Posts by anthonysolaris

Hello everyone, Twilight here. For some background information, I haven’t really looked at the forums for over a year, and stopped playing on this version of Soul Worker close to that; you can look at post history and see that aside from two odd-out posts I stopped having major activities since Mar 2018. However, I still keep up with the foreign versions of this game and regrettably hang out with Humble and Co since I was a member of ExG- Roska’s leadership in the old days with the dinosaurs. The crew has been understandably fuming for quite a while, but lately Humble has been on the warpath so I thought I’d do him a favor and give him some nuclear animation. You know I really like Soul Worker too, and I’ve written stuff to Gameforge (GF) before, but they’re not too fond of even looking at anything unless a mass amount of people complain. Also, since I literally haven’t installed this game in like a year, some of the information I have on the server might be out of date. Feel free to ignore that incorrect info, but for the most part it shouldn’t affect the section where it’s brought up more than changing “a current problem” to “a historical problem that’ll most likely show up again.” That being said, here is an analysis of the reasons for why this server currently and historically has been a bad experience for so many people and why you too should bail ship if nothing changes.

Table of Contents

1. RNG RNG R_G since it’s been 1000 attempts and I can’t draw an N

2. Look a Maintenance! Yay New Costumes! Wait, that’s it???

3. Don’t worry GF, I teach marketing and economics classes so if you need some brushing up feel free to enroll

1) RNG RNG R_G since it’s been 1000 attempts and I can’t draw an N

For some weird reason money, GF not only chooses to keep outdated game mechanics in this game, but also chooses to implement some nice RNG mechanics.

I present to you, the Grutin Wheel:

Whoops wrong image here’s the GF official Image:

Sorry, it’s really hard to find it in all these images, here we go:

Let me present to you, Western Soul Worker’s 100% home-grown, authentic, stamped firmly with USA (or EU) good. It’s almost as great as our other server exclusive product:

Complete with the inability to preview costumes, slow response times, a very unintuitive setup, and unique western packages bundle what you need with $50 of what you don’t need and that’s the only way to get it! At least they removed buying able to buy upgrade mats directly tho amirite.

Okay, if I didn’t make my point already, why does GF take the incentive to add so many more RNG type elements than already exist in the game. Just for reference, in every other server all the costumes are purchasable straight from the shop for $10-$20 depending on how many pieces they include and the only time they ever tried to put it in a gacha (Soul Worker JP’s first ever attempt to sell a new cash costume), it was so poorly received that they never did it again (and even then they had the decency to give you the costume if you didn’t get by 100 tries). Meanwhile here, we get a whole new program designed just so we can throw costumes into a RNG gacha but what about my bug fixes. I mean I guess you can argue that costumes don’t have stats themselves so putting them in an RNG is fair gameplaywise, but it’s still shady af and morally inept (and kinda doesn’t make sense; more on that in section 3). Unfortunately, if GF only loved RNG here we wouldn’t have so much of a problem, but their RNG addiction is seeped into gameplay as well.

So I think it’s safe to say that the biggest outcry recently and since time immemorial is the fact that we don’t have the loyalty system, GF lying about loyalty system time and time again, and the fact that there’s no plans to ever implement the loyalty system. If you aren’t aware, loyalty provides certain bonuses to NPCs, the most important being reduction in crafting cost and materials, and upgrade rate increase and cost decrease. Every other server including the illegal one has loyalty, though apparently TW loyalty doesn’t increase the enhancing rate. I dunno how accurate this is b/c I’ve never heard any complaints about it Mandarin and everyone I see has a +9 I pretty sure they have some way of supplementing this (they probably have the KR server higher base rates) but either way that doesn’t stop them from being pretty fire in terms of player base. Meanwhile we have RNG bonanza. In my guild alone we had >10 people quit since they couldn’t get +8/+9 in anywhere between 300-1900 attempts. I quit without even trying my last ~300 attempts despite having >2000 Anti-destructions since I used ~1200 WUCS to never see a +8 in my life and I ran out of strength expansions kek.

