I doubt any of the devs will ever read this but I’ve played ~240 hours now so here’s my general feedback for the game:
• Having a red dot screaming at me that I have the Crystalline Benefactor title every time I switch to a character is more of a negative than a positive. We also shouldn’t have guide quest notifications pop up every single time we log on a character, or a merchant visit notification. Once we look at it once, we get it, we have a guide quest, there’s a merchant - chill. We also don’t need to see a bunch of pop up windows every time we get on.
• For that matter if someone doesn’t have the ability to even manage a guild then they reaaaaally don’t need informed every time there’s a new guild management thing to look at. Or research.
• I’m not sure about Asian culture but for the US it’s generally nice to be able to disable profanity filters. The profanity filter needs to be reworked to begin with as it rejects random innocuous statements like “all i can see are 1-4, 6, 18, 21” “Your message contains an inappropriate word or phrase.” Like what? It’ll even do it with item links sometimes.
• A guardian raid, cube, and boss rush should have their chat default switched to Party instead of Normal just for the sake of convenience. Raid group for Abyssal dungeons.
• There should be a “gold seller” report function with no necessity of adding a description and it should locally auto-purge everything they’ve spammed into chat. We should also have an unlimited number of blocked characters.
• For that matter… Outsource and hire 1 dude in India or something per 2-3 servers, give them access logs to every area chat in the game all at once. Make it their job to ban gold sellers instantly. If you can’t figure it out technologically it sure isn’t difficult with a GM.
• We should be able to reassign all of our hotkeys, including the interact hotkey.
• Having to manually type out stuff like /talk, /beg, /ask to talk to NPCs is just dumb and bad game design. Instead you should have the Emotes (Y) window automatically come up with the most common NPC conversion emotes at the top so the player can easily click it and it’s more natural and less awkward and tacky. Or just instead have it like press F2, F3, F4, that would be much better. Better still? Make it a literal dialogue option. We pick it, our character does the emote. No longer cheap and trashy and instead it’d feel natural and intended.
• The sea map is really awkward with individual squares that it’s hard to make navigation paths through. At some point these should really be unified to a single map we can zoom in on and much more easily create navigation paths.
• We should be able to favorite Una’s Tasks, especially in Reputation Status so they’re easier to find up at the top. Having to search “astray” and “pirate” every time for the Astray’s ones for instance is an inconvenience.
• An actual transmog system to use the appearance of any outfit would be nice instead of only a select few paid ones. There were a lot of nice free outfits while leveling but they’re trash once you outlevel them.
• And regarding outfits… I don’t know where the conception that Western audiences need censorship came from. We really don’t. Give us the sexy stuff and we’ll throw our money at you, thanks.
• NPCs singing should be dialogue, not music. With music volumes near zero when they start singing we effectively can’t hear anything.
• Finally, I’m just gonna say it. The cash shop is designed super predatory. First you have one currency you buy with real money - royal crystals. Then that converts into an entirely different crystal with a totally different value just to confuse people. What’s more, you’re never going to have enough for what you need as everything’s designed to give you just a tiny bit less than you need so you’re forced to buy at least $9.99 more locking you into a never ending cycle. For instance? You can buy blue crystals as 200 for 470 royal crystals, or 400 for 940 royal crystals. 1000 is $9.99. But crystalline aura is 420 blue crystals, not 400. So you either have to buy 20 with gold or pony up more money. Of course that’s one one of the least bad ones as you can buy crystalline aura directly. The worst part is the conversion. 1000÷470=2.127659574468085 and $9.99÷2.127659574468085=$4.6953 - I mean what the heck kind of number is that?! Someone can’t easily do that in their head. It’s a pain even with a calculator. Then 1000÷940=1.063829787234043 then $9.99÷1.063829787234043=$9.390599999999996. Like why, dude, why? You may not think this matters but it does. Without easily being able to do mental conversions or even easily know the actual real world value of something someone could spend astronomically more than they realize without even knowing it. For instance, random thing in Mari’s shop for 80 blue crystals - how much is that? How about 60? 23? Heck if I know! You have to do all kinds of insane conversions to try to figure that one out. First you gotta do royal to blue in the values you can obtain blues in, then you gotta divide those by the actual number of blues, then the actual dollar value by that. No less than 3 calculator requiring calculations per every single thing. It’s literally designed to be predatory and keep people confused and unaware of how much they’re spending.
Update: Here’s some more…
• Let us use mounts on all islands. The super slow running just feels like intentionally wasting our time for no reason.
• Above all in the game the one thing that really bothers me is that I can’t play with my guildmates or my friends. It’s not really what you want on a MMO, or as part of a guild. The point should be playing together, not being prevented from doing that. You should let people that have completed an abyss dungeon re-enter so they can play with friends and guild members. If it’s the rewards then just nerf their rewards for subsequent entries so they get like idk no gold, maybe some card packs, maybe some raport items or something. As it is if you already entered for the week you can’t play with your friends, can’t help your struggling guildmates, and so on.
• The sailing events only being super late at night I really don’t like. They should be throughout the day. If you could only play during the early morning through early evening for instance you could literally never do any sailing events as they’re all 9:30 or 11:30 PM PST. That’s just insane.
• One thing in general I’ve thought is that there are a lot of things for the game that you really have to look at guides out of the game to actually understand and in my opinion that’s really a failing of the game’s designers. New players to the game that aren’t informed won’t know about things like material islands, stronghold research for alts once reaching a tier, how cutting ability stones actually works, how many various guardian raids and abyss dungeons work, and so on. It isn’t even really taught how stagger, counters, and weak-points work. Hardly anyone understands it even in tier 2 and tier 3.
• Really though let me come back to the in-game profanity filter. It is absolutely absurd. You can’t even type “t3” or “weap” - it won’t even censor it, it’ll reject your message as inappropriate entirely. Yet you can say the b-word and bots can rampantly spam. There’s so many innocuous things just blocked that it’s insane and can be very confusing trying to figure out wtf you just typed that was inappropriate to their censor. “sorc i” is also a curse in-game, apparently. Here’s how silly it is, this sentence “cause i went from 1302 to 1304 gear” is rejected as inappropriate. For what possible reason? A terrible profanity filter, that’s what. Another example? “because jeff bezos hates us” becomes “because jeff bezo******* us” as apparently “s hates” is a curse in the profanity filter. It is just incredibly dumb.