Best Of

Roadmap looks nice except for June, maybe they could separate Bai TF and move it there so its on Q2 again lol. Im surprised Seth is coming on August I expected her a bit later but new characters are always welcome.
My only problem is how far are Task forces from each other but I think it is the same on KR or longer... looks like I will have to wait till dec or next year for seulbi and harpy TF
Besides this I hope there are good events these upcoming months.

PD: its funny how people who dont play on this server have the time to check news and forum to complain and of course make sure to let us know they are whales and server is missing their money or friends xD

I do think Bai's release in April is way too long. So we got Luna in November, then Bai in April... That's 6 months. Then, the gap between Bai and Seth is 3-4 months, which I think is the perfect amount of time between char releases.

As it stands now, a lot of people are going to be inactive for months to come, which means people aren't going to be as interested in the sales or whatever.

Fortunately, you guys put that dates are subject to change. So all it would take is moving Bai up to late Feb or early March, and you would get people excited to play once again. I doubt this will happen, but if it did, I think it would be quite beneficial to the community and the game as a whole. You could even make a news post or an announcement out of it: 'Hey Closers! Get ready, because Bai is coming Feb. 26th!'

@Icywizard said:
So you are the guy who suggested the server merging. Based on your reasoning for server merging, do you actually realised that your actions for server merge have bad consequences and detrimental effect to total gaming population?

From all these discussion and knowledge gained, I have finally understood about the "rankings" that drives my friends off. And I have personally checked with all my 15 friends. Indeed, it was the TCP Ranking boards that made them rage quitted the game. I can vouch for them that they are true blue whalers and huge spenders as they are my own clique of best friends that I have known for years. And I have to admit that I am a very significant big spenders in terms of playing FGO. If any of you who play FGO would knows how much money they need to spend to gacha the character you want. Or maybe you can say I'm unlucky hehe.

As checked with my friends, they mentioned that everyone is always aiming for rank 1 to get the visual frames and EU is the perfect place to do it, since the competition isn't that high after all. I believe all the whales, not just my friends do understand what I am trying to point out here. They worked hard for it in EU by spending their money into it for tunings, enhancement and stuff to achieve that. But what happens here? Server merge to make their effort completely wasted? And to add on, they mentioned about name priority given to NA players only. Some of them have their name revoked and needs to rename their character. On top of that, they have to reformulated their gear just as to compete in TCP ranking again? Spending money is not an issue to them, but it is totally not worth to spend anymore again as it would be pointless due to server merging which is defeat the purpose of them playing in EU in the first place. Ask yourself, if you are one of them who suffers from all these. Will you not get angry and get raged?

Yes, you are thinking for the healthy population, but did you really think in the EU server player shoes? You can act as a hero thinking that what you do and suggested is Justice, BUT Did they even want you to save them and give such bad suggestion like server merge to ruin their gaming experience because of all the issues that I have just mentioned? Because of this, most whales and non-whalers are leaving this game which makes the server merging lost its purposes of creating a healthy population. As for non-whaler leaving case, the easiest explanation would be name priority issue.

And based on the discussion thread, it seems like you are a person who hold some power in talking to the relevant gaming authority here. Enough to make them to take a move in their plans on whatever you suggested. I shall not comment on that as everyone knows what I want to say regarding this.

Thanks @Karousl for the nice deduction over there with the TCP Ranking Analysis. You are absolutely correct and spot on in your theory that many players have indeed left the game because of server merge which is evident by the low TCP on rank 5th below.

I shall end my speech here. Thank you. Have a nice day everyone.

Well to respond to quite a few of your points:

1. I am not the single person who suggested a merge. Countless others have suggested it before me, I just put it in a forum comment in a pvp thread recently.

2. I agree that losing TCP ranks from the merge sucks. However, the merge didn't change the system for TCP. They may have invested money into getting rank 1 there, but if rank 1 from NA beats rank 1 from EU, then that means that relatively the NA player has likely invested more. Why should the EU player hold rank 1 if they haven't invested to that same degree? NA players also had to spend their money to do the same thing. One of the most core parts of TCP ranking is your enhancement levels. From what I saw on EU, almost all of the top rankers only had +14 enhancements on their cores. In NA, most of them have +15, which is the maximum enhancement. A +15 is frequently a bigger investment than a +14 (depending on RNG), so it's logical for the +15 player to be higher. If the EU player wants to fight for their rank 1 spot, they should also go for a +15.

3. My suggestions for the merge come ENTIRELY with consideration of the EU players. NA playerbase is nearly unaffected by the merge. The most that happened for NA players was that we had a 24hr downtime, got a box of goodies, and a bunch of names are now available. EU players were the major impact and I feel that the upsides of better matchmaking for EU players for raids, better crew availability, better market selection, etc massively outweigh the few niche downsides. It makes the game as a whole more accessible for the average EU player. There were some things handled improperly in my eyes (NA getting 100% name guarantee, EU name sniping/selling, EU Puri progress reset, etc), but these are small details of a merge that could've been handled differently. I do not feel that the server merge as a concept was a bad idea, just that some parts of the implementation could have been improved.