Look here, the problem is that we already have a bunch of RNG that affects gameplay for which may I add we literally have the un-updated, lower rate version. To list some: AR Cards, Brooches, Grade (0-100%), Armor Familiars, Energy Converters, Tags, Whether we’re going to have an emergency maintenance today for NA only or getting hit with unbearable amounts of lag etc. Aside from armor familiars, all of that is monetized and half of them are replaced every time gear comes out. And believe me none of that shit is easy to get what you need. I opened >1500 and no more than 2000 AR cards and I still don’t even have one hidden rita, nor a level 3 Grutin Army or Big Plastica (╬●∀●). At least I’m not like half of my guild mates who didn’t get a full playset through 5k cards lul. Do you really need to monetize further the upgrading system? I’m actually really glad that AOV familiars and soul stones aren’t monetized or have RNG upgrading- whoops, shouldn’t give them ideas. See the big problem here is a fully +9 decked individual can literally be half as strong as another +9 fully decked individual depending on those other factors. I still remember when a guildmate who quit gave me his +9 Aurith Gun, with that equipped I had 10k Crit Damage while my other guildmate with a +9 Aurith Gun + his whale powah had 18k Crit Damage. See the thing is, when everyone has a certain baseline (+9 all gear), there isn’t going to be some extreme variation more than like 20 minutes to run 10 manic AOV manic vs. 40 minutes to run 10 AOV manic, but when people are struggling to get that and might have +7 you can get 40 minutes (or even 20 minutes) versus 100 minutes to run 10 AOV manic yes parties with +6/+7 will struggle to run that shit in 10 minutes. That also means people literally don’t want to group up with random people with bad gear because if you get 2 pick-ups instead of bumping your overall time from say, 20 minutes to 25 minutes, it could bump your time from 20 minutes to 40 minutes and there’s no way people like spending twice as long to run content and this is if people are being fully efficient which lol good try that’ll never happen. Aside from nice guilds with people with good equipment basically non-existent, there aren’t reliable pick-ups extinct, so unless you got big bucks or you’re blessed by RNG gods or you have extreme patience you’re outta there which means this happens in the middle of the day.

(Hi Shinoa, :D)

You know what cash item people in KR/JP/TW need the most? They need Anti-destructions because they’re enhancing so much thanks to WUCs being abundant and the fact that they can actually reasonably get +9. Meanwhile, when I quit people literally had thousands of Anti-destructions sitting around because they didn’t have enough WUCs/ Strength expansions to attempt getting their weapon to +9 lmao. GF I know you love your RNG but this isn’t where you need RNG and people are leaving already pced tf out because of it.

2) Look a Maintenance! Yay New Costumes! Wait, that’s it???

Alright so the last gameplay update we got was SkyClock palace, which KR got 8 months ago. At least we’re no longer 1.5 years behind a game that only existed for 1.5 years anymore at least, ¾ a year improvement. But guess what, Grutin Wheel Update! What was that, Knight costume came out 2.5 months ago in KR? Oh boy, I do love my biweekly maintenance's that add items to the cash shop for a limited time but that gronco bug didn’t get fixed for 7 months okay.

Look, if we’re going to be updating the cash shop and focus the updates on what makes money, at least have the common decency to update the rest of the content at a reasonable rate. There’s literally been periods of time where I’ve seen the cash shop cycle 4 sets of costume before the fact that a bug exists is even addressed. Do you think people want to buy things when they’re having a sub-optimal gameplay experience? Aside from actual gameplay content, let’s go over some other things. Most bugs aside from cash shop ofc? A few months. Emergency/Unscheduled Maintenance? One per month on average. Getting skill balances over? A year. Tradeable Brooches? Over a year. Adjusting Cash Shop prices? Also Over a year. Implementing Brooch/AR Changes Higher Rates btw? What’s that, never heard of it. Botting problem? Actually they gave up before you did XD. I dunno, when an update is “Primal has been out for a bit, now tagged primal weapons can drop lol,” you bet I’m throwing my computer out of the window after being the sole survivor in my guild of +9, I have to do it again. It’s exactly these sorts of backwards compatible, nonsense updates when future updates literally solve the problems for you that makes player scratch their heads and then exit through the door. People are literally leaving this server to go play on that illegal one that infringes on copyright. Look just because KR took a certain period of time to put out content doesn’t mean this server has to wait the exact same amount of time to put it out. You can’t convince me that translating, and publishing content somehow takes longer than actually developing it.

I know you can’t appease everyone; some people will always complain about the update speed or some thing or the other that’s inconsequential (stamina), but you know people are far less likely to get irritated when you give them uneven content speed updates and the only one that updates faster is cash-shop related. Like for example, if skill balances/item changes previously were shipped over quickly instead of us having outdated ones forever, you can beat people wouldn’t mind that even if content was only release monthly/ bimonthly. Or if the level up box rewards/ new character sprint rewards are these even updated in here I literally have no idea earlier. See, it’s like if you’re going to go out of update schedule don’t just be pulling over these cash shop changes and only cash shop changes that make it worse on the consumer mind you, bring over the Quality of life changes too please. After all, why is the new content I’m seeing another limited time costume when my SF bar has been broken for 20 years without hearing anything.

