State of the Game

[TA]

So, what do you guys think about the state of the game and what do you consider the major problems it has currently? There's a thread on official, but I wanted to see what you guys here thought. What, without all the trolls and such.

Personally, here's my list at the moment...

1. Seal Exchange is broke.
This was addressed here by Potatomatic. Still a pretty big deal though since we're losing 70 tokens a week.

2. People are extremely bored.
While this may not seem like a major concern off hand, I contest that it certainly is. The last content update we got was October 13th. We did get Evie on October 27th and her Scythe the 3rd, but that doesn't really count as content for those that don't play Evie. Basically, we're going 2 months without a new boat. But, that isn't the problem. The boat is only going to last about 2-3 weeks anyways and Korea isn't so far ahead of us that we're always going to have a new boat bi-monthly. It's kinda unrealistic as well. What we need is sustainable content. Content that people can do over and over and not get bored. Something like PvP with some sort of title system or Top Scores for dungeon times or something to keep people entertained. As it is, people are just logging on for dailies, maybe talking to their guilds for awhile, then logging off because they're bored with nothing to do. Everyone is doing this, and several of my own guildies have talked about quitting. I personally don't want to quit, but I can't play with myself (well, I can...). We need something sustainable people can keep doing that will keep them in-game. People staying in-game and entertained is something you should certainly want and it's something we want. Getting bored and having to find something else to do doesn't help anyone. It draws us away from your game, and results in us buying less of your product. Realistically, boats are only ever going to last 2-3 weeks. We need something sustainable to keep people around. I fear the community won't last another 2 months without new content like this.

3. Weapons using wrong attacks.
Hammer attacks change to Sword, which isn't horrendously bad. Cause well, you're still pretty useful. Scythes switching to Staff.... this is totally gamebreaking and makes your character completely useless since you deal hardly any damage, have no magic and can't use your scythe smashes or finishers. I don't know if this is caused by lag or what, but it's really bad.

4. Guild/Friends breaks.
Pretty frequently when we switch characters our guild/friends functions will "break." Meaning, it won't show us in our guild, we won't show up online to our friends and we can't speak in either of the respected chats. I suspect that this is caused by something in the client caches old information when it relogs into another character rather than wiping it and starting again when the relog occurs, this is evident by the chat log and one-on-one chats staying how they were on the previous character. This is fixable at the moment by closing the client entirely, but it's a pretty annoying bug that happens and a pretty frequent occurance.

5. Names on 31 day timer.
I guess this may be considered minor compared to the above, but having to wait over a month to use a name we reserved is downright ridiculous. A week would be reasonable, along with an Undelete function. Because we have to wait 31 days, I've already made an Evie with a name I never wanted my main and I still can't make the Evie with the name I wanted until 3 days from now. But even when I can, I won't use it. It's an entire month behind... there's just no way I'll do that. As for it stressing your server or some other lame excuse... get real. So what if we can't use that name? We can just make another with a different name, which just adds to the database's size rather than deleting an entry and repopulating it with another. Besides, since we can make as many free accounts as we want and as many characters as we want, that argument is totally moot.

6. Permanent Hair
You did mention you were considering Permanent Inner Armor (though a lot of good "considering" does us...). But no mention of permanent hair. Does this mean you're: A) Not even considering it? or B) Not acknowledging the community wants it? With a couple hundred page petition, I think this one should be pretty clear that the community wants it. It doesn't matter how much you charge for either of these, owning something is just more desirable than renting. You can probably prove this yourselves by checking your Storage Chest sells. Which one sells the most? 30, 60, 90 days? Or is it the permanent one? I suspect it's the permanent one, because honestly I've never heard of anyone buying the temporary ones. I think you'll make a lot more money doing this. People that are already buying it will buy it and people that don't intend to buy temporary ones will buy it. Win-win for you.

As for issues they have addressed and/or acknowledged, see here:

Hello Players,

Thank you for providing us with feedback and information regarding your major concerns. Here is a short list of some of the concerns, along with updated information.

