Question2

The effort : reward ratio is bad.

You dont see anyone throwing secondary weapons to do s3 breakoffs (im talking about spears, etc) because its just too hard for +1 core. People only consistently break regina/lugh, etc when theres a kai or chain vella in the party, lugh often falls below the HP threshold before you can break him with normal smashes. Braha break = wayyyy too many bombs required, plus the raid is bugged so you need to break off both brahas to get the extra core + bonus mission. Lord glas breakoff has a very small window where he is stationery and is easily blocked by people standing infront of the boss.

Eochaid break is relatively easy but dependant on him doing the long ranged roar, which is RNG based. Most people cannot break him unless he does that roar.

Abo has the best designed break as you can easily break him just by attacking his face, without any special skills required. This is the standard that all breakoffs should be based on, when you have a breakoff that requires too much effort, most people wont bother.

Sunmi wrote: »

Failed 9 times trying to get from +9 to +10, what kind of curse- who hexed me- i don't need this pain in my life TT TT

In my experience (this includes what ive heard from others as well) : If you have a weapon that fails a lot of times, get rid of it. Boom it if you can. Im not talking about reasonable fails, like failing to go from +5 to +8 ten times. Thats still reasonable. When you encounter the same weapon, on multiple days/times, failing something like +10 ten times....just calculate the probability of it happening. IIIRC its like 0.00098% or something like that, which is worse than 1 in 100,000.

This is not a weapon you want to keep sinking runes into. Everyone that i know who has ended up with a weapon like this and kept sinking runes into it has regretted it. Dont fall for the sunk cost fallacy.

My personal theory is that items are generated with a seed number which determines the numbers that can be rolled when you enhance it. So for example you might end up with a bad seed that only has a 10% chance to roll a 51 or higher to suceed at a 50% enhance. Of course this theory is impossible to prove without access to the source code/some insider info from Devcat. An example of a game that uses seeds for RNG generation is Titan Quest : When you start the game, you get a certain seed that determines what items may drop, so it is literally impossible to get certain sets/uniques to drop on one playthrough without restarting the game. IIRC, PSO:BB used a similar system where item drops were dependant on your character name/class combination (meant to encourage trading).

The RNG in general is known to be streaky...very easy to see this if you incinerate items one by one and record the results.

Of course if you dont believe me and want to keep sinking runes into the weapon, go ahead, its your money/runes.

Ikarsu wrote: »

Quick battle in a nutshell.

Anyway to the topic, if you're trying to board of a quick battle, YES, it does have an attack requirement. Regular battles are usually dependent on the host and sometimes you run into one of those guys that go all wild over the attack stat (when it's capped at 23,000 for s3 runs, 18,000 on s2, and freaking 14,000 on s1).

Uh, the attack caps in s2 are 21k and roughly 19k for s1 (drags).

s1 attack cap was largely irrelevant, since most people had 12-14k attack back when s1 was end game (with +10 level 60 weapons, mael being insanely rare and some characters having low ATT weapons like twin swords, etc). The bosses were balanced for parties of average stats (and characters were weaker back then). Drags took maybe 15 mins to kill with an average party. Roch was maybe 10 mins or so IIRC.

s2 ruined this by making everything have insanely high DEF and have massively inflated HP pools. Even a party of attack capped players in s2 can take 10 mins or more to kill bosses like Ulchas. s2 and beyond are obviously balanced for parties of attack capped or near attack capped players. The only s2 bosses that are fast with a party of attack capped players are stuff like panth, kraken, havan, iset, jugg (if you dont fail the bombing phase). Havan being fast only if the party can interrupt the one hit kill and iset being fast only if you can chain disables.

Nowhere is this more obvious than s3 bosses, they average 10 mins to kill with half the party being attack capped (by attack cap I do not mean top DPS characters with +15s obviously) and the others having average stats of 19-21k (min : event gear). The stat requirements of s3 raids are so silly that players with the +9 level 80 gear will almost never break 10% damage (unless the rest of the party is very, very bad) even if they play very well. And that is insanely good gear for level 80s. Your average new player will have +0 gear, no scrolls and spend most of the raid dead.

This is basically flawed progression. Devcat's train of thought is that a level 80 will gladly spend runes to +10 and enchant his level 80 gear before tackling s3. This is wrong. Most level 80 newbies will run into the progression wall and jump straight over to other games like BDO.

If there's a situation where you need better gear, there are dungeons that can be farmed easily and produce gold where said gold can be used to buy better weapons.

9 out of 10 new players won't do that. Why? People almost always take the easiest route. Most people would rather log off and play an easier game than farm something mind numbingly boring to make gold. Ask any veteran who has tried giving advice to new players before. It usually goes like this :

Newbie : Man, I have no gold, what's a good way to make gold?

Veteran : You should try farming enchancement elixirs to sell, you can also sell high level enhancement stones, ore, powders, etc.

Newbie : Too boring/takes too long/too hard. I'm going to play an easier game instead.

OR

Newbie : *stops responding* *logs off to play another game*

I have seen dozens of newbies do exactly this. Hell, most veterans do this too. They complain they have no gold/mats/whatever, but they refuse to do dungeons to get anything because "ceebs", "too lazy", "too hard", "I would rather play another game instead", etc. I know multiple people with very good gear (+13s or higher) that quit because "I have no gold" or "Mats are too hard to get" but they refuse to run anything at all because "ceebs" or "too hard".

