Yet another thread about problems with ToS

[darkexiler]

There’s been dozens of threads with people complaining, criticizing and ragequitting while describing what they think are the major problems preventing ToS from living up to it’s potential and player expectations.
We can all agree that this matter is clearly very controversial and everyone has their own point of view, placing varying importance on various problems.

In my opinion most players are focusing on lesser problems without looking at them from bigger perspective and trying to identify the sources.
In this topic I’d like to present my thoughts on the roots.

1. Unsuccessful launch.
ToS has a huge population at launch and everyone was filled with great expectations towards successor of RO.
There was a lot of pressure from many directions. Release was rushed and game was not ready.
Bad launch is always a first critical step towards game’s downfall.
It leaves a large portion of potential players disappointed. Many of them will never again return to the game.

2. Unbalanced players population.
This is a problem that started surfacing over time after launch and I believe it still persists as a core issue that is breeding a lot of dissatisfaction of ToS players, even those who are still dedicated to playing.

The problem begins with too low player population for amount of content (maps, dungeons, etc.) present in the game. It becomes inefficient to form parties for levelling as there are too few players in your level range to be worth the effort. Players are starting to solo and levelling is becoming boring.
Boring levelling has a few side effects:

• players are rushing towards end game (even more than just from desire for character growth),
• devs making content faster and easier to solo,
• new player bonuses and boosts,
• devs increasing level caps,
• devs being under constant pressure and hurry to release new content - often impacting it’s quality,
• players leaving due to dissatisfaction and boredom.

You might notice that all of these effects are making the problem worse. Players are gathering up at the end game while 90% of content is being forgotten.
End-game players are bored and constantly hungry for something new and fun.
IMC is not able to deliver new content fast enough to keep up player satisfaction. Even if they did it now, it wouldn’t take long to get worse as adding more content will just spread out player population even more.
This loop of dissatisfaction was closed a long time ago and it keeps on spinning to this day.

These is no easy solution to the problem.
Devs can’t just make pre-end game content harder and longer as players (especially new ones) will be stuck in content that is currently deserted.
Adding new content might help the situation for a short while but in the long run it is making things worse.

I think at this point the only choices left are between bad or worse.
The best option I see is revitalising pre-end game content by making it worthwhile and enjoyable for players despite large level difference - yes, by that I mean major flattening of power curve (what would be very controversial for many players) and/or some system of averaging/downgrading your level to match your party.
With that, some extent of rework and new cool rewards earned at pre-end game content would be needed.

How would that help?

• it would balance out player population distribution across levels - end-game players could have fun with beginners, revitalising game content and adding up fun brought by social interactions,
• more varied (revitalised old) content you can enjoy, more things you can and would like to do,
• devs would have more breathing room and time to work more on quality of content and fixing and improving what’s already there (and meeting with their families on holidays).

"No, no! The real problem with ToS is unbalanced class/skill X, bad/existing PvP/PvE, easy/hard and accessible/restricted content, greed, devs being lazy incompetent idiots who spend too many evenings at their homes."

There are surely a lot of smaller and bigger controversial problems with ToS.
While reading complains I often feel like a lot of players are extremely subjective, focusing on their own point of view while trying to portray it as the single biggest issue.

On the other hand, many other players are pointing out justified problems.
All bigger and smaller issues (including balancing) are important and are also causing players community to slowly bleed out, however most of them are not too difficult to fix with a single well thought out update.

However, I have rarely seen players looking deeper at what is really the thing that they’re missing to have a lot of fun, what is it’s cause and what is the cause of that cause.

I have presented you my opinion on that matter.
It is only a personal opinion. Feel free to agree or disagree with it.
If you have your own thoughts on this or other root causes of ToS not living up to it’s potential and related conclusions I would be interested in reading them. (I’m not very interested in subjective rambling though.)

Some extra, off-topic, personal comments

Either way, IMC is incompetent.

Well, I’m not gonna argue here as I am don’t feel confident in judging that with information I have.
Making and keeping alive a MMORPG is definitely very hard and there are a lot of critical and non-trivial pitfalls.
IMC surely did fall at a few of those.
With a project of this scale it is near impossible not to though.

I don’t know which of you guys and girls had a chance to see behind the scenes of gamedev but let me tell you a little about it.
I’m a games programmer who worked at a few completed game projects and companies across years.

It is very hard and tiring work, often resulting in a lot of overtime and sacrifice of your private life.
There is never enough time to do everything right.
Lack of time is the dominant reason for all the mistakes and bugs in games.
Very often devs wish they could make things better but they are just physically not able to - not without living at the office and/or delaying their projects for years (which is from business perspective not even an option).
Note: as example, look up crunch on Red Dead Redemption or Witcher 3. There’s many more of those.

Gamers who don’t have gamedev experience (though sometimes even gamedev people themselves) are often quick to judge believing they could do a better job themselves but we all know that this kind of thinking is almost always very naive (in case of games or anything else really).

