Tree of Savior - Tree of shit

Tree of Savior is the spiritual successor to the very loved game Ragnarok Online. Ragnarok Online was a good game right? Well, lets take a look at it without our rose tinted goggles. Ragnarok Online is a grinding game where you spend hours and days of your life to get a few precious % of your exp bar while trying to kill mobs while being surrounded or KSed by million of bots. Drop rate for items were so low you have a better chance of getting hit by lightning than actually getting them unless you bot. Bosses are tuned to one shot you so the strategy of fighting bosses is to use a big hit and then run or teleport away until it dies. They also have a long respawn timer, sometimes as long as half a day and you will be competing with a million other people on it. PvP is a mess where everyone either one shots or spam potions and never dies. Does this game sound fun to you? Looking back, no it doesn't. I do know why I spent years on that game though, it was because we didn't have anything better. Now our standards for games are higher we can forget about that such a shitty game existed.

Now, what about Tree of Savior, is it the same shit? Yes, and no. For starters, it is an incredibly grindy game but there are now quests thrown about where you can avoid a small bit of the tedium of grinding. However, the quests will eventually stop and you'll be forced to spend days killing the same 5 monsters in a spot contested by hundreds of people. The maps in Tree of Savior are small and the number of enemies are even smaller. Party exp is also heavily penalized so grouping up to kill mobs at the same speed you are soloing is a waste so everyone is a greedy asshole purposely stealing mobs whenever they can. You are pulling mobs into a pack to use an AoE? NOPE! Not if Archer Mcfuckface here shoots his arrow skill and pulls them away and kills them. Its not like you are able to spam your skills to kill monsters either. Most skills have a long delay and your basic attack does barely any damage unless you're lucky and picked a swordsman or archer class so you have to AoE to get the most out of them.

For the quests you get, it comes in a few varieties. Most of them are simple, kill 5 mobs finish a quest, collect 5 bear asses finish a quest, talk to asshole finish a quest. Some are the most idiotic ideas for a quest I've ever seen. Go and collect a plant. Well that seems simple enough right? Nope. Every time you pick one up you have a lets say 5% chance of it not failing. Now there are a few that spawn on a long cooldown and you see hundreds of people running around trying to pick up flowers but keep pricking themselves and bleeding all over the fucking place. Why was it designed that way? Then you get to the stupidest quests, the bosses. This game is lazy, it uses the same 10 bosses in the game with the same name over and over again. The level changes, their damage and health went up but nothing else. They all use the same attacks, they all share the same name, and they definitely didn't get more threatening than the time you met it at level 5. All they are is nothing more than a giant punching bag. You can't kill them very fast since their health is so high, but they don't really hit you either so its just a big waste of time.

Outside of those things its good right? There are a lot of classes right? Right there are a lot of classes but it doesn't really mean much when each class only comes with 4 skills. Going up a circle adds two more for circle 2 and another for circle 3. Each class has a rank and as you rank up you open up different classes depending on rank, or you can upgrade a previous class by increasing its circle level, up to a level of 3. However most of the classes, and most of the skills are pure shit. Instead of having a single class with many useful skills, you have many classes with many worthless skills. It looks complex and amazing at first, but once you realize how shitty the majority of the classes are you basically are forced into one path because none of the other classes or skills are worth picking up.

What if you just want to make a guild and play with friends? Nope! Not here! You'll have to level up a templar class, which is a rank 7 class that requires a base level of about 220. This would take months to get to just to make a guild. Whats worse is you need to waste a class change to turn into a templar whose skills consist entirely of guild stuff. A guild can also kidnap people. Inviting someone into a guild and if they join they are unable to leave. Spam invite in an area where people are commonly asking for grind parties will have a few people accidentally accept eventually. When other guilds declare war on you they will get killed and become unable to play. The Korean servers basically broke down because one guild invited a mass of people and got them killed every time they logged in and with no way to leave they spent the rest of the time logged out and on the forums complaining only to have IMC/Nexon reply with "its intended."

Tree of Savior is a free to play game, which means its a game designed to make you spend as much money as possible while giving the player as little gameplay as possible. They even released the game while its still incomplete and in beta. Its officially launched, but its completely full of bugs and unfinished shit all because if its launched they can start charging people money. You can buy costumes, hair dyes, and other shit for like 20 bucks each. You can even buy resurrection tokens so you can instantly revive where you died at. Then they added tokens, which is premium. It gives you a bonus 30% increased exp, along with a lot of extra stuff like bonus movement speed and increased dungeon runs by 1, and loot reroll chances. Also they removed the ability to trade between players without premium subscription. Yes you cannot trade in this game. Why? Because its designed to make you playing as long as possible, spending as much as possible, while giving you as little as possible.

Dungeons have a lockout timer of 24 hours. You can run these dungeons 1-2 times a day. A bonus run for premium subscription users. This makes sure people aren't spending too much time on the game and progressing too quickly. They need the premium to tick down while they make more content. World bosses have a 8 hour cooldown after killing one where it prevents you from getting any more loot. Oh so we can just run a dungeon kill a boss log out and come back tomorrow right? NOPE. It only ticks down when you are online. Yes you have to leave your character AFK for the timer to tick while eating away at your premium or whatever time based stuff you have. The no trading seems like a natural thing to do too. Low drop rate of good loot means they'll be doing dungeons/bosses a lot, and with a long lockout means they'll be running stuff for months, so make it so they can't trade so it makes it take even longer to get something. This makes sure they have plenty of time to make content while they are still milking players of money if they are premium subbed.

What do you expect from a game published by Nexon anyways? Something that isn't designed to drain all your time and money while giving you nothing? The sad part is the game has potential. The art design is beautiful, the music is amazing, the gameplay with a controller is great but everything else about this game is a giant mess. They were desperate in trying to get this game out as soon as possible to collect money. The only reason people even looked at this game was because it was carrying the name of Ragnarok Online. The developers worked on that game and kept calling this a spiritual successor. These type of grindy shit doesn't work in today's market anymore. You may have a group of hardcore Ragnarok Online fans but that isn't going to sustain a game especially when the free to play players all start to leave and leave the game littered with tons of bots from gold farmers. In conclusion, the game sucks, Nexon sucks, IMC sucks, Ragnarok Online sucked, free to play games suck, and the playerbase for these games suck.