Ren36

It depends on the intention. If I go for NCWest you are probably right, but I aim for the community. Informing and gathering scattered infos in an effort to lower the threshold just a little for people to speak up. Not to be visible for the publisher, but the players. The publisher is only 2nd in line.

Monetization is not bad, but there has to be limits. If NCSoft as head and NCWest as subsidary cannot restrain themselves it always leads to short-term investments, as we have now. Short because the aim is not to create a long lasting game, but a quick cash grab, while holding off investments to sustain the game. Which became more apparent with the layers of rng ontop of rng and methods that are devised to bait players into investing bigger amounts than they would spend into subscription based games in a year. Paired with poor decisions, while being slow on the uptake to resolve issues and withholding investsments into long due sections repeatedly, feels as though the management decided to quit BnS in NA / EU for good, while feigning efforts to counter it. Not understanding that in the long term it would damage the reputation of NCSoft and all the employees that made themselves known. Yet when it comes to practices how to monetize upon their playerbase they start to shine and it becomes appaling how sophisticated one can work if the direction is clear. Methods how to monetize on the playerbase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4

And even then, the efforts are way to scattered. There are enough threads that exclaim that the game is dying without constructive feedback, yet if you wanna join them at least use the search function to find such threads.

The way you write is confusing and it´s not easy to make out whom you mean with NC, but from what you write... You make it sound as if the devolper and NC(Soft?) work independently, but let´s say NCSoft really has no say in it. Do you think that NCSoft/NCWest as an investors would just be an onlookers to the developers? I mean on the off mark since NCSoft acts as the figurehead that faces the wrath of all the customers, do you really think they would just watch as their money is drained without any result or profit they invested into the development studio? Let alone the investors, even for distributor & promoter it wouldn´t be long until they were gone, if their feedback didn´t count. Same as the playerbase. Everyone makes failure, but it just doesn´t feel professional. There is not even an encouragement from the publisher, the incentive starts from the community´s side. NCSoft & NCWest only react, but do not act. The problem is I see no effort in many fields. There is only regress, while putting the playbase on stand-by. I don´t expect everything to be solved at the same time, but even one should be possible within this year without dishing out the next content. If they would have concentrated on fixing issues before they became this size it wouldn´t be as hard to start anew with UE4, because as of now BnS has no positive reputation as it was pointed out what would happen if BnS would be put up in steam and their review. And who says that UE4 won´t be a waste of time either, if none is left to enjoy it and if it will do anything at all for our client, because with the amount of options that UE4 will offer it becomes just as easy to mess more up.

For sure it´s playable, but there is a difference. It was made unplayable by NCSoft and playable by the community, because in the same moment you recommend BnS to a friend it became a habit to suggest him to install bns buddy too. To make sure that he experiences BnS with the least amount of possible problems. Though it shouldn´t be like this, through the years the pace at which performance issues are resolved by the playerbase currently exceeds paid programmers of NCSoft, including localization and translation errors. For good or for worse, due to this everyone´s knowledge of their operating system windows got upped by at least one level through the sheer amount of tries and effort even the average user put in to find their personal cause for their problems, while showing findings & results to NCWest. With the most recent approach to translate dx9 into dx12, which was even brought up back in 2015, but actually done by a player. https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/141112-directx1112-upgrade/

Brother Bill and many other BD, who ranked high left because the class is not good and the high time of warlock for 2,5years. Classes with 1 escape suffered the most during that time and it was usually sin, kfm, summy or destro that engaged or had any chance vs them. It was the time most pvp players gave up on balance and even rerolled to ungeared warlocks to play the meta. Same as in korea. But being forced to play a class you don´t like to play the content you like made them hate pvp. There is a reason why melee players stay melee the whole time, because unlike range classes you feel much more engaged in the gameplay and boss fights, aside from mechanic phases where range play a role too. The strongest classes are played by more people and if arena reflects the amount of BD even just a little then there are next to none left. Considering that BD contributes nothing to the party that cannot be done by other classes better.

