Some changes that I think would make the game better

[Toshiwoshi]

First of all, sorry, this will be a long post (and since english is not my main language, you might find some gramatical mistakes, sorry for that), but as a UE4 game developer myself (yes, an unknown indie one, but that's not the point ) I have to think a lot on how to make a game rewarding for the players, and at the same time, keep a balance ingame (you know, you will never please every single player, but should have the community happy while you reach your own goals). I have to think a lot in how I prepare the content, so I will give you what I think would be some interesting changes to the game that would keep the balance, combat the gold inflation, etc. This is only my idea on how to make the game better for everyone, but I could be extremely wrong as well, so well...

 

1: Dungeon difficulty, reward, etc.

 

That easy mode we got was, in fact, a good addition. The problem is that it shouldn't be called Easy mode, but "Hard Training" mode, and Normal mode should have stayed. Also, there's no point in adding a mode to learn hard mode dungeons if you remove those hard mode dungeons. The best you could do is to get back normal mode to all dungeons, get all hard modes you removed back (except maybe starstone and hollows, wich were the only ones that were supposedly removed in patch notes), add the Hard Training mode on the dungeons that still have hard mode, and if you want people to really do hard modes, give better dynamic rewards in hard (for example, one extra materials chest, etc.). Hard Training would have same rewards as normal mode, but players could use that mode to really learn the hard mode mechs, wich would do the transition from normal to hard smoother.

 

2: Combat gold inflation

 

There is one thing you should never, NEVER do in a MMO: Reduce the rewards and increase the effort needed to get those rewards. If you do that, you are punishing your players instead of rewarding them, and there's no way people will be happy with that. But there's a two step trick to combat the inflation (and just keep in mind that inflation is always a thing, but you can try to keep it at reasonable levels), and is quite simple:

 

A) First, make a standard gold reward for dungeons. For example, let's say that the 3-4 hardest ones give 15 gold, the next one 13, next 11, and you keep decreasing as you go down the list until you give your base reward for old content. When a new dungeon launches, you just move the list rewards one position up. Yes, I know there are dungeons sometimes that are faster to complete, and others are harder and longer, but you could make modifiers on top to that (+2 gold if it's hard-long, -2 if it's super fast, etc.). If you do this, you NEVER reduce the ammount of gold people can get, but you don't end with tons and tons of gold ingame.

 

B) Add money sinks. A money sink is a way for players to spend the gold ingame, a gold that dissapears from the game instead of changind hands. Right now, the biggest money sinks are the equipment upgrades, breakthroughs, etc. The problem is that if you only do moneysinks there, that might be something a veteran player can afford, but with your actual gold policy, new players find it VERY hard to get enough resources to get new equipment (more on that later). So, what you could do is add new optional money sinks. For example, a wheel that you can spin spending a few gold pieces, and in return it can give you cosmetic items, like the clothing from region wheels (stalker, etc.), older events accesories and clothes, etc. I can tell you for sure that a lot of people would spend a lot of gold there to get clothes that they missed from old events or wheels, and that would lower the current ammount of gold, thus reducing the inflation a bit. As an example, a lot of people in my clan spent a lot of gold to get the Catwalk). Another moneysink could be, for example, a hairstyler. Right now, the only way to change your hair is by equipping a new one as accesorie, or buying a character customize voucher. Since the last option is too much for just a hair change ¿How about adding a hairstyler where you could pay gold to change your hairdo and hair color?. That would have sense ingame, and also could give players the chance to get the new hairdos you release every once and then. Even new social features that right now the game ignores, like housing, etc. could work as a money sinks and alternate ways to spend time in game.

 

To summarize this point, when you combat gold inflation you have to do it by adding new content for the players to spend gold on, not by punishing players and reducing their rewards. That will never work.

 

3: Make the game more newplayer friendly

 

Right now, the game is quite hard for new players to progress. A few new players joined my clan and ended leaving the game after a couple of weeks because the game is too demanding for them at this point, even if we tried to help them. Let's face it, the content we had to fight so hard to get once (raven jewelry, etc.) right now is very easy to get, but get those pieces to level 10 still requires a huge ammount of effort, and for a new player, with their little equipment, no alters, etc., is something that can, and indeed does often, overwhelm them. I know that veteran and loyal players are the ones that keep the game going, but if you dont take care of new players, the game population will keep decreasing and decreasing, so it pays to sit and think how to make the game more friendly for a player that just joins. We as players are also to blame when we ask for a lot of AP just to rush dungeons and don't want to see a single 1200 AP character in our parties, and that's something that might be hard to change, but also we as a community could do an effort to support new players that would in the end benefit us too. For example, make campaigns to help new players do content they never did before (a couple of high level players could take new players to do some content, learn the mechanics for the first time, so they can do that on their own in the future, and who knows, maybe once they become high level they could do that to help new players again). But let's face it, that's an utopia, I know some people are willing to do that, but a lot wont. So that's the reason why the game design must adapt to help those new players. Maybe adding back some low level dungeons to the daily challenge, reducing the materials and gold to level up low level legendary jewelry, etc.  In the end, we want as many new players to stay as we can.

