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In the past, Nexon North America hosted Q&A with some of the Korean Devcat developers in a means to show they have not lost touch with their western audiences. This is what I am referring to as a 'status update.'
Would love to see some actual links of this (NA ones, not the EU one posted earlier). 95% chance that the Q&A was just safe questions like "Will you make a second weapon for Hurk" and very general answers. Almost every Q&A with a game company ends up the same. It is considered taboo in the game industry to ask any hard questions when interviewing devleopers. Hell, games reviewers have gotten fired for giving less than stellar reviews before. Q&As are frequently used as PR events, not as information sessions. A quick 15 mins spent typing up vauge answers and then firing them off via email to some community manager is the norm.
Look at the EU one for examples of general answers :
Q: Will you work on older contents with high potential like Resenlian's Labyrinth, Colhen/Rochest Gauntlets,
Fishing or PvP? If not, why?
A: We can't tell you the exact date but we do have a plan to revamp older content other than the regular battles or raids.
None of the older content got revamped, because Devcat doesnt work that way. They constantly push shiny new content to cause a end of quarter spike in player numbers and revenue. Thats why we got stuff like ein lacher insted of revaping lab/gauntlets/etc. This is the typical game dev answer that dances around the issue.
Unless an official Nexon NA representative confirms that they are doing a Q&A and asking people to submit questions, attempting to get a status update from Devcat here is, sadly, nothing more than wishful thinking. Even if we do get a Q&A, it will probably not be very informative anyway.
And things like this is why no one really responds from Nexon's end of things .- . You cant really expect a company to reply back if nothing but disrespectful assumptions are thrown about. As much as no one wants to believe this statement it is however true.
If you want answers about the direction of the game directly from Devcat/NXKR you're asking on the wrong forum. The best you'll get here will be vague predictions as to what might or might not happen. Best to head over to KR forums of Vindi where you're more likely to encounter actual devs and pray they actually understand English like someone pointed out.
No one in kr knows where the game is headed either.
In the past, Nexon North America hosted Q&A with some of the Korean Devcat developers in a means to show they have not lost touch with their western audiences. This is what I am referring to as a 'status update.'
Would love to see some actual links of this (NA ones, not the EU one posted earlier). 95% chance that the Q&A was just safe questions like "Will you make a second weapon for Hurk" and very general answers. Almost every Q&A with a game company ends up the same. It is considered taboo in the game industry to ask any hard questions when interviewing devleopers. Hell, games reviewers have gotten fired for giving less than stellar reviews before. Q&As are frequently used as PR events, not as information sessions. A quick 15 mins spent typing up vauge answers and then firing them off via email to some community manager is the norm.
Look at the EU one for examples of general answers :
Q: Will you work on older contents with high potential like Resenlian's Labyrinth, Colhen/Rochest Gauntlets,
Fishing or PvP? If not, why?
A: We can't tell you the exact date but we do have a plan to revamp older content other than the regular battles or raids.
None of the older content got revamped, because Devcat doesnt work that way. They constantly push shiny new content to cause a end of quarter spike in player numbers and revenue. Thats why we got stuff like ein lacher insted of revaping lab/gauntlets/etc. This is the typical game dev answer that dances around the issue.
Unless an official Nexon NA representative confirms that they are doing a Q&A and asking people to submit questions, attempting to get a status update from Devcat here is, sadly, nothing more than wishful thinking. Even if we do get a Q&A, it will probably not be very informative anyway.
This was the NA Q&A
They asked us to submit questions and chose to answer those out of 11 pages of submissions.
And things like this is why no one really responds from Nexon's end of things .- . You cant really expect a company to reply back if nothing but disrespectful assumptions are thrown about. As much as no one wants to believe this statement it is however true.
People wouldn't make assumptions about them if Nexon was better at communicating with their playerbase and try to better please them. Hell it would be nice just to have some sort of response coming from the KR team on a monthly basis on what they plan to do going forward for the NA market. You can't just ignore an entire player base when you expect to be making money from them. Do you think its fair that we have to have someone who knows how to read Korean just to translate upcoming content from the KR servers every time we want to know whats happening? Understand that the NA market has asked countless questions and we literally get no response from NA other than "we will inform you when we get an update on whats going on with said issue." Like it or not, they brought it upon themselves. They have to suck it up and deal with it.