SF bar broken? Don’t worry, we got you with 12 cash shop updates before we fix it

Long story short; it’s okay if it takes 10 months instead of 3 months to catch up reasonably to what is out, just don’t make those 10 months miserable okay.

3) Don’t worry GF, I teach marketing and economics classes so if you need some brushing up feel free to enroll

You see, normally a company tries to do something to protect their image and appear to be upstanding and reasonable. Therefore, I’m confused on why we’re actively sabotaging our image by either: saying sorry and that’s it for the 100^th time, not actually saying anything, or literally lying on record and then having to apologize about that. Hello guys, I don’t think you have the customer loyalty to do that kind of stuff and get away with it. You know, at this point I’m convinced that Soul Worker is literally sustained by a handful of super massive giant blue whales that probably already have hit 6 digits in spending in game and all the other monetary transactions are insignificant. I mean, I dunno how else they could get these kind of ratings and still be afloat.

How do you even get a 0.6/10 rating on trust pilot wat

Hey at least their own employees like them (at least they’re not rated worse than companies known to physically abuse their employees amirite)

This is literally worse than when the KR server was about to go up in flames. For those of you who don’t know, KR at one point was down to like single digit users and about to rear end up in the water. They literally had the “biggest miracle of the Korean gaming industry ever” to recover due some megalia shit and even then, they went from top 10 PC Bangs back to low numbers in 2 months because of bad management. Unlike GF however, Lion Games has actively been working to fix their image so nowadays they rank about 60-70 in PC bangs and spike to 30-40 whenever they have a big update unlike NA which spikes 100 people and then drops back down to 700 average users. In fact, Soul Worker gets better numbers than Closers in KR nowadays, which was the most popular anime MMO and all of its other servers are doing fine minus this one.

Since I’m an econ PhD (in progress) and not a marketing PhD, I’m not exactly an expert on eastern vs western marketing practices but one thing that’s way more prominent there is brand loyalty. If somebody plays soul worker in korea, you can bet they are consistently spending money on it there. As opposed to us here, probably 80% of all transactions are one off $10 or so transactions which is why GF is trying to use whales to keep this game afloat. Heck, when I stopped playing people weren’t even buying VIP anymore since even the lower incentive spenders lost what little incentive to spend on the game. If you’re not familiar with it, consumers have different tiers of willingness to pay for products, so you design your cash shop around extracting maximum value from all those different tiers. On the other hand, GF scrapped all the bottom tiers and only focuses on their behemoth class customers which means for the majority of the customers they just don’t want to spend anything on the game. I literally bought $50 of SC back in the day and I literally still have $50 SC lying around b/c there’s nothing worthwhile to buy. What is this bs limited akasha bundling where you get 2 limited cards with 50 normal akasha’s. That’s right, you heard. Not 2 bonus transmitters. Two total transmitters you want and 50 that you don’t need, yippee. Like for example, in KR your low valuation customers are the ones that buy the bundled packages that have a bit of each cash item, or costumes. Your high-valued customers are those whales like Kim Mayo or Palttuk who make those KR videos where they open a bunch of RNG things and explode lol. But they get what they need b/c KR has a ceiling system which means you have bad luck protection. Meanwhile NA everything is targeted to whales. Costumes? Put that shit in the Grutin wheel 2000 boxes no aurith wings wut. AR Cards/ Brooches/ Flexors etc.? Make the brooches untradeable so gotta play RNG to get the ones you want banzai, 2 chances for special akasha for $50 have fun. Value Pack? What do you mean our flexor value pack that is purchase once a day is too popular? Make that shit once an account so the whales stiffen up and buy 10000 from cash shop instead. Yo wait a sec the only thing that’s reasonable to buy for low value customers is VIP.

