Issues and suggestions

[Ulrezaj]

Hello

Dear devs, producers and publishers, I'm not even sure if I should mention to whom I'm writing this, but throwing it out in the void wont satisfy me. This is the general collection of complaints, problems, bugs and all the stuff people are dealing with to play the game, things you should probably address to at least keep some people from leaving. I don't want to bug support over this, they are doing their job /s, but maybe some constructive input from other people still lurking here, or even staff, may be interesting and worth discussing.

 

Lets start with smallest thing from my perspective, bugs and issues of unintended matter that bug people on daily basis:

- Rapidly mousing over your items in inventory drops your fps to oblivion. Is this the 2nd case of huge fps drops when a few more quests were accepted? Worth looking into to improve performance.

- Bugged mobs. A few cases that are annoying me daily: I use shadow grasp on a group of mobs, if the mobs are at around 10m+ they will use their approach skill. Why? In the very description of the shadow grasp skill it is stated, that hitting with it will block all approach skills for 3s for every hit(with HM skill), most notable in irontech forge, but so frequent its worth checking for mobs skills anyway. Same thing, I cast shadow grasp on a few mobs: they walk back to their starting location and reset. They walk back 3 meters and are immune to all skills, then they get pulled again and reset again. Mostly happens in ebondrake lair with 2 warlock officers tending to mutated zealots in 5 rooms.

- Still not fixed: f4 bugs. We cannot delete empty accounts from friends list. People report having empty friend lists while being unable to invite anyone because "you already are friends with that account". Support wont fix it because of tools limitation. Thats their response to this matter.

- Raid fps problems(and any dps problems in general), let me explain whats happening and how we figured it out. First thing: people have been reporting poor fps in larger group settings like raids and open world content. With the most recent raid - Nightfall Sanctuary, you released the Grand Celestial Emperor. His mechanics sometimes require your group to stop dps, the higher your group dps is, the more times you will have to wait or adjust to his mechanics. I am playing with characters turned off and all class animations disabled(yes, people are using mods to make the game playable, more about it later). When my group stops doing regular damage to the boss, our fps skyrocket back up to acceptable levels. Why is that? Damage calculations are at fault? There was a similar case in diablo 3 while attacking huge groups of mobs with many stacking effects. Path of exile can straight up disconnect you for your poor fps due to similar multiplied stacking mechanics. Most solid evidence for BnS is this: my group had to replace our usual KFM with gunner. Unfortunately the gunner had to leave and our KFM went back in. Our fps tanked by a lot, some people say up to 20(I cannot confirm this, I dont even have 20 fps in raids). The difference is searing palm? 1 debuff on boss, 12 people attacking, fps tank.

- 6v6 crashes. At some point there was unofficial info that you are gathering informations about potential 6v6 fixes, what people would most likely want to see to keep them playing this mode. I've been on the lookout for such info because it may fix other things as well, so why not. I'm not disappointed, heres what people figured out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bladeandsoul/comments/a45jiz/6v6_crashes_on_eu_potential_causes_tricks_to/

Very good threat, I would also recommend you checking reddit if you haven't(I know some people do, thanks Cyan). Maybe its worth to add those ticks to disable premium effects from windwalking/weapons/outfits/gem procs etc to your client options? Definitely not a bad idea, but can help. Please don't tell me you wont do this, modding online game to make it playable is a nono? Make it playable then.

 

Now lets move onto second category: problems and complaints that may, or may not be intended, but still exist and should probably be looked into to improve to quality of life and player sentiments.

- RNG raid progression. This is a big one. Recently there was some info coming from russian bns stream that we will be getting new raid during spring this year. I'm looking at my group and I think they are going to stop playing the game when it comes. First, I have screenshots but to skip lots of links and time to hide names, etc. I'll just explain the problems with examples and only put screenshots here later if requested. First example: shadow earring from TT(Nightfal Sanctuary name used by players), we had to wait 26 weeks to get first shadow earring. What did we get during those 26 weeks? Earth. Only earth. One shadow user stopped playing, the other changed group. I have 5 weapon materials for kfm/des/sin/gun and 1 for BM/BD/SF/WAR on my FM, those are leftovers from the raid, junk that nobody wanted anymore. What do we need? Weapon materials for ranged classes. For similar stories go to reddit, people have been complaining about RNG drops since bt came out, maybe the system is due for a change? We had one. At this rate we won't be ready for next raid.

