Reikan

Hello, it's me, Reikkan/Sirocco. I decided to open this topic in hopes to contribute towards the server activity with a suggestion regarding content. No, i'm not asking for new content! I'm not asking for a higher level cap, new armors or anything else. I'm here to suggest stuff to do on a rotating schedule, stuff that can be done by pretty much everyone regardless of gear levels and that should give us reason to stick around in strategic times between each new patch. 1 - BATTLE PASS It's kinda hard to figure out how to do Battle Passes well, because it's either time-gated or locked behind some high requirements which not every player could do. So i'll leave this as "step 1" just to point out that we could bind the seasonal event schedules in a sort of "Battle Pass" quest chain, so by playing the event and doing stuff related to it, players would get nice rewards back as motivation to stick around. Keep this part in mind before reading the rest! 2 - CALENDAR SCHEDULE Currently, as far as I remember, we only have guaranteed events during Anniversary (September), Halloween (October) and Christmas (December). We have at least 9 opportunities to move the players a bit and keep them around for longer. A list of doable suggestions: January - Lunar New Year: Asian culture is quite big, and in fact, EE comes from that part of the globe. It would only be fair to have activities tied to this holiday. Fireworks, traditional dances - Rewards in form of mounts/pets that follow the animal of the year would also be great. February - Valentine's Day: EE always had the incentive to be played with a love interest. Having a whole event tied to the couple/spouse system, or even looking for a partner would be great. March - Either Saint Patrick's Day or Easter would be good alternatives. I'd prefer St. Patrick since we already have Christmas as a Christian holiday. St. Patrick also opens up for loot/luck related themes. April - April fools! We could have funny related stuff (Clowns, a Fair, theme parks, etc). May - Mother's Day? Not sure about this one, maybe could adapt to some sort of thematic event tied to guilds, friendship and/or family. June - Pride month! We have a fairly decent amount of LGBT+ community. July - Not everyone lives in the US, but 4th of July could be a base for an Eden Eternal version of an event. Maybe developing the conflicts between Valencia and Toroto? Maybe guild-related stuff? August - I had no clue what to suggest here so i'll leave this open for suggestions (sorry about that) September - Vendetta Anniversary, not much to say October - Halloween! November - Thanksgiving, could be a way to expand on the Banquet System! December - Christmas! This should be enough to cover the entire year with almost automated events, that shouldn't require much thinking after they're set in motion. 3 - EVENT STRUCTURE AND HOW TO MAKE IT EASIER TO HANDLE These events shouldn't be stuff with complex contents that need constant maintenance/adjustments. Instead, we'd have a steady, predictable and interesting influx of content to do outside of just gearing ourselves. Core aspects to look at: Possibility of progressing through each event with a low player count (stuff like 10p+ dungeons are kinda hard to pull off with our current community) Availability to players regardless of their gear levels (even players below Lv92 should be allowed to tackle events, so low level world bosses and events to interact with other players are more democratic compared to stuff like "do endgame dungeons twice to progress in the event schedule") Non-tradeable rewards, no Eden Crystal rewards (not much to say about alt-account and abuses, eh?) Replayability (Stuff like event potions, temporary boosts to EXP/CP/Loot, increased rewards for taking part in endgame content or PVP, these things add reasons to stay around during the event durations, even for players who are already advanced on gears or even resources) Seasonal Equipment This is the most controversial part of my suggestion, but I truly believe it would add a nice depth towards each event. Example Item Creating items like this is just a matter of changing a single pipeline in the maintenance day at the start and closure of each event, and it opens up plenty of room for seasonal and useful equipment. Of course, this example is quite bland (it's just a mix between 2 trophies (Wicked Chasm Certificate and Kerdos' Broken Medallion), but it was made just to visualize the potential of this idea. I wouldn't recommend it on trophies, though, since it lowers the value for players who are already maxed out on gears. My suggestion is to tie the temporary effects to EVENT-RELATED COSMETICS. I don't believe we need more damage, triple hits etc, but having nice effects in there like extra EXP/CP/Loot, or even PVE MoveSPD / Mana Regen / HP Regen / MaxHP would be nice and something to strive for, and it is broad enough for every player ranging from low level to endgame to benefit from it. 4 - BATTLE PASS AND HOW IT BLENDS WITH SUGGESTED EVENTS I've mentioned how battle passes are mostly poorly handled by publishers, but it's kind of a nice incentive when properly executed. Being rewarded for logging in and doing the seasonal stuff puts players in motion. I remember when we had Ortyx (a world-boss with mail rewards like One-eye Roger), a well setup boss that could be done either with a pair of players on healer/DT, or with a full server, and everyone would benefit from it! That was peak design by Jordan and I believe that is the way to go when we think about events. Killing world-wide bosses, finishing event dailies, doing the Recommended Events, getting a class level (past 100, since we have the Basic Class Stone...), this kind of simple task is awesome as a way to progress outside of locking ourselves into the same dungeons everyday. 5 - PAID BATTLE PASS Yeah, I get it, everyone wants free stuff. I actually would never suggest the Event Items with exclusive effects on the Vendetta Upgrade Stone version, but instead, would suggest that we could buy a "Battle Pass Version of the Dank Scroll", which would give us extra rewards when progressing through the Battle Pass quest chain. That way, we wouldn't need to actually program a Battle Pass interface, and instead keep the Quest Chain model for event quests. I'm sorry about the long post, and I hope to see your opinions on these ideas.

