So I finally managed to get a party for Story Regina and did compositing, and I noticed tons of other things like cash models and plotholes... Just going to list them, you'll understand.
1. Vindi was designed to be a challenging skill-based game. Stats were kept as a genre legacy, but really the only ones that mattered were attack speed, weapon length, stamina, and durability, because these were based on the game's mechanics. Attack power, defense, etc were detected by the game, but they were passive - the effects of atk spd, length, stam, and dura could easily be seen by the naked eye without the need for damage numbers.
Everything in S2 was designed around that vision. Premier was just the testing ground, and XE - which S2 was designed around - was the true skill-based experience. Then the developers got lazy, deciding to go back the Pre which was easier to balance and program for (and it had nothing to do with which was the favorite, since even in KR it was 50/50). They cut off S2 halfway, then entered a long hiatus for actual content which slowly yet surely killed the population, which was doomed even more when they destroyed Europe's integrity (XE, tons more IPs allowed, Tir Coins, just overall better) just to save money...which ended up losing them tons of revenue instead.
Then RISE happened. Everything became stat-heavy, length had long been abandoned, most weapons released now are copy-paste from how previous weapons work, and the cash model got even suckier while Oceanic players had to deal with an entire ocean between them and the server. They failed to keep the male:female character ratio by releasing the new character as a female who is too much of a stick to be dragonkin, even more of a loli than Lynn, who is honestly just a hybrid between Delia BS and Chainblades...plus a super OP insta-KO everything Mary Sue. It doesn't matter if she's a glass cannon since the cannon aspect gets attack speed and additional damage straight from that p2w cash flow.
2. So let's talk Compositing. The Compositing interface - heck, the entire experience - is extremely nice. This is what crafting should have been in the first place. My problem with it is that it should just require normal mats instead of recipes and its own unique mats, it should have just been a reskin of the crafting interface so that profession levels would still matter, and all equips should have been able to do replacement so everyone could fashionogi any equips at max level - in fact, it should have been possible to turn costumes into equips (equip menu from then on instead of still working as costumes) by doing replacement, while other equips would need to be crafted at their initial level before equipment upgrade. If done right, replacement would require profession levels, so the market would burst with activity due to max professions making max gear out of all equips and perhaps even costumes through a "commission" system (a player could put a costume in a lend queue and any professional of appropriate level that sees it can take the commission, upgrading it without taking it away).
So much money could have been made there. Heck, if they kept focusing on pets, if they even had released S2 and S3 as paid expansions (S2 would have actually been finished instead of cut off halfway), if they hadn't gone on a hiatus that naturally decreased their players and screwed over tons of their European customers, they would have kept making tons of money. Enchant/enhance items don't make as much as appearance items; that's always been the case, always will be the case, and won't stop being the case no matter how stat-heavy the game becomes, because Vindi was designed around challenge and appearance.
3. And the plotholes! If we went back in time, yet it was implied that the dead were already being forgotten, why the hell did the Druid and Princess remember their dead families? That was literally the cause for the ending of S2; so why did they remember when the curse was in effect? This is ridiculous and just another example of DevCat not paying attention anymore. How come the devs retconned the initial claim than Vindi was Mabi's prequel just because they didn't want to read up on the lore before doing S3?
Heck, they could have made the character registration packs cash items instead of buggy website click items, but no - they choose the worst things to make money, and the worst methods of earning without money. They even prematurely allow people to use NX before they even verify the exchange was successful, then blame players for it when it's likely their own clerical error that caused the exchange to get rejected! And the new customer support team just makes this 100x worse.