- Soulshields. This another, very similar problem is bugging us really hard. We are supposed to get wings for doing raids, sure. Soulshields drop from each raid boss, sure. There are two big problems though, those soulshields are dropping for classes we dont have in our group and whole TT raid wont even give you enough wings to buy one soulshield from npc. I've been waiting for premium to use all my wings in premium tab to get better soulshields. There wont be any improvement anytime soon. I've wasted all my wings and got nothing. I have 3 pieces with good stats, I've been trying to get 1 more piece with good stats, since 8 set basically reduces my crit rate by 10% with its shitty rolls. I've been raiding all this time for what? Waste of time and effort. It's way better to just do it once, cash in during trove and buy everything from there. Don't even get me started on that trove along with boss 3-4 in TT. I really hope you won't pull something like this for next raid.(Of course you will...) It's been bad enough doing vt and tt with unoptimized soulshields, despite doing previous raid nearly since release. RNG involved in raid rewards should be mitigated.

- Reduced gold and drop rewards for old dungeons. While I understand that You should push people into doing higher and newer dungeons, I dont understand why do you want to punish new players so badly. At the time when so many long time players are selling their accounts(yes, it is a fact and we all have to deal with this), you go ahead and cut the branch you are sitting on, making new players grind those low dungeons for longer time periods. This may be going along with reduced costs of weapon and accessory upgrades, but... Every time you reduce costs of weapon upgrades, a small part of us dies. Our progress and dedication is being thrown out of the window, diminished, marginalized. It's nothing special to have next tier of weapon, fame and respect you get is nothing compared to the costs you paid when rushing it. You are encouraging people to sit on lower stages to save materials and money. Can't you just up the gold and mats gain from lower dungeons, so new people can reliably catch up to the endgame without those shady tactics?

- Game guide. Some time ago you added that irritating white square looking icon to our interfaces, promising some kind of game guide there, where did it go? It was a good idea since people seem to be complaining about mindless strangers in f8 who have NO idea whats going on in the dungeon, very likely failing simplest mechanics. I know its all about dps and in most cases it works since you just skip all mechanics with high enough dps. But then there comes a moment when there are no endgame geared people in party and all those raven(or worse) geared people have to do damage and pass mechanics by themselves. I've been doing such things on my alts, the general problem is that nobdy pays attention to mechanics anymore or have no idea whats going on, just starts blaming left and right instead of asking how to do X or Y. Game guide could help us all I believe, it wont hurt people, unless you put it in there for everyone as permanent icon like it was before.

- Reduced drops from newer dungeons. Who would have thought, you said you increased the drop rate of awakened engines and divine grace stones from irontech forge and ebondrake lair. I have seen none since that last "increase" I believe, and I'm not going to do dailies on 10 alts to get those square obsidians going, lets be reasonable. My friends are saying something very similar, which makes a decent control group I think? Trove shouldn't be the ultimate fix to everything, you should make the regular game pleasant and playable, whales wont keep your game up forever if you keep releasing new stages without providing REAL sources of lower stages of said items for f2p/non-whales.

 

Now that we have the most annoying things out of the way, lets talk about my suggesstions to some of these problems:

- Bring back up the gold and mats reward for low dungeons and dont change any rewards from current and new dungeons.

- Cease all planned and pending changes to item upgrade costs.

- Add real soulshield crafting system without RNG chance for desired stats. How I see it: put unsealed soulshield into reforging window, let us modify the random stats of it for wings/fusion powder/gold to desired one. Example: I get soulshield X from raid, it has 4 possible stats: block, evasion, crit, accuracy. I rolled block and evasion, I dont like those, now I can wait for next soulshield to have better rolls or I can reforge it to my desired stats. I have some raid wings and other materials, so I'm going to reforge it: I want to change block into critical and evasion to accuracy, price for that is 2x the raid wings cost for each stat change for that soulshield from npc + 100 gold and 1000 fusion powder. Sounds acceptable? No? Then check next suggestion.

- Remove soulshield drops from raid bosses altogether(maybe keep that one soulshield chest in skybreak spire, its old anyway), add soulshields to dynamic quests for each boss. Example: My group defeats the raven king in skybreak spire, everyone gets a box with either soulshield 7 or 8 for their class. This will at least eliminate 0 progression weeks since we all will get something useful. - Add options to hide premium auras and item effects.

- Recalculate the time needed to max out gear from one raid before introducing next one. It really feels like we didnt have enough time to gear up from current raid, now that there are hints about next raid coming in spring.

- Change raid rewards into tokens: 2 tokens needed to buy item from npc: boss 1-3(or 1-2, without the last boss) for accessories and badges, 2 last boss tokens and achievement for weapon. This may add time required to gear the raid in best case scenario, but drastically reduces the time needed to get base items for everyone. Maybe add last boss token to orange quest rewards for clearing the raid? I can see people complaining about changes from 1/3 to 1/9 or 1/6 drop chances for their item after awakening patch, I really hope we can improve the perspective.

