I don’t believe that I’ve seen this game try to promote itself outside of the official website, other than through their Youtube channel (which I only found out existed when looking for certain OSTs). With the 4ever update coming out, couldn’t the marketing team try and sponsor a few appropriate Youtube channels to try and raise the player population?
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games still very iffy on some parts, so ads probably not the most important thing on their minds. plus the game style is for a very niche audience so word of mouth is probably the best way of getting this game to those that could be interested
I was wondering the same. I don’t know what kind of policies they have that they’re lacking of advertisements. Most people get to know it through recommendations within friends or fan arts. Or the simple reference that its from the creator of Ragnarok, so yeah.
Wowww… i love this word “indie” and yes!!! indie game 
If this game managed to get 50 000 players during launch, then it can be implied that this game has a relatively large niche that this game can pander towards. When I first played this game I didn’t encounter any serious bugs, and I’d imagine all games have some issues that the team can’t get around to fixing, or are impossible to fix (balanced PVP).
Like, I can’t imagine that PVP in this game can ever be balanced, unless everyone’s forced to play the same class. There are 4*(16!/(16 - 3)!) +13!/(13-3)! = 2526 class combinations that are available, and for true balanced PVP they need to worry about all the different interactions between these combination of classes. They do their best to compensate for balanced PVP by monitoring feedback and game-play, but there’s always will be some imbalance because of the diversity in each of the classes. If they change one thing, it affects a number of classes, so I see balanced PVP as unsolvable problem with only patches as a way to remedy it.
I’ve only seen this game try to sustain the current population, rather than reach out to attract new players. Since the team at TOS hasn’t done anything recently to draw in more players, I’m not surprised to see the player population stagnate. Most of the recent events and updates I’ve seen that are held are focused towards bringing returning players in and keeping the current population satisfied. With the Arts update, this looks like it appealed to most of the current players but as a relatively new player I don’t really understand the impact of Arts. With the 4ever update they promise to bring more classes and rework PVP which is exciting for current players, but new players don’t understand the current state of PVP and don’t know if the new upcoming classes are good at all.
I’m not saying that TOS should forgo all of this, and focus only on bringing in new players, a balancing act should be played between sustaining the current population and increasing the size of the player population with each opportunity that comes, such as major updates. TOS should still have some focus on sustaining the current population, so these having events and these updates are really beneficial towards keeping the current player base. Not having a growing community hurts the game as well, such as when I queue now for dungeons below level 330, I have quite some trouble finding other players to party with unless I use a microphone. If IMCgames wishes to grow they should invest some time and resources towards attracting new players as well. This is so that they have access to more feedback and resources because of the larger community.
Edit: Combination calculation correction
Edit 2: Content corrections (…exciting for new players, but new players… ; …new upcoming class is good at all…)
Maybe they don’t have… a budget for ads? 
A few years back i remember seeing an ad of kTOS while browsing the wiki of some other online game.
They should have… but to make sure… just spend a few more thousand $ on TP boxes. 
I dont think this game will ever be big in north America because progression is so heavily tied to rng and you know how north america hates rng mechanics. Look how quickly a lot of people dropped black dessert.
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I don’t play for years from now, and came here to see if the game still exists.
IF and a big IF IMC want to ressurrect this game, is just relaunch with fixed fps and ping. New and old players won’t back to a server with years of existence after all bug exploits and bots. People hypes with new, fixed, 2.0, improved and even without ads, a relaunch or something like that would make players get knowledge of ToS.
I can assume that a lot of old players wanted to back to ToS, but after take a look on steamspy, the impression is that the game is the same crap that made everyone leave.
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It is a wiser move to save their money until they can be sure about the game retention capability, as many pointed out ToS suffers with many issues on multiple fronts.