4. "It seems like you are a person who holds some power in talking to the relevant gaming authority here". There seems to be a lot of misconceptions on what exactly an 'EME Partner' is, as well as what "power" we have, so I'm going to clear this up for people:

• An EME Partner is a content creator (Streamer, YouTuber, etc) who produces content for EME games and has a sizable following.
• The EME Partner title/status is a contract-based one, where both parties involved mutually benefit. I benefit from being an EME Partner by getting a monthly newsletter that has some handout codes in it with varying goodies. In the month of January I received a giveaway code for a $10 gamble box for me to do with as I pleased. Most EME Partners will use said codes for on-air giveaways, to attract as many viewers to a stream as possible. EME benefits by having content creators who are passionate for their titles creating content to put their games in a good light. An EME Partner is one of the best sources to talk to about the game in general if you're curious on trying it out because they'll be fairly involved in it's gameplay and community.
• An EME Partner doesn't have the same obligations as say, the Forum Moderators, the Closers Player Council, EME staff, etc. We are required to create a minimum amount of content for EME titles each month, but at the same time we're still able to voice our personal opinions on things since we're still technically independent content creators. If EME disagrees with what we're saying or doing then our contract will be terminated, but that level of severity only comes with major offenses or repeated normal offenses. Quite a few content creators build a following with things like toxic behavior, and the partnership program would likely seem less appealing if people had to conform their content to the same level that the PR staff does.
• In terms of what "power" we have, it's actually quite limited. The only real "extra power" that I have as an EME Partner over a normal player is that I likely interact with a higher number of players than the average person, but that moreso comes from the fact that I stream than the fact that I'm an EME Partner. I still have to voice my concerns in the same way that other players do (check the Feedback section of the forums if you don't believe me), I still have to do the same grind, etc. As an EME Partner, my power and status is nothing more than a streamer who gets a monthly virtual goody bag from EME as 'payment' for making content for their games and promoting it to a consistent audience.

I hope that clears up what an EME partner is, so people can stop assuming that they hold power just because 'EME' is in the title.

I see my name's been tossed in here a few times, so I'll weigh in some thoughts on what's been said.

@Karousl said:
This analysis justify that many "Whales" or known as Casher have already left the game because of someone who suggested server merge, which we all know is Solbane's suggestion during one of the forum discussions previously.

Yes, I wholeheartedly suggested a server merge because the pros of a merge far outweighed the cons. The NA server already had players from most countries outside of the EU region that didn't already have a dedicated server (other servers being KR, JP, CN, etc), so the server size population was comparing EU playerbase to the playerbase between NA, SA, SEA, and a few other players. The excessively larger area of coverage made NA a more active server than EU, and this reflected on EU as a server. I'm active in as much of the community as I can be, and I've heard quite a few complaints from EU players about it being hard to find a good guild (there was maybe half a dozen?), it being hard to find specific costume pieces for certain characters due to the smaller amount of players spending on gacha, and a variety of other issues related to a small playerbase. As it stood the EU server was dying, and honestly it was at a point of either merge the server or kill it. The only "downsides" is worse PvP due to distance lag, some merge issues (loss of names, Puri progress reset), and rankings being affected. I somewhat expected the name issues, but the Puri progress reset is something unexpected and it leaves me curious on what's going to be done to fix it.

@Icywizard said:
After my constant rejection to their invitation, all of them suddenly complain and asked me not to come after-all. They are from EU server and they have already quit the game because their ranking was affected due to server merging? I'm not sure how ranking works in here.

As someone else stated, MOST of the rankings should be unaffected by the merge. There are five total leaderboards, and only two of them should have been majorly impacted.

• The Hall Of Dragons board is based on how quickly players can clear a preset 10 stage dungeon, so all you need to do to rank is clear it as fast as possible. From what I've heard EU players now have slightly worse times due to distance lag, but it isn't big enough to just dumpster their rank.
• The PvP board is based on the number of wins and Arena Points earned, so all that EU players have to do is PvP and they're back in their spot.
• The Puri Ops Points board is based on how many Purification missions you do accountwide, so EU players would simply need to do their Puri missions.
• The Crew Ranking board is temporarily heavily impacted due to crew points being reset for EU crews, and I can understand if there's dissatisfaction here. However, the next monthly reset should be soon and all crews will be reset to 0, letting the EU crews play on an even field again.
• The TCP Ranking board is the one most likely impacted from the merge, and if people are quitting over losing their spot then they aren't sticking with the nature of the board. I checked the EU TCP boards before the merge and there was barely anyone there who would compare to the NA rankings. I didn't personally play on the EU servers a ton but I think one of the biggest reasons why there is such a TCP shift is because NA has a lot more players, meaning a lot more EB2s/tuning plugs in circulation and a lot more players buying things like Hyperclock Equalizers off the EMP store to sell on the black market. The higher availability of these items allowed NA players to aim for higher tunes/enhancement levels compared to EU players. All the merged EU players now have the same resource availability to upgrade their gear as the NA players had, so they should get on the grind to getting on the rankings.

