Things that REALLY need to be changed for Blade & Soul.

[swpz]

Premium membership benefits should definitely be addressed.

 

Doesn't give nearly enough given the cost of maintaining it (especially at higher levels to justify the amount spent in obtaining them).

 

I literally only keep it on the wardrobe... which is actually pretty bad.

 

 

[Purple Miku]

3 hours ago, swpz said:

Premium membership benefits should definitely be addressed.

 

Doesn't give nearly enough given the cost of maintaining it (especially at higher levels to justify the amount spent in obtaining them).

 

I literally only keep it on the wardrobe... which is actually pretty bad.

 

 

Fortunately it's been brought to my attention somewhere in my reddit thread of this that they actually *are* revamping the premium system. Apparently it's controversial in RU and we're at risk of being triggered depending on whether or not we receive the same system as there, but at least we can know for certain that it won't be left as it currently is.

 

Sadly I don't know specific details of what they are going to be doing.

[CyberKyo]

On 10/21/2017 at 2:43 AM, Purple Miku said:

 

6. We need the game to do a better job at teaching new players some important aspects to gearing their characters.

Me: .... Can we fuse soul shield?...

((I am the living proof of this statement)) 

[Purple Miku]

Friendly reminder that many of these items should and need to be addressed.

 

I've seen a few other topics posted recently mentioning a lot of the things I've outlined in this thread, and the only way we'll have a shot in the dark of any of this becoming a reality is if we make our voices louder.

[Takemikazuchi]

On 10/21/2017 at 3:43 AM, Purple Miku said:

Hello all! 

 

I'm posting this as per suggestion on reddit where the original thread is. If you want to read it there, here is the link: https://redd.it/77pmin

 

Today I've had a good 2 hours to kill so I thought I'd do what I've wanted to do for a while and just plaster some of my ideas and suggestions out there that I think this game either really strongly needs or would be much better with.

It's quite a long thread so I apologise about that in advance. If you'd like tl;dr versions for it all, just read the underlined text for each numbered section.
  
  
  

1. Rework the mailing fees for everything / change the values to be appropriate based off of the current state of the game, and do this more frequently.

 

There are so many items that are arbitrarily set to costs that make no sense which render said items useless to a large portion of people. The perfect example for this would be legendary gem hammers which cost an insane 5g each mailing fee when you can now just keep re-rolling a new weapon for chump change in comparison. If these items are to be of any value at all, they need to be either free or cost a negligible amount to mail otherwise there's just no point of them existing. Additionally, there are some items that should be free at this point such as freezing orbs from CS and black feathers from HM since that content is old and outdatet but the most glaringly obvious examples of things that need adjustments:

• Petal of Lament - currently cost 1g each to mail  
• Flower of Lament - currently cost 5g each to mail  
• Taikhan skin - currently 5g each to mail  
• Legendary Gem Hammer - currently cost 5g each to mail  

 

 

2. Remove the sacred longgui key system for MSP soul shields or change the costs of them.

 

What even was the point of making the soul shield boxes so accessible if you're going to keep these soul shields the most expensive set in the entire game? These are supposed to be entry level yet they technically cost several hundreds of gold in value for moonstones/sacred crystals just to unlock. To make it worse... that's just for taking what you get-- you could potentially need to go through over a thousand gold in resources to get stat rolls you wish for. No other soul shield set in the game has this insane and arbitrary cost 
 tied to it. If the keys need to stay, then change the cost per to be something more realistic. 

 

My two suggestions are to either change it to be 1 sacred longgui key to open each box or to change the costs per key to the following:

• Current: 1x moonstone, 8x sacred crystal  
• New: 1x sacred crystal, 4x soulstone crystal  

 

  

3. There needs to be a more convenient method for players to report griefing in dungeons/instances, or there needs to be an implementation of a tool to enable removal of said griefers.

 

Ultimately most of the griefing tends to be those jackasses that join dungeons and AFK at the start so that they can reap the benefits of quest rewards without doing anything. I understand the potential for abuse and have seen many suggestions and arguments on the topic so I'll just try to communicate here what I think could be done:

 

Implementation of an ingame AFK status indicator on the party UI and above the name of a player's avatar that would say "(Away)" if it detected no movement/activity for a certain amount of time. Let's say 5 minutes as a hypothetical example. If a person has the away status then they're elligible to be vote-kicked out of a party just like when offline.

