What have you done?

[Kozuki]

 

For anyone who don't know, the trio mentioned above are founders of BnS Academy, a place where they provide useful guides (dungeons, optimization, tweaks) and a Discord server where people don't mind spending time teaching you how to play, either a dungeon or a class. Or just a hangout place where you can find dungeon parties, talk about games and share things like screenshots, memes and cute cat pics.

 

So yeah, they left. Will it make NCWest rethink their business model? I doubt it, but maybe there is still hope.

 

Personally, after the latest patch, I think the business models have gone to wrong way:

-Golden Lotus chest that only prove there are only handful of players willing to support the game. Let hope we even reach the US$400,000, lest anything beyond.

-Daily Specials that directly control the economy. Not only materials prices, but also currency exchange. The F9 rate will never have a chance to recover, and even NCWest has to manually increase the rate so that people are more willing to sell their hard-earned gold. Honestly, Daily Specials should have only included outfits and adornments.

-Daily Specials with unlimited items for lazy whales. While I don't mind people paying-to-progress, I think this kind of unlimited Daily Specials is overboard. It is like they directly sell a legendary weapon in F10. Whalemanship should have only tied with oils and gems.

[ombremq]

Game has been like that since months, don't understand all those complain all of sudden...like if we just discovered the game has been destroyed by NCwest last patch

[NightFer]

Equipment isnt supposed to be gained by people for a week or 2. You either spend money or play more, if you are doing both you are probably full gear by now. If they talk about the soul, that thing is mega OP and its not supposed to be obtained easily so being too expensive is ok. The daily special is a nice way for people who dont have much time to play to get mats they need to upgrade (I bought so many stuff from there with HM Coins that helped me improve my gear).

Currency exchange is controlled by the community and NCSoft stated multiple times the will NOT interfere with the free market. In the end they might just remove HM Coins and currency exchange like KR did and get over with. If they quit, let it be, I dont even know them or use their guides because they are just a copy/paste from KR or CN guides Ive read long time ago. So what if they quit?

[Grimoir]

18 minutes ago, NightFer said:

Equipment isnt supposed to be gained by people for a week or 2. You either spend money or play more, if you are doing both you are probably full gear by now. If they talk about the soul, that thing is mega OP and its not supposed to be obtained easily so being too expensive is ok. The daily special is a nice way for people who dont have much time to play to get mats they need to upgrade (I bought so many stuff from there with HM Coins that helped me improve my gear).

Currency exchange is controlled by the community and NCSoft stated multiple times the will NOT interfere with the free market. In the end they might just remove HM Coins and currency exchange like KR did and get over with. If they quit, let it be, I dont even know them or use their guides because they are just a copy/paste from KR or CN guides Ive read long time ago. So what if they quit?

I think you missed the fact that people that got the soul maxed used the oils and mats they got from the trove by swiping the card like no tomorrow and other rng boxes.

 

Point is the game is extremely pay2wim which makes a huge gap between the players and which is why pvp is nearly dead as no one can stand against a credit card warrior.

 

Not to mention for the free to play people the game is utter most grindy af.

Not even Tera has this extreme grind or Revelation (given it went p2w aswel). Lack of real content to do except the same dailies and same dungeons to farm the 200 pieces and other mats to even acomplish 1 upgrade discourages a lot of people.

 

 

[Leyren]

6vs6 is Pay2Win, not the game nor 1v1 / 3v3 itself. Why always those generalization...

[Tsuzor]

10 minutes ago, Grimoir said:

I think you missed the fact that people that got the soul maxed used the oils and mats they got from the trove by swiping the card like no tomorrow and other rng boxes.

 

Point is the game is extremely pay2wim which makes a huge gap between the players and which is why pvp is nearly dead as no one can stand against a credit card warrior.

 

Not to mention for the free to play people the game is utter most grindy af.

Not even Tera has this extreme grind or Revelation (given it went p2w aswel). Lack of real content to do except the same dailies and same dungeons to farm the 200 pieces and other mats to even acomplish 1 upgrade discourages a lot of people.