Anyway, if you ask me, I still have some faith, seeing that IMC is doing a lot of work (though there’s way more work still left to be done) and they are not scared to make big features (like housing) and massive reworks.
I believe Re:Build was a step in the right direction and I really hope that we will be seeing more of those.
They are still needed.

[IrisHeart]

The biggest problem of ToS is that the game is still in Open Beta.

[dasdasdas]

i’m online but i don’t have anything to do now, i’ve just failed 3 ichors, threw away 1 week of playing…
now i have no more cm runs, no more sierra powder, no more portal stones, no more anything fun to do.

[Hillgarm]

Thou, who have summoned me from my slumber shall be cursed with a text wall. (ok, that’s all for jokes here).

1. Unsuccessful launch.
ToS has a huge population at launch and everyone was filled with great expectations towards successor of RO.
There was a lot of pressure from many directions. Release was rushed and game was not ready.
Bad launch is always a first critical step towards game’s downfall.
It leaves a large portion of potential players disappointed. Many of them will never again return to the game.

This is one of the few times i have to “defend” IMC without questioning, i’m almost sure the devs at time knew the game wasn’t ready for launch, however they had a release date set with Nexon and couldn’t push it further. I can’t say for sure this is 100% accurate but seeing how things were done this feels like a natural and logical explanation for it.

2. Unbalanced players population.
This is a problem that started surfacing over time after launch and I believe it still persists as a core issue that is breeding a lot of dissatisfaction of ToS players, even those who are still dedicated to playing.

The problem begins with too low player population for amount of content (maps, dungeons, etc.) present in the game. It becomes inefficient to form parties for levelling as there are too few players in your level range to be worth the effort. Players are starting to solo and levelling is becoming boring.
Boring levelling has a few side effects:

This is kinda a legacy of the old (circle based class system) game design in which players needed to reach X point to really live the fantasy of their character/build, it was natural for a rush culture to be established since class changes was a deal breaker achievable in small intervals. Re:Build (in theory) fixed the progression rush need but the base level aspect wasn’t addressed, as such the only way for new players to interact with veterans is by rushing them all way through. An easy way to fix this aspect is by condensing levels instead of increasing the cap, after all the level rules can still be applied in the same way (tuned for the new gaps) and have players to feel like in closer playing ranges.

---

As a retired player that always bashed on the game design aspect i’d like to point out an interesting issue that ToS has that i believe was never brought up, ironically all the claims listed as “the usual issue” are tied to it indirectly, these Lazzaro’s four keys to fun (link to the article). After all, what got me to retire was that i could not have fun with ToS anymore.

Within Lazzaro’s study she acknowledges four different elements that are essential for any game in some degree, with the highest regarded having achieved three of them. An important aspect to have in mind each key is more attractive to a different kind of person and all of them have interest conflicts, it is more effective to focus on specific aspects to than going half way on all of them.

Easy Fun

Easy fun is all about the new and unknown, the ability for players to discover new things, explore elements, create and combining stuff and also the get into the game story/lore.

It would be expected for ToS to have this as a major pillar since it is an MMO with hundred of maps, quests, items, enemies and several classes, however this is only held by the experience of doing it itself. Just as mentioned before, the “rush culture” developed by old systems and promoted by IMC to this day undercuts the easy fun completely, players are pushed away from the natural game progression, maps and quests at the time they were supposed to be getting used to the game and exploring it.

The excitement of dropping a rare item or recipe at early levels is long gone as they will discover that it has not much value itself due power scaling and can be replaced by any bellow average item soon after (ignoring the fact the player itself may not be able to use it due ingame limitations). Classes also are part of it as players can explore build combinations, yet in the almost 4 years the game is up it still doesn’t present routes for full class compatibility which can turn this exploration side into sheer frustration for those that don’t research beforehand (kudos for the class replacement feature though).

The most a player can take from any exploration is to know the things are within the game and the story of the world, unfortunately for it to be rewarding on its own the world building has to be solid and deep to certain level.

Serious Fun

From the four this is the trickiest to describe as relaxing and going with the flow in exchange for some positive outcome for the time spent. This is the grind, build and collection component that RPG play with since their origin and is what ToS offers the most, regular monsters are just re-skinned sandbags and crafting requires a considerable amount of items with medium-low to low drop rates, players can establish ingame goals and complete them by investing the time required. Not to mention the countless daily and weekly content that follows a basic and static formula.

The only thing that gets in the way for ToS to be perfect on this key is how RNG throws it out of window completely. If serious fun is about converting time into something beneficial, allowing it to be lost over a dice roll is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve and an easy way to generate frustration instead. Character progression, gem and (regular) card leveling are the only way serious fun are achieved in game as the items obtained within a grind section are either disposable or have no enough value on their own.

Hard Fun

Going over challenges, it’s all about personal skill and game knowledge, in RPG’s the ‘preparation’ component is also added to the duo. This is the key in which ToS fails the most as challenges almost only a matter of preparation, with some cases in which knowledge is also needed.