 

While it's obviously still prone to potential abuse such as somebody saying "hang on guys I need to brb for an emergency I will brb as soon as possible!" and still getting booted, I feel that this would happen far too infrequently to not outweigh the huge QoL improvement for the whole community here that has to deal with the frustration of being griefed with leechers on a consistent basis.

 

 

4. We need to add a decay system for arena PvP rankings in addition to addressing the problem of ladders being totally hogged by a single player on a ton of alts.

 

I have seen this talked about in another thread by an EU player recently but hopefully they won't mind if I repeat their suggestion!

• Add an account restriction of 1 class per ladder section (for example, if someone has two blade masters they would only be able to rank and receive rewards with whichever one has the highest rating). It would still be possible to have a character receive top season rewards from every category as long as they are of a different class.  
• Require the same participation activity for everything as with clan 6v6 to receive weekly rewards. While this would negatively affect a lot of people including myself easy free stuff, I think it is a necessary change to the currently awful elo systems that we have ingame where people basically just get ranked and sit on that until the season is nearing its end. Elo systems *need* higher populations in order to function properly, and having a single participation requirement (note: *not* a requirement of winning a game, just doing one) of doing a match/run would be a great way to give people an incentive to play a bit more.  
• Add a decay system to rating. This is a very controversial one and I'm indecisive of how long it should be until the decay should begin. While I'd personally be fine with 2 weeks or longer for the decay to start it seems to make more sense to align it with the weekly rewards and the suggestion I made in the above bullet point. Regardless, I feel it would be appropriate to give people an incentive to not farm their platinum ranks in arena/gold in whirlwind/beluga and sit on that for the season.  

 

 

5. There needs to be adjustments made to 6v6 to encourage people to still participate even if there's literally no chance of winning.

 

Currently there is a huge issue with 6v6 and that mainly stems from the fact that it uses an elo system but our population isn't really high enough to make it function properly, as mentioned already. While I strongly believe that my suggestions in the above section would do a great job at improving this issue, I've thought of another idea that would be in my opinion much better for the gamemode than what we have currently: 

 

Change the weekly quest for winning in 3 games to be instead of just *existing* in a game from start to finish where your team won to being based off of how much you actually did. This could be based off of the following for example:

• How many kills you've acquired total  
• Killstreaks  
• Total numbers of points captured  
• Capture streaks (would reset on death)  

 

And now for another 6v6 QoL suggestion that I've thought about derived from a game that I used to play called Guild Wars 2. On that game when you wanted to teleport somewhere there would be an icon that would indicate the location is contested. This would change the minimap icon and prevent you from teleporting to it. To better illustrate what I'm trying to get at here, I think that when the game detects combat happening at a brazier's location then it should change the map icon. This would make it more convenient to pay attention to what's happening in the game for people to better assist one another and I can't really think of a downside to it, especially considering we have no ingame implementation of a voice chat so it's very difficult to type while fighting.

 

 

 

 

6. We need the game to do a better job at teaching new players some important aspects to gearing their characters.

 

This number could be a whole different topic itself with endless possibilities for discussion but I will concentrate on soul shields as I believe it needs the most attention. Currently the game does a very poor job at stressing the importance of fusing soul shields along with how to fuse them to begin with, which is something that I posted on a thread about 3 months ago. The two most important things that I think need to be done addressing soul shields and new players:

• Add a loading screen message that says something like "remember to fuse your soul shields for large attribute gains!" and shows a diagram of it.  
• Give some very basic/mediocre primer bases along with some fusion powder and the ancestral set that would give players the opportunity of learning how to do it. Incorporate it into either the yellow quests or add a purple quest or *something* to teach this. I won't let myself get off on a tangent here so please click on my archived thread for months ago if you wish to read more on soul shields and my opinions of them and whatnot.  

 

 

 

7. NCWest needs to actually pay attention to their hongmoon store way better than they currently do.

 

It has items still on there that have no relevance to the game whatsoever and are rendered useless or obsolete, yet they are still being sold with the misleading text "Hot!" next to the discount text, which is quite frankly dumb as hell. 