Aside from the cash shop being made for whales don’t forget you used to be able to directly buy enhancing mats lul, GF clearly hasn’t taken the typical players experience into consideration when tackling certain aspects of the game. Here, let’s give a good example of good customer consideration. When Lion Games rebalanced their brooches, they didn’t give out any specifics and wiped the market by delisting all the brooches so people couldn’t snipe the posted one’s before people could login and prevent speculation. While this sucks for people who fused brooches and stuff that ended up being good, at least it prevented people from screwing with the economy. Meanwhile what did GF do. Messed around with energy converter stuff in casual raids that caused 10x price change in one day which screwed a bunch of people over. Wat. I mean they literally made VIP get rid of market sales fee which literally made speculation and market manipulation a billion times worse. Not to mention the blatant inflation from bots which they literally ignored and all their other not announced and poorly documented changes which they don’t ever think about the consequences and just put them out. They literally also never have events and when they do, when people do them too much they literally nerf them. Easter what Easter. When I quit the illegal trading rate of dz to real money was $4.4 for 1billion dz. You know how long it takes to actually get 1 billion dz naturally collecting that from dungeons? It’d take you at least 3 months if you did it reasonably, maybe 1 month if you went full on hardcore dz collecting mode. But the whales don’t care, they drop a few thousand and then boom giga inflation because suddenly trillions of dz are in the market I kid you not I knew people with over a trillion dz. Do you know how problematic that makes that makes trading on the market that only trades up to 1 billion dz when a lot of gods are worth over 1 billion dz? That’s literally prime marketplace for people to scam and shark people but GF didn’t attempt to address that problem Our guild beware of this scammer list was literally 10 pages long. Oi I mean people are literally buying gold instead of buying SC shouldn’t GF be concerned are you sure you’re not literally running the gold sites. If you want to make money quick in KR, you sell cash items like costumes but in NA you buy gold. In fact, the reason for GF’s server deflation isn’t because of some amazing tactics by GF to combat botting, it’s literally because all the gold buyers stopped botting in soul worker because it was so unprofitable since all the whales quit eventually. The reason the gold prices are through the roof nowadays is not because of demand push inflation; the prices were literally decreasing when the game was populated but now that all the supply is gone, cost push inflation is causing it. It’s a real sad day when even the gold bots are bailing ship here for customer experience. In any case, it’s clear that customer satisfaction only applies if you’re a customer with a big wallet.

In conclusion, the server is a S+ grade health hazard and our recommendation is to avoid all contact if possible. I’d say not too expect too much unless Roska descends in a miracle and saves our server. Alright, feel free to have a field day if you want to discuss, but I’m not going to be responding to anything cuz I’m too lazy and this shit’s already 15 pages lul.

You, the soul worker, are not actually physically present in the dungeon. You are essentially taking the place of Tenebris in these dungeons and experiencing what he did during the void 15 years ago.

Well, that's all I'm aware of from reading the KR stuff and from overseas players telling me.

For the last time I'm not a lolicon nor a pervert.

My guild is full of trolls >_>

Zodai Wow, props to the dedication. 13 Pages is nothing to scoff at and you'd be hard pressed to find people who write that much for a school paper, let alone for a game they happen to play. If you ever want a fellow long-winded individual to chat with, do pm me.

That being said, while I do favor some of Zodai's suggestions (particularly the monthly subscription bonuses and adjusting the EP costs for lower level zones), I'm against strongly changing the current Energy system as it stands. I only support changes that at worst result in a net benefit across all users (Kaldor-Hicks improvement) and any major alterations of the system will result in the opposite. Frankly, I don't care if people stop reading at this point and proceed to flame, down-vote, and meme me. But I'd rather have this system that is inconvenient for me in order to protect most players and retain game integrity.

Any game designed with a energy system in mind is not designed to intentionally screw people out of their gaming time but rather balance how they want content to be progressed healthily for the players and for the game as a whole. Particularly, energy relates to inflation. Every game is going to have inflation; that's just a consequence of player progression and how higher level areas naturally give more in-game currency than low level areas. The game is designed with cash sinks (a prominent example is enhancing, as well as market fees) so that inflation progresses at an okay and healthy rate. Having some inflation is okay; past the starting days of a game the market normally levels out and prices remain pretty constant until major updates. You know what is problematic though? Hyperinflation. What causes hyperinflation? Botting.

Now, botters don't just sit down randomly and decide "I'm going to infest this game with my bot army muahahahaha- *cough." Botters also have a limited amount of resources at their disposal to make money with; most prominently are time, in-game currency generation, and probability of detection. Energy helps to mitigate all three of these variables. With limited energy, not only do the botters have higher initial setup costs (getting their bots to cap), they have to do more manual work (swapping bots out when they hit max energy as opposed to leaving one online all day), they're also more likely to be caught before major payout (as a consequence of the longer time to cap). Now, I don't have any clue how good Gameforge's bot detection system is, but let's be generous in our hypothetical and say 2 weeks on average to catch and remove a bot. Without energy, the botter can set up the bot, get it to max in 1 day, and get 13 days worth of max-level revenue before it gets banned. With energy, the botter has to spend longer to get to max level, let's say a week, and then they'll get 7 days of max-level revenue before it gets banned. The worse Gameforge's bot detection the less this matters, but nevertheless, being gated by energy represents a real cost for botters.

