I’ve learned throughout the years playing various games, ranging from FPS to RPGs to MMOs(and others) is that even if you have the best game in the world, it’s only as good as it’s developers’ decisions. Shitty decisions can very easily and very swiftly ruin an otherwise profitable game, simply because somebody, somewhere, thought it wasn’t making money fast enough.
I’ve seen way too many games’ bright futures being ruined by poor business decisions and it annoys the hell out of me every single time. They never learn, and they refuse to acknowledge that it’s their fault.
What I’ve also learned is that if you make the player base happy (to not be mistaken for complying with their every desire), they’ll keep playing, some of them will spend money and should they leave in good terms, they’ll be back down the road when you release big-update#XYZ.
Ultimately, you want them to enjoy your game enough for them to WANT to give you money, to desire supporting you because they like your game.
Piss them off, and they’ll hate you with everything they have. They will not only leave, they’ll make sure anybody they know won’t play your game too. Word of mouth is a powerful thing, just ask the Box Office.
The difficulty in making a free to play MMO is carefully balancing how many and which features are available for free, and what requires money. By far the biggest source of revenue of most free games is cosmetics. If we’ve learned anything from TF2, is that people are willing to spend a LOT of money on absurd costumes and hats, just because they can and because they want to look different.
The easiest way to get people to play your game(By that I mean to keep playing) is to actually encourage them to do so. Not necessarily by giving them a ton of “free” stuff (which is something a lot of MMOs do, daily login rewards, bonus xp, events etc, ) but by simply not putting so many restrictions on just playing the game.(Having millions of restrictions with a paywall to remove them is a pretty popular but ultimately poor business and design decision, you’re simply pissing off customers, Hello Devilian)
This isn’t about being poor or being rich or having money in your pocket. There is a reason why microtransactions are called as such. Pay for one small thing, and then the next purchase becomes easier. As such, developers usually target two different demographics. The casual gamers, and the “whales” (also known as those with very deep wallets who can afford to spend a couple hundred/thousand dollars on free games)
I’ve seen MMOs with only 2-4 character slots when there was 2-3 times that number of very different classes to play and this boggles my mind as to how stupid that is. You want people to play, to try, to mess around.
The only reason that is done is when there is literally no meaningful choices in the way you make your character until you reach max level, and the only difference between you and the next player is your character name, gear (that can otherwise be easily bought of the auction house) and cosmetics.
TL;DR starts here (sorry it’s still pretty long)
When every single character of the same class is identical, you feel forced to put a gap on how many characters player can make, because otherwise they’d go through all the content too quickly. The developers are quite literally putting a paywall on most of the game content, because there isn’t that much content to begin with. This is something that I believe(and hope) ToS is not suffering from, thankfully.
This is where the Pro-Reset/Anti-Reset discussion comes in.
A game like ToS that has this many combination of skills, classes, circles leads to massive theorycrafting by the community, and offers many different ways to play the game.
The issues seem to come from the fact that when you reroll a character, you’re losing all the progress you made on the character you already have, due to:
- -Unavailability to trade gear (all gear) between characters, including currency (which comes in part from the fact team storage is a pay-only feature)
- -Low amount of (free) character slots
- -Cash shop items being untradeable
- -Various items making character deletion impossible
This leads to people feeling like they wasted their time, and more importantly, their money, when they want to reroll a character because nothing they did with their previous character has any meaning on the next one.
(I’m aware there is XP bonus? tied to the number of characters I believe, but that’s not just not nearly enough)
In a game such as this, with quests (and books/tickets/cards whatever they’re named, I forgot) being the primary sources of xp, leveling isn’t (usually) nearly as big an issue as it is gearing up and accumulating wealth. If you’re rerolling a character and you’d get to keep your wealth, your crafting materials, your gear, well at least you feel like you’re not completely starting from scratch, which is GOOD.
Unless it becomes possible to trade any and all gear between characters at will (hell make it bind on account for all I care) and the number of free character slot is increased to a reasonable amount (whatever is reasonable considering the huge number of class combinations) to allow players to experiment freely, then I believe a reset (whichever kind, soft, hard, throbbing, you guys can argue on the details) can be considered reasonable. (I’d prefer the first option over having access to resets, in my opinion)
TL;DR#2: Increase number of character slots. Make team storage free and make any character bount items account bound instead, including currency. Make any and all microtransactions tradeable between characters of the same account.
Fire up those torches and pitchforks.