Onigiri's Sustainability - An Analysis of Playerbase Decline

[Tekato]

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.

I agree with this statement, where is the tech support when needed?

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Need to rebalance staff/wand/bows skills. Wands are very dependant on skills to kill enemies, without any good skills, especially high level skills, wands are pretty useless.

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Proof of Concept to rebalance weapons to Spears/Swords

My challenge to community :

- Please screencast a gameplay video that can beat godlike spear player like Rhythm or godlike sword/twinsword player like Sebastian in clearing dungeon time at Hell Difficulty with 5-man party, using either Staff, or Wand.
In higher level dungeon like : Secluded Forest, Grotto, Echigo Estate. ( you need to finish at least under 4 minutes @lv.80 ), at lv.90, you can finish at 3 mins, and at level 100 you can finish it at 2 mins using those weapons.

If you can finish this dungeon in lower time based on your level, or at least the same time with godlike spear/sword player, than my point is moot, if not, then my point is valid to rebalance wand/staff class.

I don't think staff are meant to be able to clear dungeons fast... just saying.. maybe wand but not staff....

[Lynneth]

Then, why not just make staff, "full support" weapon, which only dedicated to support others.

Or, make it dedicated to attack enemies, or at least cripple enemies?

Why make half-assed weapon?

At why Onigiri_US remove ressurection spell? Does anyone can answer this question?

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@Tekato

You can try with Wand. Try it yourself. I can guarantee you, that it's almost impossible to clear dungeon as fast as spear/swords in higher level dungeon with many scattered mobs.

The only exception would be Yakumo Temple, which I can clear it in one minute (the same time with Rhythm) in Hell 5 people. Since I can OHKO all the bosses there, that, with maximum upgrade wand.

[Moriya Suwako]

Lynneth, I really don't get why you're making our class sound like utter crap; it really isn't. It starts to scale and it's certainly very strong if you know how to build it.

As for the time response, I can clear Echigo Estate faster than most sword or twin blade users players can. By that, i mean yes, i CAN break the 5 minute mark with wand in Echigo estate, and yes MOST sword/twin sword players CANNOT do echigo under 5 minutes. I don't see what you're trying to prove here, besides the fact that raijuu mobility is a bit absurd (which we DID go over in that video). If you're going to compare, you need to compare similar level players. Obviously any undergeared/not as strong player is gonna fall absurdly short compared to Sebastian or Rhythm because they will ALWAYS have more damage whether same gear or not due to the level 100+ affinity increase as well. Compare a level 80 to a level 105 and the result is kind of obvious.


I don't mean to be rude, but put bluntly, either you're not building your wand build correctly, or you're still underlevelled compared to the people who actually can consistently carry a grind dungeon. Wand isn't a half-assed weapon. It has it's cons and it's pros... but "lacking damage" or "requiring too much effort" is a GLOBAL con to every weapon in the game. It has the greatest AOE potential in the game, greatest multi-hit potential in the game, and you can even deal more damage than spear/twin swords at times if you correctly place certain skills (ie: hitting the frost glaive at what I like to call the sweet spot AKA where all spikes hit).

[Tekato]

Then, why not just make staff, "full support" weapon, which only dedicated to support others.

Or, make it dedicated to attack enemies, or at least cripple enemies?

Why make half-assed weapon?

At why Onigiri_US remove ressurection spell? Does anyone can answer this question?

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@Tekato

You can try with Wand. Try it yourself. I can guarantee you, that it's almost impossible to clear dungeon as fast as spear/swords in higher level dungeon with many scattered mobs.

The only exception would be Yakumo Temple, which I can clear it in one minute (the same time with Rhythm) in Hell 5 people. Since I can OHKO all the bosses there, that, with maximum upgrade wand.

There are higher lvl dungeons in which wand can dominate such as echigo estate which has monsters cluttered toghether in small rooms which you can just aoe spam at a safe distance compared to spear and sword (which u seem to think are godly weapons) that have to be right up in the middle of the danger zone risking death ..
You seem to be focusing too much on clearing times at grotto which isnt the only dungeon out there and are deviating from what wand class is capable of

[Lynneth]

Maximum damage potential - yes.

Multi-hit potential - yes.

But in reality, not really since there are multiple factors come in, especially SP consumption.

Don't forget the SP consumption scale. With Ice Glaive VII, with your casting twice your SP will have already depleted.

Unless you have unlimited SP/mana pools. You're doomed to drink SP pots, even with Invigorate from other player.

