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I can't quite wrap my head around these changes.
Titan goes down in like, 5 shots? This isn't fun. Whose idea was this?
Comments
I guess it's supposed to help new players be able to progress through the game casualy.
This isn't casual. Casual would suggest a smooth gameplay experience that takes about weeks or months to finish. This is infantilization - casuals getting to endgame in 1 to 3 days with endgame itself being a ridiculously massive gap compared to all prior content. This is a baby game that trainwrecks into a whalefest. It's a stiff; bereft of life, it rests in peace. Its metabolic processes are now history; it's off the twig, kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleeding choir invisible! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!
Other things they changed that you might have noticed include the story progression mode, which essentially made it a much faster way to progress through story if you play on your own. Party sizes went down from 8 to 4 for all normal battles and most raids. And all of the raids before S3 are now considered normal boss fights.
The link below goes into all of the changes they made:
vindictus.nexon.net/news/23324/rise-revolution-update
Another user named Rade wrote about the changes in a positive light and how they are something to be thankful or at least appreciative of when comparing the game to it's older state. I think he worded it quite beautifully:
The original thread:
http://forums.vindictus.nexon.net/discussion/11352/is-the-game-dead/p1
1. Rise Normal is a nerfed version of pre-Rise easy. That's why so many players are complaining - new characters just one-shot everything which destroys any challenge in a game that was designed around being challenging. The point of Vindi was to create a challenging game that required skill to conquer rather than luck (like most "difficult" games nowadays). And players used to get punished for going Easy because Easy didn't give them all the BP needed to unlock further dungeons, which was a good thing as it forced players to work together to either do the bonus missions on Easy or just defeat Normal.
2. The economy is actually the worst it's ever been. Mobs dropping +4 equips at the beginning of the game with +6 before midgame has destroyed the economic value of trading, and all that simplifying the materials has done is make the market bot-friendly because now all recipes can be done without players having to aim for eyes, helmets, etc - which means now bots can just 1-hit bosses and basic enemies and flood the market with materials while actual equipment is nowhere to be found because players are no longer dependent on one another to get good equips. And that's in addition to the fact that no one even needs good equipment anymore since the entire game up to S3 can be solo'd nude with basic sword, meaning even IF players got +0s as drops they'd still be bulldozing all of the content, therefore making good equipment nonexistent in the market due to no demand until level 90; this also means that crafting is even MORE expensive now because players can't get any return for making any items except the final ones possible, making all pre-90 crafted items junk and therefore making it hell for players to invest in crafting, which restricts crafting to an elite few that are dominating the only part of the market that matters - the lvl 90s.
3. aka THERE'S NO ECONOMY
4. It claimed to fix typos. It didn't, and even created some. It claimed to streamline the story - it didn't, outside of Story Progression, which is a gimmick aimed at beating the game within a day, which is bad in a game where the whole point was to be challenging. And it also took out stories that literally took no time to do and there was no reason to get rid of them since they had plot and character development. The DIFFICULTY is what made the game good, the DIFFICULTY that forced players to work in PARTIES which created a COMMUNITY that had a good MARKET because mobs didn't drop Infinity +10 equips, the DIFFICULTY which was found in XE that got replaced so Nexon could go back to the P2W Pre that is even MORE P2W now than it was in Pre!
And Rise DID NOT rebuild the game's core - that would suggest it rebuilt the engine, changed from the dungeon structure to Open World, fixed the P2W stat focus, decreased the number of channels, gave actual character models to NPCs, delimited the profession system, made the characters classless, allowed players to enter values for things like hues and party cap, or anything else that actually changed how the game functioned; instead, they KEPT the core but NERFED the details, cut out important or meaningful parts of the story, made side quests and bonus missions irrelevant, ruined the title system, ruined the market, destroyed any reason for party-play before endgame (turning it from an MMO to a singeplayer game), added new max enhancement levels that are even more P2W than the previous, and this was all after even the entire Korean playerbase told them not to implement Rise after they tested it.