So then, you may be wondering how hyperinflation would actually kill off the game and not just be an extreme annoyance to people who want to hoard their DZ. Consumer demand for in-game currency hinges on two different things; their risk of being caught and the cost of buying the in-game currency with real money. Last time I saw one of those gold selling websites (yesterday night), they were selling DZ at approximately 1mil=5USD. You know how much hair colors are selling for on the market right now? 2.5mil. You know how much hair colors cost in the shop right now? Approximately 5USD. Thus, if you're a player with income, you're going to buy premium items from the premium shop and sell them in-game as opposed to buying gold from a botter. One scenario means that the publisher gets money and premium items are more available to free players while the other results in money going to third-parties and the game going down. Regardless of whether or not you agree with being able to sell premium items is up for debate, but it is objectively better for the game health than the alternative scenario. Additionally, once gold-buying becomes cheaper and the underground economy becomes settled, the risk from buying illegally becomes less and less. If you think it's pay to win now, it'll be worse then and your gold drops from dungeons will be entirely negligible. There have been many examples of NA ports of energy based games with some type of unhinged energy usage and they've experienced hyperinflation resulting in some shutting down. Where did all the hyperinflation come from? The rich players buying gold from botters to circumvent the intended effect of cash sinks thus driving up demand for additional botters and creating a compounding cycle.

Now, onto the topic of the impact of the Energy system on the typical player. No, the fact that you have a bunch of threads on the forum is not indicative that the typical player despises energy. Even the fact that there's a poll where more people want uncapped energy than no change lends no further support to this. There's already two stages of bias present here: 1) you're population is biased because you're assuming that all people use the forum equally, when having free time and having strong opinions and the need to share these opinions predisposes people to going onto the forums, especially those who are extremely unsatisfied since they have the most to gain as opposed to those extremely satisfied and 2) the people taking the poll are biased due to voluntary response bias and the fact that it's an open survey. Here's where numbers come into play. Zodai assumes the casual, thus at most average, gamer plays 2-2.5 hours a day and would like to play 3-3.5 hours a day, while literature and closed surveys assume that the typical gamer spends 1-2 hours a day playing games, across all of the games they play. The only research I came across while scouring papers that suggests between 2-3 hours of play a day on average come from subscription games, but those are inclined to be higher than non-subscription based games due to human psychology on sunk costs. Thus, with nearly no information on player demographics of this game, it's better to assume it's closer matched to the typical player demographic. This means your typical player most likely isn't going to be hindered by energy costs. The fact that the naturally biased poll showed a meaningful number of people who don't care about the system or simply want a larger cap should be telling that you don't need an overhaul.

Which leads to why so many threads are popping up about Energy. You can naturally split the population into 4 segments based on time and money spent: More-active and less-active and willing-to-purchase and not willing-to-purchase. The less-active people generally don't run into issue with Energy and the more-active, willing-to-purchase can purchase enough energy to feasibly satisfy their extra playtime (whether or not this is acceptable for Gameforge to sell energy is another topic in itself that warrants discussion elsewhere). So who's getting shafted? The more-active, not willing-to-pay people, who are the people you say raising the issue on the forums, since they have the most to gain from the change. And of course, one cannot fault people for acting in self-interest. However, unless you produce a representative sample from random sampling (minimal bias), or bring forth a petition that has at minimum 1,000 signatures (theoretical floor for 10% of population), you can't justifiably claim that a statistically significant portion of the population is affected. Do you know who provides the majority of the income to Gameforge for this game? The whales provide on average, from market reports, 80% of the revenue and they generally fall into the more-active, willing-to-purchase category. The remainder is provided by one-time purchasers and small, consistent spenders, generally in the less-active, willing-to-pay category. So you know what uncapping energy does to the company and consumer groups? In the short-run, both less-active groups see negligible additional benefits, while the more-active groups see realized benefits since they are no longer capped and the buying group no longer pays and the company loses money since they can't sell vitamins. However, in the long-run, you're screwing over both of your less-active groups since they can't keep within reasonable distance of the more-active ones and thus the less-active, willing-to-pay is far less inclined to spend money. You're also screwing over all but the most-active in the more-active, not willing-to-pay category since the gap created from gold-buying is going to mean more hours need to be invested to get the same gold for free. The more-active, willing-to-pay group is least affected since they are just going to switch over to gold buying for everything except gachas and the like, since there's no incentive to buy premiums to sell on market. And you know what happens when you lose an entire consumer base and a good proportion of the revenue from the other? You either get less resources spent on the game since it's not as profitable and at worst, shutdown.