 

 

U say our trove is P2W than u dont even know what p2w we get only materials in trove and some gems thats it imagine if we had this trove now oh god prolly u would quit now >..>

 

[zerooo]

1 hour ago, ombremq said:

Game has been like that since months, don't understand all those complain all of sudden...like if we just discovered the game has been destroyed by NCwest last patch

 

 more people are realizing the path the company is taking with bns people  the faith is dissapearing and they prefer to abandon ship than sinking  with it , personally i have ....4 maybe...that already quit bns due to these factors , and honestly im thinking the same , the company ( for me atleast) is trying to milk the game all they can , before a sudden move , btw i already seen this before , i used to play a certain game , and they started to change things bits by bits , they were very secretive about the changes and what happened ...they shutdown the game after milking all they could from players , this behaviour is not unknown to many people.

 

 

is like the bussines model ncwest  ( http://www.bladeandsoul.com/uk/news/business-model-revealed/ ) "applied"  were they stated and i quote : " We believe in letting everyone play the game as it’s intended to be played – skill-based progression throughout all the available content. No paywalls will hold you back, and no amount of money will give you an unfair competitive advantage over other players." you see now why people started to lose faith that things are going to be the same as day 1 or year 1? unlikely 

[ombremq]

14 minutes ago, Tsuzor said:

U say our trove is P2W than u dont even know what p2w we get only materials in trove and some gems thats it imagine if we had this trove now oh god prolly u would quit now >..>

I / we don't care about china, you can compare this game to the bigges p2W game we still don't care, you compare our one year version to a 3years+ china version, that argument make no sense cause to be honest we'll reach this kind of p2w aswell in some months

 

20 minutes ago, Leyren said:

6vs6 is Pay2Win, not the game nor 1v1 / 3v3 itself. Why always those generalization...

what are you talking about? just create one character and go full free to play, i'll do the same being a credit card warrior....boom instant lvl 50, boom instant every Hm skills, i Wonder how long that will take you to beat me in arena.

[Grimoir]

6 minutes ago, ombremq said:

I / we don't care about china, you can compare this game to the bigges p2W game we still don't care, you compare our one year version to a 3years+ china version, that argument make no sense cause to be honest we'll reach this kind of p2w aswell in some months

 

what are you talking about? just create one character and go full free to play, i'll do the same being a credit card warrior....boom instant lvl 50, boom instant every Hm skills, i Wonder how long that will take you to beat me in arena.

Oh right forgot to mention also the "special" treatements the p2w warriors are getting from support which they refuse to do for free to play players xD

[Arkdain]

38 minutes ago, ombremq said:

I / we don't care about china, you can compare this game to the bigges p2W game we still don't care, you compare our one year version to a 3years+ china version, that argument make no sense cause to be honest we'll reach this kind of p2w aswell in some months

 

what are you talking about? just create one character and go full free to play, i'll do the same being a credit card warrior....boom instant lvl 50, boom instant every Hm skills, i Wonder how long that will take you to beat me in arena.

what you are talking about? lvl 50 ticket only leave you at the start of act 5 whit shity accs/ ss( and is worst because at the start of act 5 leveling up normal you should be hm2 or 3) and dont unlock the HM skill you still need get all items/achievements.

Leveling is a joke i done a lvl 45 kfm in a week playing a few hour peer day( you know what im at the start of moonwater plain arc for my lvl i alredy should be at silverfrost but the exp i got from quest is insane), besides quest got simplified( no more get 30 items or kill 50 monsters just 1 or 3 items or 10 kills).

the ticket is for people who dont have time or dont want to do boring low lvl content this happend in any mmo.

it dont give you any advantage over free players at all and for the price 50$ dollars the stuff you get and where you start dont worth it the item itself seem like a scam.

 

battleground isnt the center of the universe as someone told here 1v1/ 3v3 are gear equalized so if you lose is your fault, for pve whales can be whales and do their 99999 ap+ HM ultra mega fast run, at  800+ ap you should be able to do all content until now i never had a problem whit my 886 ap bm.