"A lot of people assume we either have our own client or a port of another client. Obviously there's differences when branching off and doing other things, but the people responsible for creating the KR builds are the same ones that do it for every other region." Cyan says assume, but the performance issues compared to when you log into the "KR-Client" are not mere speculations. And if it had been an issue that didn´t require coding, it would have been fixed already. This kind of statement also makes me worried if UE4 will even do anything because from what Cyan says it´s not the coding. Then what is it?

Come on Imouto we had this discussion before, I know we can state our opinions, but try to look at rankings. We all know which classes are at the top, even arena, which is 1v1 has no bd in top 10 of all ranking classes. Stop stiring up sojaa. Your inputs have no base. You even got reprimanded from an admin for your false information. To sum it up the classes that are favored in arena are the same that are favored in group battles, because most of them have unlimited iframes, unlimited blocks and one shots with less gear than the other classes.

An in-depth reply speaking from experience and simple solutions. Makes me wonder why NCWest/NCSoft didn´t come up with this, especially since the forum is filled with several approaches, but there is probably more to it. And that´s competition. Bns barely faced competition with their game, even if their players count dropped it didn´t affect their initial sales. People that invested too much stayed the longest and continued to do so. And the fishes that didn´t, didn´t hesitate as much. But when the servers crumbled and the whales were left alone with their own kind, this game became a race within a race with the pace the updates came out. Upgrading and upgrading to defy the meta just to keep up and compensating with the downsides of your class and what it can contribute to the party. Just to realize that rerolling to new classes ends up with far less gear & time required to do the same. For me. at one point this game stopped to being game. That NCWest employees "resign" left and right now is hardly the way to approach it, if the blanks aren´t filled. So ye I agree with your suggestions and NCWest should hurry with the man power that is left.

Sad ly that´s not how ncwest/ncsoft operates, pointing out flaws will be investigated on the korean client not ours, hence why they can´t find the cause. It´s also much cheaper at this point to delay any effort into fixing UE3 and hoping for a soft reboot with UE4, which sad ly doesn´t change the people who are in charge of bns to rethink their ways for 4 years.

After reading through, some replies mention the management of the developer NCSoft, whereas others briefly the support of NCWest, bugs that are stacking up with each patch and some other projects of NCSoft that were run into the ground, but in general the focus is on performance issues, which is mostly the job of the devs in Korea. Aside from that regarding Liinxy´s impact on streams it´s true that she lacked knowledge about the matter and in general it felt like that none of the recorded team played BnS, which is probably why the developer NCSoft and publisher NCWest feel so disconnected from BnS or the products they try to sell. Merlin brought up miscommunication and that it´s very likely not only the fault of one person, seeing how babbletron partitally helped Liinxy to relay info to the community as producer, even though it wasn´t his job. About the ideas, there are actually many from time schedule changes, reverts, account wide rewards/limiting rewards to 2 characters, more ways to obtain certain items up to QoL to unsummon cats for screenshots and recycling content. All in all it´s nice to see that the CEO recognizes the problems, but the thought that it came so far while problems/suggestions were intentionally not looked into or put on hold and that we are now at the 3rd attempt before BnS might quit for good in EU & NA leaves me with a mixture of feelings. The product can be only as good as the person who understands what he is actually selling and the marketer who compiles and forwards information to the producer & community.

