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.

Leaked SWTOR developer's meeting

SWTOR Dev Lackey: GUYS GUYS GUYS GUYS GAIZ GAIZ! I has idea! What if we take our game, which nobody thinks is worth paying for... And then strip content out of it, and sell it back to them as individual components at a collectively higher price?

SWTOR Dev Lead: GENIUS. Let's take 6 months to covertly plan and develop our new F2P features, while subscribers continue to pay a monthly fee and receive no content updates. Then when F2P arrives, they will have to pay TWICE just to get back the items and perks they've earned and already paid for.


And thus, an already shitty game became a cosmic joke. In retrospect, I guess they achieved something original with the franchise after all, instead of just cloning another MMO.

If you haven't heard, SWTOR announced F2P some time ago, after the TORtanic prophesies proved true. Waves of players and developers abandoned the sinking ship, and EA hastily branded it a failure, and the sole unpredictable blemish on their otherwise flawless business strategy, deferring all blame onto Bioware. When your own parent disavows and abandons you, you know you've fucked up. Around that time, BW/EA tried to excuse themselves with data claiming that subscription based MMOs were dead, and an unsuitable payment model for the times. They also tried to reference F2P MMOs like LOTRO, DCUO, etc for their relative success. But the truth is, F2P isn't a cureall. I will probably make a dedicated post about that later, but F2P doesn't automatically make your game better, nor will it alleviate the existing flaws. However, no need to worry, because SWTOR never got the memo on how to make a F2P game; they focused all their time on fixing their public relations problems instead, so it would be a farce to even call this F2P.

Back to the headlines then: SWTOR officially launched their F2P today, and now all servers are open for you to play for free. Not that I would recommend it.

SWTOR's F2P restrictions are so tight, that many players are labeling it an 'extended trial', as it allows a player to level from 1-50, but little else. For the first time in any F2P MMO I've heard of, SWTOR restricts your UI, and makes you pay money to use it. It doesn't end there. Let's list some moronic restrictions:

1. Only get 2 of the available 6 hotbars for skills (and believe me, you need at least 4)
2.  Pay more at vendors and every time you exchange tokens for gear (the primary way to get good gear)
3. Can't use guild bank or regular banks (any items inside are locked)
4. Can't mail or trade
5. Cant accept common quest rewards
6. Can only post 2 auction house listings
7. Cant have more than 200k credits on you (the rest is locked into an account that is never released until you subscribe)
8. Can only talk in 2 channels at 1 message a minute
9. Cant wear epic gear (even if earned from being a subscriber)
10. Cant wear event gear (even if earned from being a subscriber)
11. Can't hide headslots or display titles or legacy name (even your 'founders title' awarded from being a long term subscriber)
12. Can only roll 3 times for loot in dungeons PER week (failed rolls count)
13. Can only do 5 battlegrounds a week (losses and incomplete games count, and the weekly quest requires 9 battlegrounds won)
14. No access to the LFG tool
15. No access to raids.
16. Only 1 of 3 professions allowed
17. Emotes are locked
18. Half your inventory size. Anything in the other half is locked until you pay.
19. Quick Travel (town teleport ability) cooldown is quadrupled, now at 2 hours. Emergency fleet pass (teleports you back to main fleet hub) completely disabled
20. Only 2 characters per server. Returning players must select 2 and lock out the rest.
21. No rest xp.
22. No using /who.
23. No using out of combat move speed passive ability until level 14.

What the fuck? So for the past 6 months, instead of adding new content that people will want to pay for, they took content that people were ALREADY paying for, and removed it. I guess that's one way to slack off as a developer. And even though you can buy back the features you want piecemeal, they are horrendously expensive, outweighing the monthly subscription. Just paying the weekly passes for raiding and battlegrounds ONLY, will make your monthly bill around $20. And you still won't be able to wear any epic gear or use hotbars.

SWTOR Devs: Herp derp, you don't want to pay $15 a month for my game? How about $20 for only 1/5th of my game? ULTRA DEAL!

It is clear that this F2P change won't draw in any more players than their free trial did. Because that's all this is: another free trial. And a chance for Bioware to double-dip into their subscribers and make them pay again for something they've already paid for months ago. And which ex-subscriber would be stupid enough to pay? If they didn't think the entire game was worth the money then, why would it be worth the value now? Nothing's changed, except for getting even less content. Sickeningly, it also means Bioware gets an excuse to put in a CASH SHOP into a P2P game. People would have been outraged if they did it while it was still technically P2P, but now they can call it F2P, however unfaithful it may be to that label. It shocks me that Bioware promises more content every 6 weeks from now on, when they've broken that promise repeatedly since release, when people were already supposedly paying monthly for content. Now that people don't have to pay monthly... They're promising monthly content again? How gullible do you think your subscribers are?

