Tree of Savior Forum

This Game is Nothing New and Not Much Good

Does anyone else feel that as this game is doomed to a short and mediocre life? I’ve played a good number of MMOs over the last two decades and I just don’t think this game has it is now has what it takes to be a long-lived MMO. I’m currently a level 100 Swordsman>Highlander3 and the game still hasn’t opened up into anything more than endless grinding to gain levels.

Before I go further i’ll say what I do like about this game. I adore the visual style and the soundtrack is 10/10, though one could argue that it is more dramatic and over the top than it really needs to be for many areas. Combat mechanics are solid though I feel not enough is being done with boss design as they’ve all been exactly the same fight. The way classes are set up has been interesting so far.

Everything else though is the same poop we’ve seen since WoW destroyed this genre. Every zone and quest exists to level the player and it does so in an extremely linear fashion. The level requirement to pick up a quest is absurd. If the player can complete higher level quests why not let him?

Each quest is one of the following:
-Collect X bear asses
-Interact with X bear asses
-Use the above bear asses to lure and fight the Giant Raving Bear Ass
All of this with map indicators showing you exactly where to go or where to find the bear asses. The one time I found a wild quest hiding in a well which required me to look in a general area for something was an immense relief and for a period of ten minutes I was actually engaged with and applying my brain to a quest rather than mindlessly running to grey circles on the map and holocausting everything with a golden checkmark above its head.

Another problem this arrangement highlights is that every zone only contains monsters of the map’s recommended level. Higher level players have no reason to return to these areas to hunt these monsters.
This approach to things is going to leave the beginner zones progressively emptier as the game matures. New players will not interact with older players, and vice versa.

On the subject of idiot-proof quest handholding, the minimap is an absolute blight on video games. It needs to go away and be replaced by a static map that works off of landmarks. A minimap with real-time GPS accuracy just prevent the player from ever actually looking at your beautiful scenery and actually orienting himself in the world. It’s also a missed opportunity for something like a Cartographer class, which could’ve been a class that makes maps of any area. The better the Cartographer has explored the area the more complete the map he will produce. But there is another thing preventing such a possibility addressed in the next paragraph.

The quest warp mechanic seems benign at first but it’s really, really bad. It makes a group of strangers impossible to keep together and more importantly it allowed the map designers to be extremely lazy, to the point where every single zone and dungeon is a chain of islands connected by paths, tunnels, and bridges, often in a trunk-and-branch arrangement. Often they have plopped down completely unneeded walls, visible or otherwise, to adhere to this theme.

This setup of having the quest vendors extremely close to the quest targets highlights another type of problem. At the moment mobs spawn in very predictable locations (Sometimes exact, unchanging locations) and have a short leash, to prevent them from wandering away from the quest they’re relevant to. This makes them very farmable and easily targeted by bots. it also makes the experience of killing them all the more predictable and boring. There is no longer any hunting. We just go to the grocer’s now.

This approach to things has ramifications applicable to things I mentioned earlier. You used to see not only high leveled monsters in beginner zones, but also low leveled monsters in high leveled zones. The monster were a part of the world and made it feel alive to find them wherever it would make sense to find them. They didn’t magically become stronger, pallette-swapped variants either. The presence of low leveled monsters in high leveled zones made those zones viable play areas for new players just as high leveled monsters brought older players back to the beginner zones. All this only served to increase player interactions while immediately making the world space feel much larger and more open, as no one was caged into the few zones relevant or useful to their level.

I’ve played some grindy game before and even without the tripled XP rates of this CBT this game is far from the grindiest when analyzed critically, but it FEELS grindy. I think one reason for this is that every enemy is very easy to defeat, even when you are 10 level beneath. This reduces each encounter to a brainless series of button presses that you know will yield .1% XP. The lack of danger also means you never have to form groups or work with other players. MMOs are at their core games of social interaction and the absence of danger is a serious problem. There’s also very little to do so far aside from grind. So far there are card battles, but if you’re never interacting with other players what are the chances you’re going to get into a card battle without intentionally seeking one out?

Currently there is a limit on how often you can trade items. On gear it reduces potential, and materials can only seem to be traded once. This ‘feature’ is absolute poison. Some say it prevents auction house manipulation, and it might, but what it really does is encourage every player to bot or die. There also shouldn’t be a need to prevent auction house manipulation because of the next paragraph.

