Tree of Savior Forum

TOS and its potential w/large audiences

Gameplay Feedback General Feedback
#1

Okay, I’m not sure how often the developers read this section of the forum but I figured this was the right place for my feedback regardless. I am a little wordy, so I apologize in advance.

I’ve been playing for a little while now and I am really enjoying myself. This game evokes a lot of fond nostalgia I have for games I used to play when I was younger. I’ve played a LOT of MMOs, and am still subbed to several others while I play TOS and bounce back and forth, but something about TOS is just really charming and old school, and I find myself happily logging on each night to play.

That said, there are some issues that need to be addressed before this game goes F2P. If you release the game in the state it is in now, you guys are never going to find your Western audience outside of the very dedicated few that have probably been here since the closed betas. If that’s what you guys, as developers, want, then so be it. But TOS is already a niche game, it doesn’t need less appeal for people when they’re deciding whether or not to give it a shot. I fully accept that this game is probably never going to be a blockbuster MMO, but at the very least it COULD have a healthy community and make okay money provided some steps are taken.

To start, let me say that you guys are absolutely putting a stranglehold on your community with certain mechanics and policies in the game. The market system and trade restrictions in this game are the WORST I have ever seen in a modern MMO. I understand that you have heard this feedback and are taking it into account, but I wanted to add my voice to the chorus. Having the wait time after items sell be so long is absolutely ridiculous. So is the idea that people can’t set their own prices for items. It is not up to you guys, as developers, to determine how the market will go. That is up to the PLAYERS. You are trying to stop RMT by punishing the legitimate players of the game along with it, and that is ridiculous.

Same with the trade restrictions. Leveling an alt in this game is already going to be daunting for people, so not being able to trade across their own account outside of the terrible team storage system just makes it even worse. That + items losing “potential.” (Seriously, potential is a terrible system/idea.) You know what’s happened to other alt unfriendly games in recent times? Wildstar. That’s what happened. Again, it’s not up to the developers to determine how trading and markets should go, that should be left up to the players. If you remove that aspect of freedom, players are understandably going to get upset because it’s one less thing they have control of in the game.

The dungeon entry restrictions are just…I don’t understand why you would do that. By putting in such heavy-handed restrictions on the market and instanced dungeons, you guys have made this game a bot haven. In other MMOs, bots and gold farmers prefer to just go into instanced areas to farm. I mean, nobody wants bots or farmers in their game, but in the world of MMOs they are an inevitability and at least that way they are out of the general public and farming cloth or whatever where it’s not stealing mobs from other people. As opposed to this game where there’s way more incentive for them to be running around on low level maps ganking mobs for the silver that drops.

Your dungeon restrictions and weird party mechanics also mean that pure support classes in this game suffer. Pure support isn’t my preferred gameplay style, but it clearly is for other people who enjoy partying up. Right now there’s no real incentive for DPS classes to party up with support folks unless they’re friends, which means they get left in the dust and one of the few areas where they shine - dungeons and missions - they are arbitrarily locked out of after a couple runs a day. (If they have a token.)

Basically, you guys as developers are strangling the life out of your own community before it even has a chance to grow, and it’s only going to get worse when the paywall comes down and more people get into the game and go, “what the heck?” at these mechanics. Your audience and potential customerbase will die out after the initial boom of interest unless these major issues are addressed.

There are also other obvious problems like the abysmal spawn rate of mobs. LBR, this game is for grinding. It’s why a lot of people are playing it. You cannot grind on a map where the mobs take 5-10 minutes to respawn and even then you’re competing with 3 other people for them. I gather that this is a bug, but PLEASE fix it as soon as you can. When one of the gameplay aspects people are looking for in the game isn’t working properly, that’s a huge problem. And what else are people going to do? Dungeons? Hmm.

All of this said, I still really love the aesthetic of the game. I wouldn’t still be here and have bought the expensive founders pack if I didn’t. If I didn’t like/care about this game, I wouldn’t even bother submitting this feedback, I’d just leave like I have for countless other generic F2P games. But this game isn’t generic, and it has the potential to be better than what it is.

2 Likes
#2

agree on everything but the market… in fact if the devs would put a max price on every item i would be extremly glad because it would prevent people ruling the market, expecially people using real money for it.

i have to admit as a pure healer/support class that the dungeon and mission limitations hit me quite hard gameplay wise since they’re the only places were my character’s abilities “shine” as you said… if you think that after the lvl 160 dungeon (160 one included) dungeons also give very crap experience and they are ALSO limited in entries… you get a picture were the only places were healers and support classes are actually usefull are almost completely useless and limited…

If you solo you take AGES and are the main target of kill stealers, if you want to farm but don’t have friends for a full grinding party you’re screwed… even with friends the spots were to grind after a certain level are so few you have to be lucky to find one free to use and the low mob density and respawn rate really does not help-

Aas for now what i can do is: log in - missions - no dungeon because the 160 one sucks so bad noone wants to do it - log out… most of the times.

