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Whisper system : The original whisper system allowed you to use backspace to instantly delete the player name, this allowed you to quickly whisper multiple different people since you could quickly change the player names. The UI revamp introduced a bug where pressing backspace when there was still one letter remaining after the player name would delete the player name, e.g. /w playername a and then hitting backspace would delete the playername instead of the "a". The whisper system now forces you to manually backspace every single letter of the player name, making it a really tedious task to whisper multiple players at once.
Level 85 belt : Abomination drops the essence for the level 85 belt apparently, similar to eochaid earrings.
Skill window : Skills are now sorted by alphabetical order, you can no longer disable skill videos from playing, and you are now forced to spend all or no AP when ranking up skills. This is an incredibly dumb change for obvious reasons. It serves no purpose and nobody asked for this change.
Secondary weapons : When aiming secondary weapons, it used to aim where your camera was, now it always aims at a fixed spot that is in the middle of the map (height wise). Try aiming spears at, say, kobold archers you now have to manually aim downwards EVERY SINGLE TIME you go into secondary weapon mode. This makes spearing things much more time consuming as you have to re-aim a large amount for every single throw....
The patch notes say "Fixed the starting location for the flight path which appears when aiming a secondary weapon" which might be referring to this change, but I cannot fathom why they thought this was a bug. If anything, the fact that the aiming location is fixed (instead of aiming where the camera is) and we have to constantly aim downwards everytime we go into secondary weapon mode is the bug.
Importantly, Nexon EU did not "fix" this "bug" for the EU server. This is a NA exclusive change.
Item obtained system messages : They now include hotlinks for the items so you can click them to see what they are.
Deleting expired items : You no longer get a popup asking you to confirm that you want to delete expired items, including expired NX items. Great change overall, as you no longer need to type the stupid confirmation code in order to delete expired badges from your NX tab.
Environment info in advanced controls : On my evie, "environment info" in the advanced controls section where you remap the keyboard keys, misc section, has been renamed to "casting sound". Not sure if this was just a one time glitch, but this change is not present on my other characters. It still functions the same (pressing the key causes environment info to show up), it's just been renamed to "casting sound" for some strange reason.
Mail with items can no longer be deleted : This makes it much harder to mass clear your mailbox if your inventory is full.
Lynn's running animation changed : Lynn's running animation has apparently been changed according to dazedgumball.
End of battle screen now shows AP bonuses from AP/Divine blessing stones : Unfortunately while that bug has been fixed, the AP section is still too small and you have to scroll down to see the full list of AP buffs. Just use a divine blessing stone and look at the end of battle screen afterwards, you will see what I mean.
Low level battles limited to 5 a day : Apparently this is an unintended change according to Ehgess.
S1 dailies now ignore the gold level penalty : At some point devcat/nexon seems to have broken s1 dailies so that the gold level penalty was still being applied even if it was a daily, this appears to be fixed now.
Marketplace listing price limit raised : You can now list items for very high amounts (billions) of gold.
Its nearly 1 million gold each because people didnt stockpile them before and are scrambling to do it in the middle of a enchanting event. Obviously if you are just scrambling to get enough powders now, its going to be a nightmare. Anyone who has been playing for a while before the event should have enough powders stockpiled, especially if they have been using seals of dedication to buy them.
Lets say nexon allows people to get enough free elixirs, 5 per day for the duration of the event. The longterm consequence of this would be that normal elixirs would be practically worthless for months afterwards as plenty of players would have stockpiled free elixirs during this event. This would have pretty negative effects on the economy.
Empos have massively dropped in price for months because everyone is using the free event equip. The market will take ages to recover from this. Scrolls like impending are currently worthless since 30 mins worth of raids gets you enough coins for one and people are farming hero two moons like crazy for powders anyway.