At the moment the auction house is busted, which has been a wonderful thing. In its place a flea market has populated the town squares, something I haven’t seen in an MMO in a very long time. With time these informal marketplaces will appear in areas outside of towns, like major dungeon entrances for instances. the player-operated flea market is a much more engaging experience than a global marketplace accessed through a single NPC. With this game’s approach to support and utility classes I feel they missed a great opportunity for a very unique class: Auctioneer/Broker. A class that could run a personal auction house wherever it wanted or had built-in mechanics to take items from players, sell it, and skim a portion of the profit.

Currently every class can craft anything so long as they have the recipe and materials. I don’t think this is an ideal setup. There could’ve been dedicated crafting classes which would again, promote player interaction. It could work in the old fashioned way of player’s putting trust in the crafter not to run off with the materials or you could make them operate like Squires do now. Materials in. Fee. Item out.

I went into this game really wanting to love it, and I do think i’ll still play it but as it is I don’t think it’s going to become a legend of MMOs like Ragnorak, Everquest, Mabinogi, Dark Age of Camelot, or Lineage were. It really needs to fill out all those dead-ends in the maps with interesting zones to explore and a lot less hand holding in the quests. It would be better to have no quests at all than what they have in this game.

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Well most of your points are good.
But things the way they are for a good reason. IMC did the homework really good. In the last 10 years there 2 groups in the mmorpg.
One want it old school hard core open world go any where do what ever.problem is doing so is not making good progression for the player.
Group number 2 want it more or less the way its now.quests that progress you to the end game.problem is its way tobuard to do a good end game and upgrading it at last one’s 3 months.
Now ower the last 10 years most of the hard core game closed or go not so hard core.look at somthing like ms or ws.
There just no 500k + - of this hard core players out there.500k is the number most companies need 2 have now days or go down.even se stoping suport for ff 11 as it have under 500k players for a long time.on the same time ff 14 have somthing like 5m registered people ,so at last more that 1m playing and paying.ff11 is much more hard core that 14.and in 14 people saying its to hard for them do end game so se making the game more easy.
That is how mmorpg is now days and wow didnt make it so.vanilla wow was not so easy.

just gonna compare this in ragnarok

the only reason high level player revisit low level map can be either:

  1. materials for making headgears
  2. mvp/boss

other than that they have no reason to go there unless they want to mess with lowbies by one shotting their targets.

also in ragnarok there are maps that are not touched by players unless farming for materials. there are set of maps that are used for grinding. other maps, well for traveling and when you have no choice because the most used maps are all taken.

not a hardcore ragnarok fan and i only played ninja when it was released (was only a child when the version was old RO) i only grinded on less than 10 maps i think. first was payon dungeon where i can just get a few good levels to get skills
next was geographer until i am high enough to take on sleeper until i get to 99 since i cant seem to find a good spot to grind till 99.

when i now need items, those are the times i visit old maps for equipments that i need for mvp or pvp

there is also another game that i can compare in which there are higher level mobs to a little bit low level mobs
RF
since the game has exp penalty when dying most retarded people lure mobs and lure it near the lowbies and let them die via AoE attacks made by the mobs. and that game when you are high level and died will hurt more than dying multiple times in pvp 1% is grinded for about 30 mins there and takes days to level up by just only 1

there is a class known as alchemist who can craft potions and they are the only one that can do it
also pardoner which can craft spell scrolls
squire for enhancing weapon giving additional damage

almost every MMO that has crafting let everyone craft items as long as they have the skill level (ie. weaponsmith lv 7 can craft lv xx weapons)
if we do what you say that we give materials to a crafter then we are kinda breeding scammers mostly in late game. even the most simple trade (even giving you only $1 when sold in real money) can still be scammed by someone and i know a lot of those case in a moba game. i see a minimum of 10 scam post for a very simple trade.

TL;DR
you have your own opinion i respect that but we really cant make ToS the ideal game by suggesting features/mechanics that you see in other game.

also suggesting something that can let one or two class get a huge advantage over all classes will only yield complaints from other class and also saying that they should make that said class is kinda an invalid argument since we know that devs wants to make a balance game in the final product

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Yeah, a flea market of people trying to rip others off by buying stuff at ridiculously low prices. <_< I haven’t seen anyone actually sell anything.