 

Moonwater keys should first of all be freebies on the dragon express if you're going to make viridian and cinderland ones free, but even if they absolutely must be sold on the cash shop, how the hell does $5 seem like an appropriate price for a key to open a weapon box of something that's going to be obsolete in a few hours while you're leveling? Is this forreal? There is no excuse to leave this as an optional purchase with misleading text and it would be unethical to even accept money from unsuspecting newbies who have the naivety to buy them.

• Example picture 1
• Example picture 2 

 

 

 

8. We need better incentives to be doing hard mode dungeons.

 

We have the issue of many hard mode dungeons offering too little of returns for the excruciatingly larger amount of effort required in order to do them. Harder content should always feel rewarding to complete.

 

An example of a dungeon that I feel has good or decent returns for doing hard mode is ebondrake lair. You have better chances of getting dark vicar boxes (as far as I'm aware?) along with the chance of obtaining an item exclusive to hard mode that gives you a title and a neat dance emote. All hard mode dungeons should be like this, where there are items that you need to specifically farm hard mode for in order to get.

 

Some suggestions:  

• Increase the amount of guaranteed dungeon tokens from 2x to 3x in hard mode dungeons along with the crit from 20x to 30x.    
• Just like ebondrake lair, I feel we should have a consumable for every hard mode dungeon that gives a new title and emote. I thought that idea of theirs was really neat so I'd like to see it used more.  
• This one I'm unsure of myself, but perhaps it would be nice to make the dynamic quest rewards from hard mode dungeons give slightly more resources such as moonstone or elysian crystal(s), or perhaps a flat coin value ranging from 50s-1g each?  

 

 

 

9. We really should have a functioning game wiki along with an ingame command /wiki (insert search here) that would automatically open up the page for whatever you want to look up to find information on.

 

Obviously this is something that would require a large project for NCSoft but the technology for this exists in other games and it would be *so* helpful for the entire community to look up information about the game and I can't make a wish list of things I'd like for this game without including it.

 

 

 

10. The pet system is currently in a very pitiful state and needs adjustments ASAP.

 

Right now upgrading pets is most atrocious piece of garbage of an implementation imaginable and is almost impossible for new players to catch up with if they aren't planning on investing hundreds to thousands of dollars. It costs around 3000 gold alone to get up to a stage 10 pet and then another 17,000 gold to get up to an awakened ultimate stage 1, which isn't even the highest stage. 

 

Considering how absurd the prices of pet pods are and how awful the scaling is as you upgrade for how many you need in addition to the essentially cash shop exclusive way of them coming into circulation, this is some serious bullshit. There have been tons of topics made on this and I don't think I need to reiterate much of what needs to be done here because quite frankly, nearly anything would be better than what we have right now (I hope I don't regret saying that LOL) but what I will say...

 

I really like what they ended up doing to the sacred oil/soul upgrading system. I feel that the originally intended idea of souls being a long-term upgrade that you'd otherwise have to pay an obscene amount of money to bypass is well-in-place now as we've been getting event after event that enables us to acquire them slowly but steadily. If something like this could be done with pet pods as well, it would solve a lot of problems with pet upgrades!

 

 

 

11. Premium membership needs to have better value for the cost of it.

 

Lately there has been a lot of controversy of removing some of the discounted purchases from the premium tabs on the dragon express and while I'm personally fine with them doing that with items like MSP soul shields/hongmoon skills, I only think those should be equalised for f2p/p2p because I feel that those items in particular *should* be extremely accessible. That does not give an excuse to remove a feature of premium membership without compensating for it.

 

Some suggestions on what I think NCWest should do:  

• Add an account-wide storage for gems. There are many possibilities here, so I will leave this bulletpoint vague for the time being.  
• Improve the UI for soul shield switching with all of those unused icons and make it function as a storage for soul shields. This would make so many people, including myself, really happy.  
• Add an additional bank tab only available for premium members. If premium membership expired for someone they would be able to withdraw from it but not deposit again until repurchasing premium, similarly to the wardrobe.  
• Increasing the daily cap based off of your premium level would be a pretty sweet bonus for those that have a lot of time to play.  
• I haven't put a ton of thought into this one so it may be controversial, but perhaps increasing the daily cap on hongmoon purchases for premium members would be a nice bonus? For example, from 20 to 30 trove keys during a treasure trove event.  
• Having a reduced cooldown on being able to use escape from the default 15 minutes would be *so* nice.  
• I know that most people probably wait for the troves/events to get their legendary elements and jewels, but it would be nice to have a discount on the dragon express for purchasing them as a premium member.  

