How to keep hardcore players playing (no p2w)?

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It doesnt say in your post so i figured id clarify something:

How much of the horizontal prog have you done? The adventure tome, songs, emotes, rapport, cards, and collectibles all have ways to tie into your progression and power growth, in some ways they are more important than your item level itself.

If all of that is done and you still dont want to just do dailies on your main there really is only 3 things to do: goof off doing pvp, work on alts and making money, or play something else til they add more content or honing changes.

This mmo is very different from other ones as your item level isnt very important in the end game. In its current state, you actually locked yourself out of content by pushing so hard as new content was only scheduled for once a month from what i can tell and they might further delay it even more because of the whole honing fiasco.

Oh i forgot that you can also do infinite void dungeon runs to get some mats or buy them from the merchant ships with pirate coins. The racing event also has cracked rewards. Then you can also progress your guild and guild shop to get more with bloodstones

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Thank you for your ideas.
I do not know how much of the horizontal progression they have finished so far (from stuff they shared on discord it is likely quite some already). But it sounded like the horizontal part was not really something they were interested in.

I tried to get them interested in pvp, but I guess it is not rewarding enough at its current stage.

From your post I assume that with the current stage of content I should probably look for a new guild until new content might be able to get my guildies back to the game :sweat_smile:

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The 1340 “wall” it’s because most of the players were selling all their mats for weeks just because stoopz recommended it :v sell everything and buy blue crystals, this is the consequence

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Wow if your guild is telling you that then they really must not know huh…

Yeah island hearts, adventurer tomes, rapport, collectibles una reputations have many extremely worthwhile rewards.

Skill pots are a vital thing to unlock that other than one or two easy to grind ones ive neglected myself. Also have you been working on your lifeskills and stronghold? Your guild is weaker as a whole if you dont have a way to build up consumables. The ones you got from the msq and events will run out faster than youd think.

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Hey yamyan!

Tbh tho i agree with Stoopzz on selling lol. Get to the softcap then wring the whales for every penny is what im thinking

Im at 60 days of aura completely f2p and i havent even done any of the real gold generation stuff yet lol

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Well… They basically said that the horizontal progression is just too boring to grind for a whole day. And I kind of agree on that (if you’d do it for whole days) :smiley:

And they didn’t sell mats massively. Otherwise they wouldnt have gotten to 1340 by the beginning last week I guess.

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This is the key I think.

Most players in this region play MMOs for power progression and challenging group endgame content. They aren’t collection players, quest players, event players, exploration players, achievement (tome) players and so on. Those are considered niche playstyles in this region, and most hardcore players don’t prefer those playstyles and aren’t engaged by them. This is why the whole design with horizontal content and collecting things and completing tomes and so on is falling on deaf ears for the most part – if that’s what the bulk of the time here is, together with running alts (another thing that is niche in this region), people become uninterested quickly.

It’s another example of how this design for a game doesn’t really fit the gaming interests of this market.

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Yeah. A lot of the stuff like cards is supposed to take years. I accidentally dismantled like 100-300 of em and asked for advice. Even then i was told that restarting on a new server wouldnt be worth it to get them back.

Its supposed to take a long time because its years worth of stuff. I usually do it while im queuing for pvp so its something to do while waiting for the match to start or if i dont feel like working on my alts.

Id say just look for stuff to do and if you really dont want to do anything one day, dont force yourself. They put the rest bonus in the game for your sake after all :+1:

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You’re in for a surprise if you think honing changes that let you do this one raid at 1370 out of the plethora of shit to do in KR is the stopping point. The people who refuse to play alts for materials are going to be asking for honing changes for a very long time at this rate.

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I wouldnt say it doesnt fit with our market wholistically. I just think that a lot of people misunderstood the kind of game that it is. Its supposed to have something for many different styles of gamer. Unfortunately the more hardcore players were expecting to 100% the dungeon content and forgot about the rest of the game in doing so. But as you said, its definitely not their fault necessarily either. It was marketed as a purely hardcore experience by most content creators when its more of a 50/50.

Id say its a lot like ff14 if it was a f2p game first. If all you wanted to do was sit at end game and run your dailies and weeklies youd end up like quinn

I loved ff14 but hate tab targetting. This game fills the spot i needed it to to get me out of league and im a way happier person for it. Ill be the biggest shill if thats what it takes to feel the way i did playing on RU the first time. In a lot of ways i already do

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What other MMOs have you going straight into raid content without getting geared for it? I think people are forgetting that T3 is the endgame. If everyone is getting to do the new content just because they logged in then there wouldn’t be anything to do.

There is an argument for there not being enough avenues to farm mats like there is in KR/RU, but complaining about honing rates is pointless. I rarely see people whine about drop rates in other MMOs and a single BiS in those games could take months to get.

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What other MMOs don’t even allow you to progress to the endgame story/quest tier without running an RNG gauntlet akin to the end of T2?

T3 isn’t just a big mythic raid. It’s an entire tier of content that is gated behind a substantial RNG wall. It’s as if WoW required players to progress through the endgame of the prior 2 expansions, and gear up in them with full RNG in place for drops and so on, before even being able to set foot in the current endgame. No other MMO has ever done that.

