Tree of Savior Forum

Something like this should have been front page news: Kim Hakkyu's Letter to the Community Discussion

I’m re-posting this for people who didn’t read all the way until the 100th post in the [well-written] rant thread by @dcandrews7 here…

I Love Tree of Savior; I Am Leaving Tree of Savior

This thread’s purpose is to discuss the gigantic reply Mr. Hakkyu posted. How do you feel about it? Does it make you feel warm and cozy all over again? Are you not convinced? Share your thoughts in this topic. If you have actual follow-up questions for Mr. Kim himself please direct it to the thread in which he posted this response. This thread is simply for discussing the post’s contents.

Here’s the huge response…

[quote]Firstly, I would like to thank you for the love and support Tree of Savior. I would also thank you for becoming the Founders and buying all the founders packs. It is very unfortunate to hear that you decided to leave. However, Thank you for the detailed and long list of the aspects of the game that you found dissatisfying. On that note, there seems to be necessary that I should address the points raised in your letter and clear some misunderstandings.
The trade restriction in TOS was designed to solve the bot and RMT problems. I do recognize that it might cause inconveniences towards the players as well. If, like you have said, the restrictions were not there due to the fact that the bots and RMT are inevitable and unavoidable, would that have improved the game overall? Unless we compare two situations side-by-side, I cannot say for certain. However, I would like you to understand that we have been working on reducing restrictions through continuous patches.
Server instability is an issue that we have been and currently are trying to solve but it is indeed a difficult issue. However, what I can say that the client lag has been improved through the recent optimization effort and it will be included in upcoming patchs soon.
As for DDoS, its very difficult thing to overcome. Everytime DDoS attack occurs (including today), Service provider blocks targetted machine, so we have to provide service excluding that machine. The problem is Service provider also limited our access to admin account as well, so we cannot add machine instances for now, resulting very crowded users in less machines in SA regions.
We have made a contract with one of the world’s biggest cloud service provider, but their counter-DDoS measures differed from region to region. This situation is beyond our expectation and we are currently in talks with the service provider but we are yet to receive a satisfying answer from them. The proposals we have received were seeking a different service provider or move it to the NA region, which may leads to also dissatisfying solution to many users. So we’re seeking for other solutions now.
Even since the announcement of the One Month F2P Delay plan, our users have raised many issues such as a ping problem, lags and even racism and regional pricing. In order to address those issues, I have decided to separate regions and transfer the necessary data between them. During that process, each region required its own devices and infrastructure. It meant that the cost of having the servers in four separate regions was drastically higher than having them all in one region.
You mentioned that, the region transfer usually only takes 10 minutes for other company. In reality, that is simply not possible. DB duplication process from one continent to the other continent takes a considerable amount of time and the whole process requires our utmost attention if we were to avoid any errors. The fact that the process was not planned months in advance meant that much effort and care were needed for the preparation, execution and confirmation.
We also wished to allow players to obtain TP as soon as possible after transitioning to F2P. However, we were unable to sell TP via DLC products as identical DLC products cannot be purchased more than one time.
There is a separate system, the ‘Steam Inventory System’, but it is taking some time to develop and verify since it is different from the DLC system which we had been using up to this point.
The Beginner’s & Veteran’s Packs were launched to allow players that wished to purchase more premium items until the ‘Steam Inventory System’ is fully implemented.
You do not need to purchase these DLC products if you do not agree to their contents or pricing. You will most likely not need the extra boost as you already had purchased all the Founder’s Pack.
We did not launch the Beginner’s and Veteran’s Packs thinking that everyone needs to purchase them. It was more of a stop-gap measure to allow certain players to obtain more TP and other items before the launch of the ‘Steam Inventory System’. Those items were currently un-obtainable since there are no DLC products in the Store.
It would have been better if we could have also launched various DLC products that only contain TP. However, There is a limit Steam places how many DLC products we can sell at once. It was not possible to create diverse products since we had to create 8 different DLC products in order to provide 2 types of products to each of the 4 different service regions.
We did not reject the communication. We did not fired the Community Manager. Her leave was made by her own and I also hoped her to continue working. She had hard time dealing with responding community. It’s difficult to improve and solve problems fast in these situations. Current community managers, may seem to be less enthusiastic. But, I believe they are doing their best as they can.

I admit that the game currently has many issues. However, I really want to convince you that we have never given up and will continue to solve any issues one at a time. One example of such an issue is the monopolization of World Bosses and we are addressing this issue on the Korean servers by applying a debuff after defeating the Bosses. This will soon be applied to the Steam servers as well.
It’s regrettful if you consider that IMC is a cashgrab with over-priced DLC products while not trying to deal with any identified issues. It could have been due to the fact that we weren’t capable enough or did not communicate as well as we could have. However, I sincerely hope that you do not misunderstand that to mean that IMC does not care about Tree of Savior as a game, because we do care. We love this game at least as much as, and probably even more than, the players do. We created this game and will continue to improve this game to the end.
We thank you for loving Tree of Savior and hope that we will be able to meet again in a better gaming environment.
Regards,
Hakkyu Kim[/quote]

Personally?

Damage control. Not to mention; talk about walls of text :confused:

12 Likes

It seems more like just a huge amount of excuses. I can understand some problems but dam, taking everything one at a time will never solve our issues with the game. Well, maybe in a few years. I personally don’t think they understand NA/EU players enough to keep publishing the game. Maybe international wasn’t such a good idea.

