I have two never ending frustrations with MA:
1. they do not have vision and longterm thinking
Meaning:
Initially skilling was linear and stupid (pre 2005), so first 10k points players appeared at the end of 2004 iirc.
Then they slowed down skilling alot, so your average player would have need +-1 year to hit lvl30.
Then they changed their mind alot and in 2009 or when the sga happened, they started with long periods of 3x skillgain bonus during events.
Lately even more, with skillbonuses, skills from missions, skill pills and what not.
So now the game is in a silly situation where:
- there are a ton of players at 300k+ (and even a bigger ton at 200k+)
- there are some "level insane" players like Smilgs, messi, Dan etc, but the content for that lvl of skill gets at ridiculous level of cost
What will they do with these players in 5 years? How much more expensive mobs can they introduce? Is getting more and more stupid, vigilante pieces used to drop from what, repesilex, caudatergus and exa and now they drop from robots level lol+. We have now as regular mobs costing, lol, 10-50 ped per kill and the shared stuff as much as a dinner in the city for your whole teambuilding lol. Same for mining, I thought amp lvl13 is the maximum possible stupidity, no wait, we can also make a finder with 17 peds per drop or something. So maybe put them one on top of the other and go indoors. Wtf.
The problem with this greedy scaling is two folded:
- you end up with the very top players needing equipment costing as much as an IRL house and their cost/hour getting toward medium wage in the civilized world (something which in itself is a measure of insanity of this VR economy)
- but in the same time you naturally want a growing playerbase. Which needs to do something. MindArk's solution is to rush everyone up, lol, to insane level of costs. So what was korss 400 (L) in 2007-2009, a midgun by all possible measures, nowadays is pretty much the newbie ArMatrix25 (L). While ArM series is up to, what, lvl 105?
In same time, the more people skill up, the more their weight vs day-0 newb is growing.
The whole vision of MA about this was, back in 2005, "we expect an average playlife of about 1,5 (iirc) years per avatar". Lol, well look we're plenty at 10+ years.
What is their vision for skills, meaning of skilling and playing? Playing, not gambling at higher costs than in IRL casinos. Surely nobody pushes you to gamble, but why are those opportunities even existing?
What are their ideas for Entropia Universe in 2050, hitting the headlines with the first player who commited suicide because had no succes on a 13 clicks (L) bp costing 150k$?
2. they are not consistent
Events started and not finished (they seriously brag with how much time it took for THE egg to become something)
(what happened with the gridman, btw??)
no storyline for Calypso, no meaning for the world itself (while every other planet partner is very consistent from this p.o.v., makes Caly look very bad)
changing the loot from 1.0 without having a system to put in place
promising an update for mining and crafting in same moment when loot 1.0 went away and, 9 months later, still nothing
having ingame hoards and hoards of old items, resources, components and whatnot, cluttering databases, inventories, confusing everyone and doing nothing. I saw today a Heimdal on ah. A freaking Heimdal. Oh, and an adjusted outbacko. Lol.
pushing very high cost choices and items (upgrading armour, weapons, rings in strongboxes etc), only to nerf all of them 3 months later. Why, for the love of God, did they came up with a mission to adjust DOA or maddox 4 and who the hell would do that if there is no efficiency gain and we have no clue what efficiency actually does and there is no way to significantly improve it? Why to put players in such a stupid position in where to ponder whether they should keep or sell their adj whatnot (ep41, mad4, just2, you name it)? Because who knows what update and loot 3.0 they might dream tomorrow and half implement overnight and who knows what items will appear in 1 month and become redundant in 6 months.
Sorry, I forgot my biggest third frustration: strongboxes, damn strongboxes everywhere. One day they will put the damn login into a strongbox which will cost 100$ and you may or may not have access to EU that day, but you will only know after paying the hundred, because hey is dynamic.
God damn it, and it could be great.
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