Of course the soul is very hard to get and the progress in game seem slow if you dont play 24/7  but if ncwest still hold their model and keep going if you want to leave and leave a constructive critic is ok but nothing of "game will die" "server are empity" because bns still have viable ways to advance but in true pay to win games wich punish free players to the point where they cant advance whiout paying those kind of games are still alive cooof coff perfect world cooughhh sorry on the end dont get me wrong i want them to put viable sources for materials in game so i can farm my own materials and the gold should be used on upgrades and stuff not for an unbalanced market.

[Tsuzor]

41 minutes ago, ombremq said:

I / we don't care about china, you can compare this game to the bigges p2W game we still don't care, you compare our one year version to a 3years+ china version, that argument make no sense cause to be honest we'll reach this kind of p2w aswell in some months

 

what are you talking about? just create one character and go full free to play, i'll do the same being a credit card warrior....boom instant lvl 50, boom instant every Hm skills, i Wonder how long that will take you to beat me in arena.

U know even if cn is 3 year old content compared to ours but still what doesnt stop for nc to put in bt legendary accs, normal legendary accs even they could put maybe raven stage 9 in it what would u think about that, as long as we get mats i think its fine >..> 

[Beleth]

Those who think they will have the same privileges as paying players, are just delusional. Those who think companies will care about free players needs more than their own pockets, are delusional. The only thing that bothers me is sending gems to alts cost and recent lags/high pings and I'm sure they'll reduce the fee and fix the latency. For what became of this game and how much of a P2P it has become, you can blame our community for that. No matter how many topics are open, complaining about how this game is Pay 2 Win, people still make it rain on Troves and pretty much on everything whether it's outfits or materials for gear. 

[Rea Shinwa]

3 hours ago, Kozuki said:

 

For anyone who don't know, the trio mentioned above are founders of BnS Academy, a place where they provide useful guides (dungeons, optimization, tweaks) and a Discord server where people don't mind spending time teaching you how to play, either a dungeon or a class. Or just a hangout place where you can find dungeon parties, talk about games and share things like screenshots, memes and cute cat pics.

 

So yeah, they left. Will it make NCWest rethink their business model? I doubt it, but maybe there is still hope.

 

Personally, after the latest patch, I think the business models have gone to wrong way:

-Golden Lotus chest that only prove there are only handful of players willing to support the game. Let hope we even reach the US$400,000, lest anything beyond.

-Daily Specials that directly control the economy. Not only materials prices, but also currency exchange. The F9 rate will never have a chance to recover, and even NCWest has to manually increase the rate so that people are more willing to sell their hard-earned gold. Honestly, Daily Specials should have only included outfits and adornments.

-Daily Specials with unlimited items for lazy whales. While I don't mind people paying-to-progress, I think this kind of unlimited Daily Specials is overboard. It is like they directly sell a legendary weapon in F10. Whalemanship should have only tied with oils and gems.

Sad day, to see BnS Academy founders quit. And their reasons are too right :(

[Sinlay]

I dont know what did you expect from f2p game. You think they create such a good game, and also run it for free? I am aware of that, f2p models are always p2w, this game was great just in first moths in order to encourage players to stay here, and then slowly it became pay to progress. At least they could make this pay to play, subscription looks way better, than cash shop. I played a lot of mmo like this, and evryone die because cash shop was the only way to progress. Those threads wont change mind of ncsoft, you think they care about players who dont pay? There are a lot of those who pay, and they will run this game just for they. Some people will say thats is not p2w, because of hmcoins, yeach evrything from cash shop can be obtain by gold, just earn gold by doing the game dungeons x200 evryday, sometimes do it twice or triply per day and you will get what you want. I am over two months here, and cant even watch on those dungeons, more interesting is card game on my computer. I really respect people who are here longer and endure conditions which gives ncsoft.

[XO]

This game definitely should've been a subscription mode. 

[ombremq]

6 hours ago, Arkdain said:

what you are talking about? lvl 50 ticket only leave you at the start of act 5 whit shity accs/ ss( and is worst because at the start of act 5 leveling up normal you should be hm2 or 3) and dont unlock the HM skill you still need get all items/achievements.