I'd like to point out that Angel of Justice and both Illusionist AWK classes are kinda niche but good classes to have around on specific tasks. I won't add further detail into this but you guys could explore more of these classes and see their potential.

Welcome to the community! How did you find the server?

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This is kind of lazy, it only forces the dev goal into players without a proper thought. People will "try" combinations until one of them does content 10s faster. Then you'll get kicked out of teams if you wanna do the "wrong combination" because it's "absolute garbage". I am getting flakk from "complaining about endgame content when i'm not properly geared" because of the topic I've made recently. Thing is, my point of view now stands still, since its target audience is "the average player" and not high-end fully geared min-maxers. And i'm not even "the average player" considering I have full achievements, L115 sets, L125 awk weapons, gems, +14, CC1 accessories etc. The average player is still struggling harder. Anyway, I digress. I'd say if Jordan doesn't want people to stack classes, then at least similar classes should help each other. 2 classes that thrive doing Fire DMG (Dragon Emperor / Arch Elementalist / Demon Tamer)? They should maybe grant Fire Penetration to the team, idk. So it would be nice to stack them together instead of 3 Arch-Elementalists. Forcing a "color-lock" to teams might bring more issues than solutions. Read about the Occam's Razor.

By that angle, we could very well say that once someone decided they're geared enough, they'd stop doing content anyways. I was on the side of the "full BiS" players some years ago. Back when BiS was Awk100 weapons and L95 Awk sets. I've gotten EVERYTHING the trials could offer me. All L100 awk weapons, costumes, title. And I still own 296 extra Trial Coins because I kept running the content to help others. I do not expect everyone to be like this, but "doing content" becomes subjective if we look at it through the lens of "what people want to do". The truth is, there are BiS gears, and in order to obtain it there is X amount of time required to achieve it. If people want to do it or not, it's up to them, but ALL CONTENT related to said gears should be taken in consideration. Even Sky Tower, if a single gem from there is still META. That's my approach when looking at our gaming schedule: We'll have to sort everyone through content in a way that each player can hope to achieve their own BiS at some point. I'll be OK to pay full price for a Mystery Box pet (which should be a week of the average player's farm by now) if it's a ready-to-go pet, but if we take fusions in consideration, then that will escalate the prices to months of gameplay from the average player. Which is FINE if the pet is just a luxury item but ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS if said pet decides whether this player takes part in content or not . This was already mentioned by @seraph82, but I'll expand on it mentioning other classes such as Blood Knight, Mecha Ares and Arch-Elementalist (my personal favourite) as they all are capable of clearing all entries of Palace of Dreams (the most cost-effective dungeon) in less than 1 hour. My own Arch-Elementalist is decently geared so I can clear it all in about 30 minutes. Everything else was covered by seraph aswell. I'd just say we are pretty good on these QoL changes, the game is better now than it has ever been to new/returning players. Reason why I opened this topic was in hopes to further enhance this experience, not to myself because I can handle the curve, but in order to make the server feel more welcoming of new players. I have a couple of friends from outside of the EE community which I hope to bring here, but some of them are kinda overwhelmed by the amount of information and time spent in order to learn the basics. Thanks for everyone's contribution, though. This discussion is keeping a good pace and each reply from Jordan makes me more hopeful for the near future.

