FriendlyFox

and imo that's one of the reasons why this game is dying currently. Previously you worked let's say 2-3 days for 1 upgrade and it was a safe upgrade, rewarding you for the grind of the last 2-3 days. Aside from even increasing the required amount to try to upgrade once it's now also RNG... Even the average upgrade costs jumped from ~150 oils to f.e. ~8k, that's more than 50x the original upgrade costs. And you can even get unlucky and require much MUCH more. So now you have to grind for multiple weeks to try to upgrade once just to eventually fail. Voiding the whole grind you did for the last weeks, resetting you back, completely invalidating your effort. The new upgrade system is completely unrewarding and even the pity meter is a joke. Instead of steadily increasing the upgrade % like nearly other MMORPG does it only is a separate meter which requires f.e. for the soul 100+ fails to even reach max level (at a 7% upgrade chance even). You just grind for another lottery ticket. I stopped playing because of that upgrade system and I know a lot more players who either stopped because of the upgrade system or because there are no more challenges left in the game (like raids, CM, pvp) or even options available to grind (like msp double drop weekend, multis for drops in parties, selling runs for scales, etc).

This honestly shows how out of touch with the game the management is. I'd honestly estimate this bundles worth to 300-350 NCoin

That's not fully correct, there are plenty of ways to boost your stats with the itemshop. Every event also has some items f2p players won't be able to get, to boost you additionally. Blade and Soul is rotating their current cash shop events all the time, so each month gives you different benefits. Currently you can do fortune favor to retrieve the materials from the later pages (ignore costumes). Especially interesting is the Pet achievement, which gives you 30 AP (Attack Power), which f2p players can't get. Since this event is returning every ~3 months it's stacking up everytime and already for max gear players it's a 5-10% boost in AP/HP. Else things like Sacred Oils/Sacred Vials/Pet Pods/Pet Packs/Sterling Scales/Etherial Vials are interesting to max your gear (Soul/Heart/Pet/Talisman) and change the additional bonus attributes. The most broken bonus will be at max stage (+20), but be prepared for it to be expensive to get there due to RNG upgrades. If you do dailies I'd recommend you to buy 14 battlepasses for all your characters to get the gold from the battlepass (you can either do the missions or just buy it to max if you have the money). You'll need a LOT of gold to max your gear. Be prepared. Whenever trove cash event comes around the corner you can fully max your unity with awakened mythical ascension/radiance stones. Especially the ascension stones are interesting since you can't get them f2p at all. Else it's the same as with fortunes favor getting materials to upgrade. Then there are weapon gems/pet gems and etherial vial packs in the itemshop. Even though obtainable ingame you only get them in very scarce amounts, while you can buy them in huge amounts from the itemshop. These are really good to boost your AP and to max your unity. Additionally you also get the BiS Badge Psyches from the big bundles which f2p players can't get, giving you a slight edge over them. You should also buy premium for the weekly gold and quality of life. Every month you can buy different things from the itemshop giving you always a slight edge over f2p plebs. But looking at your character I'd recommend you to still do soul boost, to get at least basic gear. You can't buy the base items in F10, so you'll still have to farm them normally, but you can immensely progress by participating in the itemshop events every month.

Yep that's the main problem I have with this game. It's not just that they are not investing anymore money to make changes for the western version. They are actively investing money to remove the most important rewards (f.e. with Celestial Basin literally nothing useful was left in), nerfing drop rates or just making it harder in general (f.e. accessories dropping from stage 6+ instead of 5+ and I don't think this is just a bug). All while keeping the insane upgrade costs even KR complained about (they were the original reason KR even got Kaebi village). They don't invest money to make players happy/keep players in the game, but they are actively investing money to make the game worse for the western audience for whatever reason. I for my part am done with this game since this patch and I spent monthly between 300-700€ in this game.