 

If you can address at least a few of these problems and suggestions, I would be interested in further playing the game and maybe throw in a suggestion or two here and there. For now the outlook is grim, if this is going to be yet another week of wrong soulshields, wrong weapon material and again only necks from vt, I'm going to stop.

tldr; fix your game

Regards

 

[Arcadeath]

It would be good if NCsoft actually read your thread instead of planning the next trove. Some of the issues may be minor and harder to fix, but some are game-breaking and should be resolved asap. 

At first I thought it's going to be some rant by a new player, but then I saw you listed most problems that may kill this game sooner than expected.

[Grimoir]

1 minute ago, Ulrezaj said:

- Rapidly mousing over your items in inventory drops your fps to oblivion. Is this the 2nd case of huge fps drops when a few more quests were accepted? Worth looking into to improve performance.

I wouldnt persay call it a "bug" its simply the tooltips of items, and sorting quests by distance in the quest log, both are options you can turn off under settings if that helps mitigate it. I honestly do not see this improving until the new engine upgrade.

 

2 minutes ago, Ulrezaj said:

- Bugged mobs. A few cases that are annoying me daily: I use shadow grasp on a group of mobs, if the mobs are at around 10m+ they will use their approach skill. Why? In the very description of the shadow grasp skill it is stated, that hitting with it will block all approach skills for 3s for every hit(with HM skill), most notable in irontech forge, but so frequent its worth checking for mobs skills anyway. Same thing, I cast shadow grasp on a few mobs: they walk back to their starting location and reset. They walk back 3 meters and are immune to all skills, then they get pulled again and reset again. Mostly happens in ebondrake lair with 2 warlock officers tending to mutated zealots in 5 rooms.

This isnt a bug, what the mobs use are not classified as approach skills in that sense. I know its sounds stupid and confusing but thats why it doesnt work on mobs. The skill effect ist most noticable in PVP as some skills wont be able to be used while others will.

 

As for the other things i ....would say i partially agree, on the other hand i dont.

Soulshields - The main source is dungeons / raids, the wings are just an additional way to get them, not the main source of them.

Raid rng has always been a problem and point of discussion. But on your suggested changes , personally:

 

I am against any soulshield crafting system. they should stay they way they are as a drop, the only thing i would change is that the drop cannot contain 2 soulshields for the same class at once, and that it should not drop shields for classes which are not part of the raid. That should already boost the chances up.

 

For the weapon cores:

Keep drops as they are, but allow the exchange of them. So say a Weapon core for KFM, can be exchanged with additional say...15-30 Wings for the weapon core for ForceMaster. that would elevate the issues a bit, but still keep the semi grind factor.

 

Gearing progression - there is nothing to recalculate as it depends on individual people, their pace mostly. I would however, up the weekly raid limit from 1 entry to 2 entries, with 3 after using a reset. so you could get 3 raids a week max.

 

This game is all about grind, it does not have an i will call it "open end game" goal other than raids and dungeons, so naturally they cannot make those items easier to obtain, else that would make no sense.

People need to accept that this game is a grind game, you will never be able to obtain current BiS gear easily and on your first go. the grind is the actual end game.

 

Now whether rng is stupid / fair...lets not go there cause at some point it can bless you and at another damn you to hell. It needs improvement, but i definetely do not agree to give a flat out 100% chance to get the item you want.

For the issues with performance, interface, DC's .....i mean they are there, should be fixed, but i also think if they really were that easu to solve they wouldnt be there anymore. so hopefully the engine upgrade fixes most of them.

 

[Ulrezaj]

Mobs sure can go outside the desired aoe effect, even though their skill looks like BM's 2(rush?), but at least prevent them from resetting every 2 seconds, I attacked them and dealt damage, why they not see me as a threat and target?

 

I understand that very well, grind is grind and thats ok, I'm not against grind, I'm against mindless raiding for 4 months without single item for my class AND THEN wasting all my TT wings for soulshields that give me NO improvement over my old ones. I dont like when things I do do not translate into progress, its a waste of time and effort. Why I'm doing this? I'm still at the same point I was 4 months ago, with exception that I have lots of shitty soulshields and some more GC steel for my nonexisting weapon. I made a mistake and used up all my VT hearts and got 2 decent soulshields out of it, I'm still using SS8 with block and SS 6 with defence I believe. But I had aransu weapon stage 6 when TT came out and 0 VT hearts. I don't see the progress in there. No progress=no enjoyment=stop spending time and money on something not enjoyable. This is like a distress call, at least give us hope that something is going to change because at this rate I'm going to stop playing and soon raiding as well.

 

I've had my share of RNG in this and other games, RNG here can translate into 0 progression for few months, RNG in some other games always gave you something you could sell or exchange to get ingame money or materials, oh, and you could buy things similar to soulshields here from other players, so at least those lucky ones got some hard coins and those who don't could at least grind for it. Here you can grind for months and get nothing.