I don't believe that veteran players would complain to complete their daily objectives in 2h instead of 4h. Also, we're not suggesting stuff to make the gameplay easier, the topic was meant to look at current content available/relevant and adress how much time spent on said content is invested to build a character. Let us remember this is a game with 60+ classes and it favors/promotes the idea of gearing multiples of them. Pets being expensive isn't an issue per se, but them becoming the thing that dictates how the gameplay plays out is not interesting, to say the best. It was tolerable with the prayers because even if expensive, a perfect pet would work for a group of weapons/classes, but now we're supposed to invest both in prayer pets and fused -RES pets. It seems as a really weird way to sell more Mystery Boxes, and I believe the community wouldn't be pleased to see game design going this way. Please reconsider the whole "let's force -RES pets into the game" thing. VGN's main goal is based in good faith. We've talked about this before and we have a similar point of view when it comes to newcomers/returnees, so I believe in this statement. But this comment is going away from the main objective of this topic, which was: Your community enjoys content, but each new content should come with adjustments to the previous ones, otherwise they'll just stack up and exhaust the players. I do know you have ways to check player count and these numbers might not seem alarming, but the player experience and how anyone perceives the server is devastating at the current moment. I know about other gaming options and all, but these opinions brought here are not mine alone. It was a carefully woven topic made of a collection of opinions from the small community that I could reach once I came back. I know I'm not the bearer of the absolute truth, but many people have told me the reason why they quit was not really because of the changes to how RES works, but how insufferable the content became since it was all too long. This is not really relevant but I didn't quit because of the staff decisions. I live in a third world country and sadly my family didn't set up a good start for me. I'm always struggling with basic stuff, and sometimes I have to get away from gaming in order to keep myself alive and living under a roof. I'll not leave upon VGN decisions, as I believe anything can be fixed and this is the only game where I see feedback actually going the correct way. It's the reason why I open these topics, instead of randomly quitting or spreading flame around. Thanks for the feedback. I hope we manage to work together to create a nice place for everyone in our community.

