Best Of

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.

@SuzumiyaSolbane said:
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.

While I understand why updates needed to be slowed eventually, I don't think it was necessary to leave such a large gap between us and KR. By the end of the road map, we will be roughly 10 months behind KR. Some games have caught up to and remained within 6 months of the original server and if the player numbers and game's longevity have anything to show for it, the players are happy.