Snowyamur

This is the last post I am ever going to make for this game's forums. After that, I'm leaving. It's just not right being a part of this anymore, and it's not the player base nor community being awful. It's the publisher and developer(s) being this untrustworthy and shady. Thanks for reading through all of this if you did. I've been playing this game ever since it came out in NA back in 2016. I quit for 2 years, then came back to find this game become one huge Pay-to-Win mess. I dismissed it, believing this to be one huge obstacle to overcome for this game to achieve its true potential. But then we get: recycled and repeated events, poor reception and feedback from NCWest community coordinators, very little to no bug fixes or status updates, poor game design decisions and changes made to the game, and now even more Pay-to-Win garbage. This has been evident over the last few weeks, and this game has shamefully continued falling from grace since 2017. With the release of the "patch," if we can even call it a patch, for Hongsil's Summer Blast event, NCSOFT decided to increase the Unity cap from 220,000 to 500,000. You can find the patch notes here: https://www.bladeandsoul.com/en/news/hongsils-summer-blast-patch-notes/ From a surface-level perspective, that doesn't sound so bad, and that's probably how some people saw it. Not really a huge deal, but not one that's game-breaking either. What it does is it allows players to farm more Unity, which doesn't really break the game. If Unity applies for PvP, then it definitely broke PvP, but I wouldn't know because I don't dare to touch it for Blade & Soul because of how poorly-balanced it is. The thing is, the Unity system itself is dominantly Free-to-Play because you can't spend real money to buy Unity levels, which made it a decent progression system that's earned through playing the game, not spending money on it. In fact, having Unity is likely a core reason people would get online daily to play, thus it was a good thing to add to the game. Unfortunately, little did we know that both NCSOFT and NCWest increased the cap with this patch just so they can ninja-add a bunch of bundles that include: Purple Ascension stone chests Unity XP charms which can be bought 10 TIMES PER ACCOUNT! And keep this in mind: they increased the cap because they knew the whales would hoard all the Unity charms and use them, which wouldn't work if the cap was set at 220,000, but increase it, and now it's effective for use. Considering Unity provides permanent stat upgrades, this game has officially become dominantly Pay-to-Win now that you can BUY permanent stat upgrades. Let me ask NCSOFT this: what happened to your promise mentioned below? Did this fully go out the drain? I think it did, considering what you did for this event contradicted everything in your "philosophy, especially where it says Outright shameful; you just scammed and cheated on your own player base and community, on top of breaking a promise you set forth from the beginning. You can read more about their revealed business model here: https://www.bladeandsoul.com/uk/news/business-model-revealed/ Now, being P2W screams NCSOFT, and we all know that. It's been seen with the daily material offerings that we can buy with NCoin and have reset daily, and it's been seen with Trove, especially Trove. But what they did that was absolutely disgusting was not tell us about these bundles being released, or plans to make Unity become a purchasable in-game item through microtransactions, completely turning it into P2W, only to carry them out and sneak them in with this "patch." That's disgusting, pathetic, and shameful; it has high D.P.S. written all over it. Players in Blade & Soul need high dps to even participate in the so-called "content" you roll out, well, now you can appreciate having your own high D.P.S. For those of you who might not have known this, one of NCSOFT's community coordinators made a reply to me when I said that we should have more daily livestreams to give us a look at events before they go live. This is what they told me: Hyunkel told me this 2 days before the event released, and he is a GM Community Moderator. You can find its parent thread here: So they tell me this, and what do we get? Nothing! No livestream, not an even an announcement for one, and after what we all saw when we logged in looking at the cash shop, we can see why. They knew we would flame and frown on them if they showed us this: and they were right: we're frowning upon them now. Guess what, unlike NCSOFT, I'm not afraid to show that I spent more than 25+ USD on NCoin through these screenshots because I'm not someone who keeps secrets and scams people, unlike NCSOFT. They never told us about this, and these bundles were NEVER mentioned in the "patch" notes before the event went live. A BnS Reddit user named Ponifex actually theorized the price to be paid if a whale wanted to overspend. While it may not be accurate, it's a horrifying estimate: You can find the Reddit thread here: Is this what you're expecting from EVERY player? Is that how much you want us to spend on your poor excuse for a gambling simulator?? Are you joking??? To all members of the BnS community, if you can't see it clearly, see it now. NCSOFT, more like NC$cam, is not to be trusted. Their greed has plagued the gaming culture with their focus on profit over quality and performance. I've been patient with them and tried to make this game seem more appealing, that in the future, it would improve, but clearly, it will NEVER improve. It only goes more downhill from here. Leave this game behind and don't come back. You will never get back the time wasted on this poor excuse for P2W garbage, but that will be made up with time spent on doing other things you know will not scam you in the future, like NC$cam did just now. I will not spend another penny on this game ever again for what it's becoming, nor will I spend another ounce of my time and energy putting up with this. This has become an illness on the gaming culture, and it's only spreading and getting worse.