2 Likes

Agreed,it should have been an announcement.It felt more personal,especially for the OP I’m sure,but way too hard to find because of the size of the thread.

Some of it we already knew [the SA server issues were a separate announcement,we figured there was a Steam issue with the DLC,most of us weren’t going to buy the new packs because we disagreed with the prices…so he basically accepted that that was happening],and the rest needs to be taken very cautiously.

People need to remember that although it was nice of Kim himself to come here and post,it took things getting pretty out of control here and ratings wise on Steam for that to happen.I won’t say it’s BS because he said fixes will be implemented with time,so all we can do is wait and see if he holds true to his word or not.

10 Likes

From my perspective Mr Hakkyu Kim gave a great answer. He showed that they are human - and working much harder than most people imagine on solving issues that they are just being flooded with.

I would wish to see this kind of “we are all just people, so let’s try to get along with the situation and make the best of it” more often. That is not to say that I am playing right now, but I do appreciate this open communication a lot.

What people might not realize is the extreme explosive reactions that occur here, over minor things. It’s like a mine field to navigate through… so someone going out of his way to address the critics does mean something to me.

10 Likes

Well he did communicate a bunch of things, people have been clamoring about IMC not communicating about.

So thanks for communicating those things and gl on the future Mr. Kim.

2 Likes

Communication with us is a step in the right direction. If the developers are willing to actually respond, and give us insight on what the hell they’re doing, it’s something. even if it’s damage control or whatever. I don’t care, so long as it isn’t just complete bullshit.

I’m not going to step on this and brush it aside for the sake of my own pride that “ooh I can see above what you’re trying to do you can’t trick me IMC! I’m infallible to damage control!” thing that naturally manifested because I want them to keep doing this. It’s a constant tether to remind them that we’re expecting results. It’s fine and natural to be unconvinced by parts of it after everything, and weirded out by how defensive it may be rather than compromising, but I want them to have a conversation with us more than I care about how much I can shit on IMC.

tl;dr: It didn’t get me to love IMC, but it’s a step in the right direction and I don’t think it’s a good idea to reject it.

3 Likes

Honestly it makes me happy to see the guy behind ToS himself coming on the forums and making a personal response. It should really be followed up with an announcement as some have said so it reaches a wider audience, but considering how much communication we’ve had over the last few weeks this is pretty damn good.

If it’s damage control, fine, as long as it’s also real. I think between this and them deciding to limit restrictions in order to fix the game, my faith has been some what restored. It’s teetering, but it’s there.

1 Like

Basically, they shouldn’t have published the game on their own, especially on a platform they’re not familiar with (Steam).

Seems with or without a proper publisher, they’re losing players. So I think it’s in the game’s best interest for IMC Games to look for an English publisher so the developers can actually spend time doing developer stuff like fixing and optimizing the game.

Either that or do a hard reset (close game), take a few months or so to straighten themselves out, and try again when they know they’re ready.

Don’t know why they weren’t developing the Steam system when they knew they were going to be on it for quite some time before launch.

3 Likes

I don’t like trade restrictions. I feel this restrictions generate more problems to the user, than to resolve the problems generated for bots or RMT to the game, because the players can’t generate money in-game and obtain good items. Moreover, part of the essence of a MMORPG is the interaction between the players.

1 Like

This does confuse the fuq outta me. Rather boggles the mind.

Most people that were skeptical about his answer are people that forget that they are humans like you and me, they have jobs, family and friends and more importantly FEELINGS.

We are pretty upset about the situation the game is at the moment, yes of course we are. There is no reason to say that Hakkyu Kim’s answer was a bunch of excuses though. People that work will probably relate to his answer. We know how sucky it is to deliver a product and when things go bad as they did it’s even worst when you know it was your fault (IMC in general in this case).

The worst thing you can do to someone that is working their ass off and made a mistake is to keep bashing them even after they admit the error and promise to work on it.

7 Likes

Well they could leave the game up, take 6 months to do anything, and lose even more players on top of gaining a reputation for being a bad developer (and ever worse publisher)…

…or they can fix their stuff on their own terms, relaunch (give the players who paid for the first preview a GOOD freebie), and work on solid ground from there.

If you’re still confused, I suggest you see a middle school teacher.

I was agreeing with what I quoted… If you sir are still confused… I suggest you sit down and take a breathe.

Take a “Breathe”…right, that Middle school teacher, time to find him…

I see you’re still confused. Since you still dont see I was agreeing with what you said…

I see you’re still unaware of how to spell “breath”.

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

Ok, since we are going this route. Ill break it down for you.

  1. You said[quote=“DxDark, post:9, topic:276789”]
    Don’t know why they weren’t developing the Steam system when they knew they were going to be on it for quite some time before launch.
    [/quote]

  2. I then agreed with you.

  3. You attack my intelligence. When I really dont care if I spelled breath wrong. At the same time completely misquoting what I was talking about.

  4. I said take a breath, “breathe”. Quite harmless.

  5. I attempt to clarify I was agreeing with you, while you continue to atttempt to attack my intelligence.

  6. We go no where. Since you can’t see I was agreeing with you. I guess we could waste some time and continue to go in circles over nothing if youd like.

7.At this point Im just going to assume you are either Zip on an alt account or one of his cronies attempting to be confrontational, while at the same time completely derailing the thread because it does not fit his agenda.

Some reason this thing relabeled my numbers.

2 Likes

Meee no breeeeaaattheeeeeee …meeeeee sucky and blowyyy

Never go full retard