Onigiri's Sustainability - An Analysis of Playerbase Decline

[-x-SongNhi-x-]

I have read the whole thread and there are some very really good feedback. I just want to admit first of all I havent listened to the 1hr thing cos its like 1hr long, you guys should just make a bulleted list of things, I can read posts but I just dont feel like listening to a whole hour of the chat. Im sure im not the only one who feels this but its great what you guys are trying to achieve anyway.

My list of things im sure has been said a million times already and biggest gripe is the trade thing, RMT kills games,the market and player-base, no one wants to be forced into spending real money on junk like materials, its not so bad if it was for weapons only, also the stupid 30% tax has to go.

2ndly I would like to see variations in our clothing and weapon designs, so re-skinning and dyeing our clothes maybe a good option. Later game weapons are ugly as hell and I'd like to reskin as there are hundreds of different weps available some of which i love.

3rd- I just want to say that the game is veering very much towards AOE users like spear, I know you covered this but I just wanted to vote on it also. Everyone who wants to grind as fast will have to move over to those type. I dont know if its just me or not but I'm a bow user and it takes me like ~9-10mins to clear Echigo estate while spears and odachi or other big aoe type users can do it in less than half the time. I dont want to change to twin swords or other weaps but the long grind it takes to level up is making it a very tough thing to stick with BOW as it feels like im having to grind for 2-3x as much as my spear buddies. This needs ironing out, or make it semi balanced somehow that clearing dungeons between different classes doesnt mean 2-3x the difference.

Lastly - It's true people are leaving game once they face the grind of Secluded forest and then thought that was long, leading them into Echigo which is like many times worse. Lots of people are leaving as the thought/notion/practice of NOTHING ELSE TO DO but grind in dungeons hundreds and thousands of times over n over without any other activities to do is simply boring.

I really really love this game and want to carry on playing it but theres nothing keeping me here. I log to buy from bargain bins and say hi to friends then AFK. Maybe CS should make the game more competitive by having some ranking systems so we can atleast try and compete with each other even though its all friendly competition as there is no PVP. Maybe like time attack, First to reach xyz, the dungeon master thing was good but why dont u publicise the list? and have an ongoing tracker so people can try run more??? whats with all the secrecy? If i knew i was near top 10 I would try harder and beat the person ahead of me. Everything was hidden so it doesnt promote motivation in people to play more.

Its a shame this is such a pretty awesome game, nice combat system, great story, friendly player-base, community who loves and wants to see the game thrive yet CS is not doing anything to keep them after 2-3 weeks worth of play?

[Lynneth]

The biggest problem actually is C$, the community is already good, some I met are really good people, and they're very helpful and welcomed.

The conclusion is C$ is actually our favourite company, and since then, they forgot to become everyone's favourite, so players are leaving. Nothing to see really, besides grinding, grinding and grinding .

[Tekato]

The biggest problem actually is C$, the community is already good, some I met are really good people, and they're very helpful and welcomed.

The conclusion is C$ is actually our favourite company, and since then, they forgot to become everyone's favourite, so players are leaving. Nothing to see really, besides grinding, grinding and grinding .

Even tho i agree this company is doing a pretty bad job at running this game .. Bashing them and spamming C$ isn't really going to help the situation
This thread was meant to address the problems and issues or atleast that's what i thought it was for

[Ryxa]

It's hilarious that someone who has actively contributed to the decline of the Onigiri population by repeatedly taking advantage of a small handful of generous players for their own selfish gains is now posting their concerns about Onigiri's declining population. You reap what you sow.

Where did this come from?

Skill balancing. Increasing damage values on some skills and reducing the SP costs on others while possibly adjusting durability costs would go a long way to making a much, much more enjoyable playing experience for a majority of weapons. Spear is all about Water Dragon Spear and Ice Blossom; the English wiki doesn't even have the other skills filled out to any meaningful degree because nobody cares about them. Wands? Ice Bolt/Frost Glaive all day every day. Swords should be renamed to "Ougis." It seems like every weapon has one or two overpowered skills and maybe one or two decent skills to fall back on when your murder button is on cooldown. Bow seems to be the only balanced weapon choice in this regard as almost everything that isn't a kick is pretty useful. Exorcist Arrow, White/Rainbow Peacock, [Poison] Rapid Shot, Icicle Arrow/Storm, Lightning [Flash] Shot, Aqua Needle... these are all viable skills in one sense or another. Even Cursed Arrow was a key component in my ability to take down a few bosses while leveling. I'm not expecting perfect balance but some semblance of an attempt at making a majority of skills at least viable would be nice.

