I’ve been a long-time fan and player of ToS, since it was first announced and teased years ago. I played back in iCBT2 (missed out on the iCBT1 window, alas) and have been playing the game on and off ever since. One of my very first MMOs was Trickster Online and that classic MMO aesthetic hit me hard. I’ve always been a bit of an MMOhopper, playing games for a month or two at a time before quitting or taking a break to play a different one, but ToS has earned its spot on my short list of games that I return to from time to time. It’s full of all the goodness of the classic MMO experience that I love so much, but it also improves upon the faults of those games. It’s not a perfect MMO, but every time I return to ToS I see new improvements and changes that make it better and better each time.
Recently, there have been a lot of changes aimed towards gameplay, class balance and streamlining the levelling process. I think all of this is great! Balance and fun, non-frustrating gameplay are both very important for any game to have. The removal of “grind walls” by improving EXP gain from dungeons/missions and implementing more effecting grind areas in the form of Hunting Grounds makes it feel like far less of a struggle to level and rank up. Allowing map exploration cards to be collected by all characters on the team also makes it ten times easier for experienced players to level up new alts, along with the already existing team level EXP bonus.
All of these changes help players old and new reach the higher, more fun ranks in record time, and also make it much easier to reroll a character if you end up disliking what you picked. EXP tomes are also a very very common reward from events/emergency maintenance and the like, so it’s easy to craft 4x and 8x EXP tomes to level even faster. Add in enough reset vouchers, multiply tokens and clear vouchers and you can go from 1 to 330 in a day if you really want to.
However, these changes opened up a new issue, and the more I think about it the more it disappoints me. Because levelling is so quick and painless, most of the quests and maps in the game are now pointless. Lately when I make new characters I only do quests up to lv50. After that, it’s daily dungeons/missions and maybe a few maps of quests if I feel like making more progress without using resets or waiting a day. I’m a filthy casual player and even I can level a character from 1 to 250 in just a couple of days with one 8x EXP tome and a couple resets. Without any need for questing or exploring past the 100% map cards, new players are skipping huge swathes of the game’s content and speeding straight towards endgame.
Being able to level up quickly is not in itself a bad thing. This isn’t something I want to see changed. What I do feel needs to be changed is to bring questing and exploration back into relevancy.
There is also a second issue I want to address at the same time: there are many cool puzzles and unique class systems in the game, but many of them aren’t very well explained in the game itself. Players have to collaborate with the community to figure things out most of the time just by throwing random ideas out until something sticks. Sometimes this works really well, other times… not so much.
To give a good example: Alchemist’s Dig and Magnum Opus. It’s known that Dig can actually dig up rare materials like Terranium and Zircon, and a quick google search can confirm that players have reported this… but no one wants to share where these materials can be found, or what other items might be possible to dig up. I can’t fault players for wanting to keep these secrets to themselves for personal profit, but it makes it difficult for any new Alchemists to make use of Dig without spending hours upon hours testing possible dig locations
Magnum Opus has the same problem. While most of the recipes have been discovered through datamining, I’ve seen claims that a few players have been able to find hidden recipes and even linked the items in chat before to prove it… but no one has ever revealed what these recipes are, if the claims are even true. And even if we look at the datamined recipes, these are puzzles that players were expected to figure out without datamining. Without any sort of hints whatsoever, how the hell are players supposed to figure out how to make something like the Alchemist Stone, which has like a dozen different materials in a very random placement?
My solution: add puzzle and class hints to quest NPCs, only available after all their quests are completed.
In a way, this has already been implemented! For some of the hidden classes you have to interact with quest NPCs, and they won’t give the correct dialogue to start the hidden class unlock until you finish all their other quests. My idea is basically the same thing, but even simpler to implement. After completing the quests for certain NPCs that have some relation to a class or map puzzle, they would give a different dialogue to reveal some piece of the solution.
To use Alchemist as an example again, in Nahash Forest we have the NPC Lucienne Winterspoon, an alchemist who has a relation to Vaidotas, the alchemist master. If you completed all of the quests in her questline and spoke to her again as an Alchemist, she could give you a book or note with a useful Magnum Opus recipe, or tell you a location where you can dig up a rare material. Since digging is basically mining, you might also talk to one of the miner’s village NPCs after becoming an Alchemist and get a hint about where to find rare ores with Dig.
This method could be used for a lot of different hidden aspects of the game! Like places to find rare recipes or weapons for certain classes, skill combos that have special effects (Psychic Pressure + Fireball, Feint + Barrage, and however many others haven’t been discovered), Scan locations for Scouts, hints to map puzzles and gimmicks, hints for hidden classes and where to find more hints… even if it’s information that the community at large has figured out by now, I think it’d be beneficial to include hints in the game itself so anyone can feel the excitement of discovery when they find out about a new puzzle and solve it on their own.
This solution should be very easy to implement (you’re only adding new dialogue and maybe a few new book items), and it wouldn’t detract from the speed or smoothness of levelling at all. Players who don’t care could just ignore it entirely without any drawbacks, and those who want to learn more about the game’s puzzles or their classes would finally have a way to do so without relying solely on the community or spoilers. It would give a great new reason to finish quests beyond just EXP and item/silver rewards, and encourage players to follow the storyline and explore the world.
If anyone has any thoughts/comments/etc. I’d love to hear it as well!