How is the official game not dead yet? Truly a mystery

Question

How is the official game not dead yet? Truly a mystery

Ever since my last post, somehow, there have have been both many and also few changes. We have made considerable improvements to the code, its structure, and its reliability, while also adding many new features that are slowly but surely bringing Melia closer to becoming a full-fledged game server

One of the largest changes on my side has been a shift in how I perceive this project. What started as a server emulator for the latest version of ToS is slowly shaping into something more, as we discover how few users are actually looking for such a project. As counterintuitive as it may sound, every person I heard express interest in Melia over the years has had different ideas of what they'd want to create with it, and their ideas rarely align with the game the server is compatible with

And since we also discovered unprecedented abilities to modify the client's behavior from the server, it has become more and more viable to craft much more customized experiences than were originally thought possible.

With this outlook, we gradually veered away from creating a straight forward server emulator and are now striving to make the server a piece of software that can not only recreate the functions of one game or a version of it. Instead we invision users handcrafting and piecing together their ideal world, while sticking to our ideals of making Melia as simple to use as possible for all user levels.

tl;dr Tree of Savior emulation will "soon" be possible. From what I've read the devs say, it seems possible that we'll be able to use the modern game client(with all the performance improvements and bug fixes) while having it behave like the vanilla game.

10 days til the mobile game.

I would be happy to play a private server Tree of Savior game. They need to buff rates by a ton, tho. The game was amazing in CB and then it opened and it was a nightmare game.

That game is not Tree of Savior, it literally only has the name in it. It's not even trying to wear its skin.

There's a lot more that needs to be fixed. The rates were actually okay, the problem is that ToS has the gay little mechanic where you only get mobs from monsters around your level. But the game did not have good grinding spots for all level ranges. So, if you misused your EXP Cards, you'd run out at a point where mobs did not give you good exp. This made the difference between having to grind for a day, and having to grind for a week.

Tree of Savior emulation will "soon" be possible.

They have been saying this for ages and it never happened. The closest thing we ever had was based on an old leak and it was taken down from what I remember. Besides every single version of the game is ass. They were on a good track with Ep12/13 but then threw it all away for the mobile game.

There is a private server running right now called Seeds of Yggdrasil. I tried it and it was okay, better than official ToS but I didn't like the rebalance. It's based on the leak.

The thing I'm talking about on the OP is an emulator, not just an edit of leaked files. It has progressed along to the point where the game is playable. They're currently at the stage where they're implementing the hundreds of skills for the dozens of classes, one by one. Once you have every class finished up to Rank 5 or 6, it'll be perfectly playable.

Here's something I pulled from their discord. They have the skill working except it causes your character to flinch and stop every time a monster is hit, and they were working on smoothing it out.
It's indeed been "ages" but it's still coming. Once it reaches the point where serious servers are possible, more people will jump into developing it, and from there it will grow.

I'm surprised the gif I made near the start of Tree of Saviour still gets used. I remember it running like ass, building a new PC, and then it magically running even more like ass. I actually tried it a few months ago and it was barely running at all.

I'll probably give private servers a look once they happen, but I don't expect the same sort of magic of RO and the custom stuff people had.

How are korean games so grindy if they work 20 hours a day?

Thanks for making OC, Anon.
Over the decade since release, they've made major improvements to the performance. The modern clients are orders of magnitude better optimized. I remember that they even made several blog posts about the process, with tech details. When I played about 2 years ago on the Papaya server, it handled like any other PC game.

but I don't expect the same sort of magic of RO and the custom stuff people had

The point of doing things "the hard way" and making an emulator instead of using leaked executables is precisely the fact that it makes the game customizeable to a large degree.

They expect you to pay to skip the grind.

I liked ToS enough until they started with the p2w class bullshit, that well and truly killed all my interest

When I made it, I was really clueless about making gifs. I still need to start it back up and make more shit but my homeboard was more than anything.

I have fond memories of tree of savior launching and I played a mostly full support linker

I've seen those shorts for some time now just like the statement it will be there soon. Till they release it I don't see why I should believe them. However the thing is getting the classes running wont magically make the game good. The stat system would require a full overhaul, the class balancing a lot of work with the pre scout system requiring more than the latter one and content of course. Slowing down leveling to an absurd degree to match RO wont make the game significantly more enjoyable when monster AI is as barebone as it can get.

Despite what anons always say the game was a huge pile of shit in the beta and on release. Some of the latter changes were actually good though one good change was usually accompanied by at bare minimum one fuck up on another end.

Everyone had "that one patch" that broke the camel's back. Whether it was the cash shop, Earth tower, guild neutrality, ReBuild or the mechanics shifts, every time they touched the game, it was made worse.

Linker was a really fun concept in vanilla, definitely one of the better aspects of the game.

It's okay if you didn't like the game. Personally, I really like the core gameplay, although I agree that the enemy AI was awful.

