[monKa]

Hi, your friend monka here yet again!

From my last post it`s already been 4 patches and Heaven did a good job in improving things. Thank you for your efforts and time invested. Still we got some major things to be done. I noticed new players are coming and leaving. So I was talking with people all around to listen their opinions about the server.

First of all, let's talk about private servers of korean MMO's in general. The most popular and successfull of them don't copy official servers but offer different stuff for players, who tired of grinding but still like the game and want to enjoy it in other perspective. 

Now about Vindictus. This game wasn't popular even on official servers and player base is not big enought to hope that any newcomers will come on private server. Main focus is on veteran players, who played that game and just want to enjoy it once again. So my point is to try make Windictus DIFFERENT from outdated official server, mainly in the point of RNG, which everyone hates. Especcialy now it can`t get worse as soon as we have just few active players and tons of leaving people. They join, check it, see that it is official alike and leaving. It's possible to revert changes any moment and make another official with a little higher rates. We all agree, that WE NEED to support admin and server with donations, but to make this happen Windictus must get proper amount of active players. Let people enjoy their favorite game without those stressfull things and they will thank you with cash in return.

Also there is no reason to focus on party plays, since Vindictus is P2P game and players can`t cooperate really well due to different regions (ping, conenction, time-zones). 

So, in my opinion to make great private server things must be changed this way:

1. Remove raid limits - it gives freedom and make people enjoy things they like.  This will let to farm useful things how much everyone wants, independent on any limits.
   
2. Adjust game rates. Increase gold income, AP (remove raid limits again), items drop rates (mostly Scrolls and OJ`s).
   
3. Make enhancement less stressful. Add runes to seal and gold shops (+12-15). Make lvl +11-12 Runes cheaper. Now it takes to farm for 5 days to buy it from seal shop.
   
4. Change daily missions. Now this system isn`t really profitable. You can receive 1 ticket daily if you are not abusing multi characters. It takes 15 days to buy +11 Enhancement rune. If you try to put here argument that tickets are tradable - to trade something we need to have players here. I`d suggest to add tickets to raid bosses with some chance to drop.
   
5. Provide alternative ways to obtain items. Runes, accessories (brooches, artifacts, badges, etc.) should be also available for gold. So player can decide: farm AP to buy, farm gold to buy or just grind those items.
   

Looking forward to receive your opinions here. And also I`ll be glad to help in server improving if needed.

[Gift]

1 and 2 are pretty intertwined. You can either have one or the other, but not really both.
Think about it this way... if the drop rates were increased (which they already are for ES), and raids were unlimited, then it would be an exponential buff in terms of progression.

1. I am open to increasing raid limits (maybe 10 daily instead of 5?), but not a full unlimit
2a. Gold income was just increased on Monday, and it was significantly increased for S2 & S3. I've tested around with it, and I think it is mostly sufficient. I will increase gold on individual Heroic S1 and Hard Nifilheim raids though (in the next update).
The global server gold rate will also be increased to 10x in the next update too.
2b. The server AP rate was just increased (not to mention guild AP capsule rates as well).
Also with a higher guild level cap (later on), I think AP will become a complete nonissue if it isn't one already.
3. I sort of see your point, but you also neglect the fact that runes are available as drops from many (over 10) different raids. You only talk about guaranteed rune access here, which is why the +11-12 runes are the price that they are. They're guaranteed. They're a sort of last resort kind of deal. That's the way these runes within the shops were meant to be.
I'll certainly look into creating additional paths of obtaining runes though.
4. I may add tickets to some raid drops. The system is still in it's infancy and being worked on.
5. Keke will respond to this point (later).

Let's do this for now, I will increase daily raid limits, and the server gold rate first, and we can discuss gold/drop rates again after that.

[Keke]

I actually talked to Gift about this earlier of centralizing currency with gold, AP, and seals. There is benefit to having overlap behind the purchases that are able to be made with each currency. This includes runes and other necessities in gear progression.

However, I do not believe in making accessories that accessible. I've seen that players are willing to grind if they are rewarded for it, which is why I can see the suggestions come up where if you grind an x amount of gold or an x amount of AP, there should be a concrete reward at the end. This actually limits Vindictus down to just its raids, when there is still so much that can be explored in this game. The accessibility of these things can be implemented later, currently, there are some more important things to focus on.

The suggestion was made with the thought in mind that "don't try to make the server require reliance on other players, because there's not a big enough playerbase," and quite frankly, this is true. The server does not have too many players right now, let alone players who are able to compete at the highest content. But this is true even for me. I have been playing on this server for longer than all of you guys, and I have been locked behind content because my gear was not good enough. Did that stop me from playing? No, I simply kept on playing to prepare for when I am able to make the upgrades and move on. Similarly, you don't have to be "I want it now now now!" you can start farming or grinding for things in advance so that when you do get past the bottleneck, you're already well on your way to the next progression.

With that said, I do think it's a good idea to make things more available in different ways, because it allows players that want to focus in on upgrading a certain thing to be able to do so. However, I disagree that gold and AP should be able to directly purchase accessories and the like, but I do have some ideas about some exchange systems.