@MomoDaaku said:
Updates were super fast last year, some poeple le actually got burned out by the speed. When they got thei end-game gear the next update came and brought new, much better gear. Updates hit every 2 weeks, bringing either new characters, a new event or new end-game-content. This year slows a bit down, because we are getting closer to the amount of content the original server in Korea has got (giving us ~2 years of content in a single year - check out Solbanes Comment in the Bai-thread). That's why EME slows down the content drops a little bit.

You're 100% correct. The content needed to slow down otherwise we'd be caught up around April or May, then we're just stuck with the same grind nonstop with nothing new for god knows how long.

And for the people who think EME "didn't listen to the feedback on Bai", I can assure you that they did LISTEN. Just because they HEARD your words doesn't mean that they're in a position to CHANGE things based on it. A character release is a HUGE investment, because they have to make sure that all the translations work, the storyline, items, etc. Even a single bug such as picking up Bai's Harpas Condenser crashes the game can be breaking, because not only does this affect Bai players, but ANY CHARACTER who drops this gear off Harpas and picks it up will crash. We've had quite a few bugs in character releases, ranging from costume bugs to gear bugs to trying-to-market-an-item bugs. I'd rather they use a larger amount of time to fully debug Bai and Seth and bring them to the World server bug-free than to release these two fan favorites with various bugs ranging from annoying to gamebreaking, causing the Bai and Seth players to quit the game from these issues.

This thread is becoming an attack on staff and other participants, so I'm going to reel it back a little here.

Bai

I stated this in the other thread, and I'll state it again here: BAI IS NOT DELAYED. Her planned release has always been for April. In the Bai Feedback thread that took place in mid-January, I stated the following in response to someones suggestion that we release in February:

@bearshoes said:
While I appreciate the suggestion, the time period is much too soon. Builds are created by Naddic, which take time, development, and effort on their part. The time period you propose is much too soon for that to be a possibility.

While I don't have an example of what COULD be a viable time period, again, feedback is taken into consideration, and I'm delivering as much of this to the team as I can. I'll pass this along to everyone as well.

Another thing I want to mention is that some content is dependent on other content to be released first. In this particular case, Season 3 is an important factor in the release of other content, and can be considered a "blocker" of sorts. It's absolutely true that the EME servers have not completely followed the KR release schedule, but it IS bound by some rules.

A great example of this was the branch update that happened in the middle of 2018, which brought with it a new UI and several system upgrades. Without that branch update, we aren't able to add additional content like characters, story quests, SA upgrades, etc.

All of this information is relevant. As someone mentioned earlier in this thread, Bai cannot be released before Season 3 is released, as she's a major player in that story. We're still on a cadence of an update every 2 week, which means tight planning on both Naddic and EME's part to make sure that we're pushing out content as fast as possible. It is not as simple as "people want (specific content), so we need to push that out right now". It is dependent on what the teams are able to create, blockers that exist in previous patches (as I pointed out in the quoted text above), and an overall release schedule.

I also stated in the Bai thread that your feedback is heard, listened to, and considered, but it doesn't always mean something is going to change. I completely understand that Bai is highly anticipated by some of you, but if it's not possible to release her any sooner than what was previously planned, then it's not something we can change. Changes absolutely can (and have!) happened through your feedback, but sometimes it's simply not feasible.

Content release schedule

In the Korean server, content patches are very far between. Obviously in our server, we're releasing something every 2 weeks, and each one of those patches has some sort of content associated with it, whether it's an event, new character content, new story content, new dungeons, etc. Things are naturally going to be spread out. Our team and Naddic's team have created this content schedule based on what we believe is not only a good rate of content, but on what we believe is possible. Releasing a huge chunk of content, and then not doing an update for a couple of months is NOT an option.

Forum Etiquette

I've said it before, and I will say it again: attacking others IS NOT and WILL NOT be tolerated. Chiding members of the community, as well as specific members of the Closers team is not only not constructive, but it's verbally abusive, and does nothing to promote an inviting community. Once more, I will be removing and editing comments in this thread, and issuing warnings and suspensions based on the content of those posts.

Continued abuse towards others will result in further actions being taken, and the closure of this thread.

Be constructive. Be courteous. Be empathetic.