You probably mean the thread that started off about the netcoding and input delays, especially on high end PC and fps issues. If it´s another I couldn´t find it, so I´ll answer with this in mind. Programming and alike is usually the responsibility of the developer including the netcode. Though ofc to some extent the publisher has the possibility to tweak it, similiar to the .xml changes that some players did with the client, but it only focuses only on one aspect and not on the publisher itself. A publisher usually informs the developer about laws and what kind of game concept runs in different regions, like f2p or if for example rng upgrade paths would float the same in our region as in korea. We were also the very first region to receive tradeable raid mats and some other perks due to suggestions and feedback we´ve given to NCWest. Community management like I said was actually the work of Liinxy, but it felt like it was mostly done by babbletron who informed us of upcoming patches via twitter and alike. He also seemed more informed in general and engaged more with the community than her. About the 3rd aspect I can´t say much, but the publisher is usually involved to what extent depends on the region from which it is ported. On a side-note, though it´s said that Liinxy and Elusive resigned, it felt more like that they were actually fired, especially after NCSoft´s CEO Kim himself stated that they were "misreading market demand in these regions consistently." Which is the job of the publisher to forward feedback from the community to the developer. For those who are interested CEO Kim continues as following: "These regions are very competitive, so we must do more to keep the player's interest on our games. For Blade & Soul, I believe the wrong steps were taken in the beginning, and our second attempt to reorganize our western branch was not very successful. We will be undergoing another reorganization later this year, and bringing our western branch closer into our Korean operations." Kim stated that this reorganization was intended to close the gap between localization releases and patches, while also facilitating western player's feedback better so they reach the dev teams with minimal delay. NCSoft seemed to signal that if the third attempt to reorganize their western branch wasn't successful, then they would have to consider if continuing to operate in North America and Europe would be wise. Aside from this, very little was discussed of Blade & Soul 2, other than a nod towards more information being shared at G-Star in November.

Wasn´t Bethany/Liinxy our community manager @Grimoir in name, which was actually done by babbletron?

In the beginning I considered creating a poll, but there are too many ways to mess with it and it´s much better anyways to hear the reasoning behind the opinions. And since I don´t wanna set the tone or influence anyone I will withold on my opinion for now. To give a rough idea of what the work of NCWest as game publisher entails: - Recruits and develops internal or third-party development talent to develop the publisher's game concepts - Acquires film and other intellectual property licenses to develop into games - Provides technical and production support to its game developers, which may include such things as localization, censoring, porting, development tool licensing and use of publisher-owned proprietary tools - Server - Conducts quality assurance testing - Promotes, advertises, manufactures, sells and distributes the games it publishes - Provides technical and customer support - For online game, a publisher may be responsible for community management and running the live team that develops new content If you find the time, I would also like to hear the opinion on NCSoft the developer, just be aware to differentiate between the publisher.

Thats easy, because they refer to random bg teams with their heavily uncoordinated attacks that trigger counter and that 1s immunity, which seems endless, while having 3 pull animations that can be anicanceled into their main dps tremor and 4. Also the meta is dictated by bm, the reason why kfm is not in the top is because it only has 1 escape while bm has 4 cc that break guard. No other classes aside from sm, sin, fm can hold up against him, because sm can cc during airborne and avoid 100-0 by ccing spectral bm with cat, fm has bubble; 2 escape and wallbang 100-0, sin has many cc with very low cd; can disable target with stealth that is required by spectral bm and double escape. Thus making arena a hellish place for kfm, because it's the only classes left, aside from sm, if you are a good kfm.

It´s not a bug, this is intended otherwise it would have been fixed 1,5year ago. The pull animation until you reach the hand locks you. The further away the fm the longer until your skills light up. They couldn´t come up with a decent rotation for fm, so they gave him that untableable wallbang instead. Pre- and during awaken.

Every content is meant to interact with each other to make players try out different aspects of the game on a weekly routine. By implementing the possibility to get said boxes without key, it would make gamers spend less time on pve to obtain keys instead. Less time in pve means less time in-game, since the gold income in bg is higher than mats + quest reward in dungeons. It also prevents gamers from getting bored of certain content and dropping the game, due to diversity, regardless of the few that only enjoy this content and quit. And less time in-game means less money for the publisher. On another note an additional source for keys will probably make bg livelier, but this change will only cater to higher geared players and cause a bigger gap between gear in the long run. Limiting it, is a way to give less geared a chance to queue. Otherwise they would always meet xy player with max gear.

I think the expectation for some events are too high, I know it might be caused due to the gap between geared and non-geared and what these geared can possibly earn with this gear or enjoy while others not, but we got the info that skills will be separated for pvp and pve. It means that whenever that comes, it will give the devs the chance to further balance the disparity. If they will actually use this chance is another matter. And sad ly this thread won´t make them work faster either, because not all devs speak english and the majority of KR players already told them the flaws on many occasions including Hae Mujin about the balance of classes and specs.