Gameforge has to look out for the integrity of the entire game, and there are always going to be people unhappy with the situation in every case. In this case, the unhappy people are the vocal ones who've taken to the forum to try to get changes. I too am a person with loads of free time between school and writing essays, and would love to do nothing more than play as much as I want of this game before I inevitably end up dropping the game in 3 months if I did so. To all the anecdotes of people who claim they've played games for many hours a day nonstop over many years, good for you but the fact is burnout is real. The typical person experiences decreasing returns to scale, which means they're getting less enjoyment from the game, heightened if they consume it in mass. Which means a lot of people who want the change will most likely not stick around after the change. What this change will do is allow a small number of non-paying individuals with lots of free time and dedication to compete with the largest spenders while the majority of people are set extremely behind, as opposed to non-paying customers being gated behind largest spenders, but by a much less smaller margin. And what's wrong with that, that's their prerogative as a substantial financial contributor. No matter what you happen to be doing, an individual dropping $1000 a month is helping Gameforge much more than you are, especially if you're spending long hours grinding each day to remain relevant. And that's how it works in real life too; the largest financial contributors are normally voting stakeholders, while the typical consumers matters very little. I don't care about being neck and neck with some whale when our server population is almost gone; I'd rather be behind but able to do comparable content with a healthy population.

Thus, if anything I'd like to see some adjustments for Rocco and Candus, or perhaps newly created characters get sent 100fp packs for the first 3 days following creation. It's my belief that characters should be able to get through Candus in around 2 days and then the game should slow down a bit past then. People are generally most excited when first playing the game and then it begins to taper off. Better to let them get through what basically is the essentials before they're set off to work towards end game. I also thinks it's cool for Gameforge to give out the EP pots and Mats during OBT and think they should continue this into release. People generally are very excited at this point and want to play more, so now would be the best time to give them out. However, they should limit this, and things like the current half EP thing going on, to major updates and events. You want additional energy to be available to people when the majority is happy and excited it use it. Not when there's downtime where only a few people are using it effectively and it's susceptible to abuse.

Tl; dr The Energy system is more constricting to some players more than others but as a whole it is necessary to ensure that this game remains healthy in the long-term for the populace overall. Also, since this opinion seems to be unpopular on the boards, I don't mind if you bash me, call me a white-knight defender of justice for Gameforge, or a crazy heretic that needs to be pitchforked and burned at the stake.

Update: We hit lvl 3 today and we have the 5% guild exp buff.

If you're active and lvl 30+, feel free to apply!

Posting here to wonder if anyone else had their mapped key bindings reset after the Maintenance. If it does turn out that this happens to many players after large updates, it would be a nice QoL change if this was fixed. Not immediately as pressing as other issues.

Frankly, this is getting silly. Gameforge, we understand it's open beta. We understand that you didn't have a closed beta or alpha, even if we don't necessarily agree with that. And yes, we understand that with no prior stress tests the servers are going to have issues. But everyone's patience is wearing thin. NA has consistently been running into problems (seems like we've had a maintenance every day and even some NA exclusive maintenances on to of that). At this point, you should realize NA probably contains a plurality if not nearly 50% of your players (going off the steam charts and how yesterday when NA went down the average player count was around half). Of course this server is going to have the most issues, since it has the largest number of possible errors.

I don't know if you're going to have a swift response today or not. But we already had yesterday, where the servers went down for approximately 6 hours before it worked momentarily again. In that time there wasn't a peep from any official, leaving NA to wonder what exactly was going on. I'm sure as a company, that you realize that goodwill is earned through actions rather than freely given. Coming into this game, I heard quick some questionable things about management, but wanted to reserve my judgement until some first-hand experience. It appeared that communication was making strides and there was movement in a positive direction. We were given approximate time frames for maintenances after people asked for it on forums. There were updates if maintenances needed to be extended. The foreboding and looming question of whether there would be a wipe was answered within a week. I was ready to write off whatever I'd heard before but now I'm not so sure.

Everybody knows that Gameforge is primarily an EU publisher. However, they are also publishing NA for Soul Worker, which is great for us consumers since we didn't have to wait for another publisher to pick it up and thus got the game faster. But if you're going to make the conscious decision to publish this game for a region, please publish this game responsibly. If you're intent is treat NA as just 1 server out of 7 rather than one that needs to special attention paid to it, you were better off leaving the NA licensing to another company. We understand that at these point in the day, you guys are past midnight and most likely are asleep. However, this server is your responsibility. At this point, there needs to be a reevaluation of what should be done to facilitate NA's success. Whether this be hiring more staff or diverting staff or whatever, this does not seem to be working out currently. If nobody can bother checking within a span of 6 hours right now, where problems are likely to happen, where's our guarantee this won't happen in the future?