All combat in ToS is resumed over equipment almost in the same way as turn based RPG’s, there are few instances in which regular combat requires either skill or knowledge to be resolved or has these elements to be significant when the preparation requirement isn’t met. Another contender for hard fun lies within instances, however these use common and simple structures that don’t offer any challenge or are based upon the same straight forward combat against stat sandbags. The only time knowledge and skill play a role in the combat is in boss fights which can be summarized in pattern recognition to avoid attacks.

The only thing that is truly hard in ToS is to get god tier equipment which an aspect tied to social fun, this itself presents a critical structural issue since the player itself doesn’t have to improve when playing, it can’t even be said that the time invested is responsible for it since the progress can be lost due RNG.

Another consequence of this kind of design is how the lack of PvE combat depth it either removes the feeling of threat or ties it to stats, this diminishes some of the easy fun value as the world becomes more artificial. Having a player that invested a lot of time and effort to be godly should be rewarded but it can’t come with the cost of trivializing combat altogether, the fact players can solo content designed to be completed in group is a visible flag.

People/Social Fun

Competitiveness and cooperation, the key component of online games. Here players need to have interact and have some sort of outcome from it.

The competitive side is always subject to balance issues and METAs, if players are forced to play or play against the same strategies it will eventually go stale, at the same time having elements that are completely broken will generate constant frustration.

For the cooperative side we have content that is supposedly designed for parties often falls into a combination of hordes, massive HP sponges or unavoidable damage to force players into groups, in few cases the strategy is different from “slay everything ASAP” and really demand proper teamwork (not to mention how the classic archetypes are limited to few classes and have few to no alternative options). A visible consequence of this shallow group use is that it doesn’t push players that are strangers to each other to unite over a specific goal (specially when guilds often do group content within itself) and instead pushes them to be self sustained, something as simple as discussing a strategy can be enough of a pretext to have people interacting beyond the game level.

---

The reason ToS haven’t (and at this rate won’t) kicked of is because it needs a lot of work to get itself together, they either have to start doing new content patches that fix previous problems (somehow) or guarantee their reworks don’t backfire, else they’ll run out of time. As i can see, the only thing that will keep people going is the commitment to the already invested time as “quitting now will make it all a waste of time (and money)”.

[akanechan]

First of all, I like to read a post that is not full of messages of “flagging messianic white knights” or similar that reflects on the problems of this game.

And yes, I agree with you that the game was released in a premeditated way and that a lot of content, currently, is incredibly easy, so easy, that it helps “desertification due to boredom”; I remember how difficult (and entertaining) it was before in the preorder (the months that the game was open for those who bought, as this server, an access before its launch as F2P).

But, I am sorry to say that at some point everything was twisted and worsened by the company, encouraged by the wishes of some gamers, either voluntarily or involuntarily. If we consider ToS not a game, but a scientific formula, the base is already bad (what you have pointed out), but the lousy base has been adulterated with more toxic substances … And as things we already know about real life, the Uncritical acceptance of consumers only aggravates the problem.

The sad thing about it is that most of them have probably disappeared from ToS because they have found another similar game, not because they really don’t want to waste time on something that is not fun or because of their technical problems. I still remember when I made my first character, it was fun, leisurely but I was advancing, it was not hitting the button and turning what was found on the screen into trash, but it was not despair of being able to do anything; but well, like everything, not everything was glory … That game had its problems.

Many times I wonder if returning to the game, leaving aside my real life, I could not enjoy anything when in 0.1 hours you have your character at maximum level and you must play the casino (different game tables; equipment, refinement, improvement … ) “Total-Gacha-System”, as well as fighting the hordes of whales-gachamens, who got the same as you in 0.001 (P2W) … Not to mention, there is no one who wants to group with anyone (it does not compensate, it makes no sense). The last time I connected were not the goldseller, but I suppose if the game achieves fame again, again they will be corrupting everything next to the bots.

Although I proposed to play without consuming EXP Cards and not skip the quest, without initial gift equipment (as it was before), I could not, I do not have spaces of characters and I do not plan to pay for that, and that includes the pets or monsters necessary for certain jobs (I can’t imagine the surprise that a rookie would take when becoming Hunter or Falconer and not having space for his monsters). Not to mention, the game continues to work with a crank (FPs drops, bad optimization) … which was already like this from the beginning … while some resentful people try to hide messages like this or yours (flagging tm) and it seems that the dev do not read any of this, they go for $$.

I put an appointment to my message about the problems that the game has, according to my point of view (I hope it will complement this).

Why is ppl quitting ToS?

What are the reasons why people leave ToS? It is a question that two years ago was more than answered, but like all the ghosts of a sunken ship, the question remains on the table … without being resolved by the will of the ship’s captain (IMC). Point by point, the reasons are more than clear; Terrible optimization to be a PC video game that aims to use nostalgia and “retro-art” as a trick. Continuous FPs drops (the main problem), unnecessary hard disk size (this is what happens when in each u…

[darkexiler]

@Hillgarm
This is a very interesting and informative post. Thank you!
I like how you explained the ways ToS features fail to deliver the fun they’re supposed to address.
I’m glad that the summoning ritual worked.

