First off, yay, forum is working! Wonder how long though.
That said, I agree. I’m not a veteran in the game or anything, but I was looking forward to it simply because it has a nice art style, is isometric (imo isometric games are usually more social) and had tons of customization that mattered (I never get why people love extensive character creators; except for hair, face and bodytype you usually don’t see anything of it). “Good customization” as I put it is the possibility to make a name for yourself, be it because of the unique way you play or because you are a well known crafter or even the scammers who put up their expensive shops who say that they give you +80% exp; that’s the stuff I love about social mmorpgs.
That being sad, as I’m still not far into the game, from what I’ve read, the game is a shame. So many amazing ideas that kind of fall flat for different reasons.
What’s the point of partying for the first 200 levels if you oneshot every monster (general gameplay, not dungeons)? Imo “slight” difficulty should be present at all times, no matter the level.
I absolutely LOVE it though that as people have stated at level 200+ solo play is not the way to go anymore. Too many MMORPGs are easily soloable and therefore casual. Isn’t the point of MMORPGs to bring people together? Even if those get-togethers aren’t always great and may end up in PvP, GvG or an argument, aren’t those the experiences that keep the players in the game? So good job there.
BUT: at the same time, the devs kind of look like amateurs. We all know that basically no MMORPG launch ever runs completely smooth so I understand that there are some problems in the beginning and I don’t mind them. But the game is clearly written very poorly. I can play fine most of the time, even with ~200 ms, but I know that there are also people who have a ping that’s way higher when it really shouldn’t be. Good rigs can’t handle the game fine at all, either, once it gets a little crowded.
What’s with the option to buy TP? Certainly very funny, because you would think that this is one of the priorities for a f2p game, but really: why can’t we buy TP? Not that I personally mind right now because I wouldn’t want to buy anything right now anyway, but it definitely is REALLY strange as the option to buy TP by itself is far from being greedy. I mean… if they actually offered to buy TP, maybe, just maybe, they’d get enough money to buy better hardware?
I guess there are some legal issues or issues with Valve, as they do everything they can to circumvent the issue by providing that “beginner’s pack” (that still needs approval by Valve it seems, so something is definitely fishy).
Then, they don’t communicate a lot. Sure, we get some news here and there, but they basically address - nothing that the community cares about. No explanations as to why the severs suck so much, why the forums are down all the time and how long they think it might take to fix the most basic issues. I think that just a simple “We know that there is problem X, it’s hard to fix because of Y, please understand that it might take Z or a little longer” would appease many players here.
Then we get the strange trading restrictions that don’t help AT ALL.
I know some of you people may believe that all those bots that are out there are just there to scam people, but they are not. Some of them sure are. But let’s just say that I know a rather big site that does this kind of stuff and I just checked to see if they were offering “service” for ToS too and they did, really cheap at that, too. Of course I don’t know whether the money they offer comes from botting or from “playing legally”, that’s a thing as well of course, although I don’t know if farming ingame money “legally” and selling it to people would be against the rules (of course IMC can ban them anyway, but I guess those people are VERY hard to track).
Point is, all those restrictions can be ignored by the people who do this “professionally” so in the end, the restrictions only hinder us, the players.
There are SO many other GLARING issues out there that simply stem from a lack of thought going into it (like balance issues even between skills of a class), that the amazing basics of the game (class system, amount of classes) are being “outshined” by all the issues this game has. Even releasing the title in the state that it’s in was a very bold and stupid move. They probably had financing issues and decided to release to rack in the cash in time, but for the long run that was definitely a stupid move. If people feel bad about the game from the get-go because of simple performance issues, skills that don’t do anything until the enemies get harder (like earthquake vs. reflect damage - why ever bother using reflect damage in the early levels?) because everything dies from one hit, they will leave and won’t come back.
It looks like the game was released 1-2 years too early, because there just too many issues. Not simply a few problems here and there, but real issues. “Rant” over.