These guys have no fucking clue how to run a MMO, or a F2P game. Since release, more than half their employees and major project leads were fired, and I'm not sorry to see them go. They were trash and should never work in the industry again. My only regret is that their replacements are just as deluded and out of touch with gaming and the community.

What a fucking waste. And I'm not even surprised. I came to my senses in March, but that was already too much time wasted on this crap. So I'll redeem myself with a prediction, nay, a prophecy: SWTOR F2P is going to flop hard, and will not get any more players than a wave of trial offers. Not even close to the 50 million predicted (this guy should be fired too btw). Bioware won't shut down SWTOR so soon, so I foresee massive revamping of the F2P system, an admission of guilt and a shallow apology, then a reduction in its restrictions, and more incentive for ex-subscribers to return. New periodic content of substance will still be scarce. Cash shop profits will keep SWTOR afloat, and they'll attempt to use it to bolster their reputation and initial claims, despite subscriber numbers not actually increasing (but they'll conveniently avoid that data).

Update: Just read this at wired.

The $15-a-month subscription game is dying. But it’s not because players are cheap, it’s because they’re bored.

As the game development website Gamasutra put it, the most expensive game in history is now free: With a reported $200 million budget, the massively multiplayer RPG Star Wars: The Old Republic wasn’t attracting nearly the number of subscribers that publisher Electronic Arts needed if it was going to see returns. So EA added a business model that has been lucrative for other online games: Allow gamers to play for free, then charge them small amounts for upgrades once they’re hooked.

But that may not be enough. Experts in the space say the reason Star Wars struggles while other online games are killing it isn’t because of the money, it’s because of how the games themselves are designed. It’s not the business model that’s obsolete, but the product.

 While the rest of the article points at a conclusion I'm not quite ready to accept, this segment of it is spot on. The game is bad, that's why it's not worth $15 a month. If they focused on trying to make the game better to match the $15, it would be harder, but ultimately a better product. Instead, they weakened the product to market it at a deceptively cheaper price. I also don't think the problem is with the p2p MMO archetype, it is with the games being lackluster and ultimately, lacking the frequent updates you'd expect with a monthly bill. Imagine subscribing to a magazine, and paying a monthly fee only to get the same issue over and over again. Not enough content? Re-read it! Read it backwards! Fold it into origami! Keep yourself warm at the fireplace! The sad thing is, f2p moba games update every 2 days, yet $15 a month, despite server maintenance costs, give you an update every 6 months if you're lucky? I'm afraid the problem lies with the developers and publishers, not with the model.

F2P vs P2P MMO Games

One thing I see over and over again are the F2P vs P2P arguments. People want F2P because they're cheap as shit. People want P2P because the quality of the game is better. Who is right? Who is wrong? I don't know. But I would prefer P2P. Why? Because P2P means you get everything in the game and all that money is used to help server stability, gms, customer support, everything to make your game a better experience. Of course thats not always the case. F2P games mean you get most of the game but the goodies are all locked out and you'll have to pay individually for them. They also limit your gameplay in some way to force you to pay for little things or be frustrated to hell. Like for example, one of the most popular things to limit are bag spaces. These games are assholes to limit you to 10% of the available bag space then force you to pay 5-10 bucks per additional bag. Thats almost more than a subscription fee. That doesn't even add in the other shit you need to pay. Yeah yeah I don't have to pay for it, which I don't because paying for bags are bullshit, but that doesn't even add in the limited content you need to buy or additional stuff like letting you see health bars and the ability to customize your skills/character.

The people who play F2P games are dominated by people who don't pay. Those who pay have a huge advantage. Those who pay spend hundreds of dollars a month for shit just to get ahead of others or to feel good about themselves. A lot of F2P games are doing this lately. Pay to win. You'll never be as good as the people who pay if you play for free. P2P games everyone is equal. You won't be a second class citizen because your wallet isn't filled with cash. I would gladly pay 15 bucks a month if the game is of high quality and that money is used to bring me better servers, gameplay, gms, customer support. Exactly what you notice lacking in most F2P games. Of course not all of them are but some are especially bad (NEXON) while a few others are acceptable.

Then there are people who are casual and don't play all that much for a subscription based game. Then F2P games might appeal more to them. They are the type of people would buy gold in a P2P game. Their argument is, "It takes more time to grind all that gold than to work and buy the gold." I agree. I don't buy gold, I don't approve of buying gold, but hey its your money. Only problem with that is the company themselves don't earn anything. However they cannot give others an advantage in a P2P game. Therefore there are people who don't play a lot for F2P games and are willing to shell out huge money to progress faster. But I have to ask you, if you can't even play for an hour a day then perhaps MMO's aren't for you. Perhaps sticking to single player games. MMO's are all about playing with others and taking your time in the game. Because hey if you finish too fast whose going to keep paying right?

