Weird comparison you might say? Not really. Here’s a game still in early access on Steam, just like Tree of Savior is. And yes, Tree of Savior is far from a complete game. We went from closed beta to a rushed release so technically TOS has never even left beta.
Here’s a developer community that heavily interacts with their players. They have weekly patch notes and details, concept art and such where they go in and explain certain aspects of their game design.
An artist can write why he chose to make new concept art for the game and a coder can also voice himself about how he found and fixed a nasty bug that has been killing players for a long time.
It’s such a huge breath of fresh air when you take a peek at how these guys do their thing. They take constant feedback from their audience via their own sub-reddit and things get changed almost every other week.
Even recently they implemented a whole new leveling system that they worked pretty hard on, but ultimately the community hated it in the long run and guess what? They scrapped the entire thing and build a whole new system.
They have an open mind-map that lets players know what they have planned up. It’s not decicive but it’s there to give the players some idea what the goal of the game is.
https://mind42.com/mindmap/7abd1334-d170-42e7-b869-f74010b9b143
Everything is laid out and the developers know they aren’t perfect, but they give it their best and Rust is probably one of the best early access games you can buy and be satisfied with it even if not everything promised is there.
It’s an entirely different game, I know that, but when you see weekly patch notes with explanations with sound logic and then you turn and look at TOS patch notes for 3 different versions (kTOS, jTOS and iTOS) only to find out OUR version is lacking in so much and is by far the most broken version out of them all.
If these guys can make Steam work as their platform, why can’t IMC do that?
Note: I don’t even play Rust, I simply follow their development because they do it really well and completely out in the open. I highly recommend you take a peek:
Their blogs: https://playrust.com/
Their sub-leddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/playrust/
And yes their developers go on that sub and give their comments and feedback. They joke with the community and it’s very light hearted. I can’t imagine a more friendly developer to player interaction.
Then you take a look at how things are done on TOS and it’s like a barren wasteland of fixes.
Half if not more of our patch notes are “item shop” related. If only we at least got the Korean patches here sooner I think most of us would be happy, but it remains a mystery if it’s Steam as a platform that utterly failed iTOS or is it translations the issue.
In the past from my personal knowledge the reason Korean patches take longer is related to publishers, but IMC is their own publisher in the west so that rules that out.
If the iTOS team sat down one night and gave us some explanations as to why things are the way they are I think most of us would calm down quite a lot, knowing there are good reasons.
However in the past when they tried all we got was “it’s two different games” only to this not to be true at all and now all versions of the game are identical, except we still have insanely bad performance issues and 3 month late patches from kTOS.
