03/26 Patch Notes - Test Server Changes Implemented

Adapt wouldn’t be so bad if they wouldn’t “dripfeed” us more of it and never implemented a limit, besides 100%, to begin with, same with Polarisation.

Agreed. Granted, I don’t think anything could make me like Polarize, but that’s just personal and not anything with whether I think it’s good or not. I actually considered getting polarize (outside of what’s practically forced on you”) when KoG said there was no cap on ERP, but with it coming out that it only has data up to level 999, I went back on that.

And that’s where it became awful. I started playing while normalisation nor item lvl was implemented and Elsword felt like an actual game.

Same. Honestly don’t mind the normalization, but I also wouldn’t object to it being removed.

It was more “fighty” as well, not constant domination required to survive a single room of enemies and I loved the fighting!

I miss those days. Not everything about them (especially not those dice rolls to determine who got what item, regardless of who picked them up), but I’d be happy if the game could go back to being like that, minus the bad aspects from bad then. Commands were actually viable back then, especially as you strung different commands together. But something tells me that’s not even possible at this point.

Despite them forcing multiplayer, they do little to encourage that.

They ain’t doing so well encouraging single-player either, despite the several dungeons that force it. That includes an entire region now with Mirror Del.

CP entry limits isn’t helping players understand, it just locks them out.

This one I’m a little on both sides for. On one hand, I really just wanna get to the later dungeons already, while on the other, I do understand wanting to make sure only players who are prepared for the duns can access them. Though I honestly don’t know if KoG understands, or even tries to understand, their own CP system.

Neither are those “tutorials” helping and CP for sure isn’t a proper showcase of capability to deal dmg, there’s too many hidden stats.

Oh, abso-fucking-lutely! They call that three-substage bare-bones prologue, lackluster “training” room, and some “guidebook” tutorials? Not saying the game needs to hold your hand, but they should really do a better job showing you how the game works, and doing it in a way that feels natural. And with pre-Elri dungeons being piss-easy now, they practically do nothing to prepare you for what comes later aside from teaching you “skill go brrr”. Not to mention so many post-Elrianode dungeons having their own gimmicks and either not explaining jack shit about them, or relying on those “danger” pop-ups that aren’t exactly eye-catching if you’re not explicitly watching out for them (and sometimes they’re worded in a way that you can’t understand a damn thing even if you see them). Sure, we have the wiki, but what about players who don’t know the wiki exists? Or even what a wiki is? Guess they’ve got no choice but to figure it out themselves, unless they’re lucky enough to party with someone willing to explain it.

So, to play devil’s advocate for half a second here specifically regarding normalization and “dictating how quickly progress is made”- for an ongoing game like Elsword, moderating players’ ability to progress is crucial for maintaining the longevity of your game, if mostly so the pace players make doesn’t comically outstrip the pace you make content at, because if players run out of content long before you’re ready to put out more, they’re gonna leave.

Things like normalization and progression barriers are some of the levers one can pull to help manage this- normalization in particular mitigates the risks of players stacking huge amounts of stats and crushing everything by enforcing diminishing returns. These are, of course, far from the only levers one can pull to manage this issue, and there’s certainly an argument to be had that KOG isn’t pulling those other levers enough. (Endgame high-replayability content is an excellent way to manage this kind of thing, if executed correctly.)

I’m also not going to pretend that the way KOG uses the levers they do pull is any good, and this is in fact exactly where I stop playing devil’s advocate, because the way they use normalization for some stats is completely ridiculous. In particular, Critical and Maximize are difficult to justify having normalization, given their particular mix of having a necessary hard cap by virtue of what they do, and the consequently relatively limited scaling in the power they offer, and most of the other stats have caps (ESPECIALLY the speeds) that are so low that they don’t even get the chance to get into the kind of dangerous scaling that mechanics like normalization are supposed to mitigate in the first place.

Or they’re Awakening Charge, which even if it was uncapped I can’t see being that powerful anyway, because even without the stat, it’s basically the norm to be building Awakening fast enough to have a full 3 beads ready by the time your current one is up anyway. I feel like the only characters this stat could meaningfully effect are the ones with weird Awakening gimmicks like Add, Ain, and Laby.

If you have a better explanation for their lunacies, please tell me.

My best explanation is nepotism: Family member got brought onboard, looked at recent stuff and forced it on everyone.

In other words: they’re stupid. They’re not making sane business decisions and constantly bank on FOMO and gambling for a burst of income.

I’m appalled at local distributers allowing their lunacies but, I guess this is what you meant with your post, eh?

Too bad I’m not asking for saints, just some sanity.