There is actually so much wrong there... - Substratum doesn't drop it anymore - Aerodrome doesn't drop it anymore - Substratum and Aerodrome both got removed from Demonsbane Dungeons and have thus no stages anymore. Hardmode doesn't drop it either - Forest of Echoes either has 0.00000001% or doesn't drop it at all, there is no indication of it dropping them ingame (dungeon guide) and I've never even heard of anyone dropping it - it is not for "higher" heart upgrades. It already starts with the heart you got instantly after the story and a 5-7 days doing soul boost dungeons. Basically your very first real upgrade. I don't want to assume anything here but I guess it'll be the usual 2 Pet Packs/Sacred Vials Account Limit once again? While we got the insane upgrade costs of averaging at 6743 Sacred Vials to max the soul (not to mention rerolling stats which is also at ~4k)? Can't wait for the 0.0186% progress on maxing stuff per week (and that's only if you're in the lucky 50% average). While you're really active in the forums which is appreciated this just showed that you didn't read what the people complained about in all those threads about the sterlin scales ... which is sad. I honestly lost hope by now

It's not a cheat though. Korea had the same problem and they fixed it a month later (well 1 week after it got known). We are just getting the patches 1:1 (with nerfed drop rates) including all the bugs however broken they are. While cheating is indeed something which is now standard in BnS these scores were not made using cheats. You can do the same scores using the vanilla client without any kind of external programs.

According to their earnings releases (https://kr.ncsoft.com/en/ir/irArchive/earningsRelease.do) which got released yesterday Blade & Soul dropped by 25% compared to 4Q 2021 and it doesn't surprise me in the least. It's now at 5.2m € (or 7,024,840,905 Korean Won) across all regions with the lions share still being in Korean and Asian market (the earnings release doesn't split regions for each game, but EU/NA have 7.4% of Korea in total and last time I checked KR had ~15x more players in the rankings compared to EU). But as a player I can fully understand the big drop in numbers (and 25% is a big drop). I can't imagine that even Koreans love more and more RNG systems being piled on top of each. New players don't get any explanations of any of the new systems. And with the latest patch this game went more into a lottery kind of direction. It doesn't feel like you as a player accomplished something, it only feels like you were lucky when an upgrade succeeded. And even worse it feels like you wasted so much time when an upgrade fails. I can understand that they wanted to add systems to keep players invested for a longer duration (since you previously just maxed stuff and then waited for new content), but as a player I'm vehemently against the way they did it. Players (at least me) want to feel like I accomplished something, I want to feel like I get better the more I play. But with the current patch you just can't. A successful upgrade doesn't feel like an accomplishment, it feels like "finally done with this ****". I want to grind and see my stats slowly grow higher, I don't want to grind for feeling like I wasted the last 7 months for literally nothing. The current patch is a dungeon where you farm RNG drops with RNG accessories with RNG stats with an RNG upgrade system which require RNG materials for even more RNG stats you can reroll with yet another RNG system (oh and did I mention RNG gild stones you can put into it with yet another RNG upgrade for RNG stats?).

I don't care about an insane grind. But I absolutely hate the RNG span this game got by now. Before you could tell approximately how much gold/resources/time you'd need to get to a specific level, but now all you grind for is not actually progress but you just grind for another lottery ticket. Players (at least me) want to feel progress however maginal it is. But with the current system and our economy you'll be able to try to upgrade like once a month. And either the goddess of luck shines down at you or your whole grind was for absolutely nothing. It feels INSANELY bad that your whole playtime was suddenly for nothing and makes you wonder on every failed upgrade why you even play the game. I spent 750 Sacred Vials and 125 Sacred Oils, what I gathered from playing everyday, cashing in a lot of events, grinding dungeons for 7(!) months. I got 1 (!) single upgrade from 12->13. At the same time a mate one tapped it from 12->13 with 14 Sacred Vials. Do you know how shitty it feels, that I needed 736 Sacred Vials and 125 Sacred Oils, 7 months of "work" for the same upgrade? This is the first time in the 3 years I play this game (and I played every single day, I even playing during vacations) that I didn't login anymore. And even if Green Storm sent feedback to the development team I think the damage is done for me. The 7 months of "work" I did went poof and I can't imagine a world where we'll get it back. I honestly think I'd have preferred 20,000 stages of the items but with guaranteed upgrades instead of 20 but with this shitty RNG upgrade system. It just doesn't feel rewarding at all. EU/NA went from barely RNG to even more RNG than already KR. And we got the upgrade costs from KR while our economy is not even 10% of that from KR (while we were already complaining about the gold income of this server). I think it's done.

And you're not alone, normally EU had ~150k lobby numbers on Thursday 6 PM. Now it's Friday 10 PM and EU just passed 40k lobby numbers. Sure people aren't botting Aerodrome anymore, but it's still an insane decline, especially since it's 1 day after a new dungeon release.

