I didn’t really think that much of it until I read the response from a Webzen representative.
The Frontier Pack were always advertised on their cosmetic aspect. I remember answering to a lot “p2w” complain assuring they will not be “cheated” items and will not give any advantage in the game as per say but were mostly made for an exclusive purpose. So are the titles and the hall of fame (that will happen, one day, I have hope )
Joke aside I completely understand the frustration of players realizing the stats are not matching the one they can have in game. I think we are clearly at fault on this as our communication should have been clearer and it was not the case. To tell your the truth it’s something we discussed a lot internally. This is something we will try to improve for any future content. Everybody is willing to agree or not with our prices or decision, but the one thing we don’t want if for the players to not trust us when they are buying something in the game.
Here we are facing two different approaches in terms of cosmetics: Korean gaming culture is all in favor of temporary items while a western based culture is in the contrary for the permanent status offer.
For our developers granting the same 10% also for a permanent items, could lead to an unbalanced system.
The reason why they didn’t have the intention in the first place to support this modification.
However, discussions are going between us and developers regarding the implementation of new permanent items or converting certain temporary items into permanent ones have been opened.
Such feedback contribute to seize our players expectations and as such, it will constitute part of our standings regarding the coming of several more permanent items in game.
So it’s not a terminated topic, it’s actually an interesting opening: we welcome this feedback which contributes to bring our common game/cash shop practices, the goal aimed in managing a flexibility and understanding in both gaming cultures.
The first bolded paragraph was like an eye opening “WHAT?” moment for me. Oh we have a ton of temporary cosmetic items in Korean MMO’s like Aion, ArcheAge, Blade & Soul, Black Desert Online, Devilian, Lineage 2, Maple Story, Riders of Icarus, TERA just to name a few. NOT!
What western gamers do not like are the stats normally associated with cosmetics where those stats end up being removed in the NA/EU versions. To Webzen’s credit, the first paragraph was true and while the permanent versions had some minor stats, they were indeed advertised as being mainly cosmetic in nature.
The main concern western players made to Webzen was if there would be “p2w” elements in their cash shop. It is now clear that yes, players can purchase these temporary cosmetic items (which have a cash shop consumable to extend the length of most) which have higher stats on them which provide a distinct advantage.
The second bolded portion was for me; “where have I heard that before?” This is where western publishers end up learning a very hard lesson. It doesn’t matter if developer and publisher are the same company (in this case, Webzen Dublin is just a publishing subsidiary of parent Webzen – the Korean developers are pretty much going to do what they feel is better and occasionally make adjustments – very rarely do you see significant overhaul to core systems and designs; Devilian was one of those rare exceptions).
I personally bought the Platinum Frontier Pack because I do like to show some support (and give the company the benefit of the doubt that they will do more right than wrong. I also pull no punches when a company conducts themselves in less than stellar ways and I have to say that Webzen is making Trion Worlds look really good by comparison when it comes to competency and professionalism. And that should say a lot considering how often I have skewered Trion for some of their incompetent decisions and poor handling of situations in at least two of their third party published games that I play (ArcheAge and Devilian).
Seeing the above was a huge facepalm/shaking my head moment. The Korean server does not have that much additional content over this global version and it has been out since March 2017. The guild versus guild system is a “what the hell is this” sort of thing, the other two continents are still locked off, and the level cap is still 65. And they finally merged the 4 servers into one last week. These are not good signs when the Korean player base has bailed already. The writing is on the wall for this game when it comes to how much and how quickly content will come out.
When someone like myself just stops playing a game in this genre in a month, that is never a good sign because despite the nature of this blog where it initially focused on Diablo III and some of its issues (and eventually expanded to Korean MMO’s that I’ve been playing) where I do have some harsh words/tone, I also had a high tolerance for sticking with these games until those issues made playing the game no longer something I found personally fun. MU Legend was something that never had that “it” factor for me when I first launched it during the first CBT and I covered some of the reasons why in my one month look back at the game.
