State Of The Game: My Thoughts Thus Far

[Nekai]

I've been thinking of writing this up for a couple days now, but have finally gotten around to it. In lieu of there being no official feedback sub-section of the forums, I have decided to post this here in the General section. This might turn out to be a long post, but I will try to keep it as clear and concise as possible to try and make some CTRL+F searching quick and easy. I'll also edit this portion of the post with what is essentially Cliffs Notes for people who may want to jump to segments that they are only interested in. With all that said, I'll get into the body of what I am making this post about.

My own thoughts and suggestions on each topic are annotated by three asterisks(***) and are in both bold and italic. You can't miss it.

To jump to a section quickly, simply hold down your CTRL key and hit F on your keyboard. This will bring up a search feature(typically in the bottom left corner for Mozilla users) that will allow you to type in keywords and skip to them, making navigating through this post faster than having to manually skim through everything. With that being said, here are the keywords for each section: (Just type in the roman numerals)

I. - Currency Interactions
II. - Outfits & Wardrobe
III. - The Marketplace & Accruing Gold
IV. - Premium Membership Bonuses
V. - Final Thoughts/Statments

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I am making this post to address some issues I've come across while playing the game since the start of the Head Start, roughly 10 days ago. I'll be covering some of the more glaring bugs I've noticed, some imbalances as well as just some of what I think are over-all poor design choices that, while they may work for the Korean crowd, most North American audiences may not tend to agree with, though I must say that I speak only for myself in most cases. I will also add in my own thoughts on how to improve a particular feature/system, etc.. That being said, let's begin.

Premium vs Freemium

I am not going to go into very much detail about the Freemium aspect of the game, as everyone playing knows what to expect when it comes to Free-to-Play games. However I will largely be using it as a reference to the differences between both aspects of Blade and Soul's pay system.

I. Currency Interactions:
 

o After having played my first thirty-two levels in Blade and Soul as a freemium user, I've found that the money drop from enemies is a borderline necessity to be able to afford even the most basic of items required for even simply playing the game. Even as a premium user I found it difficult while leveling to be able to afford simple healing items such as the rations.

***I believe the best way to alleviate situations like this is to allow enemies to always drop currency, whether or not you are freemium or premium. As it stands right now as a freemium a couple copper only sometimes drops from certain enemies. Allow currency to drop from all enemies regardless, and then simply increase the amount Premium users receive from kills and quest rewards as well.

o The price of said essential items also seem to be ridiculously over-priced, even for someone who is a premium user. Almost eleven silver for keys and charms, and nearly six silver for one piece of food rations is madness. As it stands right now the dailies you do at max level only barely cover the food cost for the day for going through and doing said dailies.
***I feel that the best way to alleviate problems like this is to drastically reduce the cost for the day-to-day essentials. I think food rations should be roughly eighty copper give or take, potions being say one silver and thirty-five copper, with keys and charms both being around three silver and seventy-five copper. This way you can afford to buy the essentials you need to make it through your day, while preventing you from ending up flat broke at the end of your dailies/leveling session. A lower price on the keys and charms would allow you to buy them without taking everything you made from your round of dailies.

o I don't have much to say about the instant-fees for completing quests and the like as you're sacrificing a portion of your hunting earnings to avoid having to go all the way back to town to turn in a quest. That being said however, I feel that the mail-fee should be tweaked slightly. A lot of things on the marketplace, at least at the current state of the game, go for a handful of copper or a silver or two for the most commonly bought items. The mail-fee in this respect I think is a little too high in its scaling. When you sell an item for thirty copper and the mail-fee is twenty-four copper, when adding on top of that the listing fee, you might of actually lost money contributing to the marketplace.
***Not much to say here aside from the fact that I think the numbers in the scaling script should just be tweaked slightly for the lesser. It's not really an issue on high-priced items, but the low-end items, the cheap ones, should get a scale downwards.

o I think a lot of times the bidding system in dungeons should just be thrown out the window. I don't know how it works in Korea, but in North America we have people who will treat it like a cash market. On my Assassin I lost count of how many times I have lost my breakthrough daggers because some Destroyer knew I needed it and decided to milk me for all I was worth. Koreans and the Japanese might be much nicer to each other in this regard(save for the occasional mean dude/chick), but this is all too common in the North American community and needs to be changed.
***The bidding system is nice when nobody needs anything and people are just rolling for some extra cash against each other. It's like a little mini-game of poker. However, when there is a character in the dungeon that needs the item that drops, they should get priority roll. What I mean by this is to make it where say you have two Assassins in the group and the rest are just various other classes. In this instance, only the two Assassins should get to be able to roll on the Assassin-specific piece of gear. The currency can still be distributed amongst the group, however only the classes that can use the class-specific gear get to roll on it. This guarantees that the classes that need the upgrade gets it, while still rewarding the rest of the group with some cash.

