Like many of you, I’m hoping this game shines. Unfortunately. A week in, which is typically enough in any online game to get a grasp of how things are or to be, it’s pretty pale and filled with obvious flaws already. Flaws that I can’t imagine were simply over looked but just too lazy to have designed the game properly for, things that were just thrown in without careful planning on the developer’s end (The type of planning that players are somehow expected to have to be explained). The example I’m talking about is the GvG tower events, they’re a big mess in general. The other big mess is the rest of the game, you feel as if you’re being punished every step of the way.
Instead of talking about issues directly, this time lets discuss how the restrictions in this game really affect us. The bottom line.
-While other MMOs encourage alt creation through ease, you’re discouraged here. With messy systems clogging up your ease of purchasing gear or moving silver to your own alt.
-With limited dungeon entries, the game discourages more gameplay. An oddity, an although other games have similar restrictions, this is typically something only for their end-game content, to restrict gearing too quickly. However their end-game content tends to be a much higher standard of involvement. Things like RO, WoW, Rift, Archeage, etc with weekly resets and with a huge player base involvement. 10+ all the way to hundreds.
-The loot system needs re working if the current restrictions remain. No player, let alone a party, wants to feel punished (through potential loss or trade count loss) simply for having a drop that is picked up by either an unintended party member or wanting to share a drop in general. Even the scenario of waiting for the loot timer to expire and having a wanting party member pick something up to circumvent those restrictions is unwise due to the fact anyone else can then pick up said item.
-The nature of experience and level restrictions is undesirable in general. Now this might be a lot more personal, and less objective, but how exp scales and how the game is designed, there simply are bottlenecks built into the current leveling curve. Periods where you’ll find very little to grind while having to depend on questing, dungeons, and missions to get through them. The fact that players begin to be penalized for killing monsters ABOVE their level of 5 and below their level of 10 is a bit of a dated concept. Especially the above part. Perhaps to curve “Power Leveling” but again this seems to be a punishment to the general RPG population. Where players would love the extra challenge for some extra reward, we’re punished yet again for a seemingly designed system to discourage foul play of some sort.
To continue, this experience issue should be linear like any other system in this game. If a player can manage to find grinding areas to their benefit, even if it’s severely below their level or above, they should be rewarded for managing to do so. The loot in this game encourages non-linear grinding, that is some items require much lower level items to craft. With typically low drop rates, a player is punished if they decide to grind it out on a high level character, their time is “wasted”, especially so if their desired item decides never to grace them with their presence.
-Back to the first point of alt creation, with a game with SO many diverse choices of class combinations. An MMO should encourage time sink, that is replay ability. Again, ToS does so in a punishing fashion in this next point. There is no way to reset class choices. After spending hours, days, weeks, on one character, you can totally bouch it up and have that character become completely useless to you. And the answer, the only choice, is to quit it and reroll. Though this is typical of any game, where in ToS class rank choices are the equivalent of picking an actual class. However there are some truly abysmall class combinations in ToS. Things that simply have zero synergy and won’t ever be useful. You’d be hard pressed to find the same for any other game where you couldn’t “spec” or swap out essentially on the fly to something else. Again the point here is not that it isn’t wonderful for all these amazing combinations, but at the end of the day it’s a combination that essentially makes one character, one class. And it’s cemented, and the difference between ToS and other RPGs is that there are truly useless class combos. Other games, like old DnD classics, there’s a role for a gnome warrior or a troll sorcerer. They have pros and cons. There’s no place for a Cleric Krivus Paladin Druid. It’ll be fairly useless. Just like many critics would claim that forums are the vocal minority. An even narrower minority might be those that do research into the game. They’ll play with most of the game a mystery to them. And although the hardcore will reroll a better combination after gaining experience, the casual may just quit and move onto something that doesn’t feel like a waste of time. After all nothing promises them their next choice won’t be superceded by another after more discovery.
Gamers have to understand that the lifeblood of any game isn’t the hardcore, it’s the casual. The reality is that games need to be casual enough for the mainstream and it’s the hardcore that are on borrowed time. You’ll only have a game to enjoy so long as there’s enough of a mainstream market to sustain it.