You can also argue that these classes are so popular because they do so well in arena and by looking at only gold rank and top 100 you already get a 94% steady picture how the balance looks like. BM is at the top because he has 2 skill tree with which he can adjust to next to all situations light build: double hard escapes, good vs classes that require target, have less aoe skills, good vs groups spectral: double hm z (draw stance & normal stance), long range kd and double air borne 100-0 very good vs classes that drag matches out aka sin and fatal vs classes that only have 1 hard escape due to 3 long range defense breaking CC Sin requires skill, alot at that, but once mastered it becomes easy just the invested time is more than other classes. Stealth on the other hand disables 80-85% of all skills a class has, especially vs melee. Including double escape and an uptime of 90-92% stealth, low CDs and the possibility to get out of range/to the other side of the arena at any time during stealth, because of movement speed that equals running out of combat. Can be countered by BM due to disabling target in lightning build, untabable 100-0 combos in spectral build and def breaking skills including animation lock and no gcd on most skills; FM´s ice passive that disables 3 iframes of sin including wallbang possibility FM Ice with passive that disables charge skills, double unlimited iframes (6s ice sheat+10s ice prison), double hard escapes, freezing an enemy even during flame wheel from destro and the 100-0 grab 4 into x wallbang combo that is not tabable even with hard escapes, because of the animation lock from pulling the enemy from afar. Can be countered by KFM with 2 freeze on grab; BM most of the time due to no gcd with flock of blades, Sin due to Lotus and stealth; SM due to cat being able to CC independet from the summoner SM that takes 70-80% of your HP with one air borne and the possibility to crit with cat´s pounce to get double air off and kill you in one air combo. FM, Sin, BM and SM have a way to counter that(FM bubble, BM flock of blades, Sin with stealth and sm with petal), KFM max evasion, block and aoe def breaking CC, FM ice passive Warden, though only with 1 escape having an immunity to CC of 85-90%, if played right, while being able to ignore damage & CC attempts and dishing out damage All these listed are at the top. With SM being the only out of place, because of BM´s 3rd spec and other classes being unable to counter him. WL is out of the equation, but after 2,5years being at the top it´s nice to have breather from him. Warden, Sin never place that far behind and BD never places on pair with BM. That´s why it´s more objective to look at the rankings. Classes that do well are played by more people, even as alt.

Your opinion is heavily influenced by your own class. If you want an objective ranking then check rankings. BM is top in 1v1 and 3v3. And the rest is occupied by Summoner because they can CC even if they are airborned by BM with their cat, FM because of untabable wallbang and Sin because BM needs a target which stealth disables most of the time. And no, sin never placed that far behind in 1v1 nor 3v3, aside from 45patch because they couldn't spec their core skills, since we didn't have enough skillpoints to distribute back then. Current ranking is as following: BM>Sin>FM/KFM>SM

You can disable the feature that others can spectate in the settings, but it could be also the possibility that the pvp players were reduced to such a state that none queued at that time. I also can´t exclude the possibility that the latest patch is the cause. You´ll have to wait.

The secret employer got me so good I had to login to upvote. With 4,462 posts he lives here and no one wants to live between salt mines and bugs for free.

Even if the engine changes, it will be the same people that operate it. Not treating a wound and watching their players count bleed out speaks volumes, since it didn´t affect their initial revenue or hard numbers and thus the players that could afford to go the short cuts and that system to play this game. If they didn´t act with UE3, you can forget it with UE4. And now with the vacant spots on the previous servers that equal the amount of opinions for this game, maybe you tell me if they were content with the developer and if this double work would have been beneficial instead, especially since most problems surfaced before UE4 was even announced.

