Well if you want to look at it like an optimistic stock market approach when you’ve gone so low the only way it can go up is right? Yeah, that might happen if a private server doesn’t pop up and puts a nail in the coffin which would be akin to another company buying out the failing one.
A steady decline in players means no new blood into the game causing problems for ANYTHING player driven especially at the mid tier of leveling with dungeon queues and dailies. It also means the economy is going to become even worse than it was before even though that was already ruined by the box duping or what ever I read about people exploiting the game.
It’s all negative and there’s no positive here just optimism. The saddest part is any new genuine player is going to be greeted by the bot swarm in those low areas and everything else bad about the game currently which turns people off. It’s not player friendly and forgiving either for retention through mundane questing and grinding along with if you mess up a build then that’s it you’re done.
There’s no light of fixing any of this stuff either. So as it stands the population is only going to continue declining until there’s mostly bots left and people who are extremely hardcore seeing it as opportunity to monopolize camps, bosses, and the PVP system. It’s honestly a bleak future you’re looking at right now if this keeps up.
One thing I’ve learned from experience in literally watching games “die” is that most don’t just go offline. They kind of drift off into existence to the point of obscurity and decaying slowly. This one is heading that direction pretty quickly not because of the players “bashing” the game but everything IMC does is simply the worst.
They could have left this game frozen as it was from iCBT2 forever and it would have been doing exponentially better. Everything from that point onward has been the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in my life to kill off your player base in what I seen as an attempt to make money from early access packs, tokens, costumes, ect.
Not to be too much of a stickler, but actually when a stock drops so low on the market, if there’s no hope left for the company it actually will go all the way down till it hits zero and becomes a worthless stock.
If we compare this game to a stock, I think it has it’s ups and downs with a steady trend downward. We’ll see what happens when they actually release Rank 8 on iToS, but I honestly think it’s too late to really salvage the game at this point beyond what playerbase they have. I think their best option is to do a full relaunch, kind of Final Fantasy style. Honestly, if they actually worked on a patch to work on a lot of the big issues rather than worrying about new content and TP, there might be a chance. I mean, no FPS optimization still is a big one everyone constantly and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As you can see the other people in this community don’t seem to see it quite like that. They think part of the problem is that people are “bashing” the game giving it a bad reputation when in reality proof is in the pudding once you’ve played and tasted the sweet and sour taste. I absolutely hate it when people have to sugar coat literally skirting around issues trying to get someone to do something. If you have to lie or gloss over problems to get people to play a game there’s a real problem and you’re leading them into disappointment for later.
This game isn’t going to “die” at all. It will just be that one book in back of the library torn by history since the author couldn’t finish it and people didn’t like the direction the story took. You look back thinking about how good the cover and plot was but just can’t get back into it since the new chapters are so bad.
I don’t think he meant using crossfire to cut off wildfire.
I think he more meant something like having Burning Man in the forest and wondering why it the forest burned to the ground.
But beside that, I still believe it should be upto someone who’s curious about the game to play it first and then see if the bad outweighs the good. Not the loud and bitter to make the idea for them.
This game is the equivalent of Suicide Squad (lol comparison), tons will dislike what’s inside and how it was made, some will like it, and some will find it just ok and leave it as that. It’s still marginally bad early wise, but wasn’t a horrid atrocity as people like to react.
mfw game actually does get FPS optimization and people move on to whine about the unfair class balancing and quit because of that
It definitely has a downwards trend, and that will is the primary problem. They need to completely overhaul their communication, and bug fixing methods to be more efficient and satisfactory.
Comparing peak players is not the whole picture, there have been 95000 players in the past 2 weeks, with 28500 of them playing more than 5 hours. Peak players is obviously important, but it must be considered with the other data.
I’m a fan of graphs myself, Steamspy does do a good job of them, so I might steal some of there’s and put it in the OP. For now, I’ll give a summarised version:
Peak players is mediocre at best, and decreasing, while overall player numbers are 95000, with 28500 what I’d call “active players” in the past 2 weeks. Basically people saying ToS is currently dead are simply wrong. There is a downwards trend, but we are not at the point to call it dead.