You will have delay to drink SP pots. Compare it with Water Dragon Spear, which has I think the most effective/efficient damage/SP consumption skills in the game.

WDS has fast cast, widest area of effect attack, low SP consumption compared to the damage induced, can be cancelled mid-way but still have full-effect damage, and WILL NOT BE CANCELLED when the caster got hit.

One skill cast Water Dragon Spear VII can clear ALL THE MOBS of one room of Echigo Estate without much hassle. Just make all the enemies marched linearly towards you.

While wand players, must place him/herself very very cautiously to put Ice Glaive to make it hit all the enemies. And sometimes it doesn't hit all the enemies.

[Otonashi]

Then, why not just make staff, "full support" weapon, which only dedicated to support others.

Or, make it dedicated to attack enemies, or at least cripple enemies?

Why make half-assed weapon? :roll: :?

At why Onigiri_US remove ressurection spell? Does anyone can answer this question? :lol:

The game doesn't seem designed around having designated healers that are supposed to focus on healing. Mnd is a utility stat, and Staves are utility weapons. You'd carry around one to trade Invigorates with your party and cast Rapid Storm for yourself and allies to clear dungeons faster, then cast heals so that the primary DPS (i.e. the one with the most AoE and least pick-off) doesn't need to stop to recover HP (since running into enemies with 1k HP expecting Chian to heal you up can be suicidal). I suspect resurrection was removed to prevent the combination of Weapon Spirit and Resurrection making Aramitama too easy, whereas it was kept in JP because they already have Satan Weapons which destroy Aramitama anyway.

Maximum damage potential - yes.

Multi-hit potential - yes.

But in reality, not really since there are multiple factors come in, especially SP consumption.

Don't forget the SP consumption scale. With Ice Glaive VII, with your casting twice your SP will have already depleted.

Unless you have unlimited SP/mana pools. You're doomed to drink SP pots, even with Invigorate from other player.

You will have delay to drink SP pots. Compare it with Water Dragon Spear, which has I think the most effective/efficient damage/SP consumption skills in the game.

WDS has fast cast, widest area of effect attack, low SP consumption compared to the damage induced, can be cancelled mid-way but still have full-effect damage, and WILL NOT BE CANCELLED when the caster got hit.

Is SP consumption a problem when wands can clear EE under 5 minutes? I highly doubt so.

[Tekato]

Maximum damage potential - yes.

Multi-hit potential - yes.

But in reality, not really since there are multiple factors come in, especially SP consumption.

Don't forget the SP consumption scale. With Ice Glaive VII, with your casting twice your SP will have already depleted.

Unless you have unlimited SP/mana pools. You're doomed to drink SP pots, even with Invigorate from other player.

You will have delay to drink SP pots. Compare it with Water Dragon Spear, which has I think the most effective/efficient damage/SP consumption skills in the game.

WDS has fast cast, widest area of effect attack, low SP consumption compared to the damage induced, can be cancelled mid-way but still have full-effect damage, and WILL NOT BE CANCELLED when the caster got hit.

One skill cast Water Dragon Spear VII can clear ALL THE MOBS of one room of Echigo Estate without much hassle. Just make all the enemies marched linearly towards you.

While wand players, must place him/herself very very cautiously to put Ice Glaive to make it hit all the enemies. And sometimes it doesn't hit all the enemies.

WDS is just op in general but on another note u must realize most wand skills have large aoe and high base skill force which is probably why the sp cost is so high which really wont matter at higher lvls because your sp pool and sp recovery will be so high you can just meditate urself and clear any dungeon without needing to rely on any kind of support , but that ofcorse depends on ur build and what magatamas you choose to use.

[Compa-IF]

Please reduce SP cost for Wand

[Argentum]

Curing still has it's places (such as death cool down -.-).

your point of view seems strange. lets try to shift a few of your arguments into my point of view so you get a better understanding of what i say.

first of: curing is supposed to prevent death, not redeath due to being unable to heal from chian magatama. cure is the supports "OH SHIT"-button. its meant to be used when the either the support or the target screwed up badly and gets into a tight spot. for everything else there are other healing spells that do it better or more efficient. keep in mind that there IS A FULLY DESIGNED HEALING SYSTEM in the game (it just needs some tweaks to work, i will come to that later because those tweaks are not necessarily done by altering the heals)



with that out of the way lets check the first statement you wrote there:

TBH, I think chian is fine as it is. I think most ppl don't create their builds so that they will be fine if they have support.

people build AROUND chian magatamas instead of building around SUPPORTERS. and chian magatama is so good that it singlehandedly invalidates the existence of support players. aside from invigorate you can build your character self sustained in almost any content and this is directly counterintuitive to the existence of groups. seriously: there is NO reason for a group function to be in the game unless you are talking about aramitama. (benefits like more exp for the carry in groups are NOT a valid argument to even fund development of a group system) so essentially the current version of chian magatama is having such a drastic impact on the game that its actually setting development funds to waste. they could have used those funds to turn it into a singleplayer game of higher quality but essentialy the same feeling. let me remind you: we are talking about a single item in the game.