 

  
  
And that is all that I have to suggest right now. While I don't have expectations of my ideas and suggestions coming to fruition, it felt really good to at least get them posted for people to think about and maybe discuss. Hell, it would even be nice to know that someone liked one of or some of my ideas enough to post/suggest themselves later on.

 

Thanks for reading my super long thread!

You are absolutely right! 

Enjoyed reading your super long... cough... thread` heehe`

 

[Jeien]

The only thing I'm not in favor is your suggestion with Pet Pods into events (mainly the ones to exchange tokens for items), everything else thumbs up.

It may just be me but I like the current pet system EXCEPT the additional 5 stages between Unleashed Hongmoon to Awakened Ultimate Stage 1. I like it because it removed the RNG factor to get Ultimate (Unleashed Hongmoon) and it isn't all that bad considering some unlucky people rerolling countless times and still didn't get it. As for whoever thought it'd be a great idea to add the stages between Unleashed Hongmoon and Awakened Ultimate Stage 1... costs the same... heh

[Troska]

If it doesn't involve more money going into their greedy held out hands, nothing will be changed for the better.

[KlausFlouride]

Another suggestion would be to fix the servers.

[Purple Miku]

On 11/4/2017 at 11:05 AM, Jeien said:

The only thing I'm not in favor is your suggestion with Pet Pods into events (mainly the ones to exchange tokens for items), everything else thumbs up.

It may just be me but I like the current pet system EXCEPT the additional 5 stages between Unleashed Hongmoon to Awakened Ultimate Stage 1. I like it because it removed the RNG factor to get Ultimate (Unleashed Hongmoon) and it isn't all that bad considering some unlucky people rerolling countless times and still didn't get it. As for whoever thought it'd be a great idea to add the stages between Unleashed Hongmoon and Awakened Ultimate Stage 1... costs the same... heh

It currently costs ~24.2k gold to max out a pet if you count pet pods to be 100g each, They are 120g each right now on F5, so ~29k gold. If you compare that to maxing out a soul from stage 5 normal all the way to true cosmic/true transcendent, it costs roughly 46.8k gold if you were to buy all sacred oils at 288g each (current market price). (Note: this is including the basic costs for upgrades as well).

 

So basically maxing a pet costs about 60% of what maxing a soul costs, yet we have literally no possible way of upgrading them without amassing dozens of thousands of gold and buying pet pods off the marketplace with said gold, or by buying pet pouches off f10.

In other words we have no way of farming for our pet upgrades at all, it's just a colossal gold sink with no other venues of upgrading outside of swiping. To me this obviously needs changing-- the system itself would be fine if pet pods weren't exclusive to the cash shop. You can't really consider drops from CS as a realistic source of them because they are obscenely rare and additionally the dungeon is only doable once a day, so it could not be farmed without thousands of cash shop resets and we're talking maybe a dozen to a few dozen would come from that anyways.

[RavTH]

I wrote what I think on each bullet points you said about.
1. +1
2. +1

3. +1 (not gonna happen tho)

4. +1 (Agreed, there are too many alts from 1-5 on EU and NA and they are appear to be the same which looks unfair for others to even get any hmcoins at all...)

5. +1

How many kills you've acquired total  (that will be farm for whales, but the more whales the better chance to have equal team with full of whales, maybe? overall match making system needs renewing for 6v6)

Killstreaks  (farm for whales)

Total numbers of points captured (we already have this, but we could make it to give more...)

Capture streaks (would reset on death)  

6. +1

7. +1 including the old accessories, that can't be upgraded nomore!

8. +1
Overall we need something that if you clear in hardmode with either 4 people or lower you get 100% chance to get the loot, that would bring back the old 4man. Normal mode 2 people or 3 people guarantees better drop.
and reducing the 200 quest items into 100, cuz I see no bloody point in that many tbh.
9. +1

10. +1 (pets are out of reach for 70% of players)
11.