I agree with mostly everything.

I’ve stated before that I kinda wish they would remove the pointless quests and only have engaging quests with bigger rewards. Most people hate that idea though. Being told exactly where to go for every single quests just makes me zone out and play… i dont like that.

Removing the minimap is an interesting idea. It will help you learn the actual terrain instead of relying 90% on the minimap. I know I do it. But the layout of the maps and terrain might make a minimap needed in this game, idk.

I agree on removing auction house too. The more player interaction the better.

It did seem a little strange that any class can craft anything if they have the recipe and mats. I’d actually like to see a skill crafting system where you can level the skills up by using them, not just putting points in them from level up. Like fishing, mining, woodcutting, etc. This would give players more things to do other than grinding monsters for mats/item/xp. Grinding is fine, but id like more than one type of grind.

The only thing i disagree on is your view on potential on items. I think this helps the market from being saturated with items and a reason to keep farming/crafting them. There needs to be more tradeable items though, everytime i get something nice its untradeable. I think most things need to be tradeable.

3 Likes

Honestly, nailed it on all points. Even the most perfectly executed post 2000 era style MMO is finite. These games need content expansions (another ten levels, or a new class) to continue existing.

Whereas some of the games described as legends were far more self perpetuating. RO’s current following for its early versions is huge compared to WoW’s vanilla following (relative to population in the official game’s prime).

This made me chuckle. With these kind of message boards, I tell myself I have exact a single post ‘like’ to give. You’ve earned it sir.

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You have presented very good points on this post and I hope the developers really listen to the comments of the testers. I agree on the comment regarding the quests being too easy because of the way it has to be done. They should remove the map indicators and monster indicators to allow players to actually explore the areas to find what is required.

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Quality post, OP. Glad to see someone saying what needs to be said. I would like to add the game does seem scattered with questionable design. For example, the charge system is a large personal gripe for me. It doesn’t seem like each charge has a dependable unique cooldown (even though they can come back after some longer than reasonable amount of time), and when you burn them all they all got locked to the same CD and come back at the same time. It makes the entire system pointless, because the only good way to use those skills atm is to burst them ASAP and trigger the overall CD. No strategy at all, and I’ve never seen any game do charge based skills like this.

It’s a huge-quantity of low quality grind/quests. That’s what it is.

Wanna help the game improve? Help me get some feedback and put in your own ideas at my super-awesome thread here: 15 Ideas to Make This Game GREAT + My Thoughts

lol I’m selling that thread so hard. But hey, whatever it takes to grab the attention of the devs. I put months of work into translating this game. Not going to let it drown without a fight.

4 Likes

There are many areas that are obvious future map connections / dungeons that is not available now. Keep in mind imc is probably trying to rush this game out of the door asap, then adding future areas as expansions. This was the way RO was built originally, with little maps and limited map progression. The RO we see today is 10 years of continuous work, and you can’t compare the RO of today to ToS that is still in closed beta.

I totally agree.

Again I agree. Warping back to original quest npc needs to be removed.

This reminds me of RO2’s flop in mob spawn. 5~10 mobs under the same tree. Boring ■■■■.

This is actually needed to control item inflation. Every MMO without some kind of item inflation control will ruin its economy in time. When the number of new players stop, your item inflation will really kill off the game.

Yes, specialization of roles forces interaction which is ideal for a social MMO.

Yes at its current state it is mediocre. But I do see its potential and its foundation to become legendary, if imc would listen to some of these concerns that you and many other players have mentioned.

The mechanics of this game is 8~10/10. But the playablility is 1-3/10 kinda junk.

1 Like

Beta feedback:

This game is a pile of crap - NOTHING WORKS.

internal server error 500

[quote=“f00m0nch00, post:1, topic:110900”]
every single zone and dungeon is a chain of islands connected by paths, tunnels, and bridges, often in a trunk-and-branch arrangement. Often they have plopped down completely unneeded walls, visible or otherwise, to adhere to this theme.[/quote]
This is the part that is really killing the game for me right now. There’s little in terms of exploration or wandering through zones. The current map setup is crowded and claustrophobic making it difficult to get anything done when there’s more than just a couple of people in any one zone. The spawn rates are abysmally low, but the maps are so tiny and cramped that raising them much higher would flood them.