Guild neutrality was whatever pvp was pointless during that period because no rewards or penalties

That's what made it great. Guild Neutrality fucking ruined the game for me and for a lot of people. Tos was the only game that scratched my itch for unrestricted warfare against subhumans and it was patched out overnight. God I hate carebears so much, I hate whiners and casuals so fucking much, I hate IMC the most. My rage will never subside.

Don't get me wrong the core gameplay is good this is why I played it for a very long time till mobile happened and they started to go full milking mode with barebone patches and paid classes. The thing is I don't see a single version of the game that isn't flawed down to the core especially the stat system is still a disaster even after all the reworks. It wouldn't even surprise me if they actually manage to get a better running server side and maybe even fix the legacy garbage the official devs didn't dare to touch but then there is still a lot to do.

I completely forgot this game existed, I tried it once in the official release, I liked the characters and the overall atmosphere of the game but I was bored after 1 hour and lost interest, I thought its because I just grew out of this sort of games and never looked back.

Now I realise a lot of people hated the game, why?

I agree with your post. The important thing really is to get the emulator to a point where making a half-serious server is possible. Once the ball is rolling, making tos good will be a matter of when, not if.

Unconsensual pvp with no penalties for death IS carebear shit, it was funny running around annoying people but I didn’t really miss it when it was gone especially because launch ToS pvp was hilariously unbalanced with like one functional class per tree

How is the official game not dead yet?

I guess it depends on what you consider dead

You could write a very thick book on everything that was wrong with this game. In short, it was incredibly mismanaged. To comical levels.

What people call the "vanilla" experience is the state of the game during closed betas and during the early access phase on steam. From that point onwards, every single patch was dedicated to streamlining, casualizing, dumbing down or outright stripping mechanics away from the game. From world pk to casual card games to entire mechanics from classes to the very concept of having a choice in equipment, all of it systematically stripped. For example, during this time, stat builds for characters were all "all point on INT", "all point on STR", that sort of thing. They couldn't figure out how to deal with this, so they simply made it so that players could no longer assign Stat points, they would be auto-assigned for you depending on level and class.

As they failed to deal with every single issue with the game, more and more it got dumbed down, while at the same time, adding layered enhancement systems designed to milk whales. Standard Korean fare.

Despite everything, the gameplay is 1000% solid and satisfying, so the game retains players even to this day. Not to mention the artstyle, the class variety, the music, the maps. Everything in the game that doesn't involve numbers is beautiful.

great art and music

hyped as true RO 2

ended up as worse version of your average ass modern korean MMO

typical korean MMO retardation like low rates and p2w

lots of terrible design decisions

"there is potential just give them more time to cook"

plenty of reasons.

Why doesn't this game have private servers for how it was in 2017 with removed idle farm.

It was jarring how they had no ceremony whatsoever surrounding the shift towards p2win.

once early access ends, you will need to buy a token that gives your account special benefits for 30 days

without it, you can't trade, you pay 30% on everything on market, you have shit exp, literally no storage space, and much more

also, the cash shop? it's going away, forever. All the cosmetics in it will now be gacha box only

That's exactly what this thread is about.

As someone who spent nearly 100 in the closed beta, this is true. I expected it to be Project r1. The closed beta was beautiful it was fun, probably one of the best experiences I've ever seen.

Then release date happened and it was like 9/11 for RO players who had been waiting for it. It was like seeing something that was cooking good and about to be served, suddenly shat on by a jealous chef that people might enjoy his meal.

Seriously how could they fuck this up? It was like the quickest steam greenlight or whatever ever done on steam was at the time. People craved a good MMO experience and they proceeded to fucking ruin with their stupidity.

Plain and outright stupidity. Yes, there was greed. A lot of it. But stupidity was the major cause.
Sheer incompetence from just about every person involved in the game.
Some of the scandals and incidents during Early ToS were so major that they would have spelled the immediate death of any other MMO. But ToS was so loved that it managed to survive countless such episodes.

They couldn't even do the most basic things, like deal with bots. I remember that the forums had threads dedicated to tracking specific bots that would roam the game for literal months, and the GMs did not take action.

Because back then the server code was still a complete black box and no one had the motivation or documentation to reverse engineer IMC spaghetti. It wasn't just about "removing idle farming", the whole game ran on jenga towers of scripts and hardcoded nonsense layered over time from alpha-era Korea builds.

Only recently have projects made enough progress to even emulate the 2017 client behavior with stability, and even that is slow going, since you basically need to replicate a whole functional ecosystem just to get to "vanilla grind hell with no afk summoners" levels. It's coming though. Slowly. As long as another gacha lawsuit doesn't bulldoze development again.

the very concept of having a choice in equipment

On release there was no real equipment so people would run around at level 200 with the cafrisun set you get at lv40, lv 90 Arde Dagger or later Manamana. Their Diablo randomized gear was an attempt to fix this but this couldn't keep up with e.g. the earth tower set. Armor type itself like cloth or leather I agree with you. Wizard and Cleric were also absurd OP on release cause their attacks couldn't miss and with the stat system could just blow everything into CON to become immortal cause of block with a shield while dealing more damage than any physical class. Ironically someone on the dev team seems to remember this cause now Cleric is the bottom feeder tree with Archer being on top but the korean top whale seemingly sitting on archer could also be a reason.

youtube.com/watch?v=II8_cojsh1E
youtube.com/watch?v=Fse1BN19CL0

oh yes this was nicegame we killed some people with summoning mobs, and we camped some worldbosses, very good game, but not really.

i mean, there was so much work made, so much good music, locations, models, arts, but the game was so shit. can't anyone just buy assets and make something? some good game, some jrpg, some solo rpg, some vampire survivors-clone. anything, because no one going to play tos, this is very bad game that is made by 3 koreans with 1 update per year or something

such a waste

Never5get only korea would accept custom LUA requests without any server side checks in place.