Okay those items have still different IDs which can be seen from the different item description: The Pentagonal Pet Gem Selection Chest: The real Kaebi Village Ticket: As you can see the text is not read and reads "Unable to Trade" instead of the "Untradable" from the original one. Edit: okay nope, the description is just different while they are still in the mail, the items STACK which means they are the same ID. Did you really replace the Pentagonal Pet Gem Selection Chest with Kaebi Village Tickets? @Green Storm I really really really need feedback here, that was more than 100€ of cashing in the very last event, like how can that happen?

I wrote it in the description, I already have everything on Penta, so I saved it for when Hexa Pet Gems are getting released.

Wtf? You simply replaced the Pentagonal Pet Gem Selection Chest from the very last Cash Shop Event with a Kaebi Village Ticket? Since I already had everything on Pentagonal from my Pet Gems I just stored the Selection Chest in my storage just to log in and see it replaced by a Kaebi Village Ticket in my storage??? I didn't interact with the storage before that at all, so it was not my mistake. Just as an advice to anyone else who still had that selection chest to write their support ticket, the selection chest is worth 100€ and just got replaced with a simple Kaebi Village Ticket??? Simply wtf?

You need on average 6743 Sacred Vials to +0 -> +20 your soul. Cheapest offer of Vials are 3x Sacred Vials for 800 NCoin. So you need 2248*800 NCoin, aka 1,798,400 NCoin. With their official course of 8000 NCoin = 100€ we would be on average 22,480€ for a max soul. If you're unlucky you can go up to 70,000€ for a max soul. That's not how I would describe doable with a credit card since it's legit only 1 out of 5 items which require this huge amount of materials. In no game should max gear be equivalent to more than 100,000 €, sorry that's a hard no for me. Pay2win took a new dimension due to KR having a hugely inflated economy and just pushing their upgrade prices and RNG factors onto the western release (and even adding more RNG and worsening the loot to top it off).

Not just did they remove all accommodations, they made it actively worse for EU/NA. We got worse loot tables in the recent dungeons (KR f.e. Square/Penta/Hexa gems, we have Square/Penta, KR got Triangular/Square Pet gems, we got Triangular). We didn't get content KR got to compensate the need for materials/gold etc. KR has f.e. vials in their daily challenge, we have it in events (and even there it got removed now, we are now at 2 vials/week while on average we would need 6743 Sacred Vials, so on average 60 years (or 3,371.5 weeks) of weekly oils to +20 the soul). These upgrade costs are insane. Just absolutely insane. There is no way in hell anyone this is justified. We don't even have any way to farm Sacred Vials/Oils. Is it the occasional drop of 1 oil or evolved stone in ad/sub (from my experience ~3%)? I insta maxed my soul when it got released (10th November 2021) and did a lot of trove, cash events afterwards. I got most of my weekly oils and event oils (which don't appear anymore apparently) and I'm currently sitting on 450 Sacred Vials and 160 Sacred Oils. This is legit 10% of what I'd need for max soul. Half a year of farming/saving/cashing for average 2 additional stages? This game is doomed if they actually decide to bring those upgrade costs. It's like they want the western release to die.

Kaebi village in the next patch will most likely also use auto combat, at least KR had it (understandably since it's ~10 minutes per characters which easily stacks up with 14 characters) and it also got added to Sanctum of the Masters in KR. While we currently only have it activated for Primewald at least in KR it's actively used for current content, so I don't think they would remove it.

Please please don't ruin this patch. The format with the tickets and as event is the same as the Taiwan server got recently. But they only got 50 gold daily from it which is far from the amount this region currently so desperately needs. A lot of hope from nearly everyone I know (including myself) is placed into this patch.

I ran this weekend 156 times stage 41 to grind the levels for ranking and got: - 6x skystealer necklace - 8x skystealer earring - 8x skystealer ring at least from my experience the chance on stage 41 is ~15% so maybe you should invest your time more in doing less runs in 41+. The dps requirement is less than 15m for 41, so that should honestly be doable for every character even fresh out of the story or with some soul boost gear.

