TL’s producer, Jongok Ahn, published the eighth Producer Letter, this time they talk about the problems that arose with the implementation of the Resistance Event, which was suspended, and the changes focused on PVE that will be implemented in future updates.
You can find below the complete translation of the new producer’s letter, we apologize for any translation errors.
We’re sorry to hear about the controversy surrounding the Resistance event. We realize that we have not been able to fully comprehend the needs of our players and are deeply sorry for any inconvenience caused. We sincerely apologize for not being able to meet the expectations of everyone who played the game with love.
We’re taking the feedback from the Resistance event very seriously, and we’re working on a number of fixes and enhancements to the game. One of the things we’re focusing on is fixing events that force you to play certain content, and balancing PvE content across the board, including dynamic events that put too much competitive stress on players. We’d like to share more of what we’re doing about this and ask for your feedback.
We’re suspending the Resistance event
The biggest draw of Resistance Events was the ability to gain new skills. Given the high value of skills in TL, this made the Resistance event a requirement for many players, and it felt like forced content. We recognized this and tried to reduce the pressure on players by lowering the minimum score to earn skills, but we admit that this didn’t have much of an effect due to the way the event was run.
This was clearly not the intent of the team, and we’ve decided to temporarily suspend the Resistance Event until we can find a way to improve it. As a result of the suspension, all level 50 players will automatically receive the new skills released in the Resistance Event. For those who have already learned the new skills from Resistance Parchments, we’ll be rewarding them with Omnipotence Books. Players who have not yet learned the new skills and have them in their Resistance parchments, skill chests, or skill books will also receive the same Omnipotence book as a reward. For a follow-up on the Resistance event, check out our February 7 update.
We realize that this is a decision that could easily negate the value of our efforts, but we are determined to fix the underlying problem. We will continue to think about our operations and explore all options so as not to disappoint you.
Even if we do have future events, we plan to prioritize rewarding you with non-growth related rewards (limited skins, cosmetics, titles, etc.). New skills will continue to be auto-acquired based on level, rather than being distributed through events, and power-ups/grindbooks will be awarded through seasonal events that everyone participates in, such as the Christmas event, and through in-game content that will be added in the future.
Let’s ease the competitive stress of Peace Zone events
We’ve long felt that excessive competitive stress is one of the biggest areas for improvement, not just in Resistance events, but in the game as a whole. We recognize that there are a large number of PvE-oriented players in TL who are focused on their own goals and growth, so we’re taking this feedback into consideration by removing the competitive aspect from our dynamic events.
Currently, the Peace Mode of Dynamic Events does not feature PvP between users, but rather a form of mutual competition for dominance in delivery totals. The rewards are distributed on a sliding scale based on rank, which creates disparity and makes the lowest ranked users feel relatively deprived. These competitive elements created a similar kind of stress to PvP and led to dynamic events being marginalized.
In the future, we plan to improve Peace Zones events to live up to their “peace” tagline, with all players in the zone working toward a common goal. The key is to move away from competition for prey and toward collaboration between users to overcome problems, which is why we’re envisioning more sophisticated content. Rewards will no longer be based on rank, but on the level of goal achievement, with rewards rising for all participants.
We’re in the process of finalizing our plans for this direction, and it will be some time before we’re able to share them with you. In the meantime, to help alleviate some of the stress of Dynamic Events, we’re spreading out the rewards across other content. Instead of reducing ranked rewards for Dynamic Events, we’re adjusting them to ensure that dungeons using “Contract Token: Abyss” have an adequate supply of “Marind” and other growth materials. *
We’ll improve and enhance PvE content
While we’re on the subject of PvE-oriented improvements to Dynamic Events, we’re also excited to announce some PvE content enhancements that have been in the works for some time. While we don’t have specific dates for some of these, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about where the game is headed after the Resistance event, so we thought it was only fair to share some of our plans early on.
The endgame content for PvE will be centered around cooperative dungeons. The guild community is a strength of our game, but it’s also a system that requires a strong sense of belonging. We’re wary of making guild commitments too much of a burden for gamers based on their personal preferences, so we’ve decided that the endgame for PvE-oriented players is a cooperative dungeon that can evolve outside of the guild community into a party and 6+ party expansion format.
Five new cooperative dungeons are coming in March. Three of these will be hardmods of existing dungeons, and two will be entirely new dungeons in development. This may come as a bit of a disappointment to those of you who were hoping for more new dungeons, but we want to be realistic about what we can do to scale the endgame the fastest. We’re working on patterns and polish to ensure that these aren’t just boss fights with different skins.
New dungeons will be released on a weekly basis, and we want to spread out the armor spots for each dungeon to give you a reason to go to the dungeon and a goal, regardless of what weapon you have.
Additionally, we’re working quickly on a system for dungeon matching. The current state of World Chat being filled with party matching is not fun for us as developers, and it’s something that many of you have expressed as a weak point. With dungeons and boss raids at the center of our PvE focus, we’ll continue to work on improving the system for a better experience.
We’re also making improvements to Field Bosses. Field bosses may have had less competitive stress, but they didn’t allow for the most basic PvE fun: bossing. The open nature of the field meant that there were too many players for the boss specs, making it difficult to experience the boss’s patterns, and the reward distribution was too uneven. To fix this, we’re making all Peace Mode boss fights that appear in the field, including Archbosses, take place in a split instance space. Players who used to tackle a single Peace boss together will be split across multiple instances, and as the number of players involved is appropriately reduced, the chance of individual rewards will increase, making for a more dense boss fight experience than before. As we increase the amount of gear that drops from Field Bosses, we expect to naturally adjust the difficulty of enhancing that gear. We’re targeting February for these improvements.
PvE improvements and enhancements like these are a top priority for TL right now. Our goal is to move from a guild-centric and somewhat closed experience to a more open and free PvE experience for soloing and parties. We’ll be overhauling the content so that you can focus on your own growth, no longer feeling pressured into unwanted competition.