 

4: Keep the monetization at a reasonable level.

 

I know this is a sensible topic, for players and for ncsoft. Let's face it, as a free2play and pay2win game, there must be some monetization ingame. The problem is when the monetization takes over the own game, like it's happening now. A good example is Throne of Oblivion, the weekly raid needed to get the new unrefined bracelet. In a worst case scenario, it can take 24 weeks for a player that does it every single week to get his unrefined bracelet. ¡24 weeks! that's half a year, and that is not reasonable no matter how you look at it. However,¡Dont worry! You can buy resets from the store to get your bracelet in a reasonable ammount of time. And That's not how you monetize content, my friends. I dont mind if anyone want to buy a reset to get it faster if a player that can't pay for resets can get it in a reasonable time. Lets imagine the bracelet costed half it's prize (12 instead of 24), and you got at least 2 coins in the raid, with the chance of getting 1 extra. In the worst case scenario, you would get your unrefined bracelet in 5 weeks, wich is a reasonable ammount of time, but people with resets would still get it way faster, thus making those resets proffitable. What you did here was doing it the opposite way: The only mode to get the bracelet in a normal ammount of time is by buying resets. Otherwise, good luck and see you in 4 to 6 months. Monetization should work to get things faster than normal, not to get things at a normal rate and laugh at people who cannot buy resets.

 

Also, There's a few things I will never understand in Blade and Soul monetizaiton policy: You sell a couple of cosmetics every now and then, instead of adding plenty of cosmetics at the same time, that would produce a good income. A lot of store clothing, even old Trove clothing could appear on the store, I myself would buy a couple of accesories I couldn't get back on the day.

¿And how about new animations? In a game like this it's VERY easy to add new animations (if I can do a dance animation in less than one day with a simple mocap rig, imagine a full dev team), you could add new dances, new iddle animations, new emotes, etc. to sell them for ncoins/hcoins, and a LOT of people would love that, that's not a game breaking thing but would be pretty nice to get new things like that. It's something really easy to add in game (for god's sake, there are event mods to change some animations, etc.), cheap to produce, and the benefits would be for everyone, since having them or not wouldn't be a game breaker.

 

5. RNG, that hated RNG.

 

RNG is good at some degree, it gives you that factor of randomness and expectation, but right now this game should bne called RNG and soul. You should understand that RNG should be there to add a certain degree of randomness, but when you abuse of that, you make the game a constant matter of luck. Its very depressing when you work hard to get something, and you end with nothing due to RNG not being on your side. I dont talk about Troves, loot boxes or anything like that, because we all know how that works, I mean ingame boxes you get from questing, etc. Every single thing you get ingame should have a granted reward that had any sense, not just chance to get something useful. A perfect exmaple for that is the pet bags you get with pearls. I've seen people opening tens of those to get just crapy exp charms. That, my friends will never work in a long term, you can't expect players to spend hours and hours of farming, fishing or whatever they are doing, and then say "ok, good luck, you probably won't get a thing from this". There are ways to change this and make this type of content more player friendly: adding a granted reward that makes the effort you had to do to get it at least sligthly rewarding, adding some coins you can use to get the things you didn't get from the rng like you do in loot boxes, etc. But you cant have a game that everyday that passes looks more like a scamming gambling post , and expect players to be OK with that. So please, keep RNG for certain things, but grant worthy rewards for the player's efforts.

 

6. Daily Challenge

 

Daily Challenge is the base core of this game. You have to do it every single day, with multiple characters, to be able to progress ingame with at least one character. The changes that are coming in October's 2 patch seems nice, but for players who enjoyed PVP, removing the PVP segments of the daily challenge has destroyed the game for them. Since there's no point on doing that, ¿Why don't you bring those pvp options back? It hurts no one, and PVP players will probably enjoy it again.

As for PVE, as I stated before, I think adding at least one or two lower level dungeons for new players and alters could be a good thing. You should understand that you are forcing players to do the daily challenge with multiple characters to equip just one main, but making daily challenge harder wont make people buy materials from the store (if you really think that will work in general, then you understand your community less than I thought). It's ok to have materials on F10 for people who wants to buy them, I even bought some moonstones once in a while just to complete the lot I needed to upgrade something, but it's the same thing than the oblivion reset I talked before: Its alright to do things faster if you want and can afford it, but you cant force players to buy them by reducing rewards.