If you remove chian, well, just remember ppl quit when their popstar ran out. If you adjust the values, ppl will just go for more crit force or something. If chian became weaker, I think the only thing that would happen is that we'd have better players and ppl would go back to using hp pots XD.

the bolded ones are very wise words. this is actually the goal of the idea: to make chian magatama USEFUL but not MANDATORY. idealy chian magatama ends in a place where people consider using it because they can use its benefits but still need to evaluate the healing it provides with the effects of other stats like the critical force you mentioned. (we also need critical force magatamas now that you mentioned it ...) this would open up alot more ways to build your characters and promote group play. the only reason why i am actually suggesting its removal so much more then an alteration of the magatama is simple: i do not see Cyberstep being able to balance the magatama to exactly that point because there is so little room for errors and CS has a rather slow reaction time for balancing issues. it would be hard to make the magatama not useless but also not overpowered. especially when you consider that it actually needs to scale with your character to keep it useful at all levels (or even better: introduce static heal values and simply add more higher level variants of the magatama with adjusted chakra cost)

also: i can easily say that people quitting over the loss of passive lifeleech are people the game can handle not having around. i also doubt that there where many that quit for only that reason alone. (what popstar did: it essentially freed up build variety by shifting 3x chakra and a magatama slot into an accessiore slot that did not offer any useful alternatives at that time. basically its half of what the chian magatama discussion was about, just without losing its benefits)

Well, I guess it's just a matter of giving more ways for support to be useful. A cool down skill would be nice and would be good for both carries and support whereas weakening chian will just make runs slower for both -.-
I've never actually played full support so maybe some of my comments are misplaced -.-" but hopefully support has more of a role in edo.

there is no "both" in carry & support. there is only the carry and the dirty leeching rest that fills up the party so the carry can get more exp. altering chian would actually turn that "dirty leeching rest" into useful assets of the group.

-Unrelated to this but just want to point out to ppl making suggestions to make them so that the game is better, not easier or more like another game. At least I think that's what the intention was :/

keeping chian maga as it is equals making the game easier. removing or altering it will make the game better by offering more valid playstyles and promoting actual group play.

on a side note:

Whoa whoa, back up a little bit, what was that about chian magatama just now?

Remove or alter them? That thing is incredibly useful.
Do you seriously believe that chian magatama is one of the causes for onigiri playerbase to decline?

i thank you very much for this post, its actually strenghening my arguments quite alot, even if that might not have been your intention.

_________________________________________________________

next part of the post:

tweaks that would be a way to make healing and specific builds alot more useful:
let power and vitality scale your hp by a percentage of your base hp instead of static values. on the same time change ornaments like fated contractor from percentages to static values.
your characters abilitys defined by its stats should make the main difference and not the ornaments. the ornaments should enhance the natural abilitys of the character not vice versa.

as i mentioned before, defense should be buffed slightly to make it scale slightly better. take note of the word slightly, especially considering my other suggestion about power and vit.

there are alot of other suggestions to be made here,too but one always needs to concider effort and profit. what i suggest are changes that are easy to do and have a big impact. essentially it is about fixing the game with the stuff it allready has so that there is no high cost involved in doing so, because this would propably make a change much more likely then proposing something that would fix the game but also cost the company quite the ammount of money first.