Although I agree almost completely with this, I have a few things to point out. First, our English wiki is not complete and I can say with almost absolute certainty that there are about 5 or so people who work on it actively. This is why a lot of information is incomplete. Secondly, although it seems like every weapon only has a few good skills, I think this is simply due to how unbalanced Ougi are. One of the first changes I'd like to see is to have Ougi damage/utility increased slightly and then mana costs of at least double. It's make Ougi use a bit more tactical. I cannot deny that there are quite a few skills that need to be looked at and I know a few I can name off the top of my head.

Better experience curve. A common sentiment expressed during the early portion of the beta was that any heavy grinding present in a game should not happen until the end-game. This lead to our experience rate being doubled... which still wasn't enough so they added an additional experience boost for new characters. Considering the game throws a brick wall at you in story progression until you're level 60, experience rates should be adjusted so that you can hit that level with minimal grinding. Something is very, very wrong when you hit Kaga at level 30 and spend your next 30 or 40 levels living in Secluded Forest. Leave the higher levels untouched.

They did this interesting thing in closed alpha where you had 5x exp from 1-10, then 4x from 11-20, 3x from 21-30, etc. I'm curious why this isn't here anymore...

Improve the Point Exchange shop. Add more items for us to trade in for points(such as Prayer Crystals and Potions) and more options to spend points on(Smelting Reset Buttons and Magatama Slot Aids please.) Adjusting a few currently existing values/prices would be nice as well; even if I were to trade in everything I own, which includes all the freebies while leveling and some rewards from Nyankoro Pon, I could not afford to buy a single Gacha Ticket with points.

Adjust minimum prices. A vast majority of items collected are essentially worthless because nobody is going to pay the absurd minimum prices for them despite said items possibly having legitimate and desired uses. I don't think there's any need to go into much more detail on this one.

Agree completely.

[Ryxa]

I have read the whole thread and there are some very really good feedback. I just want to admit first of all I havent listened to the 1hr thing cos its like 1hr long, you guys should just make a bulleted list of things, I can read posts but I just dont feel like listening to a whole hour of the chat. Im sure im not the only one who feels this but its great what you guys are trying to achieve anyway.

Yeah, sorry about that. I'm aware of how long we went on (I even cut them off at around 46 minutes to let them know) and if we ever decide to discuss this again I'll make sure to keep it short. Thanks for listening to at least a tiny bit of it. ^_^

My list of things I'm sure has been said a million times already and biggest gripe is the trade thing, RMT kills games,the market and player-base, no one wants to be forced into spending real money on junk like materials, its not so bad if it was for weapons only, also the stupid 30% tax has to go.

My personal opinion on this is that the system should be kept the same FOR WEAPONS AND MAGATAMA only. I don't understand why materials and such cost OC and a tax to trade. What I'd like to see is that materials be traded with ryou (Even if there is a tax). Why do I want to keep weapons and magatama on the OC trade system? I'm not quite sure. I just don't feel like it's a good idea to make high-tier weapons too easily accessible.

2ndly I would like to see variations in our clothing and weapon designs, so re-skinning and dyeing our clothes maybe a good option. Later game weapons are ugly as hell and I'd like to reskin as there are hundreds of different weps available some of which i love.

Weapon reskins in a good idea actually... even Diablo 3 put in Transmogrification so you can change around skins.

3rd- I just want to say that the game is veering very much towards AOE users like spear, I know you covered this but I just wanted to vote on it also. Everyone who wants to grind as fast will have to move over to those type. I dont know if its just me or not but I'm a bow user and it takes me like ~9-10mins to clear Echigo estate while spears and odachi or other big aoe type users can do it in less than half the time. I dont want to change to twin swords or other weaps but the long grind it takes to level up is making it a very tough thing to stick with BOW as it feels like im having to grind for 2-3x as much as my spear buddies. This needs ironing out, or make it semi balanced somehow that clearing dungeons between different classes doesnt mean 2-3x the difference.

I honestly feel like bow is the weakest and most undervalued class (More so that staff). I'd really like to look at an entire weapon overhaul for bow but I think that's asking for too much. As a result I'll refrain from saying anything about bows.

Lastly - It's true people are leaving game once they face the grind of Secluded forest and then thought that was long, leading them into Echigo which is like many times worse. Lots of people are leaving as the thought/notion/practice of NOTHING ELSE TO DO but grind in dungeons hundreds and thousands of times over n over without any other activities to do is simply boring.

I really really love this game and want to carry on playing it but theres nothing keeping me here. I log to buy from bargain bins and say hi to friends then AFK. Maybe CS should make the game more competitive by having some ranking systems so we can atleast try and compete with each other even though its all friendly competition as there is no PVP. Maybe like time attack, First to reach xyz, the dungeon master thing was good but why dont u publicise the list? and have an ongoing tracker so people can try run more??? whats with all the secrecy? If i knew i was near top 10 I would try harder and beat the person ahead of me. Everything was hidden so it doesnt promote motivation in people to play more.