@akanechan
Thanks for your input.
I agree with most of what you say. You pointed out some present problems.
There are a few things I don’t 100% agree with.

Grinding can be boring and exhausting or fun despite repetitiveness depending on how it’s implemented.
In ToS right now it’s bad mostly because grinding is easy and/or solitary and/or unrewarding. Those could possibly be fixed with the right changes.

It’s similar with gameplay gambling systems (not talking about gacha here - that’s real money gambling and should be banned, at the least for the underaged) aren’t necessarily bad depending on their execution.
I’d say that ToS’ main problem here in its current state is that these systems make up most of what ToS has to offer and they are too vital for your character development.
I believe that focus on these systems might be a band-aid solution to give end-game players something to aim for. It might be one of the symptoms of the problems I described.

[zweig666]

1. Unsuccessful launch.
ToS has a huge population at launch and everyone was filled with great expectations towards successor of RO.

Well, ■■■■ happens. But that’s no reason to continue the way the developers did.
They came up with dozens of new systems and contents and always abandoned them inbetween for new ideas.
Up to this day, not all skills have attributes, not all classes have attributes, not all skills have skill change arts, not all classes have monster gems, not all boss monsters have monster cards, not all maps have collections or gimmicks, not all monsters have monster gems or specific equipment they drop,etc.

Collections are, even after two reworks, still not worth the time spent onto them although they are the only content that provides team-wide rewards.

The title collection feature which is charbound is also limited to 40 stages only although it’s fairly easy to reach way beyond when utilizing all the titles one can receive from events,quests and achievements.
It was never expanded.

2. Unbalanced players population.
This is a problem that started surfacing over time after launch and I believe it still persists as a core issue that is breeding a lot of dissatisfaction of ToS players, even those who are still dedicated to playing.

This is not really a problem as IMC is doing everything to quickly push people to levelcap without providing any way to get sufficient equipment.
And equipment progress is easily lost by increasing the level to the next equipment tier, as there is no longer the ability to retrieve invested blessed gems from equipment.
Now you either need to do the specific equipment quests or to hope that you or someone else drops an equipment in your level range with some transcendence and puts it on the market for cheap
[no idea if the market lockout is still a thing,though, if yes,then gg, you have to rely on RNG or quest].

So either you’ll be heavily underequipped at level cap and start grinding planiums just to have some decent equips, or you’ll have some semi-good level of equipment that allows you to leech raids from your guild.

The problem of TOS is that it tries to combine a weak engine and crap coding with a MMORPG experience, which just makes it harder for everyone. If they would’ve kept the game in a manner like Phantasy Star Online where you play with 4 people in a party (or 5 in case of TOS) to tackle all content, balancing and content production would’ve been much easier.
The game would also suffer less from the lag that occurs when there are 10+ players on the map.

About how to get old and new players to play together, there are multiple ways to achieve that, e.g. having collections scale with your ingame progress and adding new collections;
collection-specific drops could drop with a higher percentage when someone in level range of the map is in the party.
Another possibility would be to create another version of the map as a cutscene that is high level (adjusted to levelcap automatically) with higher exp yields and drop rates, allowing you to team up with new players outside the cutscene to share exp,drops, buffs,etc.

devs increasing level caps,

this is one of the problems all MMOs nowadays face.
Since the level system in itself is rigged in a way that power easily rises to astronomical levels with no way to correct it, the only way to introduce new content that keeps the players busy without having to use your brains is by raising the level cap.

it would be far better if there were new areas released for the same “level”, but with a different focus in difficulty. This was a strength of the Pre-Re:build TOS, you had maps with different mob types for different classes to level on.
Even now we still have maps focused on different mob types, but ever since Re:build, some mob types are just crap to fight against because of their high stats while other types are pushovers and have the same drop rate and EXP gain.

Why would you make your life hard for yourself bu going to those maps?
There is a reason why most people prefer Outer Wall District 15 over Paraias Forest…

IMC could have made a new advancement system with Arts that could have been more interesting and independent on raising the level cap, but instead it’s just another boring addition to the attribute system.

As you see, IMC doesn’t care about being innovative anymore. They abandoned every system that creates work for them and instead feed us recycled maps, mob skins and new attributes,ichors,card,etc. to waste our time on.

In between, older content is just sold as TP packages (e.g. Demon Lord cards) so you can be more powerful without even requiring to grind that much for it.

Competitiveness and cooperation, the key component of online games.

9/10 waifu collector online games would disagree. What you are talking about are the basic Multiplayer Online Games from the 90s/early 2000s. Everything after that is just a $hitshow of developers copying systems from older games (like the mother of all copy&paste frauds World of Warcraft e.g.) into new engine games with better graphics.

With the second half of the 2000s approaching, games became more and more easy & casual,to the point that you could level solo halfway or completely through the game just with potions and equipment you got from NPCs for completing quests.