[Tekato]

Curing still has it's places (such as death cool down -.-).

your point of view seems strange. lets try to shift a few of your arguments into my point of view so you get a better understanding of what i say.

first of: curing is supposed to prevent death, not redeath due to being unable to heal from chian magatama. cure is the supports "OH SHIT"-button. its meant to be used when the either the support or the target screwed up badly and gets into a tight spot. for everything else there are other healing spells that do it better or more efficient. keep in mind that there IS A FULLY DESIGNED HEALING SYSTEM in the game (it just needs some tweaks to work, i will come to that later because those tweaks are not necessarily done by altering the heals)



with that out of the way lets check the first statement you wrote there:

TBH, I think chian is fine as it is. I think most ppl don't create their builds so that they will be fine if they have support.

people build AROUND chian magatamas instead of building around SUPPORTERS. and chian magatama is so good that it singlehandedly invalidates the existence of support players. aside from invigorate you can build your character self sustained in almost any content and this is directly counterintuitive to the existence of groups. seriously: there is NO reason for a group function to be in the game unless you are talking about aramitama. (benefits like more exp for the carry in groups are NOT a valid argument to even fund development of a group system) so essentially the current version of chian magatama is having such a drastic impact on the game that its actually setting development funds to waste. they could have used those funds to turn it into a singleplayer game of higher quality but essentialy the same feeling. let me remind you: we are talking about a single item in the game.

If you remove chian, well, just remember ppl quit when their popstar ran out. If you adjust the values, ppl will just go for more crit force or something. If chian became weaker, I think the only thing that would happen is that we'd have better players and ppl would go back to using hp pots XD.

the bolded ones are very wise words. this is actually the goal of the idea: to make chian magatama USEFUL but not MANDATORY. idealy chian magatama ends in a place where people consider using it because they can use its benefits but still need to evaluate the healing it provides with the effects of other stats like the critical force you mentioned. (we also need critical force magatamas now that you mentioned it ...) this would open up alot more ways to build your characters and promote group play. the only reason why i am actually suggesting its removal so much more then an alteration of the magatama is simple: i do not see Cyberstep being able to balance the magatama to exactly that point because there is so little room for errors and CS has a rather slow reaction time for balancing issues. it would be hard to make the magatama not useless but also not overpowered. especially when you consider that it actually needs to scale with your character to keep it useful at all levels (or even better: introduce static heal values and simply add more higher level variants of the magatama with adjusted chakra cost)

also: i can easily say that people quitting over the loss of passive lifeleech are people the game can handle not having around. i also doubt that there where many that quit for only that reason alone. (what popstar did: it essentially freed up build variety by shifting 3x chakra and a magatama slot into an accessiore slot that did not offer any useful alternatives at that time. basically its half of what the chian magatama discussion was about, just without losing its benefits)

Well, I guess it's just a matter of giving more ways for support to be useful. A cool down skill would be nice and would be good for both carries and support whereas weakening chian will just make runs slower for both -.-
I've never actually played full support so maybe some of my comments are misplaced -.-" but hopefully support has more of a role in edo.

there is no "both" in carry & support. there is only the carry and the dirty leeching rest that fills up the party so the carry can get more exp. altering chian would actually turn that "dirty leeching rest" into useful assets of the group.

-Unrelated to this but just want to point out to ppl making suggestions to make them so that the game is better, not easier or more like another game. At least I think that's what the intention was :/

keeping chian maga as it is equals making the game easier. removing or altering it will make the game better by offering more valid playstyles and promoting actual group play.

on a side note:

Whoa whoa, back up a little bit, what was that about chian magatama just now?

Remove or alter them? That thing is incredibly useful.
Do you seriously believe that chian magatama is one of the causes for onigiri playerbase to decline?

i thank you very much for this post, its actually strenghening my arguments quite alot, even if that might not have been your intention.

_________________________________________________________

next part of the post:

tweaks that would be a way to make healing and specific builds alot more useful:
let power and vitality scale your hp by a percentage of your base hp instead of static values. on the same time change ornaments like fated contractor from percentages to static values.
your characters abilitys defined by its stats should make the main difference and not the ornaments. the ornaments should enhance the natural abilitys of the character not vice versa.

as i mentioned before, defense should be buffed slightly to make it scale slightly better. take note of the word slightly, especially considering my other suggestion about power and vit.

there are alot of other suggestions to be made here,too but one always needs to concider effort and profit. what i suggest are changes that are easy to do and have a big impact. essentially it is about fixing the game with the stuff it allready has so that there is no high cost involved in doing so, because this would propably make a change much more likely then proposing something that would fix the game but also cost the company quite the ammount of money first.

Don't forget chian magatama isn't easy to obtain there for it seems more like an end game magatama not everyone can get it and it requires the sacrifice of a magatama slot which would decrease your damage by a significant amount. Also doesnt hurt to have a healer in the group incase your hp goes down enough to where u have no room for chian to kick in the fact that there aren't many real support players will just make things more difficult.