And things like this is why no one really responds from Nexon's end of things .- . You cant really expect a company to reply back if nothing but disrespectful assumptions are thrown about. As much as no one wants to believe this statement it is however true.
People wouldn't make assumptions about them if Nexon was better at communicating with their playerbase and try to better please them. Hell it would be nice just to have some sort of response coming from the KR team on a monthly basis on what they plan to do going forward for the NA market. You can't just ignore an entire player base when you expect to be making money from them. Do you think its fair that we have to have someone who knows how to read Korean just to translate upcoming content from the KR servers every time we want to know whats happening? Understand that the NA market has asked countless questions and we literally get no response from NA other than "we will inform you when we get an update on whats going on with said issue." Like it or not, they brought it upon themselves. They have to suck it up and deal with it.
Yes I do understand. Because I played on NA for 5 years first before I even touched KR. But you also have to keep in mind that A.) Not every game company will answer every question B.) No gaming company is going to answer a question if it's strictly internal information or really ANY company for that matter. Nothing we can do about that C.) as for the translating if it wasn't even for that you wouldn't know whats actually upcoming. Every region deals with it in every game. The reason why you get the info so early is because some of us are willing to translate and in fact even stream the content on twitch and discuss and answer any questions regarding it. I get NA players asking me info in my inbox and in Discord because they want to create the threads you guys have now D.) (GRAY AREA) In terms of an update on said issue that's because if it's a game breaking issue they need DevCAT to figure it out because chances are we are experiencing the issue too. It's not just NA that experiences game breaking issues. In fact I warn the community of A LOT of game breaking bugs but it quickly gets forgotten and the thread dies in a fire. This honestly applies to every region in any MMO if that region isn't the parent of that MMO. It's a mater of who is 100% fluent in the parent language in the company. If Nexon NA has no answer back then it's because DevCAT doesn't have it figured out yet. Simple.
Perhaps Im the only one looking at this from both perspectives.
And things like this is why no one really responds from Nexon's end of things .- . You cant really expect a company to reply back if nothing but disrespectful assumptions are thrown about. As much as no one wants to believe this statement it is however true.
Disrespectful? Those are perfectly reasonable assumptions based on available data. We know exactly why the game has had more and more ridiculous stat requirements tacked onto it...so Nexon can sell more runes.
s1 bosses were balanced for people with average gear, this is why roch bosses die extremely quickly if you have a party of 4 at attack cap. They were balanced for parties with +10 level 60 wapons and 12-14k attack, with attack caps of about 18k or so.
s2 bosses and beyond have massively inflated hp pools because they are balanced for parties at or near attack cap. 4 people at attack cap (NOT counting +15s or anything crazy) will take way longer to kill them because of their HP pool. Not to mention the massive crit resist on s3 bosses. Even characters wtih the level 80 +9 event gear and about 19k attack do very little damage in s3 raids, because again, they are balanced for people at attack cap.
Roch/Drags were the best balanced point of the game, in terms of stat requirements. s2 and beyond was a shameless money grab to get people to buy runes.
If you had a +13 or better, you used to be able to skip the next tier of weapons, Devcat realised this meant less runes so they made level 95 weapons super OP so that a +13 level 90 wont be able to compete. Therefore, more runes = more money.
Everyone can login to any of the NA servers now to see how many people are just afking while playing BDO or other stuff. Most of the afkers at the start of the event got their rewards and dont bother to login anymore. At the start of the event, at least 3/4ths of every server were just afking for the rewards while playing other games. This is not a good indication by any means.
Even my KR friend who plays vindi KR says a lot of korean players are boycotting vindi because of the current director.
I just hope they realize the enhance/enchant system is killing their players. People go weeks/months without any character progression. When that happens, they just blow their weapon and quit.
And things like this is why no one really responds from Nexon's end of things .- . You cant really expect a company to reply back if nothing but disrespectful assumptions are thrown about. As much as no one wants to believe this statement it is however true.