Leveling is a joke i done a lvl 45 kfm in a week playing a few hour peer day( you know what im at the start of moonwater plain arc for my lvl i alredy should be at silverfrost but the exp i got from quest is insane), besides quest got simplified( no more get 30 items or kill 50 monsters just 1 or 3 items or 10 kills).

the ticket is for people who dont have time or dont want to do boring low lvl content this happend in any mmo.

it dont give you any advantage over free players at all and for the price 50$ dollars the stuff you get and where you start dont worth it the item itself seem like a scam.

 

battleground isnt the center of the universe as someone told here 1v1/ 3v3 are gear equalized so if you lose is your fault, for pve whales can be whales and do their 99999 ap+ HM ultra mega fast run, at  800+ ap you should be able to do all content until now i never had a problem whit my 886 ap bm.

Of course the soul is very hard to get and the progress in game seem slow if you dont play 24/7  but if ncwest still hold their model and keep going if you want to leave and leave a constructive critic is ok but nothing of "game will die" "server are empity" because bns still have viable ways to advance but in true pay to win games wich punish free players to the point where they cant advance whiout paying those kind of games are still alive cooof coff perfect world cooughhh sorry on the end dont get me wrong i want them to put viable sources for materials in game so i can farm my own materials and the gold should be used on upgrades and stuff not for an unbalanced market.

In what world do you live? first read well before reply i am talking about arena and then again i repeat myself if i pay instant lvl 50 and instant unlock HM skills with my credit card i'll be able to beat any plebs in arena during 1month at least... what about a free2play? you can lvl up to 50 easly in 3days non sleep then you will farm gold to buy hm skill ? did you see the price of volume 2? offal? just both 1k+ golds how long that will take you to farm it? you want to farm beans? in this dead ladder?..all that trouble solved in 30sec click being a whale . Items dont Worth it? both cost 60$ = one day of work compared to weeks of farm for a free2play player.

And then your telling us we dont come with constructive critic? for real? then what about you with your "battleground isnt the center of the universe"?

We are playing an MMO ! hello !!? massive multiplayer blablabla then of course most of us expect to play pvp open world from time to time but dream is gone and since then, game is verry boring and fighting IA whole year in instance dungeons is boring and not what i expect from a mmorpg, i miss the old time (few days) where we were all chilling at misty forest .

 

Someone stated a fact i'll always remember about this game, wich is the opposibte your thinking, there is only one way to play this game..to pay2progressWin call it how you want because the time you spend farming every single items/mats will never Worth the time you'll spend working irl then invest in game. Old standard rules that allow hardfarmer get close to whale don't work in this game, if you try to outplay drop rate/rng you'll die !

[Justgreencorn]

I'm always suprised when I read people get upset over games like this wanting money. Things get put in the cash shop and/ or spending events happen because these companies need a recurring cashflow to keep this game going. People who work for this company need to get paid regularily otherwise whats the point.

Btw all these online games operate the same way, sometimes it just might not be as obvious at first.

[ombremq]

1 hour ago, Justgreencorn said:

I'm always suprised when I read people get upset over games like this wanting money. Things get put in the cash shop and/ or spending events happen because these companies need a recurring cashflow to keep this game going. People who work for this company need to get paid regularily otherwise whats the point.

Btw all these online games operate the same way, sometimes it just might not be as obvious at first.

And im always surprised to read those kind of comment.

Paid regularily for what exactly ? korean created this game and delivered it to NCwest like a sweet candy, they had almost Nothing to do to make this game one of the best mmorpg, and in less than one year we lost 90% of our playerbase cause of an avalanche of bad choices.

And no, not all online games operate the same, i never played a game that include such a demoniac package, high ping, no sense patch Schedule, low drop rate /rng, outrageous recolor /goodies prices, p2w, unfixed bug etc...the worst of the worst basically.

[KzE]

7 hours ago, XO said:

This game definitely should've been a subscription mode. 

Or the game need a better management.

[Dad]

10 hours ago, XO said:

This game definitely should've been a subscription mode. 

It wouldn't matter if it was, I could tell you all the storys of my time in kr and it's sub/still p2w mode for days.

