Edit : As there seems to be a lot of confusion, this post is suggesting that events be re-designed to encourage people to play instead of simply afking then logging out, because you could have a million more afkers and it wouldnt help the game in any way at all.
This post is not suggesting that the events or rewards be completely removed.
This event has once again proven that afk events dont encourage people to actually play the game. All servers have the same problem now : Masses of people sitting in town doing nothing and logging off once they get the 100 hour reward. Then they only login daily for the free gifts in the mail. Some people dont even bother to login for the daily gifts, they only login for the weekend ones. Because "ceebs".
(Yes i am aware that people still play, this is about the masses of afkers, who are afking in town while they play other games like BDO)
You need to design events to actually encourage people to play the game. Think of a store that gives out free samples. 95% of the people will come in, eat the free samples and walk right back out. This is the problem with afk events. People login, afk, get free stuff, log out. They dont play the game.
The theory with afk events is that people will login and figure that they "may as well play the game while getting free stuff since I already logged in". This theory underestimates how lazy people are. Most people will login then afk because that is the easiest thing to do. Clicking buttons to go into a dungeon and then actually killing a boss actually requires more effort than most of these people are willing to do. And god forbid if they have to talk to people to form a raid party. They are too "ceebs" to do this.
To put it another way, people who only afk for free stuff will never spend a single cent on NX for a game they don't play so Nexon is losing money as well.
Events need to actually reward players for playing the game. For example, the +2 cores/+2 departures we had last week? That encouraged people to play. More cores and more raids also increases the odds of people spending nx on things like enchant runes.
Word of caution : Before anyone says "enchant scroll shop event", I will remind everyone that the scroll shop event actually made it HARDER to find parties to do end game content. Again, people are lazy. Since the easiest way to get ancient coin was to do easy s1 raids, people only logged in to do the easy raids. There were many level 90s who refused to do any s2 or s3 content at all even though they had 21k+ attack until the scroll shop event was over simply because it was easier to spam s1 raids and then log off.
People who were attack capped for s3 content wouldn't touch s3 content because they were soloing rocheste raids while carrying their alts. Or people refused to play their fully geared mains during the event because the coins/scrolls were not tradeable within the same account, so they were encouraged to play their undergear alts which could only do easy raids for the event.
So bringing back an event like the scroll shop isnt an answer because while that made more people play the game, they were only doing the easy stuff because again, people are lazy.
Every event designed has to take into account that people are lazy and will do the minimum required to get free stuff. So you need to design events so that people will still do end game content.
People who sit in town afking to get free runes and wings will never spend a single dime on this game. They will stockpile things for 6 months or however long it takes for Dullahan or whatever new content comes out next. They will then play it for about a week and then quit again because "ceebs". They wont spend a single dime during this period either. Then they go right back to BDO, Tera or whatever other MMORPG is making Vindictus look like a joke currently. I saw more than a dozen people do exactly this when Abomination came out. Most of them didnt bother to try Neamhain because "too hard" and "ceebs".
You need to break this cycle and find a way to keep people interested in the long term. You need to get people playing this game for more than a week instead of going "ceebs" and going back to BDO, Tera, etc. Afk events are not helping.
Comments
I assume they need to inflate login numbers to convince corporate not to pull the plug yet. This way they get the login numbers and players who usually play a lot but are about to get burnt out (I'm almost there) can still get some free stuff.
I agree, what Nexon is trying to do here is to encourage people to come back to the game, and this does not hurt anyone who spends a lot of money in the game, people will still buy more runes, outfitter boxes, and other nx stuff. This is Nexon being generous to the people who cant afford to spend a ton of money in gaming, this is Nexon giving them an opportunity to have something nice and useful if they want to look pretty and have a over +10 enhanced weapons. This is catered to the casual players who dont have a lot of money or gold.
And as for scroll shop event, people who farm 20 coins a day are not lazy, even if they are doing the easy S1 raids, that is still 2 hours of playing the game. Not everyone has ALL the time in the world to play a video game, people have life, school, work, and other more important stuff to take care of. If they are farming the coins by completing easy raids, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are lazy. If they are truely lazy, they wouldn't be farming at all, they could just buy scrolls from mp since the event will make the ES price drop so much. I farmed about 400 seals myself last scroll shop event, I managed to finish gearing my alts. And this is also a good way of reviving Season 1 content to help new players or alts to progress, whenever I host S1 raids, I still have lower lvl players joining.
As for OP's concerns about season 3 contents, I dont find it very hard to find a boat now with the prime time event, especially with 2 extra cores and 2 extra raids. During the prime time hours, my QB alerts goes off every few seconds for any S3 boats. And even without the events, it is not too hard to find a S3 boat on the weekends and vacation periods because that is usually when people have the time to play. And as for the latest content Neamhain, if you are in the discord channel for Neamhain, you would actually see there are a lot of active players who host those boats daily.
As for your comment of people abusing the events with laziness, Nexon has been working on preventing that. For example, +10 coupons expires in 30 days, lubbers expires 30 days, exquisite enchant expires in 90 days, and you can only enhance things up to +10 of your current level, character bound items, and even those free event gears, they have put a lot of restrictions on these to make sure you wont just take it and hoarding those stuff until they would actually play. So you can't really save those things for whenever newer contents that may or may not arrive in 3-6 months.
