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I loved this game for years, and it pierces my heart to see the forum dominated by four multi-page doomsday threads.
Personally I stopped playing regularly when I noticed a visible decline in the quality of raid design after Lugh. Then each patch dropped my performance further, eventually to the point where I could no longer host. And long time friends that were fixtures of my Vindictus world stopped logging in. Eventually I stopped spending money at all because it no longer felt like I was getting my value back.
Then Rise hit, and it was all over for me. In an instant I went from having a superpowered character to having a just bleh character. It was demoralizing at a time when I had already lost faith in the game's future. As someone with poor enhancing luck, I always felt like +12 was my comfort zone. With Rise, +12 was now only average. With ATT limit release and the need to remake all my armor for level 95 too, rather than giving me more options to gear up the game instead put more and more demands on me to chase things I had neither the time nor the inclination to get. With the comfort zone lost and all these other demands, for the first time in six years I felt overwhelmed and quit.
Every MMO player is simply a cog in a clock but Nexon/Devcat are an unusually neglectful clockmaker. They don't even check back in from time to time to see if we are ticking. They make changes that indicate they have no market strategy for the game, and push patches full of changes few, if anyone at all, actually want. I'm convinced that after a solid 8 years, Nexon still does not know how to monetize Vindictus. Hence the years of haphazard changes and hiring of new directors with conflicting market strategies.
I still log in from time to time to see if any one else does. My friends list is a graveyard of people who haven't logged in for hundreds of days. The only thing that could ever get me to try playing again would be the complete removal of permanent item destruction and a relaxation of enhancement rates. After six years, I'm not nearly foolish enough to think Nexon would ever do that.
I loved my time in Vindictus, I started playing in high school and now I'm two years out of college and beyond. But the game is just another part of life that is impermanent. The game will disappear eventually whether it be this year or ten years from now, and everything you've accomplished over those years will be lost forever. I've accepted this and moved on. If you want to keep playing, then love the game for what it is now and keep playing. Vindictus isn't going to change. Nexon isn't listening to us and never will listen to us, so for the rest of us that have left, I'm afraid that the truth is there will never be a reason to return. Vindictus is just memories now.
I love the changes to launching and restarting battles. That's about it.
Ultimately I think RISE fails to do what it set out to do while causing much harm elsewhere. They tried to redesign the lower level content to capture the interest of new players better than it was at the time. Personally, I fell in love with Vindictus back when leveling was difficult. Back when it took effort just to kill group bosses and you actually had to learn your new abilities as you leveled. It was tough, but so rewarding when you felt like you were improving as you leveled.
I can't imagine anyone falling in love with the game at a low level now. There's no interest in fighting bosses that fall over in 1-2 smashes. If nothing requires any effort, there is no feeling of reward, and without reward, how is any new player going to acquire the motivation to push on and see the higher levels?
The silliest part of how RISE was executed here was not releasing level 95. There is a growth goal for 95 but we still can't gain experience at 90. Maybe if we were level 95 then the additional damage changes would feel less broken because we would have newer, more difficult content to do with them and they would feel more appropriate. Instead the damage changes have completely trivialized everything there is to do, even Season 3, while we still have no reason to farm for the same things that have been available for two years now and have fallen to little value over that time. What we have now is a Vindictus that offers nothing during its leveling experience and little more than nothing at max level.
Then of course there are the enhancement changes which will likely cause me to leave the game entirely. It feels like the game I have loved for so long is now permanently crippled!
For a director who states he wants to get more people playing and fewer people leaving, this update has so much wrong with it.
Enhancement is the least fun, least engaging, most stressful, most disliked part of Vindictus. It always has been. Its only competitor is enchantment. For players who make it to max level, enhancement is one of the leading of not the leading reason why they quit. It's a bit of a problem for the maintenance and growth of your game when its two primary means of progression are also the primary means of making spending players quit. The problem is that enhancement is too demanding and too punishing. In the pursuit of becoming stronger, you can lose everything. It seems the new "solution" to this problem is to make enhancement impossibly demanding while not only keeping the same crushing punishments for failure, but making them more frequent. How does this help Vindictus at all?
Even if we solve the problem of people quitting prior to level 30, in this state people would quit at 80 instead. Once you see that unscalable gear wall before you, why continue? "You spent how much money to get +17?" It seems the basic problem that RISE is attacking is that Vindictus does not offer enough bait to get new players hooked into its circular and alienating monetization scheme. But 30 or 80 - it doesn't matter, you're still not getting new players to a high enough level to start caring to the point where they will spend money. This update does little to fix that and much to worsen it. Once they start selling 13-15 runes, and they will, we'll have reached the point where we are now paying to lose more often than we lost when it was free. And once we as customers accept this and buy into it, we show that we are not to be respected as consumers and are comfortable with being exploited through the most basic of profit-inflating schemes.
Maybe that's what we want. Only sales numbers will tell the answer to that, and I do not know the future. What I do know is that if Vindictus' problem is that it cannot get new players to spend money on it, making our money buy even less than it is now is not the winning long-term solution.
More personally, the saddest part of this update is that it will turn Vindictus into something I can no longer enjoy. After so many years upon years, I will have to say goodbye! So, I guess you can say I am not excited for the RISE update. I see far more falling than rising.
Wow! Truly a shame! Season 3 gave Vindi so much of what it needed, making gear more obtainable by all and streamlining the gear-crafting process in ways that made sense and created realistic goals for us. Things seemed to be on the right track for the first time in years. And now, this. The gap between the lucky and the unlucky will be unbridgeable. And we can all be sure they will be monetizing these woeful enhance rates with new runes that protect to a higher level. That is beyond off-putting - it is actually insulting.