So much this. I was grinding all of my characters to 31-51 in Aero/Sub having fun playing all the different classes (I have all 14 classes with my 14 characters). But now the HM coins were taken from the ranking rewards and grinding the remaining characters to 51 for top 100 rewards is just not worth the time I have to spend for it... Yes the ranking in NA may be dead (with stage 1 being top 100 for Archer), but in EU you needed Stage 55 for f.e. Warlock for top 100, Gunner and FM were also both above Stage 51. Also Archer as the most dead class in EU was Stage 35+ (and thus way higher than Stage 1 like in NA). I even abandoned the whole soul boost progress plans I had on so many characters to finish soulboost on all of them. Reagarding the botting I actually asked some people who used auto combat in celestial basin and the response was that there is simply nothing else to do. And honestly I can agree with that. I don't even do daily challenges anymore, Battle Pass is finished and this month is completely dead since we didn't get any content at all. You do your daily soul arena dynamic and log off. There is literally 0 endgame content. The moment you get out of the story you can already run the most current "endgame content" aka the mythical dungeons, only on a lower stage. Higher stages are simply higher HP, nothing else changes. The performance got finally fixed for raids just for there not coming any new raids, like wtf? There is no progression in this game aside from gear progression. I'd really like some dungeon progression or seeing any kind of changes aside from the HP value when I'm upgrading my gear and "get better". I want to grind a dungeon, upgrade my gear and then progress to something else, not to the exact same dungeon, just with higher boss HP...

I know that's your opinion but wtf? Gem Powder is completely overpriced since 1 triangular pet gem drop from Poharan (which takes ~5 runs at stage 5 to drop) already gives you more gem powder than the overstuff gem powder bundle they sell in f10. The value you get from it is in absolutely garbage. For my opinion regarding this topic: The only thing I ever bought from todays specials were Pet Gem Chests, Hongmoon Master Scrolls and Searing Etching Stones. Everything else was cheaper to get by either other F10 packages or was in no relation from their Price to gold value (using F9's 1:0.30 which actually sells by now). What I actually would love to see: - actually costumes (we have another thread regarding wishes for returning costumes, with the current speed of 3 costumes every month it would take sometimes years to get maybe the costume you wanted to see again). Maybe put 2-3 costumes into the todays special, I'd definitely be interested in buying the costumes I wanted to see come back or costumes I don't have yet. To get people to check the specials maybe add them in irregular intervals. - Synthesis Stones. Our region requires 5x the amount of Synthesis Stones compared to KR and we still barely have any way to get them aside from the FoE 3x daily reward. A single upgrade try costs 100 Synthesis Stones for a 6% chance, so the amount we would actually need is insane. I'm not sure about others but I wouldn't buy them for the suggested 25-30 NCoin each (It would be 2500-3000k NCoin for a 6% upgrade try. If you're just looking at 50% of the cases with binomial probability you'd still need 12 upgrade tries looking at 30.000-36.000 NCoin for each +20 item, so 210.000-252.000 NCoin just for 19->20 tries). Since you still require a huge amount I'd prefer a lower cost of like 5-10 NCoin each - Etching Stones. We can't really get them so they'd be nice to have there But I'm generally more in favor of lower value stuff, so the first look into F10 doesn't seem completely pay 2 win. So I'd be more on accentuation on costumes actually.

Not using spam macros is the easiest solution. Aside from macro usage being forbidden (quoting the support: "Also, to clarify, out policy is that each keystroke or mouse click should equal one action in-game.") spamming keys is also the reason why additional inputs may not register. And if you still want to use your macro just release it for a bit. With the improved performance wie UE4 the input registration got way better even with spam macros.

