We as a community are starting to feel unheard. The easiest way to start hemorrhaging players is to make them feel like they’re being mistreated. The easiest way to assuage that feeling is to make them feel like they have a voice.
To be perfectly fair to IMC, there have been some improvements to the game’s stability and playability since Tuesday, not counting the last three hours or so.
That is, until Klaipeda crashed.
I think the biggest problem here is that the international servers are severely understaffed. Very few people available to respond to forum threads, to respond to the really nasty number of gold spammers, to be some kind of community liaison. Even if IMC was trying to fix something at this point, there’s no communication to the player base about those activities, so we collectively make these assumptions about how IMC doesn’t care. I’m sure that IMC would like to continue making money off of this product, and the only way to do that is to make it marketable and sustainable.
We have no live indication of server health. An indicator that changes from green to red doesn’t tell us anything. There are no tweets, no Facebook posts, no forum posts, no official announcements of any kind. Meanwhile, with Klaipeda tanked, you can be sure that IMC is scrambling to figure out what went wrong. We just haven’t been told that it’s happening, so the assumption is that nothing is being done.
There’s no way for us as a player base to help control the spammers. There are currently 20,000 players running Tree of Savior, according to live Steam stats. Most of those players are across Orsha and Klaipedia. If a gold spammer, or any other player for that matter, manages to get themselves blocked by 1% of the server’s population within the span of 5 minutes, that’s probably a good indication that the person deserves some kind of punitive response.
Handling the number of players on international ToS right now is more than a half a dozen staffmembers can handle. We were ~36,000 strong on launch day, and we’re peaking at ~30,000 every weekday. You can be sure that number will be higher on the weekend.
We need a community liaison. We need a voice.
Maybe a solution for the issue could be a number of players identified as established and active members of the community, with the ability to contact a staffmember in a more direct manner? Instead of having to spend additional money hiring employees, source the gruntwork to the players. Lord knows that we as a player base want the game to succeed, or we wouldn’t be playing it.
Just my two cents.
EDIT: There’s an official announcement now for Klaipeda being down.
