kTOS User Meetup Summary

Greetings, Saviors!

Recently, a meetup with players from our Korean servers took place, where questions were answered and our dev team shared a bit of what we have in mind in terms of the development of Tree of Savior.

Today, we thought we’d share some details of this meetup with you here at the dev blog to let you in on some of the things we’re preparing and also gauge your opinions on the themes we discussed.

First, these are the main goals our dev team is working to implement in the near future:

1. Improve the damage calculation system.
2. Increase the efficiency and revise the effects of each stat.
3. Create formulas to replace the currently fixed-number skill attack values and effects.
4. Revise the basic stats of all equipment items.
5. Readjust the efficiency and cost of enhancement/transcendence.
6. Readjust the difficulty of all fields and dungeons.
7. Overall improve the chat UI and develop new group chat functions.
8. Standardize and simplify item trade policies.

As for the contents of our session, below are some of the topics we discussed with the players, summarized in a Q&A format.

Transcendence and Balance

Q: Item transcendence comes up too early in the game, and the effect it has on overall balance seems a little excessive.

A: Originally, we introduced the transcendence system to give items a higher degree of importance in the game. We don’t want to devalue transcendence, since it would negatively affect players who already invested in it, so we are reviewing ways to increase the supply of transcendence items in order to reduce the gap.

Q: Being a magic class is tough…

A: We want to make it easier for magic classes to play solo in regular fields. We expect some of the difficulties felt by these classes can be alleviated by readjustments in the transcendence system and item rebalancing, so we’re going to make more specific plans after we test these out.

Q: If you think about all the new equipment that’s going to come out in the future, it becomes a little too difficult to invest in transcendence, especially if you use a sub-weapon. Even with multiple characters, it’s a lot of work.

A: In a way, the game already allows you to “recycle” your transcended items by restoring either part of the Blessed Gems or the item itself, but we are also considering making transcended equipment tradable. Perfecting the transcendence system is a bigger priority at the moment, however.

 

The group of kTOS players met with IMC representatives at our offices in Seoul.

 

Announcements and Communication

Q: We don’t get many updates from you on what you’re working on and what your projects are for the game. Even if your plans end up not working out, we’d rather you at least communicate with us and let us in on the progress.

A: The truth is that it has always been a little intimidating for us to talk about our plans for TOS, considering the amount of well-documented bugs we have yet to fix. Slowly but surely, however, we’ve started to work more on communicating our ideas and plans for the game, and we continue to strive for improvement on that area. One concern we have is figuring out the right stage of development at which to announce anything we might be working on, given that we do need to be at least somewhat sure that we can carry it out…

Premium and Cosmetic Items

Q: We get the feeling that new costumes are often released too late, and even when we do want to buy them, their prices aren’t exactly affordable.

A: Last year was a constant struggle against bugs. We refrained from pushing the marketing of the game too much until we had some of the most basic issues fixed, and at the same time we didn’t want the gameplay at the time to rely excessively on paid items. In order to be able to service TOS in the long run, we don't think premium items should have too high of a priority on our list of aspects to improve on. We will continue to review our stance on this, but we don’t want anything premium to have too big of an effect on the core gameplay.

Q: We understand that you want the game to be working at its best, but the players don’t want to wait. We wish we had more non-combat-related things to do in the game, decorative elements, housing, etc. The lack of premium items means that, even when we do spend money on TOS, there isn’t much we can do with it.

A: We have received similar suggestions from players regarding non-combat play, including some really interesting ones we would surely like to review. We will continue to ponder on them and hopefully we can introduce more interesting items in the future.

Addons

Q: Some addons give unfair advantages to those who use them; we want to know your stance on these. Also, would you develop convenience addons for TOS?

A: We wish we could review every single addon used for TOS, but realistically it’s something we cannot do. We can’t vouch for the reliability of any external addon, so our general stance is that it’s best to avoid them, although we do not punish the use of addons unless they are considered harmful to the game. We are, however, considering applying some functions of existing addons into TOS.

 

It was definitely interesting hearing the players talk about their experiences with TOS face-to-face.

 

Item Performance and Stats

Q: Can you explain why certain leather armor now increases INT??

A: Our intent with this was to reduce the restrictions on the various types of armor for each class tree. Our impression is that it’s currently tilting towards plate armor.