Add an account-wide storage for gems. There are many possibilities here, so I will leave this bulletpoint vague for the time being. (I find no problem, since I use many mimic purples so I stock gems in them LOL)

Improve the UI for soul shield switching with all of those unused icons and make it function as a storage for soul shields. This would make so many people, including myself, really happy.  +1

Add an additional bank tab only available for premium members. If premium membership expired for someone they would be able to withdraw from it but not deposit again until repurchasing premium, similarly to the wardrobe.  +1

Increasing the daily cap based off of your premium level would be a pretty sweet bonus for those that have a lot of time to play.  (the only quests you need to do are purples and raid ones)

I haven't put a ton of thought into this one so it may be controversial, but perhaps increasing the daily cap on hongmoon purchases for premium members would be a nice bonus? For example, from 20 to 30 trove keys during a treasure trove event.  (wouldn't that ruin market and make trove keys cheaper to buy for gold?)

Having a reduced cooldown on being able to use escape from the default 15 minutes would be *so* nice.  -1 (that would be too abusive in ow pvp.)

I know that most people probably wait for the troves/events to get their legendary elements and jewels, but it would be nice to have a discount on the dragon express for purchasing them as a premium member.  +1 overall they should decrease the price to 10g or something...

[thieve]

Agree with mostly of them.

Now I have to say why 3 of my real life friend quit play and I am thinkin about that too.At least this game is become "alt" game for me.

First of all:That crazy amount of upgrade priceses about "must have" items.(pets-souls etc etc).Its impossible for regular players to get good rank of them.They couldnt do something about gold sellers and made the game extremly hard to gold farming to everyone...How many players  can handle it spend 10k-15k gold for single item in this game?

Second: Every the new dungeons is for end game players.I have several HM 10-11 characters even I couldnt finish BT first boss yet.AP elitist ruins all game and do not help any others mostly time for feed their egos.Regular players must spend months to upgrade themselves (or more) to go that raids-dungeons already farmed tons of tons times by couple of houndred whales.

Now I have to see dungeon calls started  "raven weapon only-- bla bla bla" As I said elitist messing up the game for huge amount other players...Now there is new dungeon coming up do u think how many players can see there?Ppl begging to "pay" join to battles.How shameful is that? Only for god damit "must have" upgrade mat or only complete to quest and get the title for open god damit for SS "block"

Third: Farming....RNG....Just an example:How many trillion times do I need to drop single evolved stone from Basin Bosses? RNG....with amazing rate....

Only couple of hundred players playing this game with enjoy and only few ultra whales...And all of others getting stressed-pain-grindin-begging-calculating few silvers and losing hope day  by day losin attention with doin exactly same things over and over and over and over times farming to endless mats for single item...And still tryin to get some fun...

Sorry folks but u all know how sadly it is true for this really amazing game...

 

 

 

[Morlach]

On 10/21/2017 at 11:13 AM, Purple Miku said:

6. We need the game to do a better job at teaching new players some important aspects to gearing their characters.

As a new player I totally agree with this. I have no clue what I should be doing in regards to gear progression. I am currently L21 and getting quite a few weapon chests and weapons but not sure if should be keeping them or what.... Yet alone what to do with the more advanced mechanics.

[FrozenB]

11 hours ago, thieve said:

Agree with mostly of them.

Now I have to say why 3 of my real life friend quit play and I am thinkin about that too.At least this game is become "alt" game for me.

First of all:That crazy amount of upgrade priceses about "must have" items.(pets-souls etc etc).Its impossible for regular players to get good rank of them.They couldnt do something about gold sellers and made the game extremly hard to gold farming to everyone...How many players  can handle it spend 10k-15k gold for single item in this game?

Second: Every the new dungeons is for end game players.I have several HM 10-11 characters even I couldnt finish BT first boss yet.AP elitist ruins all game and do not help any others mostly time for feed their egos.Regular players must spend months to upgrade themselves (or more) to go that raids-dungeons already farmed tons of tons times by couple of houndred whales.

Now I have to see dungeon calls started  "raven weapon only-- bla bla bla" As I said elitist messing up the game for huge amount other players...Now there is new dungeon coming up do u think how many players can see there?Ppl begging to "pay" join to battles.How shameful is that? Only for god damit "must have" upgrade mat or only complete to quest and get the title for open god damit for SS "block"

Third: Farming....RNG....Just an example:How many trillion times do I need to drop single evolved stone from Basin Bosses? RNG....with amazing rate....