Disrespectful? Those are perfectly reasonable assumptions based on available data. We know exactly why the game has had more and more ridiculous stat requirements tacked onto it...so Nexon can sell more runes.
s1 bosses were balanced for people with average gear, this is why roch bosses die extremely quickly if you have a party of 4 at attack cap. They were balanced for parties with +10 level 60 wapons and 12-14k attack, with attack caps of about 18k or so.
s2 bosses and beyond have massively inflated hp pools because they are balanced for parties at or near attack cap. 4 people at attack cap (NOT counting +15s or anything crazy) will take way longer to kill them because of their HP pool. Not to mention the massive crit resist on s3 bosses. Even characters wtih the level 80 +9 event gear and about 19k attack do very little damage in s3 raids, because again, they are balanced for people at attack cap.
Roch/Drags were the best balanced point of the game, in terms of stat requirements. s2 and beyond was a shameless money grab to get people to buy runes.
If you had a +13 or better, you used to be able to skip the next tier of weapons, Devcat realised this meant less runes so they made level 95 weapons super OP so that a +13 level 90 wont be able to compete. Therefore, more runes = more money.
Everyone can login to any of the NA servers now to see how many people are just afking while playing BDO or other stuff. Most of the afkers at the start of the event got their rewards and dont bother to login anymore. At the start of the event, at least 3/4ths of every server were just afking for the rewards while playing other games. This is not a good indication by any means.
Even my KR friend who plays vindi KR says a lot of korean players are boycotting vindi because of the current director.
Not exactly sure where the data about raids being balanced relates to disrespectful players tbh.....I'm probably missing something in this here. I'm referring to talking on the forums. When people try asking about "whats going on with the game" and don't get a reply back then get disrespectful in the process. Not about the game data/stats or whatever xD Also I know about KR's situation and the Director all too well. me and my guildies have had a talk. Though we don't worry about those things because we just have fun together. Then again....we all look at both perspective of things depending on what the subject is on. If the game ends up dying in KR (which it ain't dying any time soon believe me) then it dies and we all move on to a new game. Simple.
Edit: I also re-read the very first post. Dullahan doesn't have copy pasted stats. He is actually stronger than lvl 90 bosses. Has higher crit. More life than the 90 bosses. xD
Edit 2: forgot to mention he has higher crit resistance :P
And things like this is why no one really responds from Nexon's end of things .- . You cant really expect a company to reply back if nothing but disrespectful assumptions are thrown about. As much as no one wants to believe this statement it is however true.
Disrespectful? Those are perfectly reasonable assumptions based on available data. We know exactly why the game has had more and more ridiculous stat requirements tacked onto it...so Nexon can sell more runes.
s1 bosses were balanced for people with average gear, this is why roch bosses die extremely quickly if you have a party of 4 at attack cap. They were balanced for parties with +10 level 60 wapons and 12-14k attack, with attack caps of about 18k or so.
s2 bosses and beyond have massively inflated hp pools because they are balanced for parties at or near attack cap. 4 people at attack cap (NOT counting +15s or anything crazy) will take way longer to kill them because of their HP pool. Not to mention the massive crit resist on s3 bosses. Even characters wtih the level 80 +9 event gear and about 19k attack do very little damage in s3 raids, because again, they are balanced for people at attack cap.
Roch/Drags were the best balanced point of the game, in terms of stat requirements. s2 and beyond was a shameless money grab to get people to buy runes.
If you had a +13 or better, you used to be able to skip the next tier of weapons, Devcat realised this meant less runes so they made level 95 weapons super OP so that a +13 level 90 wont be able to compete. Therefore, more runes = more money.
Everyone can login to any of the NA servers now to see how many people are just afking while playing BDO or other stuff. Most of the afkers at the start of the event got their rewards and dont bother to login anymore. At the start of the event, at least 3/4ths of every server were just afking for the rewards while playing other games. This is not a good indication by any means.
Even my KR friend who plays vindi KR says a lot of korean players are boycotting vindi because of the current director.
