All I Have Left to Say
To premise; Yes, I know the response this is likely to get is: "If you don't like the game, just quit." To which I am able to say I have. I just wanted to share some final thoughts about this game. I still have a lot left to say after my other post, in which I held back in some areas for fear of it becoming unprofessional. Though this may come across as an unadulterated rant to some, it comes from a place of caring, from the heart of someone who has been active in this community for longer than most left. So, with that out of the way, let's begin.
I first downloaded this game in February of 2011; and, what immediately struck me during the tutorial was the simplicity and casual pick-up and play feel this game had..
Little did I know it was far more complex than the tutorial led on.
Still to this day, I vividly remember entering Balefort Castle Map 1 as a Level One because I thought it looked the coolest out of all the campaigns, before quickly getting one-hit over and over. I repeated this process a few times until a higher-level joined and recommended that I try Forest Haven instead. This higher-level quickly explained the ropes to me and helped me finish the first few levels of the old Forest Haven, which was far more difficult than it is now.
I guess this leads me to my first point I'd like to address about the difficulty newer players have soloing entire campaigns after Alien Oasis, which, is in my opinion, where the game turns from casual to somewhat difficult.
It has been mentioned countless times in recent months, but I guess it can't hurt to restate it here: why can't we have some new campaign-specific vanities added to each dungeon's loot-table to give all players an incentive to run these maps? This would help new-players tremendously because I know there are still some kind-hearted players out there who would help the newer players level up and give them advice on combos and gear. This addition would be nothing but a positive and multiple lists about what the vanities could include have been made (found here and here) - why have we not had a clear reason as to why this cannot be implemented?
Perhaps the one problem I can foresee with this, which somewhat ties in with my next point is the potential for some of the immature elitist players to be rude to new players because they don't know what to do.
This has been an ongoing problem for years now and is something that has never really been addressed. There have been attempts at resolving this issue in the past, such as the GoA program, but that never stuck around for various reasons. I think a lot of the hate and elitist behaviour towards some people in this game comes from one main reason: A lot of the ‘older’ community who were around for the ‘golden-age’ of PL have disagreed with a lot of changes made to this game and simply want to go back to what we once had. This causes these players to make hurtful comments towards newer players because they feel they are ‘superior’ to them due to their longevity with this game. I can’t lie and say I haven’t done this myself – we all have – and, I think it is something that needs to be addressed at some point. If I’m being honest, I have seen some extremely hurtful things said during these arguments – things that should get you perma-banned – yet, the report button doesn’t seem to help? Perhaps one way to address this is to make the inner-workings of the in-game report function more available? I’m sure if we were as a community made more aware of how it works that we could make better use of it and slowly weed out the people who are just downright toxic.
This brings me to another, and, perhaps, controversial point. Why does this forum community get so little feedback on proper posts? Off the top of my head I could link about 20 or so posts that had brilliant suggestions that for the most part seemed as if they were ignored. Take WhoIsThis for example, who, is in my opinion, the most influential forumer to date. Of the 15 or so threads he made with suggestions, it seemed as if a fraction of them got a proper response. Why was this the case? I can understand that this forum gets a lot more dev interaction than other forums (the example used in the past has been the LoL Forums), and I can appreciate that. I just think that when it gets to the point where people can spend weeks writing single posts only to get a single reply that barely addresses the post it is clear that something needs to change. I don’t regret any of the time I spend writing posts, but I always get told that it “won’t be worth my time” to do so when it seems almost arbitrary which posts get proper responses. Being completely honest, it seems as if the threads thrown together in 40seconds get more of a reply than ones that take days, and in some cases, weeks to put together. Again, why is this the case?
I really think this discourages a lot of players from making informative posts about this game, a lot of which could end up being really useful for the rest of this game’s lifespan. I have heard some excellent suggestions that never got posted simply because we never thought we would get the reply they were warranted.
I guess the final thing I want to ask is nothing new, but I may as well repeat it again: where is this game road-mapped for now? Originally, it was my understanding that the final cap was going to be L100. However, we are past that now and I think a lot of us are curious as to what is planned for the future. Is there a final goal in mind, or is this game simply existing to generate revenue out of the few remaining players?
The rest of the things that I feel need to be addressed are in my other thread found here. The main issue is still the economy, and that problem is only going to increase with the more gold events this game gets.
And, done.
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