5. This is both completely false and offensive. If the Rise update helped the game grow at all, new players would be staying instead of leaving because either it's too boring or they hate the difficulty gap at endgame that simply stops them from thinking the endgame is boring because it is. Toxicity is not making the game die; the game's been on a long death spiral because the devs rarely create new content and instead focus on making game-killing edits like Rise, in addition to Nexon's marketing teams not doing their job and properly advertising the game in any region. There is no excuse for Vindi and Mabi not getting a lot of innovative content like the devs used to make when they aren't even making a new game (which they should, because it's past time - Vindi was made 6 years after Mabi, and now Vindi is about 7 years old without any notion of Arena being brought back or replaced); players in all regions have offered DevCat constructive criticism, not worthless vitriol, and DevCat's current director has literally just ignored all of it because he wants to get his own way and doesn't care at all about the playerbase. And many, MANY of the players that are doing this have quit the game because of his reign but keep coming back to see if the game they love will ever get better, only to be disappointed and leave again.
6. False. Bosses used to be difficult BECAUSE of large party numbers. Bosses increased in difficulty stat-wise massively per each number of players in the party. That's now been removed and all bosses have been nerfed stat-wise so that players kill bosses too fast to ever be forced to use any amount of skill, so they never even see boss patterns.
7. This is complete and total BS. The game starts at the introduction. Every single part of its story is relevant, and every single battle (before Rise) tested the player's skill and wit. Players dealt with bridges and traps from Chapter 1. They did raids starting with Chapter 1 (or 2). They traded equipment and built a market that worked at every level for everyone. Every player was relevant - the casual, the crafter, the raider, the grouper, the challenger, the achiever, and even the socialite. Now the game is a straight less-than-24-hour 1HKO fest to raids that hold nothing other than drops that used to be optional before the stupid 80% damage mechanic gave favor to whales that still don't need skill because they're whales in a stat-heavy game where the AI has been nerfed to not require anyone to use skill and lets everyone facetank even more than during Pre. Before Rise, it took days to get used to the game and weeks to complete it, not months, which is far better than Mabi which is still focused on level 1000+ players. And even Hero mode is irrelevant because the whole point was to provide a difficulty higher than Hard at any level (above 60 or whatever, now changed to endgame where it's useless, instead of given to all levels which the playerbase wanted).
8. They're not going to be because the new DevCat director doesn't listen to anyone other than himself and is going to drive the game to its complete and totally irreversible death. We need the original leaders back.
I appreciate you showing the OP that there is that 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the world's Vindi playerbase that thinks that anything other than streamlining crafting (minus the removal of skill-based unique drops) is good, but don't mislead them with claims that go against the actual data collected about Rise Vindi.
If they wanted to streamline it for infants, that's fine. But why remove hard mode for people who might want more challenging combat? Most everyone defaulted to hard mode just because of an extra core that nine times out of ten gave nothing of value anyway and no one complained about difficulty in relation to reward. So this does nothing for older players and removes incentive from newer ones to challenge themselves, get better and try for more/better loot. The new drop table is extreme in the opposite direction. If they wanted 80 sets to drop like candy, then why not save the pre-enhanced drops for hard mode? This at the very least gives incentive but is ultimately unneeded not only because of how easy it is to do yourself but because you don't even need enhanced gear to do well anymore. Basically effort for convenience. There's no reason to hand you everything on a silver platter.
Even before this Rise update, I as well as many others hated the streamlined story content. Around the time Lynn came out I believe? It destroyed the npcs we all came to love, changed their personalities and left holes in the story. Now it looks like it's been gutted even more. Is there even a story anymore? I wonder how much lore was stripped from the game when they removed mats and along with them, item descriptions. It's referred to as flavor text because an item with no story is bland and uninteresting and just another piece of trash to scrap for coins. Now we have whatever this thing is... powder? Apparently somewhere along the line Devcat forgot one of the major pulls for this game was its Monster Hunter-esque nature that made making equipment out of the hides of our enemies so enjoyable.
For 8 man raids, they were a large part of the community for the game and great for socializing. I know the community is near gone these days, but that just leads back to the lack of choice. If there's not enough people, create tiers for the raid. The raids did get tougher with each new player added, so if you chose a 4-man you not only got an equal level of difficulty, but you didn't have to wait for more players either.
The game isn't what I'd call easy right now. More like there is no game. If I remember right, someone referred to cellphone games, or in this case turn-based scrollers as having an "illusion" of gameplay. You press the button, the game does the rest for you. It's interactive artwork at best. If you can run in, slap your hands on the keyboard and finish a battle doing nothing, you didn't actually play the game, you just got a participation award for looking good.
