I was a bit annoyed and borderline outraged upon discovering that you can only have a single Knowledge Transfer per completion of a major story line/continent after the initial one. I discovered this when I tried to Knowledge Transfer my Berserker into Rohendel and the game told me I didn’t meet the requirements. Well, that really sucks because I was hoping to push my Berserker and Deathblade faster but now I’ll have to waste time questing again. I know you can skip Rohendel along with other places but I find that it’s better just to get through it since the lower Chaos Dungeons just don’t provide enough materials to move forward. You can probably just buy all the honing materials and pool all your alts’ lower level honing materials together but it feels redundant after a while. I guess in looking at this situation it’s one of those things where you feel like the game, which has already beaten your soul into a grave, decided to pull your dead soul back up and take a shit in its mouth.
Now, with three alts in Punika, I could just run a bunch of Guardian Raids with Flame Yoho on top of buying up all the guild honing materials and grab stuff from the sailing vendors, but it’s just so much work. People might think, “Well, you’re just complaining.” I am, I’m not going to lie. But when you’ve done this enough and you just want to get to the next stage, it’s just more nightmare fuel that slowly but surely eats up your “burned out” card. Maybe the only alt that’s worth doing Flame Yoho on is my Gunlancer just to see how he fares but at the same time, I just want to shoot myself to numb the pain.
I don’t think the Korean devs know how badly I want to wrap my hands around their throats and Bart Simpson them. They’ll probably like it as they masturbate with Kim Chee in a jar to that. But it sucks being blocked with very little opportunity to move forward for my higher end people. Maybe it’s my play style in having so many alts that really haven’t provided the value that people say that they should. But here’s the thing. I figured out where they get you. It’s in Tier 3 when you’re moving from the Punika Chaos Dungeons of levels 2 and up. What happens is that the percentage for being able to hone massively goes down with only tiny incremental changes that require not only tons of honing materials but gold as well. You see by this time you’ve become fully invested into the game to get to this point and you more than likely want to progress. But between that point and the 1370 mark, it’s a long, painful journey especially if you don’t have a reliable group of people to play with. So what happens in the game is that for those that made the journey up until that moment, especially the F2P people, you have only a few options available:
- Bite the bullet and start looking for an active clan that doesn’t mind your presence
- Recruit heavily for your own guild, especially if your guild died off because they arrived at the same conclusion about how the game operates from the above statement
- Create alts in hoping that there’s enough available content to keep you occupied while you inch (actually millimeter if it was a verb) your way up through molasses (and dev cum) hoping you can get by on what you have and/or that the devs come to their senses in seeing that the barrier beyond a certain point is ridiculous and will kill the game with a slow painful death
- Lose your soul and break out the wallet because you have a gambling addiction issue and are self medicating because your real life sucks this bad
- Quit and regain your sanity
I’m willing to bet most people are in the #5 category because games like this end up not lasting long once the luster wears off (and most do because the industry is unbearably greedy, won’t change and probably needs their executives to be executed in an excellent manner a la Bret Hart). It really sucks because the base game isn’t completely awful. Most of the stuff is reasonably fun and keeps you occupied. But the design of time gates and other factors to eventually crush your soul to move you into one of those 5 situations is a terrible bet that the game designers have made their bed upon.
I saw a Korean YouTuber who called the scenario “Pay to Lose.” It’s true. If you’re a rich “whale,” it won’t matter. If you’re a meth head crack addict type, you’re better off finding a volcano and jumping in because that will probably be a lot less painful than sinking your earnings into a pernicious slot machine. At least with a slot machine, there’s a remote hope that you may eventually make some money. Here, you barely get any joy especially when your honings fail. Basically, the game design is really “the house always wins.”
Regardless, I’ll probably just bite the bullet and start using my Berserker to push forward on Rohendel. I was going to work on him tonight but my stomach is growling like mad and I just woke up from a nap. So I might do that much later. It’s not an urgent thing because I can always just do the alternative which is running North Vern Chaos Dungeons and doing my Flame Yohos on my 3 capable alts. It’s more of a matter of how much pain do I wish to inflict on myself when maybe just saying fuck it and going through hell might be better.