Moreover on spawn rates, it feels like the game wants you to grind, but it doesn’t let you grind. At around level 125 I ran out of quests available but still needed to level, so I went grinding. I found a level appropriate zone where things died easy to fire or magic and start roaming around genociding everything. This was fine for about half an hour before I encountered a problem: monsters weren’t respawning faster than I could kill them. Where first I could kill two-three dozen mobs in a location every time I visited it, I was now lucky to find five mobs. This was during the early hours of the morning too when very few people were online, so it’s not like I had much help in the massacre. Good thing too since anyone wandering in trying to do quests would have had a bad time trying to find anything to kill after I depopulated it.

This is also one of the worst things about this game right now. It only encourages finding ways around it and prevents friends from sharing hand-me-downs with friends. The bots aren’t going to care about this feature since they’re accumulating items in quantity, not quality. It also prevent you from getting the most out of a weapon you found on an alt assuming you want to upgrade it to any significant degree since you’ll always need to burn a couple of points of potential just to transfer it. Transferring class materials like logs and scrolls between characters also becomes impossible until they come up with a way to cut out the middle man. The only people the system hurts are those looking for legitimate business or trading with friends.

What about ope world makes it not good for progression? I can name a good handful of open world mmos that had plenty of progression without holding your hand throughout its entirety. Why would I want a game to force me to shuffle through a series of zones just to progress?

Most of those games start in group one and make their way into group 2. Surprise surprise, that casualization is effectively a death sentence. This is especially true with Maple Story (what I’m assuming you meant by “ms”). If by “ws” you meant Wild Star, you’re kidding yourself if you think that qualifies as a group 1 game.

[quote=“lans1234567890, post:2, topic:110900”]
There just no 500k + - of this uard core players out there.[/quote]
Explain the population of EVE online.

The initial release of FFXIV was a broken horrible mess. It didn’t collapse because it was “too hard,” it collapsed because it was unplayable. Comparing FFXIV in its current state to FFXI isn’t fair either considering FFXI was released in 2002 (making it older than WoW) when mmo popularity and online populations weren’t nearly to the same scale. It’s also convenient that you fail to mention that FFXI, a game that was MUCH more difficult in its prime than its descendant FFXIV has ever been, lasted for more than a decade strong. It only started hemorrhaging players when the game was streamlined to make it easier.

Why does this have to be like every MMO? You brought up RO, but RO didn’t do this. You had dedicated merchant/crafting classes. If you wanted something made, you either had to make one which took a lot of time and investment, or you had to find and fund someone to do it for you which encouraged social interaction.

Don’t be stupid and give your money to someone untrustworthy. Get in a guild and ask someone there to make it for you. If someone is going to be scummy, they won’t be getting business for very long. Of course there’s a risk in handing someone materials for crafting, but there are ways to make sure you don’t get burned without throwing out the whole system all together. That’s why collateral is a real thing. The game shouldn’t stop you from doing something just because idiots might hurt themselves.

If it’s not working then they’re wasting their time and will have to bump their prices up if they want any business. If it is working then what they’re buying for is what the items are valued at and you’re the one that needs to adjust your value judgment. That’s supply and demand and implementing an auction house only makes it easier for bots to exploit it.

2 Likes

On the issue of item potential, I’m firm on my position that making materials tradeable only once is terrible, but also acknowledge that inflation of items would also be a problem, as this game doesn’t have any mechanic for removing gear from the game through loss.
But Tree of Savior does have a durability mechanic. What if your maximum durability decreased a little with each repair and failed enhancement? Naturally there would be a mechanic to also restore it to maximum, but for a hefty cost.
This way you can still maintain your top tier uber gear, but might opt to use something more common for your daily farming runs.

I also wouldn’t mind the concept of losing gear upon death somehow. I preferred Everquest’s method the best. If you died you left behind a corpse with all your stuff on it. if you could get back to your corpse you could get it all back. If not? Bad luck. The potential for real loss accompanied with the difficulty of that game heightened the sense of adventure enormously. It also really killed the idea that anyone had to have ‘the best gear’ to participate in ‘end game content’ as no one was expected to have made it that long in the game without having messed up at least a few times.