I still remember the early days of Ragnarok Online, you could even die to a poring if you were alone, and you got no nifty equipment from questing. You were there with only your Cotton Shirt and your Knife and had to adjust to the difficulty of the monsters to survive, and you had to farm several hours until you could go for your first advancement.

Once you got your job changed, you’d always meet people ready to team up with you as on average you’d only be able to hunt monsters much lower than your own level.

That’s the beauty of leveling only without quests, at some point you were basically forced to group up, and making parties was nice since you could fit 20 people into a party to round up the big maps.
In TOS you level solo till cap and then you’re locked to 5 people instance parties, no benefit from going with more people into Hunting Grounds either, and new boss challenges are solo only,
as IMC has recognized that non-solo challenges aren’t even challenging anymore.

Re:build has weakened mobs way too much as that a party would even make sense. You group them up and oneshot them, and even if they aren’t oneshot, they deal so very few damage points that you can just tank till your armor breaks until you need to consider potting.
What’s worse is the fact that the mob aggro limit is too low and monsters are static to their spawn areas, meaning they cannot even group up on you if you run away once you’ve reached the aggro limit.

If mobs are weak, the mob density obviously needs to be way higher than what TOS has currently, a lot of the higher level maps are pretty empty, especially considering their design.

Talking from personal experience, the only remote fun I have in this game is to fight 1 vs 1 against Demon Lords and Irredian Bosses, because at least then there is the low chance that I get crippled or killed if I make a mistake, while they are ok to fight against because there is no time ticking against you like in Challenge Mode or Bernice dungeon.

What is the point of having a party if someone can just heal all the damage you receive?
The whole game is dumbed down to a mass beating of a single enemy.

Raids should be more like Challenge Mode, with hordes of enemy coming to overwhelm you and with random bosses appearing randomly to strike you down on top of that, not some boring beating the same boss 5 times in a row per week.
The worst feature is the need to grind 6 raid portal stones just to be presented with a HP sponge boss who is always the same.

Since IMC likes RNG, why can’t they have the RNG roll the bosses stats, level and skills every time you enter, maybe even the boss type/race like in Siaulai mission?

A lot of boredom comes from the fact that every content that matters is 100% predictable and boring.

[Hillgarm]

We’ve complaint, cared, giving points and flaws here and even GM doesn’t take note of all this issues nor forwarding this to whoever on top of the company.

You: making >1000 words of complaints with several paragraphs
IMC: idgaf

I’d suppose it’s more likely for our feedback to be filtered because the iToS community ‘burned bridges’ through flaming/harassment feedback or that the high ups are ignoring it in fear that whales will just leave if they lose their power fantasy (since most of the complains are tied to systems that are favorable to them), if that is really the case there is no hope for ToS at all and the game will die from starvation in a brief future.

I still remember the early days of Ragnarok Online, you could even die to a poring if you were alone, and you got no nifty equipment from questing. You were there with only your Cotton Shirt and your Knife and had to adjust to the difficulty of the monsters to survive, and you had to farm several hours until you could go for your first advancement.

Talking from personal experience, the only remote fun I have in this game is to fight 1 vs 1 against Demon Lords and Irredian Bosses, because at least then there is the low chance that I get crippled or killed if I make a mistake, while they are ok to fight against because there is no time ticking against you like in Challenge Mode or Bernice dungeon.

That’s exactly what got me out of the game, the sole fact i can have average equipment and ram over any fight without any strategy is absurd. I remember back in the last closed beta that i hit a hard wall playing a tank (solo) because i couldn’t kill the elite enemies as they hoarded me and my damage wasn’t high enough even with appropriated (unnenhanced) equipment, the only way to get over them was by being careful with the fights i picked and pay attention to the surroundings (that still happened in some maps at with the initial game release).

I remember when i saw the first trailers and how much the game was promoted over fantasy, choice and self expression, in which every choice you made changes the game completely. This new direction of content casualization also makes the players choices less important (despite not allowing certain classes to be combined to this day), but of course that all makes sens if their only goals is to make everybody to be god like at any circumstances.

Now, let’s assume IMC is unwilling to make any major move that can scare their whales away, would it be impossible for ToS to fix any of the issues that shoved away players over the years and the unsatisfied active players? Surprisingly, yes, but only if they start it from scratch in parallel, being a second version unrelated to the current.

Of course that a move like this won’t be cheap and will demand more work (as they need to update the original) but by doing it that way they can regain players that left the game over the years and provide a new (and more consistent) experience. This can also be used as a pretext to implement features that can be unpopular towards the original version and only add them over the player community consensus. I can’t say for sure that doing it won’t come with the risk of killing the original altogether but a new version also has the potential to get a new audience willing to buy TP that would seldom/never consider it at the current game state.

Side notes
• I have no personal issue with games presenting god like power fantasies for their players, though this should be almost exclusive to those that really do all they can to achieve it. There should be a meaning to this power and not be something the average joe can do without any real effort/investment.
• I know several players asked for IMC to release classic ToS servers yet i don’t think those are a good idea either, the game isn’t old enough for it to really make sense and this can also limit how it develops. I’m someone that really loves the ToS i saw in 2014 and want to see it becoming the giant it can be, for that we need to always look forward (not dismissing what we lost).