Hello, it's me, Sirocco / Reikkan. I decided to create this topic to adress some concerns. My friends and I decided to come back to Eden Eternal together, and the only logical place to gather was Vendetta. This has always been our home, and we're happy to value this staff's work. After a couple of weeks of our return, though, we reached some conclusions regarding our time spent here, and would like to bring it to the table in hopes of contributing towards a healthy environment and a thriving future for our beloved server. Time spent on content We've got new content! Deep Abyss, new zodiacs on Celestial Corridor, LV130 trials, Colosseum... Since we stopped playing a couple of years ago, much content was added (to our enjoyment). The thing is, this content is time gated (as in: You should do it at least everyday if you hope to gear up), which is fine... if we don't consider that each content added was actually stacked up with the previous ones. Doing Deep Abyss doesn't allow you to ignore Abyss, so you effectively added playing time by creating stacking contents. Our group currently can't even "afford" doing the new Zodiacs because we decided to focus on building the new sets, and the available daily gaming time isn't enough to cover everything. If you consider AT/DF (and its new "easier" mode), CC1 and CC2, Abyss and Deep Abyss, Lv130 trials, Colosseum and maybe some source of gold farm (new dungeons, or even Palace of Dreams), that's easily 3 or 4 hours of constant jumping through content. And I say that based on a team of people who is returning, where each player has a myriad of outdated, but still strong gear to start with. I tried to bring new players in, people I found in other MMORPGs or coop games, but the amount of effort and daily commitment necessary to keep up was detrimental to the experience. I can't even begin to imagine the time spent by a group of 5 actual newcomers, who will probably struggle for more than a month doing subpar farming routines in order to do basic achievements and reach the aforementioned dungeons. Most of Eden Eternal's community is ranging around the ages of 30~40. This is an old game, that appeals to nostalgia and a core gameplay loop that is outdated, compared to the newer generation standards. Pretty much everyone playing is employed, having families and daily chores to attend in real life. Consider this paragraph when reading the next topics I'll adress. Changes to how classes interact: The "Targeted Resist Break" feature and changes to Damage Dealt formula This is a welcome feature. It adds depth and shows how much the VGN staff has improved on the programming side, opening room for a variety of ways to adress balancing the game. The issue on this, though, is that by having all classes being somewhat "independent" classes, we've guided players towards a META that favors repeating highest DMG output classes. Most of current content is being done with 1 Paladin, 1 Totem Master (for the very few selection of sources of party-wide RES Breaks) and 3 of the content highest DMG dealers (It's always Kage/Asura or something in this line). In a game with more than 60 classes, it's detrimental to its maintenance to have such a META. I've constantly pressed this button through my stay in VGN, pointing how people shouldn't be forced towards a specific type of DMG but rather have a range of possible classes to start picking from the very beginning. Even the class that you use for gold farming on such an easy dungeon like Palace of Dreams will change how you perceive the game as a new player, so if there is no wiggle room to start, then you'll start demotivated. If all you can do as a new player is sit on a Paladin and break RES, it's not much different than old Trainer gameplay. Old content is now taking longer to complete, which pours salt in the mentioned wound of "time spent doing content". New players might not see it, but returning players suffer the most with this change. While I am happy to have more meaningful content (time spent doing mechanics, enjoying the actual dungeon run instead of rushing through it in 5 minutes), adding extra time without compensation will turn the gameplay sessions into endurance tests. Specially if time spent ends up in no rewards at all. I remember the struggle of figuring out mechanics in Dragonridge Sanctuary without people telling me what to do, only to fail the dungeon after 3h of attempts. Losing the entire reward roster on Celestial Corridor because someone messed up once. This adds up and pushes players out. It's not a sustainable game design. Meaningful content: How we believe that we could tackle these issues while progressing towards a healthier game We believe these changes can be good to the game. Adding DMG back to the game won't solve the issues, and might ruin it in the long run. Our suggestion is towards quality of life while doing the daily routine of time gated content. First and most important one: Make it so that each endgame content is a single entrance, and turn it into a standard. AT/DF, each of CC's rooms, Abyss, Deep Abyss, even VGN exclusive trials (from LV95 and onwards). Change the loot accordingly, so players don't feel this change is a downgrade to how fast they gear up. This keeps the content meaningful (without being a speedrun) without making each game session a torture. Second: Targeted Resist Break should stay as a PVP feature for balancing purposes. On the PVP, repeating classes isn't really an issue and it never happens in a blatant way. We can see maybe 2 holy blades for the extra burst, but it's not common to see a party of 10 players where you have 4 of the same class, because in the PVP scenario, each class brings a specific feature to the formula. When we talk about PVE, all that matters is how fast you can clear content so you can actually do all the content. People WILL repeat 4 classes if it's absolutely faster. If there is no class variety, the "RP" aspect of MMORPG goes out of the window. Third: Resist Breaks should be more versatile on PVE if we don't want to lock teams into specific types of DMG. In fact, we could separate teams into Magical and Physical, where every Physical class that breaks Resists just breaks them all, even if on a lower amount. Same on MDPS side. There are 6 different elements, if we want more class variety, every magic class should just break all 6 instead of very specific ones, opening room for combinations based on buffs/utility and gameplay mechanics. For PVP, the classes could be locked into their own Targeted Resist Breaks for balance. Fourth: RES Break items have no room in the current game. Using a set of RES dropping gears to have a similar or even lower DPS output is absolute madness. Temple Knight's rings, Temple Arena trophies (and their enhanced versions), RES-breaking capes and other accessories should have party-wide effect at least on PVE. Could add the "PVP Changes" to it, making it be "Targeted Resist Break" on PVP maps. Before saying goodbye, I'd like to say that I have a couple of VODs of my own livestream showing our group doing content. I'm not aware if I can share it here, so i'll refrain from that. Still, people who watch it might say "oh well these noobs are using the wrong classes" but believe me, we've tested classes ourselves (and we're still doing it), and we did follow some tips from people who were still active in our absence. These VODs show the reality of what I've mentioned in this entire topic, so feel free to ask me for them if you want to suffer watch. This is a long post, written with care by a non-native english speaker without the use of helping tools. Please point out if anything is wrong or just hard to understand, but don't dismiss it entirely for my lack of ability. Thanks for reading, if you got to this point. I'm happy to be back here 😌 TL;DR> Game is currently a second job if you want to properly do content, would be good for its health to adjust it to actual, human and employed gaming hours @Edit: Formatting

Crystal Altar: Obsidian Mummy Coffin✔️ Spirit of Glossy Black Alpaca✔️ White Miraculous Gourd✔️ Mysterious Tai Chi Robe✔️

Yes, the vast majority of players is wrong, only the select small group of you and your friends is correct. Nobody is allowed to have a different opinion. Grace us with your blessed sight. The game now is just Sisyphus work. You gear up, so you can gear up in the next update. Some people aren't fond of this routine and just moved towards something more dynamic. Hence why the staff is trying to tackle Arenas and other sources of PVP. I agree that the community mentality sucks, but maybe we can agree that the game is very old, rusty and not much can be done about that. It loses steam very quick, specially for those who already know how to progress. At some point, it gets dull, and I can't blame people for leaving. Since the topic is about Viridian Gorge and feedback, sticking to the topic, i'd like to contribute: Sisyphus work again. People aren't avoiding content because it was "bad designed" (because it wasn't), they are just tired enough not to force themselves to this. That's all.