If i do something else is explore old map just to do something… knowing that it’s not making me progress

#3

I agree in all points except for these:

Putting control of the market purely to players and allowing bots to have complete freedom in doing instanced dungeons and missions

I’ve played a game where the market has been purely controlled by the players and some smartass, merciless, and greedy bastards teamed up to set the price in the market and essentially break the purchasing power of the in-game currency there. I’d wager that they are still doing this up until today and no one can stop them from making huge profits out of it because the Devs/publisher do not have a care about it AT ALL.

Also, if we allow bots to do easy type of instances that automatons can actually handle then that’s easy money for them and they will break the economy by making a specifically cheap item expensive by buying ALL of the cheap entries of said item. Bots are bad, leave them outside of the areas as a temporary pain for now. We should be able to deal with them once a report feature has been implemented.

#4

What game? Because every other MMO I’ve played that had a big enough community and a solid trading/marketplace system did fine, because supply and demand meant that it was impossible to corner any markets outside of specific niches. I’ve never experienced what you’re talking about in any of the major MMOs I’ve played, nor a lot of the F2P ones I picked up. There are some people who play the AH in games like it’s their job, but generally if the price of something is high it should be worth it for other people to farm said items which gradually brings the price down. The only way I could see something like you’re describing happening is if the playerbase was TINY. Or if the game was Eve online and it was a coalition effort. And the only item that should have dev set price on any kind of AH is a token or premium currency.

And the bots are already breaking the economy, even with the current market/trading restrictions. This image from the TOS subreddit is a really fine example:

basically bots and RMT are already wrecking the marketplace to try and transfer their silver across characters, which ultimately, again, punishes legit players.

And the bots are always going to be in the game, whether there’s a report system or not. Like I said, bots and RMT are part of any MMO. The developers can combat it, but they’re never fully going to be able to get rid of it. Reporting and banning them one by one is not a feasible solution, and any measures they take outside of something like a captcha system are just going to be jailbroken within a couple of weeks. Even a successful MMO like WoW still has a huge bot problem, and after waves of banning 200k+ people, the forums where the bots are manufactured have a new code up within a day to get around the warden software. The RMT community is huge and profitable, that’s why it’s not going anywhere. (Not supporting it, mind, just saying it’s a bigger beast than just a couple of bots on a low level map that a few GMs can deal with individually.)

You can fight bots and RMT, but you can never completely get rid of them. As this game stands right now, bots are overrunning the low level areas. What you’re saying means that they’ll essentially just kind of be a thing players have to fight around forever in this game, which, I mean, okay. If that’s what they want. If the bots and RMT are going to exist regardless, I’d rather they be somewhere out of legitimate players’ hair.

Now, if they DO want to develop some kind of captcha/recaptcha system to fight the bots, okay, as long as it’s not demolishing the gameplay of legitimate characters. But a one-by-one report system is like bringing in a tiny bucket to scoop water out of a lake. Bots can’t be fought that way, nor can RMT. So there is no “temporary” pain. It’s not temporary, it’s something that needs to be dealt with using different measures because it’s probably never going fully away. It’s less “stopping” bots and more “stalling/redirecting them in a way that doesn’t bother the rest of the playerbase until they can be banned or the code broken.” The best thing developers can do is fight them behind the scenes while still making the experience as enjoyable as possible for legitimate players. Inhibiting legitimate players with restrictions like the dungeon limit and market restrictions is not the way to do that.

#5

i’m wondering what would happen if a system was implemented in such a way that:

  • an item get a “flag” that makes it possible for the game to automatically know which player dropped it… let’s call it player Y for now.
  • when such item is traded or sold, it’ll be recorded in the system that “player X received the item from player Y”
  • if player Y is found out to be a bot and banned, all marketplace customers and/or players that had a trade with such a player get automatically banned too.

I’m atm trying to find out how a system like this could be exploitable… but i think that to stop the sellers (and the many bots) we should actually make the buyers disappears… no buyers… no reason for the sellers to be in game.

If we have a report function for the bots and a system that ban players that had trades with said bots… then i guess the buyers population would dratically decrease?

Anyway it’s just a basic tought as for now

#6

I see, well I’ve considered the captcha but still rejected by some individuals who think that RMT are capable of making bots that are made by scientists who can read and solve math.

Well that said, I guess IMC should just use all possible means right now including your idea to solve this problem before the market gets further broken soon enough.

Up to IMC really, good luck to our dying market