[darkexiler]

Personally I am also the type of player that would love to see high difficulty forcing me and everyone else into partying up and playing with brains (and, in result, socialising and overcoming challenges and doing everything you’re supposed to do in a MMORPG to have fun).

I don’t think that’s possible right now though.
If they did this, new players wouldn’t be able to advance due to not being able to reliably form parties in their level range due to low population.

I’m not sure if increased difficulty would be possible at the end game but I’m guessing players are also too spread out there due to gear quality.

[Csiko]

It becomes inefficient to form parties for levelling as there are too few players in your level range to be worth the effort. Players are starting to solo and levelling is becoming boring.

Important point of distinction as this is not a population problem but a design feature. You are never incentivized for partying in this MMO. You are even rewarded for soloing by virtue of getting more drops and more silver from anything that would be perceived as “group” content. Was the worst decision IMC ever made and they have never fixed it–hell, they’ve even started balancing the game around being able to solo content by virtue of jacking up SFRs on all classes. The game and its core feature (unique and interesting class combos) should not be balanced around their ability to solo group content in a massively multiplayer online game.

Players are gathering up at the end game while 90% of content is being forgotten.
End-game players are bored and constantly hungry for something new and fun.

Also goes back to the fact that players are blowing through content. Everything is just too easy, everyone has what they need within days of new things being released. They do need to add new content but it needs to be content that lasts.

I agree that lots of pre-end game content would give people things to do, but if it’s too easy they will just blow through that too and be bored again. And thing is, a lot of the lore stuff doesn’t interest most of the people in this game just like PVP doesn’t interest everyone. It’s all about variety and balance. The game right now is mash CMs out until your eyes bleed on whatever class you like, because it’s the only way of making silver and advancing your character. New raid too hard for you or your class doesn’t fit? Can’t get into a guild to do GTW or Boruta? Just spam CMs and buy your best in slot gear off the market.

Mindlessly ramping up the difficulty isn’t the solution either–you’re just gonna piss off a good part of the playerbase. There just has to be variety of things to do.

[alex_rivera_a]

The game and its core feature (unique and interesting class combos) should not be balanced around their ability to solo group content in a massively multiplayer online game.

agreed with every single word

[Hillgarm]

Personally I am also the type of player that would love to see high difficulty

If they did this, new players wouldn’t be able to advance due to not being able to reliably form parties in their level range due to low population.

In the current system and doing the number buff/nerf treatment it can’t work, after all monsters only have two behaviors (passive/aggressive) and states (attack/idle), the key here is to move difficulty from stats/numbers to player knowledge to make regular PvE slightly more akin to boss fights. To do so we need monsters to have more behaviors towards combat engagement and also reactions to the player combat itself, that isn’t an easy task but can be achieved in several levels and be enhanced over patches. I’ll drop some examples bellow for elements that add variance without much complexity and benefits certain classes over others (yet for it to work monsters have to be stronger than their current state).

Territorial

The current “aggressive” behavior, monsters will chase players once they get approach, chasing them for a certain distance. An interesting addition to this is if monsters can also detect when attacks (hitboxes) are performed near their aggression area and be triggered by it.

Aggressive

Chases the player till it dies or leave the map, returns to the spawn are after some time.

Reactive

Turns aggressive once attacked.

Pacifist

Passive enemies that flee when attacked. This behavior needs a complement to work and can only be used on its own as an introduction. By default this favors classes that have ranged tools, those with control skills and those that can kill enemies in a single blow. Hanaming is the best monster to have it as they don’t look hostile at any degree nor to be any capable fighter.

More complicated variants
Coward - flees from players even without being attacked (can be limited if the monster is alone or few other monsters are nearby).
Packer - fights back if other the aggressor is being attacked by other monsters, flees they die.
Minion - runs towards a ‘commander’ monster turning itself, the ‘commander’ and others from same type aggressive.

Swarm

Just as the name implies, passive enemies that turn aggressive towards players that attack their kin (like wasps and bees). An interesting aspect of this behavior is that tanks can use its nature to aggro enemies without relying on taunt skills, the same applies to players that have enough power to swipe all enemies and saves the hassle of gathering them one by one. This behavior demands players to be aware of their surroundings and power before starting a fight, in some cases engaging combat at emptier spots.

Both swordsman and cleric have better tools to handle this kind of scenario as they have better defensive and sustain tools, classes like archers and wizards can’t fight straight forward without taking some risk, the same applies to scouts as they rely on evasion for survival (decreasing with enemy count). By default any character/class that can one-shot enemies with a single attack can overcome it completely.

A natural way to introduce this behavior is through Leaf Bugs as they’re the weakest insect enemy in the game, even in large numbers they shouldn’t be able to take down a new player easily.

More complicated variants
Protect the queen/king - swarms when the “commander” monster is harmed.
Avenger - if a monster from its kin is killed in sight, seeks the player that did it.
Distressed - triggers all monsters in the vicinity to swarm.

