@Staff_Julie
So there’s a LOT of ideas to filter through. I’ll try to help you prioritize which ones are most important.
###Anything involving class balance is not that important.
Why? In every game, classes are never balanced. They will be changed time and time again. When you do make changes, don’t push a few changes. That will just piss off the players more. It’s better to have us keep complaining about the same thing for a long time rather than give us something new to complain about. We’ll just complain about both. Instead, make a LOT of changes all at once. It will have all the players scrambling to find out whether the changes were for the better. Players will still complain, but at least other players will have a discussion with them about whether or not they are completely right due to changes in balance. When you do, don’t forget to provide a reset scroll to everyone. Only fair due to the high complexity of the game.
###Anything involving end game is not that important.
This includes pvp, gvg, endless dungeons, whatever. Why? Because players who play long enough to reach this type of content are already your long term customers and players. The most important aspect of an mmo is to have lots of players, and to have them play for a long, long time. Without that, the game dies. Of course, you want to keep these players happy, but that’s not important in the short term. As long as you make a blog post with your plans for end game content, you’ll retain players without the need to actually to make anything. Then you can use your time and resources to make something better.
Prioritize any suggestions that improves the early game. What does this include?
###Monster spawns
Get rid of timer based respawns. Maps will need active spawn rates to keep up with high player populations in all maps. Active spawn rate means: As soon as 1-5 monster(s) dies, spawn another group of monsters somewhere else. This also reduces the need to have extra channels, since players won’t have to fight with each other over spawn points. Without active spawn rate, more time is spent waiting and less time is being spent playing. When players get angry at each other because one is denying the other the ability to play the game, that’s how you get players to quit. This is by far the most common suggestion I have read across all of social media, forums, chat rooms, and real life.
###Anything to help make friends
Friends keep players playing. This is the number one reason why no mmorpg can ever beat World of Warcraft. Each and every facet of your game should ask the question: “Could a player use this to make a friend?” If the answer is: “Well, maybe?” Then it needs to be fixed. Currently, the brilliant class system makes the most friends, as players will talk about class builds for many months to come. The current dungeon system and team battle arena is really bad at this. Simply increasing the amount of coordination needed to beat a dungeon, like having players stand at specific locations to unlock a door, will help. Bosses that have to be defeated a certain way would also be a good way to encourage players to chat. Novice players would ask what they have to do, experienced players will help, and a bond is formed.
###Anything that helps you keep friends
Making friends is good. Keeping old friends is even better! Players need ways to play with their friends. Otherwise, there’s no point in your game being an mmo. It needs to be something that can be done at any time. Dungeons currently are bad for this because you can only do it a limited number of times per day. Questing is awful for this because you can’t sync up quests reliably. One possible solution is to give party mates who have already completed the quest a small silver reward for helping a friend complete a quest for the first time. This way, the player doesn’t feel like they are wasting their time. Grinding is one possible thing they can do, but you would need to adjust the game so that grinding is actually worth the time spent. Right now, the only way to level is to do quests, so grinding feels like a chore. Monsters dropping exp cards is a step forward, but you’ve still got a long way to go. Anyways, make sure we can play with our friends and have fun while doing so.
Hopefully, this will help you sort out what suggestions to follow first, and which ones to handle later. Strengthen the early game. Unlike the end game, every player to have ever played tos will experience the early game. Make it good. Make it so good that I would want to play it a hundred times over. When I make my 10th character, make sure that I will have just as much fun as my first character. This is what will keep players playing. The huge number of class combinations will encourage players to keep trying new characters, so make sure the first 10 hours of the game is perfect.
###My personal suggestion to encourage exploration
Wings of Vibora gives you gifts for exploring maps. This is convenient, but not the best way to teach players to explore. If you don’t teach players to explore, doing it will feel like a chore. In order to teach players to explore, you need to put rewards right there on the fields. The first map: West Siaulai Woods has more chests than any other map in the game. More maps need to be like that.
For every reward you would have Wings of Vibora give you, instead scatter those into treasure chests and hide them in corners of the map that would otherwise have no reason for existing. Add even more chests containing keys to open other chests in the same map. The keys should not work on chests found in other maps. A count of the number of keys you have found in that map could be shown in the mini-map.
By doing so, you can now safely get rid of the “Lv.X Treasure Chest key” system. This system does not promote exploration at all. All it does is make players look up a guide online to see which chest they should open with it, because almost nobody is going to remember where every chest they have ever found was located and what level key they needed to open it.
###Finally
The story sucks, but there’s nothing you can do about it for now. Most players don’t even read the quests they’re given. Players that do will complain that the story is bad. However, it makes no sense to devote resources into improving something majority of players don’t care about. Also, there’s too much story that would need to be changed in order to make it epic. This could be a translation problem. THERE IS ONE THING THAT COULD BE DONE. It won’t help by much, but it WILL be noticeable. Give important NPCs a name. What important NPCs? Your class masters! Players interact with their Class Masters all the time, but we don’t even know their name! The moment we can attach a name to a character, we can actually associate with them and refer to them. How would you feel if you didn’t have a name, Staff_Person?