First question is, what to advertise? The two major strengths of ToS are the art style and the ability to play with multiple classes at once. Art style can catch new players but is more of a niche aspect to promote the game on, it doesn’t have enough of a retention power for the kind of game ToS is, not to say other games offer similar aesthetics. On the other side the ability to play multiple classes isn’t necessarily a good thing, quality always beats quantity and the current game state has many classes that are, from the pure viability perspective, unplayable and others that overlap with their sibling classes. It gets worse when the physical trees have hard synergy restrictions, a new player is likely to not be aware of them and end up with a frustrating build in which skills can’t be used without swapping all time. Telling people “you can play with multiple classes” in your game is quite a big statement but it isn’t as catchy as saying “you can play with multiple class combinations in any combination you can imagine”.
The second point to be reviewed is the new player experience. Right now new players are isolated from the game because of how few they and how they can’t play with veterans directly (it is possible but in a more one sided unnatural manner). IMC way to work around it was through boosting players to the endgame as quick as they can, this removes the exploration value of the game and leaves them in this weird spot in which they have power but lack knowledge.
It also doesn’t help that certain mechanics are counter-intuitive and need exterior explanation to be understood, the property damage is the best example as it screams “this elemental power should increase that specific elemental damage” but does something significantly different (which, finally, is going to be addressed soon). At last, the combat itself is basic enough to be understood at the first 10 minutes but never develops beyond that, those that seek difficulty progression will get frustrated once they invest a lot of time to see it repeating over and over. If the act of playing the game isn’t fun (or fun enough), then you can’t expect new players to keep investing on it, and most people aren’t that willing to spend dozens, hundreds or thousands of hours to hunt sparkling stuff.
Not meeting/betraying people’s trust and expectations is worse than not having any impression, as such it’s more beneficial to stay on low profile until be sure they can maintain new players engaged for long.
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I agree, the art style is one of the characteristics that stand out for this game, but it isn’t something that TOS can entirely on for player retention if they were to promote this game. I don’t believe most MMOs should rely on advertising their aesthetic qualities anyway, as it should be a “side bonus” that is shown when promoting other individual characteristics of the game that competitors being won’t be able to as relatively easily imitate and integrate into their own game.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. When starting out in this game and finding out that my current class combination wasn’t viable, it was quite punishing to realize that I would need to either need to start a new character, or pay in order to re-select my classes. There are events and dailies that offer class change points to eventually change classes, but for a new player it make take quite to earn enough class change points. There is the new player event, but it might not be obvious enough where the player would need to go, and I’m not sure how generous TOS is with giving new players class change points. With the number of classes available, attempting to make every class viable would overlap with issues with balancing classes, as I imagine making every class viable would result in some class combinations having more advantages over others, resulting in said class combinations to be considered the standard. As such, players will complain about the imbalance between classes that TOS would need to correct again through modifying properties of each class, which will result in other class combinations having advantages over others, once again causing unbalance in the classes. Offering more forgiveness at the beginning of the game with regards to class advancement could help alleviate this issue, and also ties into solving the second issue you brought up in your post.
This is indeed evident in the game, and is something that IMC has tried to resolve with the new/returning player event. Since it was discovered that trying bringing newer players up to veteran players as quickly as possible results in new players lacking awareness of certain aspects of the game, providing incentive for veterans to drop down to the level of new players could help resolve this issue instead. By providing more forgiveness when selecting classes during the few period of play, this would encourage veterans to play new characters in order to be able to experiment with more class combinations, allowing for more opportunities for newer players to interact with veterans while progressing. However this may be met with backlash from veterans depending on how it is implemented (Will this period exist for only new accounts, or just new characters?).
This is a potentially difficult problem for TOS. From what I observed from the current state of the game-play, combat can be generally summed up to involve tanking or kiting enemies while skills. Reworking battle mechanics of the game could be quite risky, as depending on how this is done, it could potentially require the entire game to be altered to accommodate large changes to the battle system. Due to this, modifying the current battle system isn’t something that TOS should consider. Keeping almost all players engaged in the game isn’t plausible, as players will eventually leave the due to boredom or other reasons. This is one of the reasons why attracting new players is should be a consideration in order to continue to support the player population.