I agree with most of this. I personally don't think rankings for everything is a good idea, but stuff like fastest run in a dungeon or dungeon master points is a good idea. If you have too much competition it's no longer friendly is what I fear.

Its a shame this is such a pretty awesome game, nice combat system, great story, friendly player-base, community who loves and wants to see the game thrive yet CS is not doing anything to keep them after 2-3 weeks worth of play?

I don't want to seem like a "white knight" but CS is honestly a lot better than some companies out there. I'm not sure why (since about 1-2 weeks ago) nearly all communication between GMs and players suddenly disappeared, but I'm hoping it starts up again...

[Argentum]

i stopped reading after page 1 because of ... dunno, reasons!

anyways, some more suggestions that are propably not noted yet (im assuming that based on how i percieved the communitys behaviour):

more magatamas: specifcally more mixed weapon magatamas are needed as well as alot more different variatians of cooldown magatamas and especially -SP cost magatamas.
why? because this would add more depth to character building and -SP cost magatamas would also promote more use of lower ranking abilitys.

weaponsidegrades: for the same reason as the magatamas we need more weapons of the same quality and level requirement but with different stats. the game offers various ways to focus on elements and specific skills for builds .... its just limited to specific level ranges due to the tiered equipment design. thats a MAJOR design flaw that can easily be fixed. im not even asking more weapon models and/or recolous. just use the same skins and give it a different name + stats.

magatama cost reevaluation: especially elemental and cooldown magatamas are either ridiculously expensive for what they do ... or they are so dirt cheap that you question yourself how the pricing was made ( great lion dog magatama for example is way to cheap while the higher level magas are way to expensive compare to the generic skill force magas )

oh and propably the most important point here: remove or change the chian magatama. the magatama is so good that it has become mandatory for many builds just because it exists. that is bad and cripples the support role, the build variety and also negatively affects the use of defense attributes. it should be removed or adjusted to a FIXED VALUE. and by fixed value im talking about 500 heal or maybe 750 at most. or give it an internal cooldown. just remove or adjust anything that makes the game dull by basically forcing you to use it because it is overpowered no matter how you look at it.

[Otonashi]

i stopped reading after page 1 because of ... dunno, reasons!

anyways, some more suggestions that are propably not noted yet (im assuming that based on how i percieved the communitys behaviour):

more magatamas: specifcally more mixed weapon magatamas are needed as well as alot more different variatians of cooldown magatamas and especially -SP cost magatamas.
why? because this would add more depth to character building and -SP cost magatamas would also promote more use of lower ranking abilitys.
I think Magatama rebalancing in general covers this. At the moment skill force Magatama are extremely powerful and discourage the use of other types of Magatama, excluding Chian. I don't know about the use of lower ranking abilities, although it seems like an interesting gimmick, since they also cost less to use, so it might be possible to use such abilities with, for example a Magatama that provides SF to rank 3 or lower skills, and focus on damage output while forgoing any sort of SP regeneration as it is less needed. Maybe you had this in mind?

weaponsidegrades: for the same reason as the magatamas we need more weapons of the same quality and level requirement but with different stats. the game offers various ways to focus on elements and specific skills for builds .... its just limited to specific level ranges due to the tiered equipment design. thats a MAJOR design flaw that can easily be fixed. im not even asking more weapon models and/or recolous. just use the same skins and give it a different name + stats.
Definitely, this could solve many issues and open up plenty more build options. I think that there are many ways of doing this though, not only though giving the weapons additional stats like element or raw attack, but also through other methods such as converting a certain percentage of damage dealt to another element, which would also increase the usefulness of elemental Magatama. Doing something like this could also serve as a way to convert skills to other elements, which was covered in the (10 year long) discussion as a way to increase skill variety.

magatama cost reevaluation: especially elemental and cooldown magatamas are either ridiculously expensive for what they do ... or they are so dirt cheap that you question yourself how the pricing was made ( great lion dog magatama for example is way to cheap while the higher level magas are way to expensive compare to the generic skill force magas )
If you mean OC cost, then the trading system in general needs to be relooked anyway.