Lastly, to state that the salt from older players is the reason the game isn't growing is an outright lie for any game. Forums are always a vocal minority and most people don't know they exist or bother looking at them as is again true with any game. "Haters" are dismissed by people who enjoy the game regardless of the negativity. If the game isn't growing, it means there's no new players coming in, none sticking around, nobody coming back. It's like today's politics: thinking silencing people will magically make things better and wondering why nothing has changed after you do is deceiving yourself the problem doesn't lie elsewhere.
Welcome to Rise.
They're called Idle RPGs, but even they have actual gameplay. The point of Idle RPGs is to manage the auto-battle. The characters in the game keep auto-grinding and gaining gold and exp, then you are supposed to upgrade their equipment, level them up, and/or replace them through shops and drops. It's basically a hero management game, but the point there is the management aspect. In fact, some of these games punish you for not auto-ing, either by pausing the game for some reason or just being offline. Games like Auto RPG defined the genre while games like WorkeMon have made it more complex and, to a point, even difficult.
Vindi Rise doesn't even do that much. All you have to do is click-click-click two buttons and move around and the game plays itself. You don't have to find NPCs to turn quests in, as the game auto-continues, and even your equipment automatically replaces itself with better equipment. You don't even need to manage your characters...which is why Idle RPGs actually require more player input than Rise does.
But they could've already done that by selecting easy mode.
Nope, the game is pretty much ruined. Playing since beta, quit shortly after the update (after it became apparent there was no chance that this will be reversed), I sometimes check the forum out of morbid curiosity.
Rise is the best thing.
Rise minus AD changes is the best thing that happened to Vindi in the past two years.
Yep, so good that players on all servers have dropped their +15s from their inventory and uninstalled. When you have players who have invested ridiculous amounts of hours and dollars in a game just walk away you're doing something wrong. One thing that you don't get and that DevCat doesn't seem to get is a basic facet of marketing/sales: it costs more to attract new customers than it does to retain old ones, and repeat customers tend to be the best source of revenue. The hardest things with games like these is getting players hooked, and part of what got players hooked was the challenged and the social aspect, both of which disappeared with Rise.
Add to that things like having to do the Enhance/Enchant quests, etc., on every single character and it's just tedium on top of bad design. Maybe Vindi exists in some special place outside of the norm, but it doesn't seem that way at the moment, and that likely means a continued decline. No testing before something this large scale was released is just more of a reflection that this update wasn't about truly giving players what they want, but what the director decided in his mind that players want. Worse still, he said outright that many of the changes were about getting new people to stick around, not making current players--the whales who keep the wheels turning--satisfied.
You can call it salt or whatever you like, but with games like BDO here, and Kingdom Under Fire 2, Lost Ark, the Bless revamp, and plenty of other titles on the way Vindi is going to hold less and less appeal with its easy early game and non-social end game.
Except that it was tested by Korean players who reacted negatively to it and outright said not to implement it, yet the DOL did it anyway. A lack of testing isn't an excuse; the feedback was simply ignored.
*shrug* I was salty when it came out, no doubt, but I've since moved on and I'm supporting other companies now. It was a good ride and the memories are there, met a lot of friends and the guild I joined is thriving after 5+ years (in other games now). Everything ends eventually.
This comment is extremely misleading. The game has always auto-equipped newly acquired items from a run you just finished when you return to town if there is nothing equipped in the corresponding equipment slot. It's probably been this way since year 1 even. If you're already wearing something like a Crimson Rage hat, the game is not going to automatically replace it with your newly found Armageddon helm for you.
@TC: Should be extremely obvious by now, but there ARE indeed lots of good and bad changes that came with Rise. How much of it is good/bad depends on what each player values for themselves and how much you care about what the community wants--ALL of the community, not just the people with the same values as you. DevCat still made a massive mistake by not polishing Rise with community feedback before implementing it though.
True testing isn't just letting players find bugs and ignoring all their feedback, so I supposed I should have put that qualifier in. How they handled it was extremely unprofessional. The worst part is how quick they are to implement nerfs if they feel something makes players too strong, but they ignore players saying explicitly that they aren't okay with the forthcoming changes.
Low level crafting has always sucked for new players. They could never farm the mats to be able to purchase new gear, and gear that sold below catalyst prices Market Standard Prices have reflected the prices those items sold for in their prime, because a certain volume of that item has to sell within 24 hours for that price to update. New players thought their +5 Dreamwalkers were 13 mil, when really everything pre-80 was sold for scrap (element stone catalysts etc). The market IS healthy: the low level mats are actually a solid amount of gold for a new player; expertise dismantles most of the upcoming equipment into catalysts that have good value; element stone mats are now readily available, opening up infusion as an option for more players. Most items available in the game are listed on the marketplace (I'm having trouble thinking of ones that aren't, since even DER bracelets are listed there).