A month ago, I was talking to a Kai with a +14 or+15 (cant remember which) and he said he quit because it was too hard to make gold. I asked him why he didnt run s3 dailies to sell the drops and he said it was too hard. He now plays BDO and wont come back, he wont even login to get the free weekend gifts. This is pretty much the typical MMO player these days.

In the last one year I have only seen one newbie actually put in the effort to farm elixirs, etc to sell to make gold compared to the dozens who chose to play other games instead. He was able to make a lot of gold doing this and gear himself up easily with fully enchanted gear, etc. Therefore, its not impossible to make gold via farming as a newbie, but most newbies simply wont do it. He even got lucky and got a +15 coupon from an event. Unfortunately, right after he got the +15 coupon, he started refusing to do any end game content (s3, nif, etc) because "I already have everything I want from this battle". Complete waste of a +15. He quit permanently because he doesn't want to get level 95 gear after Dullhan has released because "I worked so hard to get my gear and it will be obsolete once Dullahan is out" and now plays BDO.

I would be surprised if Devcat has anyone capable of speaking english fluently, good luck hearing from them. Thats assuming they want to talk to you at all.

There is a reason why you almost never hear from korean game developers directly when their products are licensed for overseas markets. Game companies with similar arrangements usually have the overseas distributor (Nexon NA in this case) handle everything with the overseas market because frankly, they could care less as long as they get paid according to the contract.

Its like, Mcdonalds. Mcdonalds has different branches all over the world right? Mcdonalds HQ isnt going to talk to, say, korean customers directly. Thats not their job. That's Mcdoanlds Korea's job. Mcdonalds HQ only cares about how well Mcdonalds in Korea performs. The only time Mcdonalds HQ starts looking at things on that level is if Mcdonalds Korea is making a MASSIVE loss and the HQ believes they need to completely replace senior management for Mcdonalds Korea. And even then they wont talk to Korean customers directly, they would be sending executives to Korea to do a major shakeup of the operation, and they would be talking to middle and lower management. At no point whatsoever would you see someone at Mcdoanld HQ trying to engage Korean customers via social media or whatever to find out what they think (even assuming they have someone capable of speaking Korean there).

So no, devcat isnt going to answer any questions, even assuming they understand it. Hell, I bet they ignore most korean players all the time unless they want to do a highly publciized Q&A session (like most game companies).

What is the direction of the game? More lame parallel updates to delay content release obviously. Devcat has been following this model since the start of s2 since it is very easy for them. Why increase the level cap every episode when you can delay level cap increases for a whole season instead? More lazily copied and pasted gear all with the exact same stats (this isnt a prediction, we already KNOW Dullahan will just be using copied and pasted stats).

Getting more players to play? They dont care about that. Devcat is not out to grab market share. That is not theri business model. They are out to maximize profits. So if one crazy korean guy spends $200 per month on runes, they are totally fine with that vs 10 players spending less money per month (which is how BDO and other western games operate).

While Nexon NA likely has some leeway to set prices for their regions, its Devcat that ultimately determines things like "No, you HAVE to keep the shitty permanent item destruction model, we don't care if you lose players to games like BDO because of it, how else will we make money from runes?".

Devcat doesnt care at all about competition from games like BDO. Why? They are not korean focused. Devcat's major competitors are OTHER korean MMOs who are targetting korean players, most of which we have never heard from. It's the overseas publishers that are facing competition from games like BDO, but their licence agreement obviously limits them in terms of what they can do. To Devcat, if Nexon NA is struggling because too many people are hopping over to BDO (becuse of the enhancing/enchanting system, etc) , thats not their problem, it's Nexon NA's problem.

Basically, its like you (sales manager) telling your boss (CEO) that the product sucks and customers are jumping ship to your competitors. Your boss shrugs and tells you to deal with it because thats your job. Thats assuming Nexon NA even recognises a problem in the first place. Keep in mind that executives dont see the situation on the ground....they dont login and see the masses of afkers in town playing BDO. They just look at quarterly reports and as long as they see a nice profit they are happy with that. I can 100% guarantee you that they have absolutely NO idea how many of the accounts that have been inactive for a yearr or more quit beacuse of other games like BDO, because they dont bother trying to find out why those accounts are inactive (assuming they even prepare reports with the number of inactive accounts).

This is why everytime we near the end of a quarter, Nexon NA brings out big events to try and get people to spend money (so the managers can prepare reports that look good to senior management). End result : tons of afkers in town, like what we see now. All those people logging in just to afk, get free stuff, logout, then play BDO. Ask yourself, how many people on your friend list do you know just login to afk while they play other games?

Im honestly not sure why Nexon NA isnt trying to copy games like BDO in terms of how they monetize the game. Companies are usually very quick to copy a competitor when they do something successful, look at the Apple Iphone for example, Nokia and everyone else jumped straight on the smartphone + touch screen bandwagon. Maybe they are limited by their licence agreement or they genuinely believe that their current system works just fine.

Then again, they dont play this game and dont see more than 75% of the server afking in town while playing BDO, they only look at the bottom line. Which will remain profitable as long as people login, afk, spend $500 on boxes for things like the succubus queen outfit then go play BDO.

People who want elixirs generally farm hero mode which is much faster/easier than putting together a party of 6 players with end game stats.