 

People love to ignore me when I keep saying the game was built to be p2w, least in pve but does anyone ever listen to dad? Nooooo. Because others will try to suck up and say it isn't. Like they actually know or have been playing since 2010.

[iokunn]

7 hours ago, XO said:

This game definitely should've been a subscription mode. 

Agreed with you this "free to play" model does not work not even in other games.

[poisonedOcean]

The main issue is, as I see, the distance between NCSoft and the BnS community. All that follows is a consequence of that.

As I said in another thread before, there's a lot of business models out there that are profitable for them and not harmful to the community (e.g. GrindGearGames)

But NCWest doesn't know how to stay close and keep in touch with community, with all due respect to the community staff's work.

[Icecream]

2 hours ago, poisonedOcean said:

The main issue is, as I see, the distance between NCSoft and the BnS community. All that follows is a consequence of that.

As I said in another thread before, there's a lot of business models out there that are profitable for them and not harmful to the community (e.g. GrindGearGames)

But NCWest doesn't know how to stay close and keep in touch with community, with all due respect to the community staff's work.

I literally only logged into the forums just to reinforce this statement. I totally agree with poisonedOcean. From the start, there was clearly poor interaction between the staff and the community. Firstly, improving the forums would help a lot (it's so inconvenient and bland to use atm). I don't care if there are other forums, having a proper official NA/EU forum is very crucial. Next is actually using the forums properly, and only the staff will be able to initiate that.

 

A good forum would encourage community offline activity, and allow more interaction between highap and lowap community. It would also encourage other forms of media like game videos because there's a proper place to share it on...you always want to be encouraging game activity, whether that be ingame or offline. You also want to make sure you have some form of friendly communication between the playerbase and the staff...so like player forum MODs or the like. 

 

Give us a proper place to band together, and the community will improve in attitude. Newcomers will feel more welcomed. As I see it, another major reason why BNS is falling is because of its poor treatment of newcomers.

 

I really don't want to see this game die. It would be such a waste of a good game.

[MassiveEgo]

A quick peek at my first year university economics textbook says that a f2p model will never work if the target of the paid content is short term profit.

 

But here's the catch when it comes to B&S - it's not a stellar game at this point in time. It might have been a thing back in 2012-2015, but it can hardly compete with the newer stuff. And it's not a matter of whether they want to compete or not, it's about being unable to compete. The game engine is an absolute impossibility to work with, if the intentions are to modernize the feel of the game. Apparently their server software isn't all that good either. A well thought out game wouldn't need a third party software in order to keep itself safe from bots (though my guess is that this has more to do with how we remain practically anonymous here in the west /unless we do a money transaction/, compared to Kr where you need an online ID to go to the toilet /figuratively/). Not to mention the down time at maintenances. Seriously it takes less time to back up a DNA sample into paper form...

 

First thing's first - the game world is miniature. Literally. Comparing this to other big MMO titles from NC is like comparing an amino acid to a human;

 

Second - the world is segmented into little zones and doesn't really feel like a monolith entity. And not only that, the shift between zones is way too obvious, to the point where immersion (or the notion of it) evaporates rapidly. At one point you stop seeing a game world and start seeing systems of nodes with different behaviors and functions. That's a big minus in my opinion;

 

Third - it lacks diversity when it comes to non PC behavioral patterns. This can be excused by the fact that you can't have a super complex A.I. for all mobs in the game, due to hardware limitations. Even the most efficient code, optimized by the best assembly pros, will cap a couple of racks with server CPUs ALONE. So let's say we lack the technology for the time being. I do however have to comment on the lameness of boss monsters. The mechanics that should be a challenge, just aren't. There's no thrill in fighting anything in this game. And I'm playing a tank. I am there to meet the damage when it's coming. And it doesn't even move my heart beat. It's more challenging to account for all the random FPS dips, than to actually fight the fights. If this game was to run perfectly and never lag, I would safely say the boss battles are way too slow, lacking danger and subtlety, because all of these are formed through the presence of optimization and hardware issues, rather than actual complexity;

 