Not exactly sure where the data about raids being balanced relates to disrespectful players tbh.....I'm probably missing something in this here. I'm referring to talking on the forums. When people try asking about "whats going on with the game" and don't get a reply back then get disrespectful in the process. Not about the game data/stats or whatever xD Also I know about KR's situation and the Director all too well. me and my guildies have had a talk. Though we don't worry about those things because we just have fun together. Then again....we all look at both perspective of things depending on what the subject is on. If the game ends up dying in KR (which it ain't dying any time soon believe me) then it dies and we all move on to a new game. Simple.
Edit: I also re-read the very first post. Dullahan doesn't have copy pasted stats. He is actually stronger than lvl 90 bosses. Has higher crit. More life than the 90 bosses. xD
Edit 2: forgot to mention he has higher crit resistance :P
To clarify, when I said that Dullhan has copy pasted stats, I meant that level 95 gear will have copy stated stats, like how Regina is plate yet has the same stats as Lugh armor which is cloth. Its easier for Devcat to make since it just requires copy and paste rather than making different stats for each set.
I think what Question2 is saying is that the stats on the carved shards are more or less the same as current shards albeit have higher DEF stat on them.
Question 1: Why does Korea have better events/stuff than us? They have an attendance event that gives fine gem box, superior gem box, a carved shard box, and they get +12 Regina weapons; 1 weapon for characters that only use 1 weapon, 2 weapons for those that use 2 weapons. On top of that, Character Slots are free (there was a post a year or two ago about it) AND can have up to 20 characters on an account.
Not complaining about FREE stuff, but sometimes events we get are poorly executed/not well-thought.
Question 2: Korea doesn't remove (from the looks of it) regular outfitters from the avatar shop, yet when we have outfitter sales, both limited and regular variants are removed. Why is that?
Bigger playerbase that generates more annual income = Nexon is willing to give moar free stuff since they know numbers won't change.
Apparently NA is struggling to keep up with the economic expectations of the management so they gimp the region by placing artificial constraints to make up for the differences in revenues.
To clarify, when I said that Dullhan has copy pasted stats, I meant that level 95 gear will have copy stated stats, like how Regina is plate yet has the same stats as Lugh armor which is cloth. Its easier for Devcat to make since it just requires copy and paste rather than making different stats for each set.
Ahhh the gear. Tbh I do agree there. I do wish there was a more variety of stat'd materials for the 90+ gear. Like how some items give 4 or more stats. So if one of them had crit then you could have the possibility of creating a true crit build using those mats that have higher crit then the other 3 stats even though that mat was initially for Damage for example. It would definitely make for some interesting builds.
Bigger playerbase that generates more annual income = Nexon is willing to give moar free stuff since they know numbers won't change.
Apparently NA is struggling to keep up with the economic expectations of the management so they gimp the region by placing artificial constraints to make up for the differences in revenues.
The bigger Playerbase part definitely. The 2nd part I have no idea. I haven't gotten into the game development job yet since my Korean is still lacking quite a bit on translating in my personal opinion.
It seems strange if that's a reason for them cutting back. They had some very positive quarters before the losses started, and the losses didn't set in until Nexon Global made changes that didn't exist in other regions. The Road to 85 and the release of S3 brought in lots of new players and brought lots of old players back to the game. Even the forums stayed extremely active, and as most players don't participate on game forums, that really speaks to how active things were.
Queue Nexon Global deciding to implement its own launcher--something which the Asian regions would have rioted over, and rightly so--and at the same time having heavy-handed forum mods threatening players with bans for using the workaround or for helping others to do so. The Nexon Launcher still does not work for some players and it had major security flaws on release; I can't really blame the players who voluntarily peaced out for doing so, and certainly can't blame those who literally could no longer get into the game.
Add to that the launch of BnS, BDO, and various other titles along with the continued release of content in games like TERA and FFXIV during that same period and it's not really a surprise that Vindi was hemorrhaging players like it was going out of style. Further, we saw that Nexon employees literally went silent for months over on the Dragon's Nest forums once they knew they were selling the title off to another company. Whether that was poor management or an attempt to cause issues for a title that was about to no longer be in their possession, the fact is that it does nothing to inspire confidence in Nexon Global.