oh and propably the most important point here: remove or change the chian magatama. the magatama is so good that it has become mandatory for many builds just because it exists. that is bad and cripples the support role, the build variety and also negatively affects the use of defense attributes. it should be removed or adjusted to a FIXED VALUE. and by fixed value im talking about 500 heal or maybe 750 at most. or give it an internal cooldown. just remove or adjust anything that makes the game dull by basically forcing you to use it because it is overpowered no matter how you look at it.
I personally feel that removing it with the game as is could cause balance issues for melee classes, particularly Twin Swords. Altering it to a fixed value would make it stronger with multi-hit skills (Swords, Spears, Twin Swords), while putting it on a cooldown would make it stronger with single-hit skills (Odachi, Axe). Probably just reduce the percentage that it heals, or cap the rate at which you can regenerate HP through lifesteal (e.g. you can only recover 10% of your max HP per second, so if you leeched 10k and have 10k max HP, you recover all of it over 10s instead of instantly). If the game was changed to allow players to actually take a few hits before dying, either by making defensive buffs stronger, enemies weaker or making defense actually do something, then Chian should probably be removed.

[Argentum]

with magatama cost i meant the chakra cost of the magatamas. the problem is that not only its effect but also its level requirement are factored into the chakra cost which is resulting in magatamas being more expensive because they are lower level despite having the exact same effect as other high level magatamas. (there are a few exceptions like said wind element magatama but thats the general trend)

the problem with chian magatama isnt the way defense works, its just that it is way to effective at what it does. it makes characters way to self-sustained and i believe that this would not change with a timed regeneration at all. the issue with it is that it would be incredibly hard to achieve a balance between usefulness and uselessness with the healing recieved. its unrealistic to keep it in the game being useful but not retardedly overpowered or entirely underwhelming.

it is true that giving it a fixed healing value would make it more effective with faster weapon types, but usually the faster weapontypes are the ones being build more fragile then other weapons (power/dex katana and pure dex for the twins/bows [at least thats what i assume]) so the heal would go where it is needed more and it would open chakra for a defensive maga for the slower weapon types. defense attributes propably only need a small touch up. the functionality is there allready but the scaling is either slightly to low OR dependent on monster/character level [this is also an assumption, i only took a quick glance on it a while back.]

anyways, removing or altering the chian magatama in a proper way will promote the support role in groups alot more and force players to make decisions about ressource evaluation/character building while currently there is no such thing as character building beyond slight adjustments.

[Otonashi]

with magatama cost i meant the chakra cost of the magatamas. the problem is that not only its effect but also its level requirement are factored into the chakra cost which is resulting in magatamas being more expensive because they are lower level despite having the exact same effect as other high level magatamas. (there are a few exceptions like said wind element magatama but thats the general trend)
Ah, I see. In terms of SF Magatama, I don't really think there is much of an issue, since higher ranking Magatama grants that small amount of SF for a relatively small amount of chakra, and the higher level requirement mainly addresses the chakra issue anyway. The problem really comes in with other types of Magatama. Unless, you're referring to another type of Magatama?

the problem with chian magatama isnt the way defense works, its just that it is way to effective at what it does. it makes characters way to self-sustained and i believe that this would not change with a timed regeneration at all. the issue with it is that it would be incredibly hard to achieve a balance between usefulness and uselessness with the healing recieved. its unrealistic to keep it in the game being useful but not retardedly overpowered or entirely underwhelming.

it is true that giving it a fixed healing value would make it more effective with faster weapon types, but usually the faster weapontypes are the ones being build more fragile then other weapons (power/dex katana and pure dex for the twins/bows [at least thats what i assume]) so the heal would go where it is needed more and it would open chakra for a defensive maga for the slower weapon types. defense attributes propably only need a small touch up. the functionality is there allready but the scaling is either slightly to low OR dependent on monster/character level [this is also an assumption, i only took a quick glance on it a while back.]

anyways, removing or altering the chian magatama in a proper way will promote the support role in groups alot more and force players to make decisions about ressource evaluation/character building while currently there is no such thing as character building beyond slight adjustments.
I see the problem, but still I am not convinced that it should be removed. The thing is, defensive Magatama doesn't actually help in terms of taking hits all that much, so no matter what, healing would require a response too immediate. Maybe someone else's input would be more useful here, since I play what is effectively a glass cannon with 0 points in Pow or Vit.

[Purre]

The biggest problem with sustainability is while old players leave for whatever reasons, the gap should be filled with new players. However, with the crash bug right outside the 1st rest area, there is no way for new players to even get past level 4. So they give up and move on to a different game. Basically, while bleeding old players and inability to attract new players, this game is doomed to die.

I joined near the end of August and got stuck at the infamous bugged spot. I waited patiently for a month for the event (which everyone said was the cause) to be changed to the next one, only to find the the bug remains. I'm not waiting around for another month for a another chance of a fix which isn't even guaranteed to work. Therefore, I am uninstalling Onigiri and looking elsewhere.