After the horrific launch and seeing the changes, I couldn't stomach more than a few hours. Didn't even know until this thread that it was mismanaged even more. I kind of intentionally tried to forget it exists and not think about how bad and jarring it was after launch.

My question is, how could the staff involved be so stupid? ToS was in the oven for what over a decade? How could they fuck this up so hard?

People didn't use Cafrisun and Arde Dagger because other sets didn't matter, it was because additional lines of damage were way better than anything else, and those pieces of equipment had them.
On modern ToS, the concept of equipment does not exist anymore. When you make a character, it gives you a set, which you will evolve and upgrade, and that's the only thing you'll ever wear. That's what I was referencing. There is no longer itemization in ToS.

Wizard and Cleric were also absurd OP on release cause their attacks couldn't miss and with the stat system could just blow everything into CON to become immortal cause of block with a shield while dealing more damage than any physical class

Oh yeah, CON meta with a shield is a vivid memory, but that had more to do with how skills had flat scaling, which made your stats not important. The reason why physical classes, specially Swordsmen, were bad was because of hit boxes. With Wizard and Cleric, you could press a button to unleach a hitbox the size of the screen, or had skills that auto-targeted. For Swordsmen classes, you had to actually go up to players/enemies and hit them with minuscule hit boxes. Oh, and the netcode was absolutely shit. The position of players on your screen didn't match their actual location.

We know ToS was a decade into development when it came out. They had to get the game out the door or face cancellation, because it had already spent too much money.
I remember reading anectodes on how the devs even got paid trips to Lithuania in order to study the lore.

Picture related was the first time the game was shown, all the way back in 2011.

Ah that was such a good time in beta. I remember getting like c5 ranger and one shotting bosses with level 15 spiral arrow, or using centurion to drag botters into town.

which made your stats not important.

Your weapon upgrade was the one important thing with +40 being the cap and non-linear scaling. CON meta was just arse as physical especially the pvp when a cleric would roll around with 40k hp, endless amounts of buffs/debuffs and self sustain for all eternity. You could use hunter for permanent CC lockdown but then you had to deal with a retarded NPC by your side. Their current approach copies Lost Ark like all they do is copying Lost Ark now even their class concepts. It's better for people who actively play cause they can carry over some of their work into the next gear but worse for new players. At the same time they basically removed any sort of interesting unique lines from gear turning them into pure stat sticks. Their generalization went so far that they killed both gearing and class building even if they got two weapon pairs working and brought magic in line with physical.

I remember people telling me how the current state of ToS is basically a 1:1 copy of that game, but I have never seen it even mentioned before.

Is it really that much of a copy?

I didn't play Lost Ark but the people from the official ToS shitcord, which used to be barely moderated and basically is doomposting the game the whole day, claim this with plenty having played Lost Ark. It honestly doesn't surprise me given that the game has been nothing but a copy of whatever seemed to be successful in their eyes.

Buy cosmetic hair with shit i got from the starter good goy pack

Update happen

Hair comestic disappear

Make a ticket

lol hair cosmetic gone forever teehee XD

Never played the game ever after this

Guys. I have a confession to make. I'm the one who destroyed CNL. The method I used to destroy them is saved on another hard drive, but I assure you that it totally happened.

I haven't touched the game in like 4 fucking years, now. I don't even know if I'd even have any of my shit if I tried to log in now. I had a fuckton of those green coins stockpiled before they shot up to a ridiculous market price. A shame if they're gone.

buy founder's pack to reserve a nickname

at release there's only one server to play on and it's NA

they later add in other servers and divide them into regions but you can't change to the desired one yourself without starting from scratch

much much later they give a brief window where you can transfer your character to a server you want

miss that event, so I'm stuck as an EU on a NA server

willing to pay for a character transfer but they never offer such service

quit the game

download it years later

apparently they resetted everyone's character name at one point

of course mine is already taken

me paying for a founder's pack specifically to reserve a desired nickname was a waste of money

Most old stuff is worthless other than maxed Boruta Seals. If you played on the Korean or SEA server your character might be gone cause they did a cleanup when they merged those.

Fucking scammer

how much lewd content ToS have?

I was looking forward to ToS a lot before release and then never ended up playing it for some reason
Anyways who's the cutest character in the game?

Cryo and Highlander