TLDR; Nexon Global is the cause of its issues. I doubt that the lack of events is a result of players not spending, but rather that the lack of events and the Global players being treated differently is the cause of players not spending.
I think its mainly that vindi has lost its monopoly. There are a lot of games with combat "close enough" that a lot of players are fine with it.
The thing about non-english speaking regions is that they arent very affected by a global game like BDO because its a english game. Players in korea, mainland china, etc, generally gravitate towards localized games, its partly the language barrier i guess.
Nexon NA/EU has to deal with more competition from games like BDO, but their licence probably forbids them from changing anything major. I am still amazed that we actually got a different seal shop from korea. Whoever managed to get approval for that is a genius.
Sure, better events might make more players stay. But with a lot of players, I think they just have issues with fundamental parts of the game like the enhancing system that wont be solved by events.
To put it another way...imagine trying to setup mcdonalds in another country, but that country really really hates the way mcdonalds does burgers. But corporate HQ wont let you change the menu, so you are screwed. (in a real world scenario, menus are localized to target countries for a reason).
Theres also the possibility that nexon NA doesnt WANT to make any important changes, even if they could, as long as the game generates a profit from the occasional end of quarter big sale/event/whatever. Its entirely possible that management just wants it to generate some profit and isnt concerned at all if they lose customers to BDO or whatever, because the game just isnt that important to them.
Imagine if you are a investor or something, you own a chain of restaurants, one of those restaurants (Vindictus) is pretty empty most of the time, but it still makes money. You could go inspect the place, replace the staff, change the menu, renovate, do all kinds of things to get more customers in...or you could be sastified with the small profits coming in from that restaurant. After all, doing all that stuff to try and make the restaurant generate more revenues is a lot of work and it might be more trouble than what its worth. As long as it generates a profit, you can just do nothing and keep collecting your share every month.
Maybe thats what nexon NA management is thinking, and they are focusing the majority of their resources on other games like riders of icarus or whatever, since vindi is an old title. One thing is for sure, they arent even trying to compete with games like BDO using Vindictus.
I really don't understand your comment about Vindi not having to compete with BDO. BDO is a relatively strong title in KR, and still ranked rather highly despite mistakes at launch. I don't think it's ever been below Vindi in rankings since launch. Whatever the exact status, BDO released first in KR, the devs and publishers are in KR, and they get previews and content first. It is a very direct competitor for Vindictus.
Comments
Would love to see some actual links of this (NA ones, not the EU one posted earlier). 95% chance that the Q&A was just safe questions like "Will you make a second weapon for Hurk" and very general answers. Almost every Q&A with a game company ends up the same. It is considered taboo in the game industry to ask any hard questions when interviewing devleopers. Hell, games reviewers have gotten fired for giving less than stellar reviews before. Q&As are frequently used as PR events, not as information sessions. A quick 15 mins spent typing up vauge answers and then firing them off via email to some community manager is the norm.
Look at the EU one for examples of general answers :
None of the older content got revamped, because Devcat doesnt work that way. They constantly push shiny new content to cause a end of quarter spike in player numbers and revenue. Thats why we got stuff like ein lacher insted of revaping lab/gauntlets/etc. This is the typical game dev answer that dances around the issue.
Unless an official Nexon NA representative confirms that they are doing a Q&A and asking people to submit questions, attempting to get a status update from Devcat here is, sadly, nothing more than wishful thinking. Even if we do get a Q&A, it will probably not be very informative anyway.
No one in kr knows where the game is headed either.
This was the NA Q&A
They asked us to submit questions and chose to answer those out of 11 pages of submissions.
People wouldn't make assumptions about them if Nexon was better at communicating with their playerbase and try to better please them. Hell it would be nice just to have some sort of response coming from the KR team on a monthly basis on what they plan to do going forward for the NA market. You can't just ignore an entire player base when you expect to be making money from them. Do you think its fair that we have to have someone who knows how to read Korean just to translate upcoming content from the KR servers every time we want to know whats happening? Understand that the NA market has asked countless questions and we literally get no response from NA other than "we will inform you when we get an update on whats going on with said issue." Like it or not, they brought it upon themselves. They have to suck it up and deal with it.