I will also say there’s a right place for an auction house, but it should be an actual auction house, where you actually bid on things, not a mislabeled brokerage as it is now. These auction houses definitely should not be global either. This auction house would be the go to place for expensive items and bulk materials, like the Stock Exchanges of the real world are.

So much people here hate quests.if you hate them dont do them.yes you will take longer 2 lvl up but this what you want in the end olde school like mmo.in this old mmo lvling was slow grinding.
Some people say the quests are boring to them.ok, so can you please give examples of 3-5 quests you think is fun (add the reword as well).

i did brought up RO but in that statement i said almost every MMO that has crafting. does RO have that? no right? except for the headgear quest where you collect 100 soft feather yata yata yata.
or you could just buy it straight from him item to gold instead of hiring him to do it for you

even someone from your own guild or the guild that you join will scam you and leave and find another guild. you cant announce his scamming 24/7 so he has no worries getting out of business in scamming.

crafting in this game is ok instead of investing 10 hours crafting the same item (for exp) you just need a scroll and the materials. cuz you have to admit it, crafting for hours is like grinding but a bit harder since you need to collect materials and the time it takes (between minutes to days)

the only thing that i want to suggest to IMC is that alchemist should also have a service for awakening.
alchemist setup a shop that provides awakening of items. if a player use the service, a portal will appear and the player that used the service wont be able to use it for 600 secs. if the player is in a party that whole party will get a 600 sec debuff.
if the alchemist himself used the service, the shop will close and the skill will go on cd for 600 secs
since doing the awakening takes 1 potential and trading it takes 1 potential (2 potential) and opening sockets also takes 1 potential each (lets say 3 sockets so its 5) and failing on upgrades takes 1 potential. if you get 0 potential and you fail to upgrade, the item will break. dont know the highest potential there is in this beta (5? 6?).

if i miss anything, i probably dont want to reply to it

1 Like

Yup, two of the main problems why the game is getting blasted in eastern versions right over here, I was pretty confused to see nobody complaining about this kind of issue in the first few days in International.

Solo-player support really needs to go.

I agree with this! If only some maps can have a mix of different monster levels so players with level gaps can interact with each other - not only through the main cities! Or for farming mats.

I loved the production classes in Ragnarok. One of the things I’ve always thought would be a good/worth trying mechanic would be to have no NPCs selling gear or pots at mid-high level, and have low level npcs only generate a certain amount at fixed intervals.

Incidentally, the upper level limit stopping players from earning xp from higher level monsters discourages power leveling.
Power leveling, for all its faults, is a great way to meet people. It gives players a reason to seek out other, trustworthy players.
During the event as the lowbie character probably won’t have much to do but chat, and the higher character may not be really threatened by whatever he’s killing.

I think I met my first real Guild by begging for help as a priest in Ragnarok.

I agree with most of your points. I just want this game to survive because it’s different. But it’s not different enough. The main things that interest me were the replayability and the secret things, like in oldschool games where not everything was handed to you. And the linear questing just kills both of them righ away. I DON’T want to play this game again, even if I wish I could, because repeating quest after boring quest in the exact same way I’ve done before sound extremely boring. And the secret classes, chess items and bosses seem completely irrelevant to the game progress, because once again, it’s all too easy. Why would I need MORE help?

Because every single thing in this game IS just handed to you. There’s no challange. Monsters are weak, every quest information is literally at the tip of your finger, you don’t have to look for anything at all, the equipment drop is very high. If you’re not braindead, you’ll be able to kill all the bosses by yourself, complete every single quest, and obtain itens with ease, since the financial system of the game leaves many holes to be exploited.

I just feel like so much time was wasted to create beautiful scenarios and songs for the perfect ambientation, and then simply thrown away with what was suposed to be the easiest part of the game. There is no programming or complex systems to handle overloaded servers. Just use your damn brains. What makes you want to play a game again?

Come on, people, why would we play the game that in the end is just like every other MMO out there? Not only every replay is the same, every single level we gain is the same. Talk to npc, gather item, talk to NPC, fight Boss. Repeat. The only reason I see would be pvp, but with such terrible class balance even that would be impossible.

I want to believe this game will succeed, but right now, there’s just no way.

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