I would gladly pay 15 bucks to be entertained for a month than to pay 60 bucks for a shitty game like Fable 3 where you finish in 3 hours. Even the longest single player game you'd probably be entertained for a month at most. 15 bucks versus 60 bucks? But then I hear people go "But you can go back and play it anytime!" While that is true, how many times can you replay a game? You might go back and replay it years from now yeah but thats still 30 bucks worth of a game if you spend 2 months on it. Then you'll go "what about starcraft 2 or teamfortress 2 or maybe even Guild Wars?" What about them. You buy the initial game and then you can play for free. While that is very good, the thing is for these games you are hosting the games, they don't need to pay huge server fees compared to games like WoW or any other MMORPG. Guild Wars is all instance based like Diablo 2 where you have a major hub for everyone to hang out in (town) and you leave and everything is instanced. This cuts down on fees significantly. The main part of making a game is making money. They can't make money you can't play their game.

15 bucks a month isn't a lot of money. The problem is if the game is worth the 15 bucks a month. If the game sucks more balls than duke nukem forever then you can guarantee no one would pay it. I don't like how people keep spouting out "15 bucks is a lot of money! I can't afford that I want free to play." If you can't afford 15 bucks a month to game then stop gaming. 15 bucks a month equals to 50 cents a day. You can find 50 cents on the street in the time it takes to read this. Watch one less movie a month, don't eat subway for a couple days, smoke a pack of cigarette less, take a bus instead of driving for a couple days. If you can pay your electricity bill you can pay for a game. If you're arguing the game sucks and its not worth the 15 bucks I can understand. Just don't whine that 15 bucks is too much to pay and it should be free instead. If the game sucks then you wouldn't want to play it for free anyways.

Nowadays most games are adapting a hybrid kind of payment. Most games that are P2P eventually become F2P. The game is free but you can pay a monthly fee to become a premium member for bonus shit. Or they can pay for individual shit in the cash shop. One thing I hate with a passion about F2P games are the massive influx of goldspammers, botters, and whiners. You ban one they sign right back up with a new email. Whiners would all congregate at the newest MMO then bitch and moan about every little thing then when it doesn't go their way they leave for the next one. I know P2P have those too but there are significantly less whiners. Maybe because the whiners are kids who can't afford a monthly subscription. Or maybe because they can make a new account if they get banned for greifing or going around swearing or spamming racial slurs at everyone they meet. I don't know but from experience, this is how it works.

We all know who is the king of P2P. Its WoW. Nothing can ever come close to the mammoth that it is. P2P games are usually not that big. The amount of people you find in it is only a fraction of a F2P game. But that doesn't mean its impossible to find people to play with. On the contrary its easier because people sort of become a tight knit community. Very rarely do we hear about big F2P games. Yeah theres Maplestory (asshole Nexon) and League of Legends is huge. LoL is a Moba game (think dota) where you can pay money to unlock champions or runes earlier and even unique skins. If your game is good, and being free to play doesn't limit you to shit then you can make big money. P2P and F2P neither is better than the other. I play P2P games and I play F2P games. What do I prefer? P2P. Does that make it better? No. Its because the games that I enjoyed most happen to be P2P for the reasons I mentioned.

A MMO for consoles? Disaster meets Final Fantasy 14

Upon reading Kittydog's most recent post, regarding experience caps in MMOs, I was reminded of the appalling experience of FF14 that I had hidden in the far corners of my mind... I can't help but introduce the rest of you to this gem.

MMOs are generally considered to be immune to being plausible ports from PC to consoles, but FF14 reaches out to test this boundary. There have been some console based MMOs like Phantasy Star Online, but that one is not even close to being as pitifully laughable as this.

The YOGSCAST duo has beautifully captured this game in a series of youtube videos, and I won't spoil the surprises this game has in store for potential players/viewers.
You can find the first part here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF7vrQ04_q4

Just for a few highlights, some of my favorite parts involve:
The fishing 'mini-game' in part 3
The map navigation in part 6
The quests and combat in part 7
The hideously painful main quest line that spans parts 9-10 and culminates in a head-bashing journey in part 11.
Part 14 is pretty hilarious at some points too, a strange highlight of everything wrong with the game, all at once: crashes, non-existent navigation, useless skills, and boring uneventful travels to reach quest destinations.

Go check it out; it's way better than anything I could have written here.

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.