And yeah, it seems there are a few people on the forums who switch between a more trolling like attitude, but will then come out of no where with a serious good point. It can be difficult to determine who some of these people are, but I don’t think the answer is heavy moderation. I think IMC has had maybe a little too light of an approach so far, but I don’t want them to go overboard, it’s all about balance.
IMC did lose out an a huge opportunity, it’s too bad, but I think the core gameplay is good enough to regrow, if the game actually gets to that point.
At times it’s warranted, and people are right about a downwards trend, but the game is quite far from death.
Very well said. I totally agree, that’s why I understand the posts that say the game is dead, they’re wrong, but I understand where they are coming from.
That would certainly be an issue if that were the case, but it’s not. 95000 players in the past 2 weeks, with 28500 playing more than 5 hours, I call those with more than 5 hours the active players. Put that together with a peak of anywhere from 6500-7000 and what you most likely have is a mix of dedicated and new players, with a very large group of casual players. My guess on why there is so many casual players is because of the frustrations that currently exist.
This seems to be something people miss out on, MMO’s can go up overtime. PoE is a pretty famous MMO and at one time used to be quite small, Project Gorgon is another, the latter recently really went up with a bunch of updates that came out. My point is, ToS missed an opportunity to capitalise on the hype train, and even though it’s shrinking, with more content and more bug fixes I think we’ll see a reversal. Keep in mind, the last part is just my own speculation, as it is very hard to determine what players will latch onto. If they fix the FPS update, release R8, and add those costumes everyone is looking for, maybe that will be enough to get people back on the game, I’m not sure, but the base game play is so solid I have hope.
That’s exactly my point Tree of Savior is alright. That’s it. It’s not doing super well, in fact, it has a downwards trend which is a problem. I just want to point out those who say it’s already gone are wrong.
But yeah, that’s part of the problem, ToS currently seems to have a bunch of casual players, it will of course translate a bit going into dungeon queuing times but not enough to be satisfactory, same thing with the market.
There are new players, 100000 new people download the game a month (remember through owners ≠ players) the main problem I see is too many being casual.
This is where you just revealed yourself as a troll. Thanks, now I’ll make sure to never take you seriously after saying “the main problem is too many being casual” when clearly there’s much more to this game’s decline than people being “filthy casuals” who can’t understand the complexity of a game like Tree of Savior.
Not only that but your 100,000 number a month has nothing to even do with concurrent total players on average being 4000-6000. 843574897537593794853798513978 people could download this game and that doesn’t matter unless they login and play.
A super old game I used to play www.darkages.com is still not dead but it only went from like 6,000 people down to 50-100 and most people botting for numerous reasons. Guess everyone is just too casual man.
Uh, I’m going to gloss over you calling me a troll, I’d recommend editing that out.
The main factor contributing to the peak being 6500 compared to 95000 people, are them being casual. I’m not blaming them for being casual, in fact, I’m a little off the game right now, and I’d consider myself casual. I’m only playing an hour a day or so at the moment. Honestly I think this may have been a miscommunication. By problem I did not mean the problem with the game, I meant problem making those 28500 active players contribute more to peak amount.
The real question is why if there are 28500 active players, why are they casual? Why isn’t there more conversion to dedicated players? That’s where IMC’s failing comes up. I’m not blaming the players, I’m blaming IMC. They have been slow to fix the problems and add content. I never said otherwise.
The owner amount is absolutely relevant, that means people are trying it but there is no retention. There are new players but ToS is not keeping them at an equal rate to losing them. I’d argue this suggests there is a dedicated core of players, that’s slowly dwindling down, while new players are just supplementing the peak amount.
Not going to happen because that statement is trollish meriting a quote because there’s fallacy in what you’ve said. The current downloads are more than likely from bots having accounts ready for banning. Everything previously before that was from Ragnarok Online’s big international following this game had going for it.
You can track the biggest hit to the player base in a timeline of events occurring on the forums with this post three months ago: I Love Tree of Savior; I Am Leaving Tree of Savior and then them having the Q&A basically not doing anything leading to the steepest decline. Also, they screwed over the SA community at this time with the server location migration.