II. Outfits & Wardrobe:

I don't have much to say about this subject, just what seems like a bug issue and maybe a couple quality-of-life improvements.

o I believe it's the Pure Jiangshi or however it's spelled that refuses to go into anyone's wardrobe. The one I'm talking about is the one you get from the Orchard of Souls field boss.
***Simple. Just allow it to go into the Wardrobe.

 

o I feel the Wardrobe should be account-wide, and I am not the only one who believes this. I understand though that by doing this you cut down on the longevity of the game because you cut out a chunk of the grind on alternate characters. However, with this feature only being available to those with a Premium account, this issue can be easily taken care of and taken advantage of.

***You could add an item into the cash shop which can cost say one-hundred NCoins/Hongmoon Coins, and it allows you to enable one piece of cosmetic attire in the Wardrobe be transferable between characters on your account. One-hundred is pretty cheap because even the most basic, crappy venture coin can typically net you one-hundred Hongmoon coins, so freemium users can still achieve this, albeit at a much slower rate. Also you could stand to profit from this as people who would pay for such a feature would more than likely buy the item in bulk so they can transfer grips of different cosmetics over to their alternate characters. I know I would personally.
 

III. The Marketplace & Accruing Gold:

Okay so I will open saying this is the subject that originally inspired me to make this post. With that being said, I don't know how much I will actually end up putting in here, but I'll be going over my biggest gripes with these systems.

o Having only ten posts a day on the Marketplace as a Premium user is atrocious. I'm just saying it outright that it's absurd. I can understand limiting the freemium users being as how if you didn't you'd have a bunch of people purposefully taking the market value of everything, but people who paid for premium are committed to getting their monies worth, and limiting us/them to ten posts a day is borderline insulting. It feels like I am paying a monthly fee but not getting any monthly benefits.
***This one is simple. Just allow Premium users to post as much as they want per day. The reason behind this is tied to another subject I am going to talk about, so I'll just end this suggestion here.

o The end-game of Blade and Soul is really where the "Korean Grinder" comes into fruition in my opinion. Although it is always a good choice to allow players to do dailies to accrue currency, the amount received from a full string of dailies is simply not enough. A lot of the items needed to breakthrough your top-tier items, with the current daily system, means you have to do dailies constantly for almost a month straight to afford to breakthrough one item, not to mention needing money for other things such as tradeskill plans and the like.

***I think dailies all across the board should have their currency rewards scale at max level. Say you are level forty-three and you do a string of dailies. That would give you your standard thirty-six to forty-four silver, but when you hit the level cap, which is currently forty-five, it jumps up to an even gold piece. And then dailies in the lower zones would scale up to what the current currency reward is right now, scaling down for the lower level zone. For example, a Misty Woods quest at max level would net you a flat one gold piece, but a at max level a daily in say Jadesong Village's outskirts would net you roughly twenty silver. This would encourage players to go back to zones they have abandoned due to level  being as how the money would be too good to ignore going back there. It would also help keep those lower level zones once the game hits its population peak from becoming ghost towns, which in turn would mean there's almost always going to be someone there to help low level players do field-boss quests and low-level dungeon quests because both the low level and max level players will get something worthwhile from it. The leveling character will get his/her experience, while the max level will get his so-desperately-needed money.

 

o This is basically going to be an amalgamation of both previous subjects. Only having ten posts a day as a Premium user and the marginal at best rewards from dailies really limits how players can get money. The name of the game in the North American region is options.  Once again, I don't know how it works in Korea, but in the North American region players like to have multiple options to achieve the same goal. Questing or grinding. Marketplace or dailies. So on and so forth.
***Remove the ten a day limit from the Marketplace for Premium users so that people have the option to either do dailies to get their money or work the Marketplace, which is sometimes an all-day chore in and of itself. Like I said, the NA crowd likes having options. With the way the current system is, there aren't any to really speak of.