Only couple of hundred players playing this game with enjoy and only few ultra whales...And all of others getting stressed-pain-grindin-begging-calculating few silvers and losing hope day  by day losin attention with doin exactly same things over and over and over and over times farming to endless mats for single item...And still tryin to get some fun...

Sorry folks but u all know how sadly it is true for this really amazing game...

 

 

 

I don't agree with your points here.

 

1) If you don't farm the materials and just login 1-2 hours per day, of course you will have to spend 10-15k golds on single items. However, remember that this game is a continuous gameplay. It means that everyday you have to spend some times to farm stuff. If you don't have time, then whale it with real money. If you can't do either ways, then this game is not for you. There's no one asking you to get top gears within a day/week.

 

2) People request ravens players only because ravens have a huge dps boost compare to baleful/seraph. Basically, people can skip many mech and run the dungeons a lot faster. Who doesn't want to run the dungeons easier and faster? Also, the chance of raven players fail on CC or mech is smaller than baleful/seraph players, based on my personal experience.

 

3) For evolved stones, you have to farm them in SSP. You should transfer to dominate faction in your server to farm them in SSP. It is much easier than relying on RNG box in basin bosses or GHS or baylee.

[SakiX]

As long as we can still play the game, I think we can all go along with these. The biggest issue is that they need to improve their customer support while we are unable to login nor play the game... LOL

[MassiveEgo]

On 10/21/2017 at 10:14 AM, Milennin said:

2. Not sure if I'd agree. The fact MSP is so accessible to get justifies their higher costs. It's like, yeah they're easier to get than BT / VT shields, but at the cost of having a price attached to them. Maybe in the future, once BT / VT shields become easier and easier to get for people, they could think about reducing the cost for MSP shields. As of now, MSP is still the best for people who have no access to raiding, so I don't think they should be too cheap to obtain at this moment.

 

11. Yes. Membership needs to offer more incentives. Any extra quality of life additions would do. They don't have to be huge advantages, just nice extras to make things more convenient for those willing to pay for it. At the same time, they really should make the wardrobe available for free to play players.

2. Because making people spend their gold and mats into unlocking obsolete soul shields from 3-4 big patches ago, is the fastest way to get them up to speed and ready for the content from the previous patch. Brilliant logic is brilliant;

 

11. They'll have to be extremely creative in order to give extra stuff which would really be useful, rather than just introducing annoyances in order to make you buy premium, like with wardrobe where you either buy premium and store your stuff in the wardrobe, or buy inventory bags in order to postpone purchasing premium for a month or two, then have your vault and inventory jammed up with cosmetics, which results in having to buy the premium anyways. Either way you'll have to invest in order to remove the annoyance. That's an incredibly player unfriendly way to promote one's monthly subscription.

[GonnaNeedaMontage]

Lets be realistic here, the price of a premium sub in BnS is roughly the same price (maybe like $3-4 less) as the subscription fee for WoW, now obviously WoW is p2p so the two dont work in exactly the same way, BUT, when you look at the amount of value for money that you get from say a WoW sub or a FFXIV sub and compare that to what you are paying basically the same price for in BnS, a BnS premium sub feels like a really big rip-off for the amount of money being paid, the majority of the current premium "benefits" are pretty useless tbh and with more and more of the good benefits being stripped away from premium, we are at this point, basically paying $15 a month for the wardrobe, a service that EVERY other region offers for free, and thats just not good enough. going by the recent stream, it seems as though the wardrobe might soon be accesible to free players, and if that is to happen (which I really hope it does), the new "reworked" premium had better offer some real value for money in order to convince me to keep paying. I want to support this game, because I believe that it has the potential to be a great game, but the current trend of cash-grab events back to back is really not inspiring much confidence in my investment, and I need to see some real pro-consumer action to convince me to stay invested

[MassiveEgo]

32 minutes ago, GonnaNeedaMontage said:

...we are at this point, basically paying $15 a month for the wardrobe, a service that EVERY other region offers for free, and thats just not good enough.

I lul every time at how true this is. Also the most useful thing that premium brings and only on level 9 and 10, is the vault access through inventory. That's all. The windwalk animations aren't snazzy enough for the bucks anymore. Peach bonus is kinda worth it for crafting, but only when it's on level 10 where the bonus is big. Other than that... nothing. Nothing of value for a themepark MMO at least.