I'm sure your staff has some marketing and management people, so you should definitely be familiar with customer loyalty and word of mouth. The loyal and repeating customers are generally thought to make up 80% of a company's purchases. They are also hard to retain but easy to lose. Bad news spreads by word of mouth 2-3 times as much a good news. How are you going to build that loyal customer base like this? If every time the server went down, we had a response within, let's say, 15 minutes, people would be more inclined to be forgiving than being instantly angry. Do you want somebody who plays the game to tell their friend "Soul Worker has some stability issues, but it's staff are always working on it and I'm sure it'll be a good game by launch" or "Frankly, I'm not sure when the servers are going to be up or down and I experience constant interruptions?"

If one has been paying attention to the forums recently, it can easily be seen that there has been many criticisms levied at Gameforge (some as a result of their actions and some not). There's always going to be people complaining about some aspect of the game. What makes or breaks it is whether or not there are also people who are understanding and okay with the current state of the game. If you have the majority of the statements negative as opposed to a mixture of comments in discussion, it will be difficult to retain new players simply from the lopsided exposure. I'd be inclined to believe that what people are saying is the truth if 80% of comments are negative as opposed to if there were both positive and negative. What people want from the staff is competency and confidence; if you're having issues with the servers, at least give us transparency.

Tl;dr Gameforge had a chance to have a relatively positive publishing, and it's up to them not to screw up any further.

The simple, straightforward answer is that if you think the price is too high, then don't buy it. If you've taken rudimentary economics, you know this stuff is all affected by supply and demand. Gameforge isn't dumb and actually wants to make money, so if they notice that something isn't selling well or not producing as much profit as they desire from it, they can change the price, since they don't have menu costs and doubly since they can use OBT as a justification and pull some "testing phase price adjustments" without it seeming like they majorly screwed up. I believe more likely than not that they have some internal data on pricing that they're using for initial prices and seeing the financial responses to them. Everybody can come onto the forums and complain as much as they want, but if Gameforge is a sensible company they'll take the complaints with a grain of salt and only act on them if it justifiable to their interests. Since people who complain have a vested interest in the complaint, the number of people posting on the forums complaining about the prices are going to be much higher than those who are indifferent, since the complainers are going to see a much larger benefit if the change goes through than if it doesn't. It doesn't matter if you have one hundred people complaining here if you have a few whales buying them in bulk. Personally, I'm not buying anything since I believe the prices are too high, and I'm asking all my acquaintances not to buy anything either. And that's the best thing you can do, abstain from purchasing and hope that the loss in consumer demand puts a large enough dent in the profit from the cash shop that Gameforge responds financially.

As for the difference in pricing, you have to understand that different countries have different regulations, tax laws etc. Normally, the prices aren't too different since the publisher is publishing the game within a geographically concentrated region, but Gameforge decided it would publish in both NA and EU, which are going to have much different costs associated with it and thus reflected in the purchasing price. Additionally, you're going with different consumer bases who have different amounts of income to purchase their currency, so the price points are naturally going to vary. You're not going to sell food in a third world country at the same price it's sold in the US, because then nobody can afford it. Granted, there's nearly not that large of a difference between NA and EU consumer bases, and the 2x price difference some people are stating seems particularly jarring. Price differences are understandable; however, if you publish across different regions that can easily communicate an extremely noticeable difference is likely to create dissatisfaction and reduce purchases. So they'll need to keep that in mind if they don't touch the rates. It sucks to be playing this game in Canada compared to EU, but hey, at least your fast food is cheaper on average.

What I can't find any reasonable justification for is changing the layout of the cash shop. It's not like they had to program the cash shop itself; they most likely straight up received those files from the developers and then chose to roll with making a new one. The old cash shop was actually pretty significant, since it not only let you preview costumes, it let you mix and match pieces to see what it would look like on your character. Additionally, some of these costumes have special emotes that were preview-able overseas and a large drawing point of the costume, so not being able to see this special emote is going to make people apprehensive about purchasing the more expensive costumes. Personally, I don't like this new cash shop style at all and I think we're losing some benefits the old one had.

Tl; dr Gameforge probably has reasons (correct or mistaken) for what they are doing, and complaining here will make you feel better but cross your fingers on seeing any meaningful changes.

Inb4 Gameforge follows KR release schedule and releases Iris before Jin.

These values are based on your base values. So anything that gives you percent max hp gives you extra hp equal to the percent of your hp when you have no items equipped. Same for defense and other such values.