IV. Premium Membership Bonuses:

I haven't studied all of them for all ranks, so this will basically just be a brief overview on my thoughts on how it should be.

o Whether I am paying monthly or annually to play Blade and Soul, I shouldn't have to also throw potentially hundreds of of my hard-earned greenbacks at you to achieve max rank with my membership.
***Simply give full membership access to people who are paying a monthly or annual subscription. I'm not saying throw cash shop items at us, but simply give us all the max rank benefits regardless. If I am throwing a monthly or annual fee at you, then I don't want to have to spend hundreds of dollars to reap the benefits of the subscription. You understand where I'm coming from with this? If you think about it that way, your system really is kind of atrocious.




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V. Final Thoughts/Statements

This is the end of this for now. I will update it with more thoughts/ideas as I come across them. There are a lot of things though that I haven't mentioned intentionally as they are bugs or environmental design flaws which belong in the bugs section of the forums.

If any of you can think of anything else, feel free to leave a reply with it and tell people what you think. This post is not for starting arguments or hating on one another. It is simply my take on things and what I think things should be done to improve the over-all quality of life of the game for the players. Some of you will agree, some of you wont, that's just how it works being as how we are all unique snowflakes with our own thoughts and opinions on things. Keep that in mind before you decide you want to post something in anger towards someone else, or me.

I have edited the top of this entry for CTRL+F search convenience.

[Avenaei]

Were you aware that you can buy food and pots from the market for about 25 copper each? Don't support the overpriced NPCs.

[Nekai]

11 minutes ago, Avenaei said:

Were you aware that you can buy food and pots from the market for about 25 copper each? Don't support the overpriced NPCs.

I did not know that. Thanks for the heads-up. However my point still stands though.

[Unskilled banana]

For what do you need food and pots? As a freemium I had 100 hp potion and I have never bought even 1 from npc or from the market. Also I didn't read the post but I think it's about complaining freemium and premium. Imo it's a free to play game, and it really doesnt need players who won't spend money on it at all. Also I think premium benefits are good enough. Bid system is much more interesting than "you get it or you dont" system.

[Nekai]

11 hours ago, Unskilled banana said:

For what do you need food and pots? As a freemium I had 100 hp potion and I have never bought even 1 from npc or from the market. Also I didn't read the post but I think it's about complaining freemium and premium. Imo it's a free to play game, and it really doesnt need players who won't spend money on it at all. Also I think premium benefits are good enough. Bid system is much more interesting than "you get it or you dont" system.

If you had actually read the post then you'd know it wasn't about complaining. I encourage you to read the post before assuming all I am doing is whining.

[Labbit]

@Nekai

I like your idea with the priority rolling and transferable costumes. 

 

I have never run out of money for the "necessities." I've never had to buy potions or food outside of what I get from quests, drops and the surveys. Not sure what you're doing differently if you find yourself running out. Even now, at max level and trying to do Blackwyrm/ogres occasionally, I'm still not creating a deficit. I usually end up with the same amount (if not more) of food/potions at the end of the day (after dailies and whatnot). 

 

If they increase the amount of money dropped from mobs, I'm pretty sure the bots can and will take advantage of that. They're already running dungeons as it is. I'm also not finding that the amount of money you get from dailies is "too little." (This is assuming that you do the right dailies.) Although the things you need are "high" in price, 2 gold for the level 40 (?) breakthrough can be achieved easily from questing/leveling. I mean if you're buying things from the AH constantly, you're obviously going to run out. 

[Unskilled banana]

1 hour ago, Nekai said:

If you had actually read the post then you'd know it wasn't about complaining. I encourage you to read the post before assuming all I am doing is whining.

But it's too long I just can't. >.> play the game happily without thinking that's my opinion!

[Nekai]

On 1/25/2016 at 2:39 PM, Unskilled banana said:

But it's too long I just can't. >.> play the game happily without thinking that's my opinion!

Not meaning to sound rude but if  you're not gonna read a post then don't automatically assume it's negative. That's all I'm saying.