I agree with you in the general idea, but as Nanami pointed out, we used to be able to work around some of the "S Tier classes" which were basically the most CC-heavier ones, using the pots. I'm quite sure we can't have a "Tenacity" status to lower CC durations, but the pots would be an easier (and more comfortable) approach for this community. If pots were still available, then we'd have the general idea of DMG dealt / DMG taken being the priority, and we have multiple classes that work around these status, so I guess maybe we'd have more S-Tier classes to play around with, instead of being defaulted into Conjurer/Reaver because these classes offer that much in skirmishes. Also, +1 to Nanami's idea of 5v5 arenas. ... And I'd like to adress Monster Battle Arenas too, since they were one of my favourites. Maybe just "setting up" the player status (instead of using Penthos) to the exact same amount every time, would help it being decent. Also, it would be cool to see VGN exclusive content in there, such as CC bosses or maybe stuff from AT/DF.

Well, it was a very well-thought answer considering how oblivious I was on structuring out my answer. Thanks for that. I think the Arena goes through many layers of issues. People will need to gear up to hop in. So expect maybe a couple of months to catch up on stuff, maybe 3 months. Before 3 months, you'll be just hopping in to feel bad. Then after the gear layer, you have the issue of some classes being able to do multiple roles in small skirmishes, akin to the issue on Holy Blade being able to self-heal, CC, do burst DMG while still lowering DMG received. Reaver, Conjurer and Annihilator fit this scenario aswell. So maybe people feel too much forced into these classes unless they're supporting, which might narrow down the target audience. And THEN we have the rewards. Well, they aren't really bad, but I wouldn't say they are desirable either. We have a couple of mounts, Mimic costumes and such. We also get warstones, which was the primary reason for ungeared people doing Arenas in the old times. I can't say for sure on what would be a better reward for Arenas, being quite honest. I've put plenty of hours in this subject, and even shared it with guildmates, but we never got to an agreement. Gold would ruin the server economy. Anything in the craft line would be redundant with the other rankings. More warstones could brick the server economy aswell. In a TL;DR way of thinking, maybe we should tackle the first layers before thinking about rewards, while I do agree they should be touched, arenas should be fun in the first place.

I'm just a player providing feedback. Regardless of Arena rewards, it will be there for farming the aforementioned reward instead of actual arena gameplay. Temple Arena has PVP with a big HP pool and DMG reduction, but nobody does it because it's better to just group and farm the PVE resources. In any case, feel free to ignore my feedback. Maybe I'm just a troll that hops into topics to cause disorder. Maybe i'm not trying to help and/or bring more players into the game. Who knows.

Most of endgame PVP requires at least 5 support classes in order to survive the big bursts of damage, which means it's just impossible to hop in 3v3 arenas without being CC-locked to death. I don't think that even changing Arena rewards would help it, people would hop in for the rewards and then leave once they were done with it. It's more of a root issue than the arena itself. It's been the main reason why you don't see smaller guilds on TWs anymore, or people trying to build bigger guilds to join the thing. In short: Too much DMG

I'll just ignore Lexs commentary since he seems angry at this topic or at us, not sure why. Gravity Manipulator Air Dance only grants +350% DMG for the next Feather of Lightness/Darkness. The times where it buffs more Feathers is a bug, that only happens when you kill the target with it (The game fails to remove the Air Dance buff). I used to farm gold on Gravity, and I could get 3 buffed Feathers with it. Although, on a PVP scenario, you often won't hitkill your target with it, and even if you do score the kill, you would need to change targets really fast before your character reaches the ground in order to benefit from the "two Feathers Air Dance". It's not something you can count as a class mechanic. And yeah, you can shoot 3 Feathers in a single Air Dance, but you'll only get the 350% amp in the first one. Hence why the +200% bonus on Destructive Leap is better in the long run.