I suppose the benefit of my Berserker and Deathblade being denied fast passage through Rohendel was that I said fuck it when it came to spending gold for doing a Knowledge Transfer for my Gunslinger through Feiton. Yes, Feiton is easy and doable. But the whole point of this exercise is whether or not I want to shave my dick off with a spoon level pain in dealing with a few shitty bosses and that stupid stealth quest mission or just have zero anxiety and move on because it’s more fun and efficient running my 3 Feiton dailies which takes only a few minutes at most and two Chaos Dungeons a day. Well, when you put it in those terms, I’d like to keep my dick (and my sanity) and just do what I’ve been doing on my other alts until they can get to Punika.
One honorable mention since we’re talking about unnecessarily painful situations is that god awful Totopia daily quest. I finally did one and made the quick decision that I won’t ever do it again until the content has dried up as much as a nun’s vagina. There was nothing redeeming about that quest which was another time wasting Rohendel invisible fairy quest. The only thing I could think of while doing that quest was taking the brilliant producers and devs who worked on that thing and shoot them into space without a space suit on board an unstable, experimental version of a SpaceX rocket (with hopefully Elon Musk) strapped to a bunch of chairs kinda like in that scene from the movie Armageddon as the idiots are heading for an asteroid. The difference is that I’d send them directly, full speed into Ceres, which is the biggest Asteroid in our solar system.
Now, going through other alts that have some significance to me. My Shadowhunter is in that painful stage of ilvl 1060+ in Feiton. The mythological 70% honing success is the biggest pile of bologna in the world. Here’s the thing. That number is a complete lie. It’s a fake number used to make you believe that you have a real chance of succeeding. The truth is that the game does not want you to progress too quickly so the real percentage of success is gauged upon how fast you’re moving up. Basically, the game is like grade school where you might be the smartest kid in class amongst a bunch of retards that the school guidance counselor put you in for a particular class. Rather than you elevating the class, the class and teacher holds you back. And the only way to get out of that situation is asking your parents to change schools, which means that they probably have to pay or do something drastic. Regardless, for these particular people who designed this gambling system, I hope that they are one day thrown in jail for their sins against society and that their inmates are nothing but AIDS infected rapists where these designers are butt fucked on a nightly basis so that they quickly are diseased and have a slow death where they must review their life and realize that greed only ends up in real outcome.
Maybe the only real highlight for me today was my Paladin getting to Yorn. I came into the Chaos Dungeon scene with ilvl 600 gear, believing that because of him being a Paladin, he would get annihilated. Actually, the first run through was pretty smooth and I only missed a helmet piece, which I got on the next run. I think he ended up around ilvl 860+ or so with some honing, using his saved up guild crystals to buy up his tier 2 guild mats. So that was actually fun.
Also, my Scrapper is now in position to move to Feiton. However, I’ll probably end up running her through just because I’m down on gold again. Even if I had Rohendel as an option to get through via Knowledge Transfer, I would still have issues with the lack of gold so some alts would be forced to suffer for a while. The miserable thing about this situation is that now I have three people I need to stop my normal daily routine and sit down to get through story content. None of it is really hard just tedious and soul sucking.
If my tone came off more negative than usual, it’s because my patience is waning on this game. I dislike that I can see the real wall up ahead of me and that there’s very little ways around it. Worse yet I see the design of the wall and how the people behind it are going to be uncompromising. But I really feel that in the next 2-3 months, the game’s overall population is going to take a massive dip outside of Korea and possibly Russia because the vast majority of the casuals are going to say “FUCK THIS!” and just get bummed out that they can’t progress and don’t want to deal with the little teenage brats with their memes and awful attitudes. Not to mention the only things to look forward to are more “challenging” content which is not what casual players are attracted to. They want progress and a way in which they can see the end game without having to invest a ridiculous amount of time, effort and money. We’ve already seen trends from similar games of this genre. So basically, SmileGate need to remove the giant dildo jammed in their rectum and re-evaluate these content gates and either give their so-called hardcore players the finger and just lower the barrier on lower content so that casuals feel that they can progress again or they should shut the game down and commit sepuku.
The only party that might be slightly invested in this game’s success is Amazon. But I have a feeling that in the big scheme of things, they really don’t care. It’s more of a symbiotic relationship where one leech can suck the dick of another leech.