QUOTE (stecobo @ Jun 18 2016, 09:28 PM)
Are we missing the point of the trials? Aren't they supposed to be difficult and time consuming? It took me forever to get my Greater Alliances done on both my Mage and my Rogue. I worked until I was able to solo all the bosses, it was near impossible to get people to share at the time that I did them.
The trials that require you to have certain levels of Sage and minor quests are a definite problem. I think that trial needs to be adjusted to something other than Sage and the number of minor quests needs to be lowered considerably. There's no real advantage to make a player have to wait 400 days to go from Sam san to Sa San if they have already obtained the stats necessary. At the time it wasn't possible to obtain Sa san stats in less than a year, but that is no longer true.
Also the Sa San trial that requires you to defeat the Council, the damage output of the Council needs to be reduced by at least 80%, even when the event came out nobody could do the quest while wearing armor, the number of times you die causes your armor to break.
I knew the combat related trials had balance issues. I helped playtest the Sa san houses and other combat related trials. The stats of the characters we used were well above Sa san stats. I think the Warrior I used had like 3M vita or something. The difficulty was ranked high because the game had a ton of people well above Sa San stats, and mug's goal was to challenge these players. It's obvious that it has become a larger issue for new Sa san stat players because without the assistance of much stronger players they won't be able to complete the trials. The content was meant to challenge people whose stats greatly exceeded Sa san.
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The Party Finder feature is a good addition, should certainly help narrow down who is hunting and who is not. Having to Sage constantly to announce I am looking to hunt while asking every poet and mage on the server if they want to hunt was the most annoying crap I have ever done in an MMO.
The easiest way for Wony to make NexusTK free to play is to introduce two tiers of account membership; Basic account and VIP account.
Basic account (Free) - Access to everything paid accounts have right now, except the free monthly KRUNA bonus.
VIP account ($9.99 a month) - 150% XP bonus to characters in the account, 150% bonus to monster drops, -150% price reduction on repairs. Bonus stacks with other items. VIP accounts receive the free monthly KRUNA bonus. VIP account characters also do not need to complete certain San trials, such as Ee san culture, Sam san trial of Wisdom and Sa San trial of Endurance, just talk to the NPC and if your account is in VIP status the NPC will acknowledge you completing the trial.
"Pay to win" arguments are largely made by people who want to have free access to a game, and don't want to spend any money to play it at all. They don't accept that the trade-off for not contributing financially to a game is that you need to spend more time playing it to compensate for the difference. There is no amount of reasoning to convince the players, and so long as the extra time is not absurd they tolerate it. I think my suggestion also addresses issues with the built-in time mechanics for the San trials which should be scrapped, but leaving them as is and giving players the option to pay just $9.99 to bypass them would also address the matter. It's very probable that someone who is going to be serious about PvE will choose VIP account anyway to gain the perks, whereas the people that just use the game as a chat room will focus on item shop clothing stuff and mounts like they already do.
The instant glorification argument doesn't help address the reality that NexusTK has a lot of really [Content removed]ty design choices that make it difficult for a new player to get into the game, and will just lead to them quitting for games that don't have these design choices. There's a lot of bad design that needs fixing, but asking people who have the stats to undertake San trials but cannot complete several trials until they play the game for months longer is a key problem.
If I reach level 50 in WoW or FFXIV, but can't level up to level 51 until I have played for 400 days more I would cancel my subscription and play something else.