Are you not seeing the big picture here? Unity and Ascension stones were supposed to be the ONLY ONE FEATURE that was NOT Pay-to-Win. NCSOFT changed that with this "patch" by introducing bundles where you can now buy Ascension stones and Unity xp for real money. It doesn't matter about being happy or mad about the whales funding the game. After this patch, there will be nothing left but whales in the game, and the fact that they kept these bundles a secret is shady as hell, on top of proving the reasons why we as a player base cannot trust them. Honestly, this has to be illegal somewhere because this is screwed up, and in a way, it's extorting money from us by saying, "You want to keep up with the end-game? We made it much harder for casual players, so you either spend on NCOIN to catch up, or you die off with the rest." This is outright wrong and disgusting that they would do this. Best way to save the game: just don't buy anything at this point.

You can tell they're desperate with the amount of bundles they dropped in the cash shop, especially the ones with the Unity xp charms and the Ascension stone packs that you can buy up to 10 times.

How is NCSOFT a multi-million dollar corporation again? With all this negative stuff about them coming from their EMPLOYEES?

Yeah, and the fact BnS is declining in Europe/NA isn't good for the lot of us who continue playing the game because, knowing how NCSOFT operates their business, they might just withdraw the game from both regions just to profit heavily off of their Korean and general Asia player base. It's sad that most game industries are turning into this, but no one said life is fair, right? We just have to roll with it and see where it goes. Or, we can take a step forward with initiative to helping new players get into the game, all the while improving the community-aspect of Blade & Soul while it's still in-check.

I didn't make MMO-Populations, so I wouldn't know if it tracks the player activity across all regions, but I think it does. However, what's important to understand about MMO-Populations is that their tracked MMO player counts are based primarily on active Reddit subscribers and users for the respective MMORPG Reddit pages. The actual player count is not as accurate as it's shown, mainly because getting accurate player numbers for any MMORPG game is very difficult unless this data was publicly released by the leading industry that developed the game(s). What makes the site good, though, is that it provides accurate comparisons between different MMORPGs as they are ranked against each other. So for Blade & Soul being at Rank 14 might not be accurate considering there are some dead MMORPG games not removed from the charts, but the fact that it's up there is a compelling argument against the fact that the game isn't dying. If there are still players talking about Blade & Soul on both Reddit and general social media platforms, it means the game's community is still active, and with that comes the assumption that in-game, there is an almost-equal number of active players as well. It's just about being on at the right place at the right time to find said players.

Where was this?

I wouldn't use those numbers as a good projection of the current Blade & Soul player population, mainly because of the reason you explained: not everyone uses BnS Buddy. Better to use MMO-Population, as the statistics closely resemble those from Statista. The Blade & Soul MMO-Population graphs can be found here: https://mmo-population.com/r/bladeandsoul/

Ahh, okay. It just sounded like the dislike came from the playerbase, even though the lot of us are continuing to press for better changes to be made for the game. Unfortunately with this "patch" coming up, it sounds like the worst changes are still being made.

So are you blaming the actual BnS community players or the developers and executives on this one? It sounds like you're hating on us for these changes.

That's the one thing I'm upset about. Of all changes, why was that one made? Allowing players to switch out their legendary mystic badges freely was so player-friendly and convenient, and now that it's being removed, the developers want us to farm for another badge? Yikes.

Some of the changes are for PvP, and I don't do PvP in Blade & Soul, so for that, I wouldn't know if the changes are good or bad. But, for changes to the gear, the Marketplace, and the merchants, those aren't really fixes but are instead changes to systems already in the game.

"We don’t like pay-to-win, so what we are offering are cosmetics, convenience, and consumables – not power, not gear, not permanent stat increases." Well, clearly this practice went out the drain now that Blade & Soul does more Trove and has its daily pool of in-game upgradeable materials that affect the gameplay in the cash shop, which players can buy with real world money. NCSOFT clearly caters to the whales, and one would be foolish not to see that. It's a damn shame, but a business is a business. Too bad other game industries are leaning in this direction.

I wouldn't say these are really patch notes because from what I read, it sounds like there wasn't any fixes to any preexisting issues or anything. There are only a lot of things being changed and shifted around, which is really not fixing anything in the game aside from removing what needed to be removed and replacing it with something else.

Maybe try playing at a different time then for a potentially better result?