TaruV

Money spent on trove: 0 Money spent on F10: 0 Money spent on subscription: 0 ...since the grand orb heist. Normally I would have bought a subscription when trove ended and daily dash came back. I would've bought a few octa gem bundles and spruced up my alts a bit. But I didn't. Why? There's this lingering resentment over what I perceive as unfair treatment. Some awful new idle animations I can't remove or rollback. There's a server merge incoming and who knows what kind of technical (and other) issues that will bring about. All this put together really doesn't make me want to spend money on the game. Most importantly, I can't trust anything NC tells me, because it could be another... miscommunication. It's clear they're not going to take responsibility for their mistakes, and we get to pay the price. I'm not okay with that. So, my dolphin money has stopped flowing in until something changes. Every single problem BnS has could be fixed, except maybe the unpleasant playerbase. But it'll take serious effort, not just coasting along on gamble packs and whale milking. Where to start? Make up for the white orb disaster. Don't bury your heads in the sand and expect the problem to go away on its own. One copper per antiquated item is an insult, after we were told they could be exchanged for current items. NC, you can be stubborn about this, but it'll cost you paying customers. If we shut up, it just means we've left, not that you've managed to wear us out with silence.

Although the request for a larger blocklist above was rudely phrased, the suggestion itself has merit. I joined an English server with the expectation that I could communicate with people using English. I'm sure it's the same for German people who joined Eisenherz and French who joined Naksun. This isn't going to be good for anyone. Actually, nevermind. They'll all go Crimson anyway and Ceru chat will remain its weird self.

The whole point of open-world PvP is to provide geared and/or skilled players the amusement of slaughtering helpless newbies. Whether the lambs are led to the slaughter through the lure of rewards, some obnoxious roadblock (breakthrough mat, main quest stop etc.) or sheer surprise matters not. It's not a design flaw or a mistake. It's intentional. Koreans love this kind of thing, apparently.

It's really puzzling from any perspective I can imagine. What were they thinking would happen with this event after the grand orb heist they pulled? NC Suit 1: "Okay, so. First we wipe out all the white orbs they've gathered. One copper each should be just the right amount to spit in their eyes. You know, really drive the message home. Everyone who still plays the game at this point must be a hardcore maso. Trust me, they'll love it. Just look how much the trove is raking in no matter what we do." NC Suit 2: "Are you sure about this? I mean, they've hoarded that stuff for months or even years. Won't they ragequit if they start to think we'll just delete their stash on a whim?" NC Suit 1: "Quit and go where? Ours is the only MMO on the planet, they have no choice but to keep suffering through whatever we feel like doing to them." NC Suit 2: "That's not really--" NC Suit 1: "Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. After we've turned their effort into offal, we deploy a new layer of RNG and tie the progression into these 'new' dungeons. We'll have an event to indoctrinate them properly. And get this! Most of the event is locked behind the 'new' orbs. They'll need a minimum of two characters doing daily challenge just to get one character through the event dungeons. Every day! For weeks!" NC Suit 2: "Whoa, that's pretty good. They love their alts. The metrics will go through the roof!" NC Suit 1: "That's not all. We make the 'new' orbs untradable and hand them out for a week - just one per day. Imagine how they'll scramble to try and join dungeons once we shut off that life support. We can make them waste hours clicking and clicking and waiting for a shot at the event. It'll be hilarious!" NC Suit 2: "Better yet, we could put the shards in daily specials every now and then. And the dungeon merchant! They can buy a shard for about the same gold the dungeon pays out." NC Suit 1 & NC Suit 2: "There's no way this can go wrong." Seriously, though, this event is now worse than the first week of that halloween event, and that's no small feat. Between the YOYLtards, clickbots and douchenozzles who bid on anything valuable, MOML be damned... yeah. It's a mess. Suggestions for improvement: - Get rid of the senseless orb requirement. Both dungeons have a daily lockout, so there's no point adding another barrier to them. If anything, you'd sell more resets without the orb hurdle. - Change the daily challenge reward from one shard to two. Nobody benefits from players being unable to do content. - Put the daily charity orb back in F8. It's not ideal, but at least it keeps the dungeons rolling.

One of BnS's selling points is ambience: it looks interesting, different, exotic. Although there's some futuristic stuff in the form of ancient Naryu tech and modern research related to it, all of that fits the setting. It's all good and high fantasy wuxia. You know what DOESN'T fit the setting? My Warden picking up her greatsword to air guitar a chi-infused solo or something. I'm having trouble finding the words to express just how outrageously stupid that idle animation is. Pants-on-head retarded? Utterly idiotic? In terms of ambience, it's like ordering spaghetti and meatballs but getting a turd instead of meatballs. Just WHY?! Whoever thought that was a good idea to add to the game deserves a swift kick in the naughty bits. From what I've seen so far, only Assassin's new idle is halfway decent. Gunner's is a bit of a head-scratcher with the random shooting. Destroyers look like they've gone off their meds, ranting and raving at the empty air. It looks awful and jarring. There's a lot of stuff in the game we can tune out one way or another. Our own character is not one of those things: he or she is always present and usually visible. The old idles are mellow, harmless. They don't poke ya in the eye. The new ones are crude and brash, disruptive. Revert, remove, gib checkbox to disable idle anims entirely. Anything. Just remove that eyesore new idle somehow.

Not good enough. This is not something you, as a company, can simply shrug off with "oops, we'll try not to do it again." The impact is too big, affecting too many players. It's been my observation that (Korean) MMO devs/publishers can be very arrogant and callous toward their (western) customers. They expect us to eat up whatever crap sandwich they feel like serving. Here some valuable resources are being reduced to one copper each. For no good reason, even. There's no good reason to change the old items into new items and antiquate the old ones, if their function remains the same as it was before. It's a plain ripoff. Now add the fact that the new event features the two dungeons involved with the orbs and the players suddenly lack the means to complete a part of the event... by design and not changing, huh? You will not get another cent from me until something approaching fair compensation is given for this orb-demonstone caper.

There is one concern related to accessories I haven't seen addressed anywhere: breakthrough items from old dungeons. Skybreak Spire accessories and Tiger/Dragon bracelets require the Oblivion line items from Desolate Tomb and Ebondrake Citadel, and finding groups for these dungeons has become very dicey since they were removed from daily challenge rotation. Being stuck with the "wrong" spec because accessories can't be upgraded to the required stage for switching would be unacceptable. The way I see it, there are a few options on how to handle this. Simplest would be to add the Oblivion stuff to Celestial Basin peach vendor. Or you could expand the daily challenge lists and put the old dungeons back in there. Or just allow switching below stage 10/awakened. Whichever way it goes, something has to be done.