1.) The Gold Issue: Players continue to report that they have not received their lost gold.

Update - We continue to work diligently on the resolving the issue. Our goal is to make sure we get this right, so please bear with us just a bit longer while we work out the kinks.

**Update 11/15** Gold Spam Blocking system will be available in the near future. Currently, the team is busy implementing the fix.

2.) Market Place Issue: Players cannot access the marketplace when using a character created with previously deleted name.

Update – This issue has been solved and a fix will be implemented in the near future.

3.) Lag Issue: Players report experiencing a great deal of lag

Update- The Vindictus team would like additional information from the community. If possible, please provide specific information regarding time and server in which you experienced lag. This thread has been created for players to submit their lag reports.

4.) Censorship Issue: Players find the chat filter within the game to be too restrictive. The NPCs in the game use words that the players cannot use themselves.

Update- The game filter vocabulary list is currently under review. It would be really helpful if we could get a list oif banned words that you feel are hindering your conversations.

**Update 11/15** Thank you for all the feedback! The curse filter will be updated with the 11/17 patch.

5.) Kick Issue: Players benefiting from dungeons without participating in battle.

Update - We're currently looking into a function to kick disruptive players, but that's only in the planning stages right now. As soon as we have more information or an ETA, we'll let you know.

6.) Permanent Underarmor- Players have petitioned for Permanent Underarmor.

Update- This request is still up for debate and is being considered by the team. We will keep you posted on any new developments regarding this request.

**Added on 11/15/2010**

7.) Evie Scythe Marketplace has been resolved and should be working properly on 12/1/2010

Source: Nexon Forums - Update on Major Community Concerns **11/15 Update**

[Kueh]

What kind of sustainable content other than pvp could there be?

I'm not a fan of Pvp, so if there was an option to do something else, I'd prefer it.

Since vindictus has a rather unique trap system, why not make a set of obstacle courses? (Blinking and slip dashing would be changed to jumps obviously.)

[TA]

What kind of sustainable content other than pvp could there be?

I'm not a fan of Pvp, so if there was an option to do something else, I'd prefer it.

Since vindictus has a rather unique trap system, why not make a set of obstacle courses? (Blinking and slip dashing would be changed to jumps obviously.)

Hm, well... I dunno to be honest. Whatever works.

The Spear PvP looked hilarious.

[Kueh]

Oh wow, I did not expect it to be like that. That looks awesome.


Maybe theyll put ctf too....

[risend]

Oh wow, I did not expect it to be like that. That looks awesome.


Maybe theyll put ctf too....

That is the CTF area. YouTube - Mabinogi Heroes/Vindictus PVP Gameplay by Nishino

[Kueh]

[edit: obstacle course still sound fun tho]

[EndlessDreams]

Due to the nature of Vindictus, it is hard to "sustain" it especially if you don't like PvP. It isn't reasonable to expect them to update new boats every 2-3 weeks. We will soon then catch up to Korea in a few months, and then what will we do?

Vindictus' gameplay is the main problem. It is too linear. We go dungeon to get exp/ap/gold/items, and then there is nothing else to do.

[heretic304]

Eventually they're going to add in player crafting skills, so we'll probably have that to work on as well D:

[Lie]

Lawl at number 2 and the reasoning for number 1.

Number 2, that happens to eventually a lot of games. The games that can hold its own ground despite the lack of updates should be learned from, in my opinion.

Players can do whatever they want with the Seal Exchange Token system (if it gets fixed), but it still makes me chuckle.

[whocares8128]

As Whyrainfalls mentioned, I think it'd be fun to have some kind of obstacle course, or just a space loaded with stuff to mess with. I also think having some kind of ranking for clear times, like a top-10 (or 100?) list for different party sizes, would give some people something to strive for. It would certainly give people hosting "speed" runs some credence if their name was on that list.