I understand your concerns, but Nexon is doing what they think it is best to keep the game alive, we should be more appreciative.
Completely agreed, well said.
Hey how'd you know what i was doing lol
If events were requiring you to go out and do stuff, it would encourage people to quit, not to play.
People that really play the game, will play it with or without the events... the events only bring in the ones that don't usually play and make it seem more alive.
aniversary event/golden chieftain: rng sucks rng sucks rng sucks
free stuff event: no pls no
no event: ded gaem is ded
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
jokes aside, imo the essential problem is lacking good content, not the event itself. Vindictus like most old mmos suffers alot from it, specially vindictus while its only heavy-based on pve, while pvp and other things are big failures because of game design and mechanics. PPl now prefer sandbox mmos like bdo because simply they have many "things to do" though those activities are just boring and repeatable like daily quests, daily/weekly bosses, and hard grinding, despite the gameplay of the game is not that great, bad AI, bad boss design, etc... Devcat was well awared of this and they were trying to make some content, but this can't be helped if players just get bored too soon from recycled content while new one isn't really creative.
Some slang term to shorten a more explicit version of "can't be assed to do it". Thanks UrbanDictionary!
And yeah, this isn't what I had in mind when they teased us with the line "TWO MASSIVE EVENTS!". At least if they did Ultimate Objectives people would play a bare minimum amount of battles to participate and be guaranteed to get something good when the objectives are reached. The weekly boosts are nice, but unlimited revivals is pretty useless/encourages lame play and the +2cores/raids is a really lazy incentive that we only appreciate because raids are normally limited and the drop rates are trash. I know at least I'd much rather have an event that goes: "Play this, get this!" than "Do nothing, get this! Also you can spend more time possibly getting nothing out of it if you want idk..."
...Did I mention I like the Ultimate Objectives event?
At least with an event like Gold Gnoll Chieftain or that one redeployment event you could farm to your hearts content and work towards something the entirety of the event.
Not so much. BDO is far from being a real sandbox, and most people who have moved on from it have done so because there isn't any direction for what to do. No real end game, and outside of it nothing but horribly unbalanced PvP and siege mess. If BDO actually added real instances raids and dungeons on top of what it has then it would be quite grand, but something like GW2 for instance, despite its new grind mantra, has a much more robust system for keeping players interested in all types of content. Most of the people who have stuck around in BDO are those who invested tons of time off the rip and give into the whole sunk cost mantra. Vindi's biggest issue is that there's nothing to do outside of all the instanced stuff. Most full-on MMOs have tons of life because players will spend lots of time outside of raids, dailies, etc., just traveling around the game world and interacting with guild mates and other players. Even new things like Einlacher only add so much because they remain nothing but more of "kill this thing" rather than "here's something new to immerse yourself in the game world.
Anyway, to the original topic. I was actually going to make a thread giving Nexon Global some praise for bringing us this event. We're finally getting the types of rewards that are on par with what the Asian regions see regularly, and on top of that the Prime Time bonuses from this event make it worth playing for everyone. Already geared out and want to make some gold or just have an extra chance at rewards while you raid with your friends? Enjoy the bonus cores. Under geared and want a chance to enjoy harder content? Hop in during Unlimited Revives. Still need to max your expertise? 100% Expertise Experience.
This is actually a really well done event. Easy chance to get a decent weapon. Free Premium Enchant rune. Free permanent Inner if you so choose. Items that haven't been in NA before, and great login rewards that you are not forced to stay on for. If you don't have a PC you can leave on or the time to play then you miss out on a few things, but you can get the major bonuses just from playing a relatively normal amount and the huge items like the +10-15 coupon literally for being on for 30 minutes twice per weekend. Actually, I think you could even collect both and just spend 30 mins on Sunday to claim them.
TLDR; Nexon has done a great job with how this event is put together, the variety of rewards, and the way that even the most casual players can get some very high value return for their time.
I really dislike the Shining Keaghan battle, but I still join it every day anyways since I just like going back to fight old content as a group. This is why I'm so attached to Royal Army content (rip) and the Ultimate Objectives event. As someone who can't host I'm limited to playing what other people can be bothered to join for. No one is going to do hero Heide dragons just for an extra core towards getting a Solid es. We need some sort of incentive like an event that targets that type of content, or else it just becomes more crap that no one ever runs. We spitball event ideas like this at them all the time, and it's frustrating as hell that they just stick to giveaways during the months between content updates.
I never said they hurt people. The events should encourage people to actually play the game, not just login -> afk -> logout.
There is literally no reason that the rewards could have been distributed in a way that encourages people to actually play.
I never suggested that the events or rewards be completley removed, just that the events be redesigned in a way to encourage people to play.
What keeps the game alive? People playing and spending money. People who login, afk, then logout do neither of these. They just take up additional bandwith costs, increase the load on the server, etc.
You could have one million afkers and the game wouldnt be any more alive than it is now.
Please read the OP again properly if it confuses me. Nowhere did I say anything like "remove the event completely". Everyone wants free runes. There is no reason why the runes couldn't have been distributed in a way that requires you to play the game though.