Good Afternoon everyone!
Calirack (Svipdagr) from Kinetic here on Azena (East) and I just wanted to reinforce how substantial the horizontal and vertical progression in conjunction with building a guild has been for us as a guild. To provide context, know that I and the guild are finally stumbling into 1370+ and come from Black Desert Online, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, Lineage 2, and various others.
Many players, particularly in this forum, seem complain about a lack of content, poisonous enhancing system, and many other aspects of the game they deem as catastrophic and sometimes even claim much of the damage is irreversible quoting steam charts and other reports as a foundation for the dead/dying game claim. I would like to address some of these complaints from my standpoint as a guild leader here at Kinetic on Azena.
First, the good ole “there isn’t enough content” from players who have over 300+ hours in the game, and spent several thousands of dollars.
Plain and simple, a developer will never be able to match a player’s ability to consume (even if they add RNG elements). Black Desert Online is a great historical anecdote to this as players spend over 40,000 USD and years of game time to max characters to which development teams are unable to match with updated content. With this perspective in mind, I would ask, what are you doing to ensure that your actions are commensurate with the game developer’s ability to produce?
Kinetic and I couldn’t immediately attack Argos at its release – but found it relieving that there was already content (within a few months) for us to work toward. Some of us are now complete with phase 1 and entering phase 2 and greater in the next couple of weeks. New content has yet to released and we feel like our progression has been commensurate with that of the game’s tempo. We have dealt with FOMO by ensuring we always party together when it comes to vertical progression so that we fight, win and progress as a team. This strategy has tempered those of us who are so excited to play, we end up ruining games for ourselves – much like I see many here doing. It seems many players are attempting to change the tempo of the game rather than adjusting their gameplay to fit the tempo that exists.
Next – unfair honing, not enough materials, can’t do content that exists. The guild and I have had many conversations about honing and its impact on the player – but in short it comes back to setting expectations founded within the game’s normal distribution. Many guild members at or near 1370 have experienced anywhere from sub 200 to 250 failures over their journey to T3 part 2. With this perspective in mind, we ensure that guild members entering their honing attempts understand what the distribution curve looks like, and apply that to time and money (should players purchase from Mari’s shop). This education has assisted in expectation management, and provided a foundation for making decisions for many of our members. After reading many complaints, it seems players slammed until they got angry, slammed some more, and then rage quit finding any video online to justify their rage, rather than doing the math from the start, setting expectations appropriately and applying a plan of execution.
Lastly, I keep reading posts about general dislike in content such as chaos dungeons, guardian raids, Argos, and the horizontal content. If you don’t like the content, then I would strongly encourage you to leave immediately. With all the research we have done – this game only contains more of the same in future releases. That said – I would also encourage you to take a different perspective. In conjunction with the vertical progression (and attempting alternate characters) most of our guild takes a holistic approach to our characters viewing both horizontal and vertical progression as progression. We have PVP event nights, PVE sailing events, PVE raid nights etc to ensure players are keeping up in iLevel and continuing to attain their giant’s hearts, omnium stars, island tokens, ignea tokens, masterpieces, etc. Skill points, personality points, and many other portions of this game also have their own progression paths that lead to fun and useful items. The perspective here is that the game has a lot to offer for those who love to participate. I won’t further elaborate on alts as many of our players found the class they love and don’t bother with them.
I am interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts on the matter and I appreciate you reading this far. Additionally, thank you again to SMG and AGS for the thousands of collective hours Kinetic has had, and the millions we will have in the future – the game has been nothing short of an amazing experience.
V/R
Calirack (Svipdagr)