Q: Each class has always had its own suitable type of armor; if you start changing things now it will only confuse players. We think it’s best for each type of armor to have a concrete concept attached to it.

A: This isn’t the first time we set out a strong concept then ended up making a compromise on it. Our current plans are to make hard-concept equipment more focused towards PvP. It’s a subject we still need to consider.

Instanced Dungeon Matching

Q: Auto-matching in instanced dungeons sometimes creates parties that are really unbalanced in terms of class distribution.

A: If we focus on having a more equal distribution of classes in auto-matched parties, it will end up extending the time necessary to create a party. We need to consider what the optimal way to go about this is, since we also have to take in account the number of players in the queue.

Q: How about allowing us to enter missions with a mercenary NPC or adjusting the mobs’ HP according to the number of party members?

A: Both suggestions are already being considered and have a chance of making it into the game sooner or later.

Bugs and Testing

Q: How do you test for bugs? How do you go about fixing bugs that you can’t recreate on the test server and only manifest on the live servers?

A: We encounter many different types of bugs, from those that affect both the live and test servers, to those that only sometimes appear on the test server. In cases where it’s difficult for us to recreate the bug, the process of analyzing and fixing it often gets delayed.

Q: When is Briquetting going to be fixed?

A: We are very sorry for the trouble it’s causing. We are still investigating the cause of this bug and hope we can find a solution soon.

Guild Upgrades and Guild Wars

Q: Guild raids lack a lot of practicality and it’s currently too difficult to increase the level of our guilds. We need more motivation for investing Talt, and we wish we could get better reward items, like titles or decorations. Also, after you introduced neutrality, guild war contents are pretty much dead. Do you have any plans to take it back?

A: We don’t really want to remove guild neutrality. We do want to improve on issues like delays, location errors, lag, etc. and create a better environment for PvP gameplay. The option for neutrality will remain, however.

 

What would you ask the TOS devs if you had the chance to meet the team in person?

 

Other Feedback and Complaints

Q: Can you allow us to use TP to extract gems without a penalty?

A: The value of gems varies a lot depending on their grade, so it’s not easy to put a TP price on it. We’ll try to think of ways to make this work.

Q: There are so many problems with Sorcerer bats. If the Wugushi poisonous insect disappears, the Sorcerer summons disappear with it. You also can’t control the direction in which the summons attack. Not to mention the SP consumption is out of this world…

A: We agree that these are issues that cause inconvenience for players, although we should clarify that the fact that you can’t control the direction of summon attacks is indeed an intended feature.

Q: We wish it was easier to recognize lucky mobs…

A: We will consider ways to make them more visible.

Skill-related User Opinions

1) The damage of low-rank attack skills is too low.
2) We wish it was easier to view the amount of skill-related material items. It’s also very inconvenient to have to visit an NPC every time we need these skill materials.
3) One minute is way too short for buffs. The cooldown time for skills is also too long.
4) The pros and cons of skills should be more balanced. Some skills only have pros, which makes them disproportionally popular.
5) Make skill values a percentage instead of fixed numbers.

Other User Opinions

1) It can be hard to tell where each of our items is when we have a lot of characters.
2) There’s too much competition for field bosses, which often leads to arguments between players. We wish there was more content we can enjoy together as allies.
3) Regular monsters use stun way too often, especially considering there’s no way for our characters to cancel it.
4) We wish there was a system that would allow us to “hire” NPCs.
5) If you aren’t going to allow us to trade silver, will you at least consider an alternative? This game has so many restrictions, it feels like an RPG from the ‘90s :(
6) Please increase the number of basic slots in the Team Storage. Also, we need a way to deal with the problem of being unable to retrieve silver from the Team Storage after our Token period ends.
7) So many beautiful fields in TOS are abandoned… I suggest you improve the effects of their Collections?
8) The fact that clicking on mouse mode controls both moving and attacking causes many unnecessary problems. Please separate the controls for these two actions.
9) Having Team Battles be 2:2 can cause a big gap between the participating characters. I think 3:3 would be a better option.

 

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We look forward to your reactions on the subjects we discussed in this Q&A, so do leave a comment and let us know what you think.

And if you’re wondering, we are preparing another GM meetup soon in our Steam servers! We will make a separate announcement on it once we have the details, so keep an eye on the News page.