For example, say you have 8k base hp, an armor that gives you 4k and another piece that gives you +25%. You're getting 2k from that +25% either way, whether or not the 4k is equipped.

So I only have experience playing on JP, but from looking around and through word of mouth I've been told in KR that Energy Point Rollover (the amount that you carry over above 200) is reset to 0 at the beginning of the week. In our case, this seems to be Monday at 9:00AM CET. Last time I checked on JP, your rollover EP never reset through the system, and it caught a lot of my guild members by surprise when the logged in today when they only had a flat 200. Since it appears that our server is based on KR (merged storage, no supporters), this feature was probably carried over.

Thus, what does everyone think about this. Personally, I'm against this since I can only think of negative effects and not positive ones. This will hurt the people who have variable weekends (not Saturday and Sunday) and irregular schedules. It effectively punishes people who are unable to play on certain days than others. For example, if I am free Monday and Thursday, but not on Tuesday and Wednesday, I will have 400 Energy available when I open this game on Thursday. However, if I am free Friday and Monday, but not Saturday and Sunday, I will have 200 available when I open this game on Monday. It should not affect most people, but it doesn't make sense that this mechanic can arbitrarily hurt people based on their scheduling.

With how some western communities already have issues with the Energy problem as a whole, I think this part of it should be considered to be removed since it doesn't seem to really help, but can end up hurting.

EDIT: Your fatigue is capped at 600, so the most you can save up is the equivalent of two extra days.

The developers said clearly there may or may not be a wipe depending on whether the game was broken enough to necessitate it. This information was stated pretty clearly and given out to everybody.

You had the choice to start playing early and risk being wiped or waiting until later and risk being behind. That's just the nature of trade offs. There was no unfair advantage such as early access or paywalling content. The fact is, the people who decided not to play consciously chose not to play and this is the result.

In terms of economics, the open beta was non-rivalrous and non-exclusive, and some people chose to make the investment and some chose not too. That's just life, and just like real life some times you lose out and sometimes you are rewarded.

The only issue that you can argue has made anything unfair is the fact that some people are arbitrarily blocked to the cash shop and others aren't depending on client, but that's a result of bugs and issues and not some deliberate attempt to hinder people's progress.

Quote from Amalthius

Quote from RubyRose

The premium shop only had 1 megaphone, 1 100 Energy consumable, 3 respawners, and 1 mat that recovers energy over 30 minutes.

ahhh so, thats a no to cosmetics being in the shop then? That's too bad i rly wanted to play with hair styles and colors and eye colors.

Cash shop is in testing phase, which is why it only has 4 items. Going by other versions, once it goes live you'll have the character appearance customization options available for purchase (more than the three available at creation)

For the sake of retaining the population of this game, this first town should feel like what it is, the first town. I don't mind the difficulty, but you're going to alienate a lot of casual players if they're getting one shot in the first few zones. Keep the hard and maniac difficulties sure, but look into adjusting the normal mode difficulties for some of the earlier dungeons.

Quote from Xandorai

This system sounds a bit retarded, if the information given here is all correct. anthonysolaris says that if/when you equip a card, its xp is reset, which means you cannot use the card you want to use until it is at the rank you want it to be at, given that you cannot fuse other cards into it unless it is not registered/being used. So if you get a nice card and use it, you'll have to pay money to remove it first in order to fuse other cards into it.

Hence why it's generally not recommend you level up cards until you have enough spares to get it to the next level.

It'd be easiest if you just think of the game difficulty as a standard parabolic curve.

If you want to rank your card up (indicated by the Chevrons in the top left corner), you must bring a card with 100% exp as well as a galaxy/nebula card depending on rank to the Akashi npc. Ranking up a card gives it a more powerful version of it's initial skill. Do keep in mind that in order to increase card exp, you have to sacrifice other cards (iirc it was 15 from rank 1 to rank 2 and 50 from rank 2 to rank 3) and that if you equip a card it's exp is reset. Thus, if you're planning on upgrading a card keep in mind that if you don't have the necessary materials to sacrifice for it you either won't be able to use it or will lose all it's progress.

Guild is up. Pm Ellain or Twilight in game for more details.

Iris out only dps Erwin on static large bosses like primal or D6. That's why you always see Iris at the top of the damage charts but Erwin does everyone else better. Haru only had a dps boost because she had job advancement before the rest but now that 3 people have it she's comparatively the same as before.

If you're going by JP, Stella was by far the most popular, Lily and Haru were relatively even behind her, and Erwin was in single digit percentages.

Past that, they stopped posting playrate data, so idk, but Jin also fell off a cliff from what I heard.