This isn’t a complain thread. This is a simple statement of facts.
The game is clearly losing its player base at a steady rate. The current 30-day period has an average of 2726 players online each day, which is down from an already abysmal 2930 in August. Compared to three months ago, June, which saw an average of 4861 players online concurrently. This is a decline of 44%.
If we look at peak player counts, it reflects a similar story. A peak of 8665 in June, versus a current 30-day peak of 4848. The current peak player count from the past 7 days is around 3024. All that to say, this game is indeed dying or failing or floundering. This means white knights have no room for argument.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the problems plaguing this game.
- Bugs and their subsequent fixes.
IMC has been awful about addressing and fixing bugs. Perhaps the most recent being the- now fixed- display skill effects/damage bug. This took a full month to fix. That’s right, the bug first appeared with the field boss revamp on August 1st, but it was just fixed on September 5th. Now, for players playing on slightly lower-end computers, this might have caused a problem with the fps, but it was a minor inconvenience for those with high-end computers right? If only the game were well optimized, that would be the case.
Another major problem that plagued this game was one of frame rate. When it first launched, the game was laggier than Crysis 2 on ultra on a potato. This continued for an extended amount of time with next to no communication. We most recently had a whaling event, which let us vent our frustrations at P2W players by killing whales, but led to plenty of complaints about even more frame rate issues. Seems like some things never change.
- Lack of content
We’ve been on rank 8 since October of last year. We have had no meaningful PvE or PvP activities to partake in. There exists Earth Tower and previously we had TBL, but that was never really meaningful.
Let’s discuss the PvE aspect. The 290 dungeon is an incredibly boring single-boss dungeon that has hilariously easy-to-kill mobs. The hunting grounds are a mindless grindfest that merely exists to provide players with some slightly cheaper method to acquire pseudo-endgame gear.
The worst offender of this list, however, is Earth Tower. The crown jewel of ToS. It consists of an endless repetition of one mob floor, one protect floor, one gimmicky floor, one afk floor, and finally a boss that dies with no suspense. Perhaps the worst part about all this is the inability to transfer fragments or essences.
Saalus and uphill are probably closest equivalent to the mindless dailies of other MMOs, which is fine. The problem comes when ET, the so-called end-game dungeon, is effectively just a daily.
Progressing to the PvP, this was a mess. Clerics reigned supreme along with CryoKinos. The concept of balance was seemingly tossed out the window. There really isn’t any single word that can qualify how tragic this was.
- Misc.
The company seems fine with just trying to milk a dying cow. There have been uninspired events after uninspired events with endless goddess cubes and leticia cubes. Aside from Hunting Grounds, which is really unpopular, and field bosses, what have they released since rank 8?
Thankfully, the mods seem reasonably active, but almost never in game. When I played, there was not a single day that went by without seeing some botters. I’ll always report the gold-selling spam bots then block them. I’ll log in a week later and see that some bots are still online in my blocklist.
I’ll conclude this post here. I feel this clip encapsulates my feelings well. https://youtu.be/2hMrdzPNpjs
This game had potential to be decent, but for one reason or another, the game has become a steaming pile of fecal matter.
