Vindictus and limiting game time for mmo gamers

One question I like to ask is. Why? There's always things implemented to limit game time for free to play MMOs. Whether its a fatigue system that limits a person from running dungeons or something like stamina in Valkyrie Sky. These MMOs all call themselves "free to play MMO's" and they limit your game play to like an hour or two a day before you hit your cap. And if you are doing farming runs it can be as short as 30 minutes. The only way is to do pointlessly boring things like fishing which takes like three or four hours just to get one more extra hour. I don't fish. I don't do shitty pointless stuff. So what about those that don't wanna waste their time fishing. Well there's a cash shop where you can buy more game time! Wow! What kind of bullshit is that.

In countries like Korea and China game time is limited by law so there are systems implemented to decrease game time. For example some games will stop your exp gain and drop your stats to 0. You'll have to log off for example, three consecutive hours before it is reset. But hardcore gamers would just make a new account and play while the first one is on cooldown. It just pisses people off in places where you're allowed to ruin your health playing games for five hours straight. If I wanna play for five hours straight after class or work then its my decision fuckers. Plus if you're fishing for five hours whats the difference? You're still letting your kid starve to death.

Lets take a look at Vindictus. It recently came out from beta a month or so ago. So whats it about. Well its a 3d beat em up type of game. It feels like a toned down God of War with up to 4-6 players in a single dungeon beating the shit out of stuff. There are three classes. A rogue with dual swords, a warrior chick with a sword and shield like Sophitia from Soul Calibur, and a mage who can be, instead of standing at the back lobbing magic like a pussy, go melee with an over sized scythe and battlemage it up. The customization of characters itself is pretty big. There are a dozen hairstyles and hair colors, eye colors, eyebrow types etc etc etc. You pretty much have to try real hard to find someone who looks like you. Then there are breast sizes for female characters. The classes are gender locked and my mage is female so there's a slider for height and breast size. Not wanting to be some short person holding an over sized scythe, I pulled the height slider up to like 75% which is taller than the default 50%. Now the default breast size is 30% and it starts at large. Not wanting gigantic ones I lowered it to 20% thinking who the hell would pull it to the right. Well when I logged in I had a friend who was making his sword and shield chick thinking, "breast size? Well then I'll just click the slider hold it down and drag it to the right." Well he has a character with gigantic breasts. Was I surprised? Not really. You should see how huge most of them are in the game.

The game itself is a pretty fun until you realize how lazy they are. The game has boats where you can go to dungeons at. Each boat has about 10ish dungeons. Each dungeon is set on the same map. Yes same map. Its the biggest slack job I ever seen. Each map is split into different sections. Each dungeon is a different pattern of sections with a different end boss with occasional mini bosses and secret bosses in between the start and the end. Now here's the big shitter. Every dungeon after the first boat takes two tokens a run. You get a maximum of fifty tokens which reset every Monday Thursday and Saturday. After seven runs the tokens cost three per run and thirteen runs the tokens cost four per run. You can use up all your tokens in a few hours if you're questing and 30 minutes if you're just farming. Then you wouldn't be able to play. But after looking up some stuff I realized. Who would want to keep playing? Because after the third boat the game ends. The maximum level is 38 and the level of the third boat ends at around 31. Which means you can beat the game in four days pretty much.

There are two types of levels. Your regular exp gives you levels where you can get more quests and learn more skills and get items. Then there are the AP which is exp for your skills. AP has no cap so you can technically farm it endlessly and max all your skills. That is a huge time sink and there is no point to max it all. Stats are gained from skills or from gear. Then there are titles which gives permanent bonuses to your stats such as doing a quest. Killing a boss in a specific way such as smashing it on the head with a broken pillar column or kicking 100 gnolls to death. A quest title can give up to like 30 stats each while kicking gnolls and other pointless ones may give one or two stats at most.

Combat is mostly button mashing. Left clicking on your mouse does a hit and each consecutive click does a combo up to a maximum of four hits. Hitting the right button at any part of your combo does a smash attack that uses up your stamina and deal bonus damage. Smash also adds up more damage to the stun counter on bosses making them get stunned faster. Classes like the sword and shield chick have bonus stun chances. Hitting space is a dodge move and you can see who sucks at this game by how often they hit their space bar. The dodge gets you pretty far away with the exception of the mage who can't really dodge very far but her dodge doesn't cost stamina so there is no reason to not be spamming that when you feel the boss is going to swing at your direction. Bosses can take down someone with a few swings of their paws or weapons. There are also secondary weapons that suck shit with their aim. You go into like a semi first person view of a spear in your hand and you let go and it flies nowhere near where you "aimed." You can throw spears that does damage and sometimes stun, bombs that bomb stuff, and chain hooks. You can hook stuff over or hook a boss and make them trip. Or get dragged by them.

Here's some combat of difficult bosses in Korea that we haven't gotten yet. Clicky

However, outside of combat there is nothing. And the game limits you to a few hours every three to four days. So half the time you have no reason to log in. You can't farm AP in the earlier dungeons. You can farm exp if you want. But why do you want to farm exp when you can just stay off for a few days then log in and quest and get MASSIVE amounts of exp for questing.

Overall the game itself isn't bad if you can overlook the repetitive dungeons but it can't hold your attention long enough. I hear the Korean version has 6 boats of dungeons. Which means the maximum level is somewhere about 60-70? Its still a pretty short game.