The second biggest drop of concurrent players was in August which my guess is because of everyone’s favorite topic hook64: Gamebreaking hack and still remains at large to this day being a huge problem. It kills the game completely when you can just bot and cheat freely.
This game is pretty damn niche and doesn’t exactly attract a casual player base. Saying people left because they couldn’t handle the game play is extremely trollish and nubile when it’s more than likely from performance, balancing, and game limitations which really killed the community this game once had.
I’m so proud to see that iTos has 4000~5000 active players and yet not “dead completely”.
Why so serious ? Even IMC don’t care about itos so why should we?
BTW IMC do care about players but not here, check this
what amazing gifts from Ktos, u know why korean players can get this? Because IMC do know if they do nothing,ktos’ players will be gone. JUST ASK PLAYERS FROM KTOS,YOU WILL FIND OUT MORE ABOUT FREE GIFTS
What I can only imagine is:
IMC NA Staff: " hey guys,these westen kids are so rich and …, they don’t even care we have to provide so much different kinds of free stuff to Korean players, oh thank god, we just need to turn on/ off the server and then the maintenance is done~~!"
They didn’t have “early release” packs either like iToS. This is actually one of the biggest reasons for me quitting after them lying about saying iToS will be different. Then we just became a crappier version of that server over time with less frequent updates.
I still want my beta tester arm band considering they nuked the beta forums purging my topic about being Cleric3 in iCBT1.
You’re not wrong, but ALOT of Korean MMOs in Korea have to keep ways of retention. Whether it be daily login events, spoiling the crap out of the populace, or in game mechanics that require constant input for result, it’s just how they roll. It’s a demonized machine of entitlement.
Life’s just not fair when it’s ready. Born too late to explore the world and too early to explore the universe.
You said you wouldn’t take anything I’ve said seriously because you think I’m a troll, that’s ridiculous, unproductive and unfounded, also I’m not sure you know what a fallacy is. If you’re willing to have a conversation without resorting to an actual fallacy, I’m down, if not though, you shouldn’t come to a topic where we’re trying to listen to each other and discuss.
Some players counted are certainly bots, but I don’t think there are as many as you think.
No real disagreement from me, the only thing is we’re not sure if IMC is banning those with hook64, although from what I remember they are, they’re just not advertising it.
By casual, I meant by playtime.
Literally no one said that, but yeah, I agree.
I feel like you didn’t read what I said before other than that one quote you posted, so I’ll copy and paste it here: [quote=“Queue, post:32, topic:325336”]
That’s where IMC’s failing comes up. I’m not blaming the players, I’m blaming IMC. They have been slow to fix the problems and add content. I never said otherwise.
[/quote]
I’m not sure what else you want, the only thing I’m seeing is that you jumped to a conclusion, and it turned out you were entirely wrong about me.
The whole premise you’re making to me personally is that there’s a phantom “casual” player base that magically exists and plays this game to keep it alive. So that is the reason why IMC doesn’t fix or do anything for the players since that’s healthy right? If that right there isn’t the most silliest things I’ve ever read for a debate against hard facts of an average 4000-6000 players online across multiple servers and something I’d see a troll say then I have no idea man.
Then the other reason you’re saying this is to prevent and deter “misleading or misunderstanding” what the numbers mean? It doesn’t take a Jedi Mind Trick to understand that there’s only ever been 4000-6000 people online at any point in the month ever. Nothing more or less and in between whether casual or not that is all. If anything everything you’ve said is to mislead people into believing that the game has more players than it actually has which isn’t even true.
Real reason this game doesn’t get fixed is because the people working there are bad at coding. If you know anything about Ragnarok Online’s actual history with the leak of their server software or having played the game you would understand. Then we have to go through a whole translation barrier which they’ve remained almost ignorant towards everything any icbt tester has ever crossed over them in regards to their publicized responses and even in current Q&A
You can then piece together the puzzle with how many testers and people tried to get into the betas being around 50,000 or so people is spot on and this game never really grew past that because of the early access packs and freeze on new accounts. So there goes your whole phantom new player thing out the window which most likely are just bots doing their bot things to avoid detection.
