I discovered the game through this video (I was playing with the reviewer a small online roguelike RPG and found out he was reviewing some games), and immediately got hooked. For those who would like to see how it was at the beginning of 2017, check it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZosyC_7uzpo. For me, watching this video again some 18 months later gives me a high sense of nostalgia…
Been playing since then, enjoying the game a lot, now’s the time to make a little review and put down some thoughts on the table. So here are a few subjects I’d like to discuss (in no particular order).
** Game difficulty **
This will relate to the early game. Looking at the comments I made at that time, I was already under the impression that the game was an easy one. Now 18 months later, what did change?
- ATK got buffed by a lot (part 1)
- ATK got buffed by 50% (part 2)
- DEF got buffed by 70%
No kidding. I was laughing when the reviewer was able to oneshot a boss, now you can pretty much oneshot everything up to level 50, and even then, you probably have the money to buy pardonner buffs and oneshot everything up to level 100. I remember when my first wizard hit the Gateway of the Great Kings map and got the Rokas Robe as a quest reward – I was like a little kid opening a christmas present. Sounded like an awesome item at that time… Now new players are gifted with free cheeze-a-thon equipment and endless buffs, making the early game obsolete. And how many times I’ve seen posts on the forum about people complaining they were stuck at level 220 with trash equipment and no idea where to go to level up… how do they dare to whine when they don’t even take some time to play the game as intended. Sorry… but simply doing the main quests, exploring a bit, going into the instanced dungeons and buying from the market/trading from other players will give you everything you need so you’re never stuck. Frankly, just remove that rookie pack, the game is already easy as it is for beginners. One last question here: how many new players have watched the gorgeous intro to the game after character creation? A big 
to those who didn’t…
I will leave the endgame aside, because I’m probably one of the few that thinks it is properly balanced. This leads to my second point…
** Game content **
I have only one question here… why the hell release a game as a half-finished product? You even get a “rank 8 pioneering savior” title… when rank 10 is around the corner 
. A game must have a beginning, a plot, an end. Otherwise, it’s still in “development stage”. You can’t even say we’re “beta testing” the game, as it would imply a finished game where we look for balance issues and bugs to fix. Nope. Still breaking everything and completely rebalancing whole chunks, while adding more content that should have been there already. Imagine the same game two years ago with the content planned for rank 10 and all the bugs fixed since then (plus those I hope will be fixed in the next months). How many players would still be around?
Looking at the content itself, you have almost unlimited builds and maps to play with. Yet you only see meta builds most of the time. And how many people will complete all those “fetch” or “kill” quests? Or worse… the repetitive ones. Rarely you see interesting quests, which is too bad, because they can be fun. Tried to avoid the gazing golems in Demon Prison? Flee from the petrification frost while destroying barriers and being poisoned by Infro Holder Archers in Coastal Fortress? Clearly not if you got fed up digging spots for 30 seconds to get one item… and you need to get 5 of those to complete the quest… and you need to repeat that quest five times! And all you get is a stupid tee-shirt… So yeah, while working on the next batch of updates, reworking the quest system should be something to consider. More interesting stuff, less brainless grinding. A MMORPG needs to RPG. Which also leads to my next point: it should also MMO, otherwise it’s just an online game. And this could happen…
http://mangband.org/Main/ServerList
** Player base **
I love to see all these players running around in West Siauliai Woods in that video. Fresh players with stars in their eyes and their little weapon doing 1 damage. Where are they now? Some of us now have multi-level 360 chars and enjoying level 360 content, with one main character well equipped and alts to enjoy some extra fun. Others… will have left for good. Maybe they didn’t like the game atmosphere, that could be understandable… ToS is far from the usual MMORPG. Maybe they got disappointed… and here, guys, you can do something about it. Bring happiness to your F2P playerbase, in return they will make donations by buying TP, give you more reasons to improve the game… a vertuous circle. Another point to improve: is the game still advertised? When I started to play, there were adds (YouTube, …) on the net. I don’t see them anymore… If you count on word of mouth to gain new players… I’m afraid this will work poorly, especially if you get more and more disappointed players, who will tell their friends NOT to play the game.
When I started the game, you could see shouts for party stuff almost constantly. Reached a new level threshold? Instance dungeon queues were always full, and you just had to wait for 5 players in your level range… Nowadays, it’s a constant struggle to get 5 players for a dungeon run (and that’s for dungeon 300 – I cannot imagine what is it for lower level dungeons). Want to do an ET run? Good luck… Anything to fix the problem? Well, there’s an easy solution… you need to join a guild. And on to my next point…
** Guilds **
When I started, there were many guilds. With a lot of people. And guild feuds… And now? You have that lovely Guild Promotion Board, in theory it should improve the game a lot. However…
- so few guilds use it to promote their guild
- high level guilds with less than 10 members (wat? is that a one-man-with-multiple-accounts guild?)
- front page with all members (80 members? oh wait, I know this one… and this one… they are charming persons with which I’ve already played… wait… who is “inyourass” or “flflfl”? and all these guys I’ve never seen in 18 months…)
So yeah, hard choice when you want to join a guild… Best is probably to play with some members and see if you get a good feeling before applying. A good suggestion here would be to add the last time a player connected to the game to the guild promotion board (like on the Friends list), so you know if a guild has 50 active members or 50 dead accounts…
Now looking at people usually connected in Klaipeda ch1, many of them will have a guild name… which I will not recognize at all. I suspect here new players getting their first million silver and spending it to get a guild name from the Templar master, thinking that it’s what allows you to create a “party”. So there are probably a ton of one-man guilds now…
Finally my last point…
** Bots/Gold sellers **
Characters not meant to play the game have to go away. I’m tired of reporting/blocking those gold sellers… I’m usually playing on ch3 when warping to Klaipeda, and I often get a 2/100 or 3/100 player count. Checking who is on the channel, there’s one gold seller (shouts + normal message when someone else comes close) and one AFK char. You can report the gold seller (and block it to avoid those stupid messages), and usually its gone the next day… and the other AFK char is still there doing nothing. When you come close… BAM, it’s another gold seller that simply replaced the one you reported. Wait long enough, and another AFK char will come… meaning that these gold sellers plan in advance the fact that their bots will be reported and banned, so there’s one on every channel at any time! Not only they are annoying, but they become clever! Please think about a permanent system to block these… usually they simply advertise an online site, wouldn’t be hard to block some recurring patterns like no?
For bots it’ll be harder, and they’re sneakier and smarter… First remove the rookie pack, make necro harder to play AFK… and if possible tie leveling up to quests. Just the main ones so you’re not harassing regular players too much if they don’t want to do too many quests. Putting an “effort” button should prevent some botting if not all.
Done for now… Probably won’t do such post again in a while, as content is slowly coming to ToS. I hope in a near future we will be able to complete the final quest to kill Giltine and free Laima with our rank 12 level 500 characters. We will see how many Saviors will be there at that time. Or maybe another Medzio Diena will strike and nobody will survive, we can’t be sure…
.