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What other MMOs don’t even allow you to progress to the endgame story/quest tier without running an RNG gauntlet akin to the end of T2?

Sure, that should get changed, but this version has basically no T3 content. Argos is one thing out of a ton of stuff we don’t have. The first time T2 honing has to make up for that, and considering many people still aren’t in T3, it sounds like it’s currently doing it’s job while they line up an actual content patch.

If they haven’t added guaranteed honing chances to T1 and T2 by the time this game has more than one piece of T3 then you would have something to complain about. But it honestly sounds like you want to be able to do the endgame content the second it launches, which isn’t going to happen because that’s not a thing in 99% of MMOs including this one. That ilvl is the time gate that attunement or gearing are in other games and it’s not going away.

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I mean if you want tons of gold yeah thats the way to go, but if you are going to save all the gold, sell all the mats and then cry cuz your ilvl isn’t enough for new content… The people created that “wall” that “dead zone” cuz they literally don’t want to progress. They just want to stock pile gold as a bot and make ags push their ilvls for free.

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No the issue is that the game acts like it has three endgames.

In a normal game, you advance up to the level of endgame easily enough and then you really slow down before you can access the tougher more rewarding content at the endgame level. There is entry level endgame and then the harder content which is gated.

In this game, the entire endgame tier, both the entry level content and the rest of it (now that Argos is here) is gated, so you’re playing a game that requires you to complete an endgame before you get to the actual endgame tier, even the entry level part of that tier.

That’s a crazy, cocked-up design which was certain to infuriate players.

The reasonable options were either

(1) Launch without T3, have T2 be the endgame initially and let the playerbase advance for 2-3 months before you release T3, and then when you release T3, release a good chunk of it, not just the entry level but also the harder content that is gated behind hard RNG.

or

(2) Launch with T3, both entry level and that good chunk of gated content, but then don’t treat T2 like a mini-endgame, but make it like KR and RU so that players progress through T1 and T2 and then hit the progression wall in the actual current endgame, which is T3, the way it works in all other MMOs.

Here they tried a hybrid, bastardized design that has players go through a mini endgame in T2 when T2 is not at all an endgame, and then use the excuse that there is not enough content in T3 to do it otherwise, when in fact the content that is not included in T3 is completely available (or should be) because it has been released in other regions a long time ago. It’s a terrible design.

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Like KR, like KR, like KR you guys are such a broken record its exhausting.

I would have liked to see honing rate changes with Argos or more T3 mats but they got a good chunk of the playerbase to a T3 item level and now have to add in content. If all you wanted to do was make your number as big as possible as soon as possible youre missing the point of the game. There isnt anything to do after Argos anyways, why does it even matter? To be bored for 3 weeks while you wait for the next thing? Then complain about that?

Its a weekly roster bound lockout. You only get one clear per week. You still are stuck doing the other stuff in that time while you wait for the rest of the content.

Its not KR, its NA. We are missing 90% of our T3 content and the devs already had enough on their plate just making the game playable for the insane amount of players that joined as well as removing bots and bug fixes. If you guys want to see more content get delayed keep whining about how AGS is so bad and only letting whales play the game while you ignore the other 90% of the game that is out right now. Its so tiresome arguing this same thing over and over again. SG and AGS will handle it. Either look for something to do in the game and progress horizontally for the long haul or build that rest bonus.

Your item level means basically nothing long term. Im waiting patiently and i recommend other people do too. Slamming your head into a ceiling for a 1-2 point increase that is completely worthless and whining about it is so annoying. There is more to do in this game than just dungeons and raids to get stronger

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please stop suggesting this. I’m 1340 and my adventure tomes are pretty much maxed out except rapports, which are time gated, I have 63 island souls (I’m tired of trying for spida (cant even get enough people for spida anymore), unknown, phantomwing, harmony, yearning and all of the remaining ones are from rapports, boring as fuck), I’m tier 1 in pvp (and did a lot of pvp after reaching tier 1), got almost all giants hearts except time gated ones like tooki and nineveh, all songs are done, all emotes are done except again, time gated stuff like joy, tower is done, all life skills are above 20, stronghold is level 21… today is the first day I haven’t played since the release but this isn’t because I’m burnt out or anything. I don’t wanna play because I know my honings will fail anyway

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I honestly don’t get you people. According to your completion you had PLENTY PLAYTIME. Just push for 1370 if that’s what you care about. It’s bad, but not impossible. If you had spend all that time collecting random souls and shit - farming endless chaos - you’d be 1370 already.

You guys need to chill.

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How does playtime do anything for gear score? I don’t have time to do endless chaos as I work full time, however I still wouldn’t do chaos dungeon more than twice per day if I had time because it’s extremely boring and inefficient. Other than that, there’s nothing you can do in the game to improve your gear score. All we wanted was the game Koreans used to play 2 years ago but AGS has created an abomination of game with no way to progress. Yes, money is a way to progress and I have a shit ton of royal and blue crystals in my account but I can’t see a reason to spend it for materials because this is exactly what they wanted us to do. I won’t take the bait and I’ll stay at 1340 until this bullshit is fixed.

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“I dont have time to do endless chaos since i work fulltime” - he says with 63 Island souls to his name.
It’s actually quiite simple. You cared more about island souls than ilvl. and that’s fine. do your thing.