What’s funny is the more you understand and know from Ragnarok Online the better you can get a picture of what happened here. From my perspective many years ago I’d have blamed Gravity for being a horrible publisher ruining RO which doesn’t seem to be true. Today I would blame the CEO and lead developer Mr. Kim himself for poor direction and ignorance towards players concerns.
Having seen how the Athena RO project grow and produce something better than the original because the main company was incompetent and lazy taught me quite a bit about how the game works with sprites and the coding. Fixing half these problems would be a breeze for someone with access to the code within a reasonable amount of time that isn’t months. On the other hand them using Direct X9 is -not- an easy fix at all without a work around to utilize GPU’s properly and eliminate performance problems. The servers just required them literally to buy better ones instead of being shiesters.
Knowing full well all this stuff I know that:
A.) They are not going to buy better servers after seeing what happened with the SA community.
B.) They will never use something like http://dege.freeweb.hu/ which renders the game using old Glide technology so it utilizes resources like your GPU to not lag.
C.)That whole language barrier and ignorance thing? After seeing Julie leave because they didn’t want to hear the player’s concerns I’m pretty sure this is staying like this for good.
So if you think for a second this game is going to get better unless a miracle happens I think you’re just wrong and why the fallacy in what you’ve said. I would bet anything those users logging in and out are just bots and not new people or “casuals” as you call them.
It’s not healthy, it just isn’t as bad as many of people on the forums seem to think. I’m just going off the numbers. There have been 95000 people who’ve played in the last 2 weeks, 28500 of which were active (so basically just the 28500 because the others played so little I’d consider them irrelevant. The reason it isn’t healthy is the low peak player count, and the downwards trend, it just isn’t unhealthy enough yet, for IMC to go into correctional overdrive.
The 4000-6000 people at one time is what proves my idea of a large casual player base, with a smaller more hard core one that participates on the forums. We know there have been 28500 active players, 28500/24=1187 average daily without taking into account any of the peak times, or people who turn the game on for an hour, and decide it isn’t for them, then turn it off. It’s very reasonable when you look at it that way. There are players, just not enough hardcore ones who want to farm items to get the market going, or dungeon too much. I was in the same boat for a while. I’d hop on for an hour, do two or three maps and log off before I really got into it. And with free to play with a cash shop becoming the new norm, it wouldn’t surprise me if enough players, from both the dedicated and casual player bases dropped a tenner every now and again on TP, that’s just speculation though, no numbers for that, I could just see that happening.
Based on some of the bugs that have come out of the updates, IMC either really do have bad programmers, or their staff is much too small. And total agreement from me on their translations, I did some digging and I think part of the problem is IMC’s reluctance to international hiring. They won’t hire people unless they work at their building in Korea, so if someone wants to go work for IMC, they have to move there, even if they just want to contribute ideas or be a community manager.
I’m not sure why the early access effects the player count, even with the freeze, game went free to play, a bunch of the more casual players (myself included) decided to play. They froze the creation of new accounts because their servers couldn’t be upgraded in time to deal with the influx of new players. A new free to play MMO, is going to have hordes of players who want to try it, and when they couldn’t because it was frozen or there were bad servers, they decided to wait it out and try again later. I’m definitely speculating on that aspect (we both are), but we have no real information on that so we have to, I guess I just don’t see what you said being a problem when it comes to post launch player numbers.
You very well might be right, and as time goes on, and my own frustration increases I may agree with you more and more.
I think that might be a little too speculative, we’re not sure what the back end of the game looks like, but, there is a good chance you are correct. And if it turns out IMC simply isn’t buying the servers required I’ll be quite unhappy, but the last update we had on them was the company they were using to supply the server’s wasn’t letting them upgrade accordingly.
The game getting better is just my own hope and speculation. What is not my opinion, is the potential for ToS. The base gameplay, and the ideas, are phenomenal, it’s just the execution that’s causing ToS’s decline. I don’t really buy the bot thing either, it’s clear it’s an issue but we don’t have enough information to just credit the population purely to bots.