Supporter/Protector

A variant of swarm, joins the battle if any monster is attacked in sight, regardless of their type. This small difference between swarm makes it more desirable to be taken out first as non supporters/protectors won’t help them in battle. An interesting way to implement it is by having certain monsters to be invisible by default (revealed by skills with that ability), adding an extra layer of threat.

Challenger

Just to list a non-traditional enemy behavior, also the only type that can really be hard to implement. Once a monster survives an attack it will challenge the player to a duel, all monsters from the same type in sight will move towards them forming a circle (arena) and will watch the battle. If the monster dies a new one will step up for the challenge, repeating the cycle until they’re all defeated.

If the challenged player hits the spectators or flees the arena all the monsters within partaking the challenge will chase it, the same applies if another player attacks one of the monsters.

More complicated variants
Fighter - every time a monster is defeated in challenge all the spectators gain a stacking stat buff, also increases their silver and EXP.
Swinder - once only X monsters are defeated/left the remaining monsters turn aggressive towards the player.
Lawful Rage - applies a massive buff to all remaining monsters if the challenge is interrupted.

The key idea here is to have single target oriented builds and overall weaker builds to have some dedicated behavior, at the same time have some sort of penalty or risk for dropping out. It also has some strategic value depending on the variant as a confident player or party can interrupt the challenge in order to deal with all enemies at once, in party play it can also replace the need for a tank completely as long as both the challenged player and party can take care of their roles.

Non-behavior conditions

On top of the mention above they can also add special effects that are triggered by player interactions such as dealing specific property damage or defeating the enemy (which already exists or used to in a mage tower monster).

An fun example is to make kepas release a short range gas attack (not counting for their AI attack) whenever they receive slash or pierce damage, as a self defense mechanism of a living onion, this effect can be described as a buff listed in the monster information UI (when targeting) without demanding the player to know in advance nor memorize it, if we go further on the roleplay aspect this buff could be dispelled instantaneously once the kepa receives fire property damage.

---

All those elements can contribute for natural difficulty instead of being stat based and even a solo player can deal with them playing the right moves, it also allows maps to have more diversity as the monsters within them can behave completely different. Of course these can also be combined through the game progression in a fair scaling that trains new players to react to those situations through the game, asking a little more every step ahead. It’s also important to point out that this same variance makes the game world feels more alive and interesting as it adds depth to monsters as characters, at the same time players can have expect certain behaviors from new monsters based on their design.

I believe that except for specific super oriented builds (and mismatchers) no one should be incapable of leveling solo at early to mid game, the only difference is that new players might need to use certain strategies to overcome challenges.

The game and its core feature (unique and interesting class combos) should not be balanced around their ability to solo group content in a massively multiplayer online game.

agreed with every single word

#GiveClassesMoreIdentityAndBalanceThemAroundThat

[crevox]

I have a personal grudge against challenge modes due to their reward structure greatly incentivizing solo play. It is enjoyable content, but it lacks alternatives that give a similar level of rewards for time spent and also shouldn’t split the rewards. In an MMO, you should never feel like playing with another person (or even a friend) will drag down your experience or make things less rewarding.

Beyond that, I think that there should be other content that is competitively lucrative in terms of EXP, items, and money while also being viable with a party (or even preferred to get more rewards).

[alex_rivera_a]

In an MMO, you should never feel like playing with another person (or even a friend) will drag down your experience or make things less rewarding.

but thats how it feels i want to play with my friends and not be punished for it… getting 30% silver compare to solo …

[gyro_17]

I agree with this. It was fun grouping in the beginning but the moment I could solo I t want to group anymore.

[Remiri]

Problem is that the population of the game has been conditioned to think that solo = good, and IMC released Legend ‘Casual’ mode raids that are meant to be done solo. The conditioning was built in with CM rewards.

This can be reversed and all that would be needed is even or slightly better exp/rewards for being in a party. Also exponential increases in exp/rewards for completing cm6 and cm7.

As far as other content, a huge chunk of the game’s population left because lack of meaningful pvp content. I know pvp content isn’t for everyone, but what is around is sorely lacking and again could be easily addressed. Easiest example is TBL.

No one does TBL because:

• No meaningful rewards
• MMR and Matchmaking have been borked from day1 - You are rewarded more for winning than you are penalized by losing so it becomes a grind.
• Time windows that have never fit the primetime of the server they are on. 4-6 and 10-12 on an NA server? Really?

Other examples are just lack of casual PvP content (give me a pvp room pls), World pvp with too many downsides so it is pointless and again, no meaningful reason to do it. GVG content that was scrapped and never brought back. GTW which is spread across 6 maps, so you have to go searching for pvp and in most cases it is more economical to just sit there and defend (cause of link to super-needed boruta rewards and gtw funds/attributes). Etc etc.

I could make a whole thread on the faults of each of these pvp contents, and I have in the past which has been systematically ignored.