Yes I do understand. Because I played on NA for 5 years first before I even touched KR. But you also have to keep in mind that A.) Not every game company will answer every question B.) No gaming company is going to answer a question if it's strictly internal information or really ANY company for that matter. Nothing we can do about that C.) as for the translating if it wasn't even for that you wouldn't know whats actually upcoming. Every region deals with it in every game. The reason why you get the info so early is because some of us are willing to translate and in fact even stream the content on twitch and discuss and answer any questions regarding it. I get NA players asking me info in my inbox and in Discord because they want to create the threads you guys have now D.) (GRAY AREA) In terms of an update on said issue that's because if it's a game breaking issue they need DevCAT to figure it out because chances are we are experiencing the issue too. It's not just NA that experiences game breaking issues. In fact I warn the community of A LOT of game breaking bugs but it quickly gets forgotten and the thread dies in a fire. This honestly applies to every region in any MMO if that region isn't the parent of that MMO. It's a mater of who is 100% fluent in the parent language in the company. If Nexon NA has no answer back then it's because DevCAT doesn't have it figured out yet. Simple.
Perhaps Im the only one looking at this from both perspectives.
Disrespectful? Those are perfectly reasonable assumptions based on available data. We know exactly why the game has had more and more ridiculous stat requirements tacked onto it...so Nexon can sell more runes.
s1 bosses were balanced for people with average gear, this is why roch bosses die extremely quickly if you have a party of 4 at attack cap. They were balanced for parties with +10 level 60 wapons and 12-14k attack, with attack caps of about 18k or so.
s2 bosses and beyond have massively inflated hp pools because they are balanced for parties at or near attack cap. 4 people at attack cap (NOT counting +15s or anything crazy) will take way longer to kill them because of their HP pool. Not to mention the massive crit resist on s3 bosses. Even characters wtih the level 80 +9 event gear and about 19k attack do very little damage in s3 raids, because again, they are balanced for people at attack cap.
Roch/Drags were the best balanced point of the game, in terms of stat requirements. s2 and beyond was a shameless money grab to get people to buy runes.
If you had a +13 or better, you used to be able to skip the next tier of weapons, Devcat realised this meant less runes so they made level 95 weapons super OP so that a +13 level 90 wont be able to compete. Therefore, more runes = more money.
Everyone can login to any of the NA servers now to see how many people are just afking while playing BDO or other stuff. Most of the afkers at the start of the event got their rewards and dont bother to login anymore. At the start of the event, at least 3/4ths of every server were just afking for the rewards while playing other games. This is not a good indication by any means.
Even my KR friend who plays vindi KR says a lot of korean players are boycotting vindi because of the current director.
Not exactly sure where the data about raids being balanced relates to disrespectful players tbh.....I'm probably missing something in this here. I'm referring to talking on the forums. When people try asking about "whats going on with the game" and don't get a reply back then get disrespectful in the process. Not about the game data/stats or whatever xD Also I know about KR's situation and the Director all too well. me and my guildies have had a talk. Though we don't worry about those things because we just have fun together. Then again....we all look at both perspective of things depending on what the subject is on. If the game ends up dying in KR (which it ain't dying any time soon believe me) then it dies and we all move on to a new game. Simple.
Edit: I also re-read the very first post. Dullahan doesn't have copy pasted stats. He is actually stronger than lvl 90 bosses. Has higher crit. More life than the 90 bosses. xD
Edit 2: forgot to mention he has higher crit resistance :P
To clarify, when I said that Dullhan has copy pasted stats, I meant that level 95 gear will have copy stated stats, like how Regina is plate yet has the same stats as Lugh armor which is cloth. Its easier for Devcat to make since it just requires copy and paste rather than making different stats for each set.