There is no evidence of drop rate nerfs, but the loot table itself is visible to everyone and in nearly patch nerfed compared to KR. Celestial Basin f.e. KR gets Hongmoon Master Scrolls and Pet Collections, EU/NA had them removed Chaos Supply Chain f.e. KR is getting Square+Penta+Hexa Gems (~30% each), EU/NA has Square+Penta only (~50% each). Same applies to Pet Gems, KR has Octa+Triangular+Square Pet Gems, EU/NA has only Octa+Triangular Same with Transmutes, EU/NA requires the additional item "Challenger Token", in KR you require a few tradable materials (Soulstones, etc but not many) to fuse them. Same with Unity Stones, KR has no awakened legendary stage, we have one full additional stage to make it more grindy. EU/NA also requires 5x more Synthesis stones compared to KR, while not having any gold sources (like the daily changes or Kaebi village in KR). Soul Boost also has nerfed rewards compared to KR. We didn't get any positive changes, only changes to make it more grindy, more p2w, so of course I'm kinda tilted, especially with the patch we got this month, since they legit removed ALL the useful content you could get from there. There is literally nothing left to farm in Celestial Basin (and even more skins got removed and are now forever unavailable in the game). Don't take me wrong, I'm not criticizing Green Storm, I'm actually really glad with how he interacts with the community, he just had the bad luck to get thrown into this dumpster fire. I'm purely criticizing the people making the decisions to just nerf every single patch EU/NA is getting. It feels like in every patch they go over the loot table and just cut the best rewards you could get. I would be so glad if we could just get everything KR gets 1:1, I don't even mind if they include every single bug KR got (I mean we are getting them currently already anyways).

I kinda agree on most of your points actually. It was pretty obvious that removed rewards would drive of a few players from PvP (I even welcomed it since PvP was infested by cheaters) but the nail in the coffin was that PvP was literally broken for 1.5 months and got silently fixed without any kind of announcement (aka the season reset). As a result when people tried to q up they wouldn't find a game and thus wouldn't q up again since it felt like a waste of time. There was a time period in EU when people could get enough people to q for actual bg games with the behemoth buff (there were daily 4-5 actual bg games in EU), but this also died out since the damage was already done by breaking bgs during the release of a new game where A LOT of the pvp playerbase switched to. The demonsbane content has too many stages and stages differ too much for the LFP feature to be useful. Dungeons also went from 15-20 minute long dungeons to now 3-4 minute dungeons, reducing player interaction. I can't see a new player being bound to any kind of social interaction. And what's the worst for me personally is the feeling of NCWest trying to kill of their playerbase by nerfing every patch we get from KR. Oh? KR is getting Hongmoon Master Scrolls and Pet Collections from Celestial Basin? Can't have that here in EU/NA (fun fact: Celestial Basin was dead 1 day after the rework). Or KR is only needing 20 Synthesis Stones for one upgrade try from 19 to 20? Nope we need 100 of them. You can drop hexa gems from Poharan in KR? Nope Penta max here (btw to max your gems (if you didn't have hepta fuses already) you'd need average 14.500 runs, at a run time of 6 minutes each you'd "only" need 1450 hours of farming Poharan, 2 months full on farming Poharan, in KR it's 870 hours). Even Soulboost is getting nerfed rewards compared to KR. We have no gold income (and their "fix" was putting gold in the battle pass, but only the paid version or the top 3 players of each class). We have literally no content for this whole month inciting people to bot due to the inhuman amount of time you'd need to farm manually or without cheats. Remember when we got changes in EU/NA to avoid the RNG factor? Now we have RNG upgrades which require even more mats than KR while we don't even have a gold sources (which KR has). I'm so tilted about those decisions. The game would literally be better if we would get the patches from KR 1:1, don't ***** nerf the rewards or increase the requirements for EU/NA. You'd literally save development costs (since it's known that NCSoft doesn't even care about bugs coming to EU/NA 1:1) by bringing everything 1:1.

I tested all 14 characters now, I can't login on any alt at all. Even characters I didn't do dropscotch on. All of my characters are at least stage 35+ in SoulBoost if its maybe related to that. I did at least some battlepass on all characters on the OLD battlepass if it's related to that. All characters were ranked last Iron Conqueror event as well. I'm playing from EU

Korea did get a fix for it. They have a skill patch which took a looot of the dmg out of the game. It was the skill patch after 3rd gunner release, so literally the skill patch after our current skill patch.

I know for a fact that the first 2 people on HM 40 in EU did it fully manually. They were streaming how they do it in discord as well. You group the dummies together(20-30 seconds), burst them with debuff damage(6-8 seconds), die to grudge/healing totems (6-8 seconds), press 4, walk out and directly back in (12 seconds). No need to run back or exit back to the server lobby or anything. You can easily farm manually up to 380m exp per hour like that on stage 71 making Celestial Basin look like a joke compared to it (which it is). But yeah that's not really the main topic I feel like it would be detrimental for this thread if we drift too far from the patch, exp farm is a different topic to begin with.