[zweig666]

Personally I am also the type of player that would love to see high difficulty forcing me and everyone else into partying up and playing with brains (and, in result, socialising and overcoming challenges and doing everything you’re supposed to do in a MMORPG to have fun).

I would be alright if the game even tries to force me into playing with brains to finish what i’m about to do.
The only content that has increasing difficulty is locked to a time frame (Bernice, CM) during which you either clear it or you fail. There is no difficulty in that, it all depends solely on equipment tier and luck on RNG, as well as class performance.

As long as you whale out the right equipment and attribute investment on the right classes you can cheese through these contents.
The casualization of the game is anti-climatic to this developement, as the majority of content is either grinding against RNG or defeating weak mobs with trash-tier equips to forward the story and/or sidequests.

Not even the sidequest bosses that are not required to beat to forward the story are any challenge, they are just pushovers with the worst monster “A.I.” (it’s not really an A.I. but a program with RNG elements in it that resemble the basic program a Poring is using to determine whether it uses the basic or the water elemental attack).

As recent additions have shown, the only thing that makes the monsters “engaging” are the high amounts of large AoE multi-hit attacks which are difficult to impossible to avoid manually on a boss with ridiculously high attack and defense values (for example Misrus and Moringponia before the nerf), hence creating an artificial bottleneck on those players with bad equipment.

However, these bosses never attack behind their line of sight, have none or nearly no homing attacks you have to outrun (a feature which could be used for easy difficulty boost, in the way you can outrun Magic Missile that just disappears after moving a certain distance when it has locked onto you) and are using their skills way too slowly while not reacting to anything you use.

In my opinion the only way how this game in its current state can provide any feeling of difficulty is either by presenting a high number (hundreds) of strong targets (CM 5 tier or higher) without an aggro limit or by having a demon lord-like boss do some nifty tricks like reflecting damage (Abomination, Tutu, Rexipher are good examples), teleporting and/or striking you from above/below and having mostly homing and/or AoE skills that come with rapid succession (less than 0.5 seconds delay between skill casts).

Of course, IMC could also just give monsters a better A.I. or make gaming more interesting by adding cast times/charge mechanics and more delay to skills, similarly to how Inquisitor works.

Mechanically speaking, inquisitor is a simple class, but it doesn’t play as easy as you have to engage in a straight line and/or close proximity to the target with some lengthy interval between skills/overheats, which create an artificial difficulty of having to adapt to movement -, skill use - and knockdown patterns of the enemies to get the most out of your skills.

For example, moving close to an enemy to hit him with God Smash is the basic way of engaging into a fight, but due to the possible retaliation with a knockback/knockdown skill that might either cancel your skill and/or disable you from doing anything, careful assessment and observation is required to time the execution so you can throw your 3 overheats at him.

It becomes even more complex with Breaking Wheel, a skill that acts as both a skill modifier for physical skills as well as a damage skill, which requires the enemy to stay close to it for up to 15 seconds for full benefits. If the enemy moves out of the range because of a charge skill, it is unlikely to come back in time to receive the rest of the hits (because of slow reaction time and heavy delay of monsters), so placement and timing have to be considerate of such feats.

It becomes even more complex if we consider the fact that some enemies can remove it via one of their skills (Velcoffer or the Demon Lords are good examples), which makes pattern recognition and delay timing a requirement to maximize your damage output (as you would want to pair Breast Ripper and God Smash with it to achieve 2x hits while having the enemy stay inside the AoE of Breaking Wheel).

Another example is Pear of Anguish, which can be used like quarrel shooters Scatter Caltrop to cause damage by walking over them. However, if the enemy uses a magic skill while on the same screen as the Pears, they will fly over to the enemy and strike it for 2 times the normal SFR, which makes it tricky to use against enemies who don’t cast magic often.
You’d want to place them not too far away from the enemy in recognition that he might move, while also wanting to prevent him stepping onto them, so you have to keep him close.

You also need to be wary of the patterns/delays of his skills, as they only last about 20 seconds and are removed by skills like Medzio Diena.

So in a way, even without a good A.I./monster programming, difficulty can be attained by giving the player interesting skill manifestations that require planning and tactics rather than just pressing button a, b or c, which make the same boss fight more boring and stupid and empty like scouts iframes/guaranteed evasion on skills.

[alex_rivera_a]

i think the silver punish in cm is bcuz most ppl wont party with other players intead they will just make a party with a party of alt accounts and funel all the silver to the main account wich is bs, and i dont think imc or nexon can do anything about it sadly

[Remiri]

At some point IMC is going to have to get over their fear of people exploiting the game and simply ban people for exploiting the game, but that’s a topic for a different thread.

Precedent has been set for people getting banned for funneling items, easy enough to extend that to silver.

[r33zra96]

I have posted a comment somewhere in a post about this game dying and told them to be better off to play another game. The next day my tos forum account got banned and (probably) deleted. Irony isn’t it? Staff/Mod being fast to shut down anyone saying bad things even promoting other to play other game than ToS but failed to notice us all or just turn their eyes blind when we’d complaining about this game.