Question 1: Why does Korea have better events/stuff than us? They have an attendance event that gives fine gem box, superior gem box, a carved shard box, and they get +12 Regina weapons; 1 weapon for characters that only use 1 weapon, 2 weapons for those that use 2 weapons. On top of that, Character Slots are free (there was a post a year or two ago about it) AND can have up to 20 characters on an account.
Not complaining about FREE stuff, but sometimes events we get are poorly executed/not well-thought.
Question 2: Korea doesn't remove (from the looks of it) regular outfitters from the avatar shop, yet when we have outfitter sales, both limited and regular variants are removed. Why is that?
Apparently NA is struggling to keep up with the economic expectations of the management so they gimp the region by placing artificial constraints to make up for the differences in revenues.
Ahhh the gear. Tbh I do agree there. I do wish there was a more variety of stat'd materials for the 90+ gear. Like how some items give 4 or more stats. So if one of them had crit then you could have the possibility of creating a true crit build using those mats that have higher crit then the other 3 stats even though that mat was initially for Damage for example. It would definitely make for some interesting builds.
The bigger Playerbase part definitely. The 2nd part I have no idea. I haven't gotten into the game development job yet since my Korean is still lacking quite a bit on translating in my personal opinion.
Queue Nexon Global deciding to implement its own launcher--something which the Asian regions would have rioted over, and rightly so--and at the same time having heavy-handed forum mods threatening players with bans for using the workaround or for helping others to do so. The Nexon Launcher still does not work for some players and it had major security flaws on release; I can't really blame the players who voluntarily peaced out for doing so, and certainly can't blame those who literally could no longer get into the game.
Add to that the launch of BnS, BDO, and various other titles along with the continued release of content in games like TERA and FFXIV during that same period and it's not really a surprise that Vindi was hemorrhaging players like it was going out of style. Further, we saw that Nexon employees literally went silent for months over on the Dragon's Nest forums once they knew they were selling the title off to another company. Whether that was poor management or an attempt to cause issues for a title that was about to no longer be in their possession, the fact is that it does nothing to inspire confidence in Nexon Global.
TLDR; Nexon Global is the cause of its issues. I doubt that the lack of events is a result of players not spending, but rather that the lack of events and the Global players being treated differently is the cause of players not spending.
The thing about non-english speaking regions is that they arent very affected by a global game like BDO because its a english game. Players in korea, mainland china, etc, generally gravitate towards localized games, its partly the language barrier i guess.
Nexon NA/EU has to deal with more competition from games like BDO, but their licence probably forbids them from changing anything major. I am still amazed that we actually got a different seal shop from korea. Whoever managed to get approval for that is a genius.
Sure, better events might make more players stay. But with a lot of players, I think they just have issues with fundamental parts of the game like the enhancing system that wont be solved by events.
To put it another way...imagine trying to setup mcdonalds in another country, but that country really really hates the way mcdonalds does burgers. But corporate HQ wont let you change the menu, so you are screwed. (in a real world scenario, menus are localized to target countries for a reason).
Theres also the possibility that nexon NA doesnt WANT to make any important changes, even if they could, as long as the game generates a profit from the occasional end of quarter big sale/event/whatever. Its entirely possible that management just wants it to generate some profit and isnt concerned at all if they lose customers to BDO or whatever, because the game just isnt that important to them.
Imagine if you are a investor or something, you own a chain of restaurants, one of those restaurants (Vindictus) is pretty empty most of the time, but it still makes money. You could go inspect the place, replace the staff, change the menu, renovate, do all kinds of things to get more customers in...or you could be sastified with the small profits coming in from that restaurant. After all, doing all that stuff to try and make the restaurant generate more revenues is a lot of work and it might be more trouble than what its worth. As long as it generates a profit, you can just do nothing and keep collecting your share every month.
Maybe thats what nexon NA management is thinking, and they are focusing the majority of their resources on other games like riders of icarus or whatever, since vindi is an old title. One thing is for sure, they arent even trying to compete with games like BDO using Vindictus.
False. KR has had vindictus for 7 years. BDO wasnt even in alpha until nearly....close to 3-5 years ago i think.
Vindi used to be in the top 5 in Korea. Not sure what place now. So BDO was under vindi for some time.
At least that's what I got from his comment.