The problem with powders though, is that fundamentally, they are pretty hard to get for high level players. No high level enemies drop them. They can't be bought using seals of bravery, only dedication which requires you to revive people, and most endgame players don't die often enough for you to farm enough seals. Their highest drop rate seems to be from breaking stuff, but the problem is that high level maps are very empty compared to low level maps because devcat got lazy. IIRC, BCE doesn't even have one handed clutter for Evie's erg transformation skill. Erg pots drop powders very rarely as well, and s2 maps don't even have erg pots. To make things worse, erg pots drop rate is penalized by the amount of players in the battle (unlike evil cores). And two moons drop rate is so bad that you only get 1-2 powders on average per run. You can also get them from raonnes chests, but its very random and most high level players skip s2 dailies because they take way too long and the drop rate for anything useful is terrible.
This is an example of pretty bad game design, where something that is heavily in demand by higher level players is harder to get at high level compared to low levels.
But i will point out one thing...once you get your enchants done, you basically have no need for powders anymore. Think back to when people maxed out enchants on level 60 gear...they went ages without enchanting anything (unless they wanted to gear up their alts). Similar situation with enhancement stones and elixirs. Anyone with a high enhanced level 90 is most likely not going to use any stones at all, i mean sure there's the occasional player who wants to try for +15 on every character, but most aren't going to spam runes and will stop at a +12 or +13. These players will have nothing better to do with their stones than to offload them on the market and then it becomes an issue of supply vs demand to determine the price.
Most of the time, the price of elixirs and powders is decent because you might get 1-2 r7 scrolls per month assuming you do s2/s3 raids regularly and people have plenty of excess powder to dump on the market (or so they think). Anyone who hasnt saved up enough powders now is causing the demand to spike. I dunno about anyone else, but i nearly ran out of powders during the last enchant scroll event but i had pretty much recovered my stockpile in a few months and i didnt do any crazy farming or anything. Just kept picking up a few from dailies and such. Leveling alts also got me a couple of stacks of powders.
This analysis is pretty flawed for the following reasons :
-Devcat/Nexon has made many attempts to make the game more casual. The easiest example of this was how difficult gnoll chief was in the NA beta, compared to now. Early content was seriously nerfed, partly because they kept adding more and more episodes and quickly reached the ceiling of how difficult they could make the new endgame content be without nerfing early game content to be easier in comparison. They were probably prompted to do so because they kept losing players to newer and better games.
-Many design decisions are not due to any coherent plan but simply occured due to bad decision making, especially prevalent when you have multiple directors, some of whom are well known for making bad decisions. Things like early characters (Lann, Fiona, Evie) having to spend way more AP to max out their skills compared to later characters are a great example of multiple directors making different decisions (and not giving a about consistency), rather than any secret plan to make the game harder.
Another example of unintentional difficulty is how the power infusion update added tons of junk drops to low level bosses, which actually made crafting low level equip a LOT harder. Before that update, new players had a much easier finding mats to craft episode-appropriate gear and the leveling process was much more straight forward. The update turned off a lot of new players to the game, which was unintentional.
-Many MMOs, even newer ones, actually require far more grinding than Vindictus currently does. Compare the amount of time it takes you to go from, say, level 30 to 40 in Vindi. That's basically one episode (ruins of sanctity). It's less than 10 battles, each of which can be done in 8 minutes or less on average. Now compare how many hours of grinding shitty "kill X monsters" quests in a WOW style game it would take for a roughly similar level of progression. Not to mention that games like WOW have a reputation for being casual still have insanely hardcore content to cater to hardcore gamers, such as forcing people to raid a certain amount of times a week or achieve certain PVP scores if they want to get the end game stuff.
Vindi's end game has been largely problematic ever since drags came out, because there was a sudden massive spike in how rare drops were. Even roch equip was relatively fine to make barring a few items (glas pants, etc), but the drag rares were so rare that most people were stuck fighting 9.6k def dragons with +10 roch weapons and low attack characters (twin swords, longsword, etc) averaged 12-13k attack. This is the point where many people started quitting because they hit a massive wall as they could not get level 70 weapons, let alone level 70 armor. I'm pretty sure a director change occured around this point because there was a massive shift in direction from the earlier episodes. MMO developers often resort to making things super rare to try and prolong content, but this is just a lazy bandaid fix and actually hurts the game in the long run because once you hit a certain threshold, people just give up and quit.