It started off in 2015 when people asked if ncwest could add the function to disable the wind walk effects. Back then it was considered a QoL, but it already displayed the intend of the playerbase to increase the performance of BnS even just a little, aestetic and a relation to crashes. In the end it was never investigated though and multiple threads followed afterwards. https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/142979-will-there-be-an-option-to-hide-wind-walking-premium-effect/?tab=comments#comment-1446911 (crashes) https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/233570-premium-windwalk-effect-disable-option/?tab=comments#comment-1994983 (aestetic) https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/234497-i-came-to-understand-you-cant-fix-6v6-crashes-and-runtime-errors/ (6v6 crashes 2017) https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/238383-bg-6vs6-crashing/ (6v6 crashes 2018) https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/237802-crashing-and-disconnecting-in-6v6/ (official statement from ncsoft that they work with the development team on it) Even though we got the confirmation from NCSoft that they were already working on it point, they weren´t able to reproduce the crash and ultimately gave up. https://prnt.sc/l0wnyt (Elusive) Instead they changed the way we lose rating in BG, which still took them more than 1,5years. https://www.bladeandsoul.com/en/news/false-idols-items-and-systems-preview/red "You no longer lose 20 Rating for disconnecting from a 6v6 Battleground. Instead, disconnecting from a 6v6 Battleground now counts as a loss and you will lose Rating as if you lost; however, if you reconnect you are no longer subject to the automatic loss." Just for a programmer from their playerbase to find a solution for the bg crashes, which was later on integrated into bns buddy. https://www.reddit.com/r/bladeandsoul/comments/a45jiz/6v6_crashes_on_eu_potential_causes_tricks_to/ And do not forget the quest log bug, which still causes fps stutter if it´s not disabled in the settings and many others. https://www.reddit.com/r/bladeandsoul/comments/8ede1z/ghetto_fix_improve_fps_stuttering_on_event_dungeon/ Now then, what disproves what I said, that the programmer´s of ncsoft are incompetent? Tbh I struggled quiet a bit what to say after I read this part, because you give me more questions than answers and preach about providing facts that can be easily checked. Especially since you take the side of programmers I expected this to be common sense for you, to first test a patch before it´s applied to the main server. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygXrGkePdi8 https://www.reddit.com/r/bladeandsoul/comments/6dzecv/kr_test_servers/ RU literally shows what else a publisher can do instead of staying passive and actively reverts changes, if they receive feedback from the community and I leave it up to you to find the souce. Just to give an example of some: https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/138717-guide-errors-installing-game-crash-delay/ https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/239619-point-of-view-pvp-on-the-decline/ https://forums.bladeandsoul.com/topic/245735-bm-3rd-spec-double-air-borne-is-too-strong/ And if you care enough look up my history. I didn´t only create topics, I also posted suggestions in other threads, but at one point you grow tired, because their are no changes where it counts. Recolouring trove keys to match the seasons are much more important than to invest this time to fix something. Realizing that these kinds of things are actually what keeps your money flowing is what a publisher should aim for. Cuz when the fishes leave their will be no whales left.

You realize that the bug i brought up was consistently tested "within the acceptable guidelines of the game" by said programmers, who came to the conclusion that they found no cause for it and was later on fixed by their playerbase? What is there to lose if NCSoft himself tasks their programmers to find the cause? They literally had to listen to the higher-ups to find it. They are obliged to follow the procedures, but not to code instable and flawed codes. They have test servers in korea for a reason. I already mentioned the mismanagement of ncsoft itself, but taking out the programmers is not right. As a whole, ncsoft including their programmers are at fault. Critic isn´t a bad thing, it shows concern in a different way and after 3 years of mismanagement or lack of awareness and pointing flaws out by the community, just to keep the status quo is what you prefer as a Mod. Sugarcoating words for the sake of not hurting someone when something is clearly wrong with every side and their lack of interest to resolve it is what we missed for many years. You also don´t mention the publisher ncwest and only refer to the programmers, but when compared to the russian counterpart they pale in comparison. Feedback and problems are resolved faster on the russian server even though they are "only" publisher themselves. And efforts that are now taken due to a decrease in revenue/money by NCsoft are caused by a decrease in players and could have been done by the community itself if they hadn´t continued give away money, when the state of the game was clearly going downhill. Threads that are about the game itself and point out bugs didn´t even receive replies from ncwest until recently. And the things that a publisher should provide aren´t even taken serious looking at the emergency take downs. Even streams contained wrong information or weren´t mentioned at all aka cold storage and HM resets being removed. What is there to praise in a civil manner, when a game is reduced to 1 server? You wanna stay civil after everything has been taken? Where were you when they weren´t civil?