Quote (ItsLotd @ Jul 29 2016 01:09pm)
Its been fun to sit back and see where the discussion has gone.
Just to be 100% clear... There are some problems (obviously) with this game. My belief is that the majority of those problems stem from lack of new players. There will always be players that quit for one reason or another, but it seems as though there has just been a huge lack of new players coming in to keep the player base strong.
Simply put... I believe that changes / updates designed to draw new players in should be of the utmost importance. If existing players benefit from / like the changes, then great. If they are unaffected, thats fine too. If it effects them negatively, that should be avoided if possible.
Resetting the game... wiping all the gear out and starting fresh... I think this idea would appeal to new players. I also think there are better ways to attract new players than to piss off the existing players.
There's nothing appealing about the game itself when it's in competition with all other games out there people could be playing instead. So wiping an unappealing game back to scratch would run of the bulk of the existing players left and ruin the potential for gaining a nice amount of new players.
New players to the game will have to greatly struggle to play. Most people will not do that especially if there's no realistic drops. If the drop rate didn't get adjusted and we're still without the old transmuting style then it would take a few years before gear would be established. Skillers would be reset to zero, so it would take them even longer to get back to where they are currently because the skiller mats would be virtually non existent at higher levels. The grinding amount will be just to much to keep people around.
The only hope is to bring the game more up to date with the times AND needs if growth is intended. The time of climbs is fine for groups and only increases as a player advances in skill and gear.
Solo needs to be made to be faster and not 2% but 20-25% faster than currently, this is a must. Most new players start out soloing and are usually forced to solo, if it's not both appealing and rewarding for game advancement then players will quit or play less often.
Skilling experience must 1.) be increased and 2.) needs to be seriously adjusted for potential incoming growth. It absolutely needs to have a sliding scale of experience put in place that gets better as a skiller ranks up. That also is a must. It's to hard for a skiller at a higher level to get skilling materials and added to that problem is the amount needed per rank continues to increase. The old style of the game the current set up was fine, now it is not. There needs to be a level cap at 10 levels higher than the max item level of the game so ilvl-55 so skilling cap should be 65. A player needs to be able to hit rank 65 within a reasonable amount of time, reasonable being in the 2 year range or 1000-1200 hours spent range. There needs to be an adjustment in the ratio of item level and drop level of the skillers now. It can be in a 10% increase which is where the +10 levels over the item level comes in. Each 10% gives real and actual chances to roll desirable stats. Example. Say you are rank 10 in muting and you are muting level 10 items. Rank 10 and ilvl10 gives you the base chance at rolls. Rank 11 and Ilvl10 would be a 10% increase on those chances. This goes up 10% each rank you get higher than rank 10 up to 100%.
"Well then you'd be getting a 100% chance to roll good item stats"
Answer- NO. If the base chance is say 10% then you'd cap out at a 20% chance to roll desirable stats once you were 10 ranks higher. Worth going for and not hurting or flooding the game at the same time.
This needs to be published in clear writing on the portal so players can see and understand "ok if i want a better chance and making fg or getting better gear i need to invest this or that to get there".
To do that the stats would need a slight tweaking but most importantly the math must be redone to get us back to working as intended. The desirable stats need to be in a small group, then in a group after that a next set of usable stats and so on etc. So when you roll an item you're rolling the chance it will get: EE, Str, Dex, Int, Vita. Then it rolls second group and so on all the way out to Unique. The math is already set up this way and the game was created this way; it's why stats on an item are always listed in the order they are just like it's listed on the portal. After the 4th update in LS's history the math and item stats stopped being adjusted correctly because of the increase in player base and the path LS looked to be taking. That meant when a new stat was added to the game it was thrown into the rotation all the way down to today. The issue and error is that with each line of stat an item will get that line is rolled with every 39 stats available. (the 38 magical stats and the blank stat to roll a zero or no stat; which is how we get a white item, magica, rare, etc)
That's one part of the error, the other started when caps were put in place. The way the calculations are done in todays game. (After an item gets to the point of level determination - char level, monster level, skiller level, well, weller, map, group size, etc) Say you're going to get a magical or one stat item; every stat has the hard caps in place and it sees those for the ilvl that will be dropping. It then has a scale it places on each stat which is a % assigned to the number it drops. What's that mean? Every stat in the game is set to drop more to it's low end of the cap than it's high end. This should be uniformed across every magical stat. That is not the case. So it makes a nightmare of a cluster when it's rolling the item. An item not only rolls every stat per every line, it also keeps the same assigned % for each and every line. Sorry I'm getting to wordy and technical. Basically it was never this way in the beginning which is why we would see a lot more items with multiple good and high stats. Today we're very very lucky to have 2. It's like this because the math didn't get reworked through each update and addition to it. So we've snowballed to the crap we see in todays drops across all methods in the game. This isn't a hard thing to correct, especially when you're staring at the numbers.
Everything is close with the game now to being great and appealing, just need the necessary changes. Fix the mechanics issues, math issues, adjust with a mind on the future of the game. And then update the freaking portal I mean seriously it's to the point a new player goes into the game first to play then looks at the portal and he thinks there's another game on the site somewhere else also.