We are now in a pretty good spot, since orange weapon feathers are 150 seals and new players can actualyl make level 90 orange sets if they work at it. Before that happened, vindi kept going from a cycle of "i can't make equip for my level, i'm just going to quit" to "oh the seal shop got updated, i guess i will come back since i can actually get new gear now" to "the seal shop doesn't have mats for the new content, i'm going to quit again". I have seen countless players quit in this cycle, except that most don't bother coming back at all after the first time. Right now, I'm pretty sure that getting to 90 and crafting your first orange weapon with seals is easier than getting to max level with appropriate gear in many MMOs.
-3D MMOs are, strictly speaking, not hard to make. There are countless terrible WOW clones out there (and before WOW, there were countless RO or whatever clones). They are never very popular, but they clearly make enough to pay the bills, because their costs are low (just make generic quests and a brainless tab targetting combat system). Of course your costs are high if you are actually trying to make something good, since that requires a whole lot of things to be done such as marketing research into what players actually want (most companies cut costs here, because developers have a tedency to believe they know what is best without needing to do any research at all). Vindi obviously does not fall into this category when you consider the amount of effort, or lack thereof, put into basic testing of new content like the S2 13k DEF fiasco, which happened when level 70 mats weren't in the seal shop and people were stuck with +10 level 60s. Devcat is not trying to make a good game anymore, they may have been in Vindi's early stages, but they are cutting costs EVERYWHERE and even the story is an incoherent mess compared to the very well written original S1 story (the re-written s1 story is also a terrible mess, but at least understandable). What they want is a minimally viable product, rather than a blockbuster.
-The idea that the high prices in NA are somehow the result of a business strategy of making a hardcore niche game is hilarious when you consider that prices massively differ by region and it is a fact that the regions with lower prices have far more players and profit than NA does. Im pretty sure EU alone was way more profitable than NA. The high prices are the result of a bad business strategy that is failing to find the perfect price point where the business makes the most profit while losing the least customers.
To put it into simple terms, you can sell a loaf of bread for $10 to 10 customers, and let's say you make $5 profit per loaf for a total of $50. Or you can sell the same loaf of bread for $8 to 100 customers for a profit of $3 per loaf, for a total of $300. Nexon NA is doing the former, rather than the latter.
The high prices are a direct result of killing their own profitability because new players hit end game, realise they need to spend money on runes for a +10 double enchanted weapon, look at the price, and simply quit. That is a loss of money for Nexon NA because those players have taken up bandwidth while buying nothing. There is a sweet spot where you will get the most players to drop money to make their end game gear, and that's the one Nexon NA should be trying to reach, but they are not trying. Whether that is because they believe their pricing is perfect or they are locked into some kind of licence agreement with Devcat is unknown. It is quite common for retailers to adjust their prices constantly to find the perfect price point, but Nexon NA hasn't adjusted the prices....pretty much ever (sales do not count as permanent adjustments).
Most players are not going to wait several months for events to snag free runes, they are just going to quit and move to other games, and as anyone who has ever studied business will tell you, getting customers back is extremely hard. Just this year alone, I have seen many players quit permanently in favor of games like BDO where they don't feel like they are being ripped off. Those players are not going to come back regardless of whatever events or sales Nexon NA holds.
tl;dr : The high prices are the result of a bad business strategy, rather than any strategy to cater to a niche, hardcore audience, when you consider that Devcat has been making the game more casual over the years to try and appeal to a larger audience, simply because they were losing tons of players to competitors. Pre-roch Vindi wasn't even hardcore by any stretch of the imagination, and things became more "hardcore" only because Devcat got lazy and thought that making people grind for months to make a new weapon would allow them to push out new content slower.
