Prepare yourselves to face the harsh reality of your time spent in this game only to do daily content because it surely made me realize that this game is preying on you big time as you will see how bad things can be and why things NEED TO CHANGE if we would like this game to flourish in the west.
Since there are a multitude of players with different ways of playing the game and doing their dailies I will account for 4 scenarios and list the loading times and methodology if you want to calculate your own rosters time spent.
For testing purposes we will assume every category does X2 party find groups (big loading time differences) and do only lopangs for unas.
We will do 4 cases of players:
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Hardcore → plays 6 characters daily , chaos dungeons daily , guardian raids daily , unas daily.
Total: 126 unas , 84 chaos dungeons , 84 guardian raids -
Rested dood → has 6 characters , has full rest bonus on start of week and does Unas+CD+GR every 3 days meaning Monday , Thursday , Sunday.
Total: 54 unas , 36 chaos dungeons , 36 guardian raids -
Casual → has 4 characters (perfectly doable) , does main character daily and alts every 3 days (Unas , CD , GR)
Total: 48 unas (21 main + 27 alts) , 32 chaos dungeons (14 main + 18 alts) , 32 guardian raids (14 main + 18 alts) -
2 Character Player → as the name suggests he plays 2 characters and does both everyday (Unas , CD , GR)
Total: 42 unas , 28 chaos dungeons , 28 guardian raids
Here are the results for time spent doing these activities for the entire week:
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Hardcore player spent 5201 seconds in loading screen alone which accounts for 86.68 minutes or 1.44 hours.
CD + GR runs equal to 34272 seconds of average timed runs which accounts for 571.2 minutes or 9.52 hours. -
Rested dood spent 2229 seconds in loading screen alone which accounts for 37.15 minutes or 0.61 hours.
CD + GR runs equal to 14688 seconds of average timed runs which accounts for 244.8 minutes or 4.08 hours. -
Casual spent 2029 seconds in loading screen alone which accounts for 33.81 minutes or 0.56 hours.
CD + GR runs equal to 13056 seconds of average timed runs which accounts for 217.6 minutes or 3.62 hours. -
2 Character Player spent 1785 seconds in loading screen alone which accounts for 29.75 minutes or 0.49 hours.
CD + GR runs equal to 11424 seconds of average timed runs which accounts for 190.4 minutes or 3.17 hours.
Loading time calculations were done following this script:
Log in main/change character (41 seconds accounting asset loading/ 30 seconds accounting asset loading) → CD first load (8 sec) → CD re-entry (6 sec) → Exit (8 sec) → GR first load (12 sec) → GR re-entry (10 sec) → Exit (8 sec) → Lopang island bifrost (6 sec) → Time spent taking lopang objectives (16 sec) → Bifrost load to Shushire (6 sec) → Bifrost load to Arthetine (6 sec) → Bifrost load to Vern (6 sec)
Total 133 seconds if it’s first time load on main and 122 seconds if it’s change character.
Average chaos dungeon run takes 178 seconds from start to finish.
Average guardian raid run takes 230 seconds from start to finish.
You multiply the number of chaos dungeons or guardian raids you do with the average time.
Time measurements (these were all done on a Ryzen 5 3600 + M.2 970 Evo and a 300Mbps internet):
-First load is 28-30 seconds + 10-15 seconds asset + NPCs to load
-Changing character load is 25-28 seconds + 2-5 seconds asset + NPCs to load
-Chaos dungeon first load takes 8 seconds
-Chaos dungeon re-entry takes 6 seconds
-Exit CD takes 8 seconds
-Guardian raid first load takes 10-18 seconds (depends on party members computers) with a average of 12 seconds
-Guardian raid re-entry takes 10 seconds
-Exit GR takes 8 seconds
-Bifrost to Lopang island takes 6 seconds
-Taking the objectives takes 14-22 seconds (depends on character mobility) with an average of 18 seconds
-Bifrosting to each objective takes 18 seconds (3x6)
All of these are made in a perfect scenario where you never die in CD or you have a competent GR party.
Take into account all those small errors which do happen with these sample sizes and you will find your time spent doing these even worse and all of this is without doing Abyssal dungeons , Argos , Legion raids which all bring their set of issues , most commonly known Jail Runs where people are underperforming making a 15-40 minute experience take up hours or doing event activities such as Adventure Islands , Timed Events , Chaos Legion Gates , Field Bosses (all of these take precious time).
So what would be the solution to the time management issue? Have the option of running daily content (more precisely CD and GR) with an X2 option to lessen the time spent on these chores which eventually burn out players (I myself am a victim of this as for the past few months I’ve been playing 6 characters consistently doing everything everyday which left me burned out to the point of not touching the game).
Having an X2 option would greatly enhance player retention , especially the casual playerbase which are the people with tight schedules or families to attend to and the fact that they are the majority of our players not the sweaty hardcore ones , with the only added downside you could say are the people that already spend countless hours doing xyz characters would further pull ahead but this is already happening as we speak + the limited number of characters and 6 characters limit for legions raids already does it’s job in stopping someone from having too many income streams.
The main attraction of the game are the legion raids and putting your playerbase through abysmal chores nobody would like to do is throwing fuel on a fire.
AGS and SG you guys need to realize that the western playerbase has a vastly different mindset towards these things compared to our KR brothers and sisters.
Sorry for the extremely long post but I hope you guys can tank through reading this and think about it if you can see yourself doing this day in and day out for years to come. This is an MMO we are talking about where most of us expect to sink in years of our gaming time to our chosen MMO.