Raids didn't properly scale in the past. The old scaling put a solo at roughly 65% of an 8 man party's HP, transitioning to 100% by 4 man. That means 4 players could basically tag for free (since the HP was already the same value without them), or a solo was worth over 5 players in damage. Ignorant players weren't forced to learn mechanics in this system since mechanics were balanced around 1-4 people.
I think the direction of the seal shop is also an interesting one. Seal shop used to be a welfare system, which either gave you gear that was too weak compared to endgame gear or devalued the endgame drop market. Now it's transitioning to a means of progression via a large variety of new stones and runes. I think as this gets expanded, it will properly reward players for grinding endgame content, and that's better than having people running everything-but-endgame for endgame gear.
Some things the game could use still:
First of all, AoD isn't a Boss. It's a Raid Boss that got nerfed just enough to be made into a normal dungeon, but it's still significantly more powerful than normal bosses because - again - it's a RAID BOSS. It's an exception, not a rule. And even then, it's easy to solo.
Yes, you do get +8 weapons from questing. You get them as Very Common (not even Common, but Very Common) drops from normal bosses on the new Normal dungeons. You also get almost full sets just from one run through a chapter that are high quality with good enchants.
Having your AP capped means nothing if 1) you're not investing it all or 2) your characters can't invest the AP into the skill because they're too low level to have the next rank unlocked. And AP isn't everything; having high rank skills means nothing if you aren't going to use them properly, which I don't know how you can't when all you have to do now is facetank everything since you might only get knocked down by an enemy once per day if you're unlucky and the game literally throws hundreds of HP pots at you plus those dozens of free Goddess Graces. It would be better to clarify my one-shot as one-combo since I see a combo equal to a shot - if you LLLR even once with full, naturally obtained gear from Normal dungeons, you'll 1HKO any mobs 10 or so levels below you, which is guaranteed to be the case because players now overlevel by 10 before the end of Chapter 3.
The point of a market isn't to be a resource fest, it's to manage an economy run by the players at all levels of the game. When the market becomes filled with nothing but cheap resources and no equips, what you're seeing isn't a player economy - it's a bot economy, just like in RuneScape; but different from RS is that in RS players still got good money from selling their crafts pre-endgame, while here the only pre-endgame items are those botted resources that are cheap because they've been botted, and they're easier to bot because now all of the mats are uniform.
Additionally, saying that it's easier for players to craft because resources are cheap in the market is just a cover-up for the fact that mats are now even harder to get from mobs than before (as many common methods of getting basic mats, like spider webs into basic cloth, are now gone) for normal players, while bots can just OP run-through dungeons in parties that are now the same difficulty regardless of party size and get those basic mats that are still uncommon drops just easier for bots to get than players. Yes, players could farm the mats to MAKE the gear they would SELL to get actual MONEY at ANY LEVEL in the market because most mats were made from common drops and advanced equipment required player skill to knock unique mats out of bosses (something that bots couldn't do, which is why unique drops were good money-makers for normal players at any level).
And I don't know what you mean about dismantling equipment to get more resources, because 1) that doesn't result in economic contribution at all and 2) it doesn't work for some talents because it's bugged.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Bosses did get more difficult per player, but raid bosses were nearly impossible to solo. The remaining raids still are difficult, to an extent. All that happened now is raid bosses got turned into normal dungeon bosses that have been nerfed to be solo-friendly because, again, player count no longer influences difficulty. Raids turned into dungeons are now easier to solo than before and require even less thinking.
Grinding is what makes endgame boring because it's literally the only endgame that exists. For old seal shop, there was atleast some incentive to play multiple content that made things less mundane. It also made non-whales somewhat relevant since it required actual playtime rather than buying items to make upgrading equipment easier than it's ever been, to the point that only whales will ever get to +19 and +20.
Okay, first, there already is one. There's literally an AP shop in the game.
Second, you're suggesting making endgame even easier than it already is and completely removing all incentive to acquire stronger equipment because everyone will play gear-independent raids if available.
Third, says the person who only cares about endgame but wants a mode that will remove all challenge from endgame. What.