I totally agree with this statement as well, as recovering from negative reputation is more difficult than improving from a neutral reputation. From your points, I can agree that perhaps that it is better for IMC to focus on improving the game before they aggressively promoting their game, as new players can currently have a difficult time remaining engaged with the game. However remaining at the current reputation isn’t sustainable long time, as this may leave no room for anything that could largely, negatively impact the player population, such an update that the community widely disagreed with ,or a competing MMO that is similar to TOS.
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because sometimes advertisements are counter-effective 
i believe the current modes of advertisements are adequate for the rate of new players coming in to the game for the current server capabilities
it may look like a “lazy” method to rely on current players to invite others to play using yt materials for visual aid. but i believe it’s steering more to a quality vs quantity type of player invitations
the players who enjoy the game would invite peers to the game and explain the gameplay in detail 
compare that to a vague ad that will potentially invite a lot of people who has no idea about the game and might not be what they’re looking for. while it is not always the case, the cons outweighs the pros. 
imagine maintaining that much accounts of players that might just play for a little while and never to be seen again
another is the availability of usernames owO it is an indirect factor that may play on a player’s enjoyment of the game (well, at least for me. it’s kind of annoying to spell my name as “Qu33ni3” or “B|ues0rrow” because someone already took it ‘w’;; well, aside from the confusion of similar names)
this is just my opinion tho Owo
Replying this will he off-topic but i’ll do it anyway because it’s worthy.
The main issues lies in class design, one of them being the mentioned weapon restriction (that, unfortunately, can be balanced by sacrificing some things but can never be fully addressed). The other major issue is class identity, which is often bland, limited or doesn’t exist. It is possible to maintain an even larger number of classes as long as each one tackle a specific aspect of the game and have their power adjusted towards this same aspect, value from function and specialization instead of raw power.
That’s actually a terrible thing to keep, in most cases you can just jump out of danger and have armor to be a safety net, and when you do face a target lock enemy it ends up feeling unfair. It’s at least off to have jump to be more efficient than C guard.
There’s no need to change much of the combat itself, just expand it enough so it won’t be completely stat based. Engagement is way higher when the combat focus is the player action, and as you said it yourself you can either face it directly or kite, no need for any other approach. Things like new AI behaviors, buff effects tailored to hinder players and even stances for monsters can spice up the combat, it just has to be something that demands knowledge and strategy to be overcome. Or we can stay in this perpetual cycle of massive damage buff and nerf every couple months.
Combat is the main pillar of replay in ToS and this extra spice can be a deal breaker for new (and even retired) players as well. It’s quite reasonable that a detail like only being able to instantly kill an enemy that is weak against rear attacks by exploiting that weakness to hook a player for a while (and way longer when combined with similar scenarios), only losing in relevance against a possible perfect class system.
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They did advertise the JP server, but that was Nexon, I guess
well, it’s kind of different when you compare 1 country to international server regions owO
they need to fix the ship hull before telling more people that its gonna be a good ride.
Yo so i just reinstall the game and you know what i saw 1st? The ■■■■■■■ leticia pay 2 win cubes, this game is awesome right? Please IMC advertise this cubes
p2w is everyhwere in any online game
the core of online game itself is business
you think they pay the server,dev,staff and mr kim with TP?
and i can tell tos p2w is not the worst among all
unless tos is the only mmo you play, better play offline game
start with tetris maybe
Don’t be that mad my friends, pay 2 win is pretty much only happen with eastern MMO especially with korean MMO and if IMC did advertise this game, do you want to play a game that complete pay2win? If tos become a buy to play or monthly sub with no pay2win feature i would play the hell out of this game. One more thing i don’t know why you guys keep protecting IMC.
lmfao…