Fourth - the classes. "But, Ego... classes are fine, no?" someone would ask. No, they are not. The way this MMO is working, physically prevents us from using say 40 skills at the same time, like in L2 or other diablo like games. And if the diversity of each class doesn't come from a huge variety of skills and their combinations, then even a huger(this is actually a word? I'm impressed I just now learned of it's existence xD) number of skill sets through skill feats and enchantments, it'll have to come from interactive skill trees and skill feat morphing. Something they are ripping out in order to "streamline" classes, aka "due to the obvious lack of utility of what we originally coded, we'll remove what people don't use and give them two cookie cutter skill sets which they already use! That way the game will also be newbie friendly as there'll be no actually way to confuse a non RPG player if there are no RPG elements to speak of! Brilliant!". Which in turn makes combat against these classes dull and predictable. It's true that keeping in mind all the situational variables in PvP isn't the easiest thing to do, but once a player adapts his/her brain to the particular requirements of this game's PvP combat, it becomes extremely obvious how shallow classes actually are;

 

Fifth - character customization and costumes. Technically these aren't bad, but the "flatness" and model flaws are a huge demerit in 2017. Do character models have more than 1k-2k polygons? Cause at a regular glance it seems they don't. Details people, they are important. But let's say we can work with what we have, no matter how limited it is. Now about the costumes - low poly count, low texture resolution, low mask resolution and above all else - tons of clipping. No matter how awesome a costume might look through the wizardry of the modelling department in NC, it's ultimately ruined when it clips with anything and everything under the sun. Any sort of deviation from the intentional proportions of the body for a particular costume lead to out of place or downright ugly/weird looking characters. And the hair clipping. Oh the hair clipping...;

 

Sixth - visual appeal. Environment textures aren't all that detailed for an MMO game. HDR is nonexistent and to top it all up the effects in general are low detail, excluding the effects for the Soul Fighter class, which look semi decent. The lighting is doing a good job for the most part, can't say the same thing for the shadows however. Whoever thought that making shadows that move and look like light maps, obviously wasn't all that brilliant. I know they had to cut corners in order to make this game run at least on high end machines, but even with the UE provision they used, they could've done a more consistent job. And then there's the water. Calling it water is an exaggeration, as it looks like slime. It's an immersion breaker. I mean even Far Cry 1 has better looking water and that game is from like what? 2003? 2004? Enough said...;

 

Given these minuses, I can totally understand why pouring more capital into maintaining it in 2017 past the bare minimum, would be viewed as an unreasonable investment. It makes more sense to make whatever money they can with as minimal budget as possible, and just build a bigger better new product. At least that's what I'd do if I was in NC's shoes. And I'm no game dev studio, so if I with my limited economics knowledge can come to this conclusion about this product just now, NC probably came up with it years ago. Afterall that's what they do for a living. Considering what the game has to offer, then comparing it to the other games in the current double/triple A MMO market, I'd have to boldly say that Blade & Soul outlived itself by at least a couple of years (on a global scale), at least in my eyes. Just my two cents on this.

[XO]

5 hours ago, Dad said:

It wouldn't matter if it was, I could tell you all the storys of my time in kr and it's sub/still p2w mode for days.

 

People love to ignore me when I keep saying the game was built to be p2w, least in pve but does anyone ever listen to dad? Nooooo. Because others will try to suck up and say it isn't. Like they actually know or have been playing since 2010.

Oh...it would matter. Are there games that have subs that still rely on profit from games via cash shop? yes. Is it ever as bad as games that are "f2p"? No.

5 hours ago, iokunn said:

Agreed with you this "free to play" model does not work not even in other games.

No it doesn't. I spent years playing another smaller game that was the complete and total definition of p2w which as frustrating as this divide is in BnS right now/has been but this patch just pushed us farther away, it still doesn't match up to the other game's greed and for that I'm really grateful lol.

5 hours ago, KzE said:

Or the game need a better management.

If you mean within NCSoft I definitely agree they could change a lot but if you mean another company, well, if I remember correctly the reason why it took so long for this game to be published to NA/EU is because no one else wanted to publish it. I'm not sure why, they just didn't.