Also, talking about rewards, since you added a daily in Moon Refuge, at least give us something we can buy there as high level players. At least with peaches we could buy material pouches, so adding those to Moon Refuge merchant for a fair amount of buds would make that daily less infuriating.

 

 

In conclusion

 

I probably forgot a lot of things, but I think that taking care of every single of those points would make the game way more enjoyable for the players, while keeping a good income of money for NcSoft. Remember, you can't expect players to do more work for less reward and cover their loses buying with real money, that's naive and greedy, and it will never work in the middle to long term. You have here a great game, Blade and Soul has a fantastic combat mechanics, it's very fun to play it with friends, learn new dungeons, face difficult raids... as long as we, as players, feel supported by the company that is managing the game, not milked and extorted like, let's face it, sometimes seems.

 

I don't know if what I wrote will ever be read by anyone, but I kinda like the game and I thought at least I could try.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Grimoir]

2 hours ago, Toshiwoshi said:

Hard Training would have same rewards as normal mode, but players could use that mode to really learn the hard mode mechs, wich would do the transition from normal to hard smoother.

Why add a "hard training" mode, when the easy mode we have now, should have exactly the same mechanics as hard mode, with the difference that in easy mode there would be no instant wipe?

Thats the entire idea of it. Whether its rewarding enough to do is a different story tho.

 

For point #2:

I like the suggestion on gold rewards.

As for the sinks, well the suggestion you gave is kinda unlikely to happen, simply because it means profit loss for NC.

To be honest asside upgrades there isnt really anything reasonable that could be used as gold sink, even cosmetics, althoughi do like the suggestion.

Maybe an additional sink could be adding crafting items for clan crafting to merchants in game for gold, add more outfit designs, even add a second version of the HM scroll to craft with items only purchasable with gold from merchants, that would be a very good sink.

 

#3

Agreed. Tho should they lower both accessory upgrade costs or just one? Meaning, lower materials but keep the amount of legendary jewels the same or reduce jewels needed but keep materials the same or lower both ?

I honestly do not think getting the crystals to upgrade is particularly hard, but the jewels are a bigger problem. what do you think?

Maybe they should increase the gold cost reductions received from the clan bonus and premium status for upgrades?

 

#4

Specifically Throne of Oblivion speaking - I do not like it that a breakthrough item is locked behind a limited content in general. Would make more sense to lock it behind an achievement consisting of clearing 3-4 dungeons 50 times.

 

As for the emote selling / animations - i dont mind the idea but idk, to me at least it seems like those would not really have that much interest with the players, i know there are some that like that, but idk, i am a bit skeptic on this one.

I am all for them selling a bit more costumes than they have available at the moment, but i dont like the adea of selling costumes that were in trove or rng boxes in the HM store.

 

#5

I agree. Knowing you can have a guaranteed reward after putting in effort to get it feels much more rewarding than getting upset over rng.

 

#6

I agree.

 

 

 

[Edensia]

Im still for Easymode from Korea.. its working great there, its already "done" .. so why don't we get it? Its like giving Korea candy and giving us dirt..

[i wanna die]

you know what people would spend money for in this game? WINGS. EVERYBODY LOVES WINGS. every cash user loves to bedazzle their characters so release rng boxes with skins and wings with dragons swirling around your character and you will be good to go! i mean everytime you release an rng box its like a mini trove with less or more profit for the players!

i think they should release more cosmetics into the game and wings for the whales and swirly dragons too! Maybe new fps dropping skill skins!

[Grimoir]

28 minutes ago, i wanna die said:

you know what people would spend money for in this game? WINGS. EVERYBODY LOVES WINGS. every cash user loves to bedazzle their characters so release rng boxes with skins and wings with dragons swirling around your character and you will be good to go! i mean everytime you release an rng box its like a mini trove with less or more profit for the players!

i think they should release more cosmetics into the game and wings for the whales and swirly dragons too! Maybe new fps dropping skill skins!

Sapphire wings for everybody as a compensation for the disaster patch! xD

[i wanna die]

8 hours ago, Grimoir said:

Sapphire wings for everybody as a compensation for the disaster patch! xD

Wings are just as worth as ❤ ❤ ❤ ❤

[Toshiwoshi]

Jokes aside, there are a lot of other things that could be done to improve the game, but we cant expect Ncsoft to change the whole daily challenge mech and other core things to work better (wich, imho, could even improve the game more). So some twists and small redirections could help the players greatly, and probably ncsoft too. If the game ends dieing for their lack of knowledge and interest in their own game, it would be an extreme waste.