Blade & Soul CBT Feedback

Posted 24 November 2015

After playing Alpha and Beta, I decided to put my thoughts together and write a long ass feedback post for NCsoft to consider. I realize that this might seem like a lot and I understand not everyone might agree with my opinions, but I just want to put my ideas out there for the devs. And if only 1 of my points is taken into consideration then this post would have been worthwhile. And isn’t it the point of Beta testing?

Pricing

Playing out as a newbie, I found the price of many things to be quite high. Here is a few examples of things that should have their price reduced.

Unsealing Charms

Drop the price to at least 5 silvers.

Repairs

Repair tools should be a lot cheaper as they are required to go through the game. I’d say maximum 3 or 2 silvers and the Weapon Merchant’s manual repairs should be cheaper as well.

Keys

Same as the Unsealing Charms, the price on keys should be reduced considerably.

Instant Mail Delivery

The price on instant mail delivery is not that much, but when you start posting items on the marketplace and crafting, it can be exaggerated in some instances. For example, selling something that gave me 10 copper on the marketplace was costly 9 copper to instant deliver.

Same thing for crafting. It could cost you more money to produce and instant deliver than what you are actually receiving when selling on the marketplace.

Please adjust the amount of money required for instant delivery to a reasonable amount depending on the amount received. It should also cap to a certain amount. So I’d suggest something like 1% of the received amount or a minimum 1 copper to a maximum of 1 Blade & Soul gold. Numbers do not have to be as is, but this is just to give an idea.

Marketplace

The marketplace is a tool necessary for trading goods, but as soon as I started using it a lot, I quickly noticed a lot of issues with it.

Maximum of items posted per day

The maximum of items posted per day is probably one of the most annoying features of all. Since NPC merchants will give you almost no money for sold goods, using the marketplace is pretty much your only option. Unfortunately, to make even a little bit of money you need to sell a lot. Please remove the cap as it would encourage the economy by putting more items up.

Maximum of items posted simultaneously

Ok this one is not so bad, but the problem is that it encourages people to sell in bulk as oppose to sell in smaller amounts. Therefore if you want to buy small amounts you often have to buy in bulk anyway. Removing the cap would allow more flexibility for the buyers and sellers and encourage a good economy.

Preview skins

Blade and Soul NA has a neat feature of allowing you to reskin your weapon as you wish. Unfortunately, to find a nice skin is sometimes more difficult and costly than what you might think. Indeed you cannot preview sealed items, which, thanks to the Unsealing Charms price, constitute the most majority of items on the Marketplace. At the moment, if you wish to try on a skin, you need to buy the item, unseal it at your expenses and then try it on. If it doesn’t fit you may try to resell it, most of the time at a loss, while also taking a slot in your marketplace listing.

Please make it so that you can preview sealed weapons directly from the marketplace.

Remove items postings

If there is a way to remove things from the marketplace, I haven’t found it yet, but if there is one, let me know.

If not well, since there is a maximum of items posted simultaneously, we should be able to remove them whenever we want. If the maximum of items posted simultaneously is removed, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but if the maximum stays, we should at least be able to change the postings.

More alt friendly

Blade and Soul races and classes are all unique and rich and we would like to try them all and make tons of alts… Well I do. Unfortunately the game is not so alt friendly. Here is a list of changes that could make the game more alt friendly.

Wardrobe

I’m sure this has been mentioned, but the wardrobe should be shared. If I buy something for a character, but then decide to delete said character, I should be able to transfer the outfit over. We don’t even need to go that far actually. It’s simply more convenient to try different outfits on other characters.

Another way to do this would be to use the wardrobe as an unlock system. Every time an outfit is unlocked through drops or shopping, it would become available for any characters on the account to use.

Storage

It would be way more convenient to have a shared storage between our characters. This way we can easily transfer goods between all our alts. Using the mail is costly and sometimes risqué, as we have to make sure to type out the name properly or else it will be sent to the wrong person.

Currencies

Money and curriencies should all be shared between alts. It is usually costly to mail money to alts and subject to mistakes as well. You may also to ask a friend to help you transfer money, but it is simply inconvenient.

Mail

This one is not such a big deal, but it would be easier if the mail received would be shared between characters, this way I would be able to receive it no matter which alt I’m playing on.

Quests, dailies and rewards

Although not as bad as it might look at first, I realized the rewards weren’t as good as they should be.

Money

Money received for questing or killing is pretty bad. It gets a bit better in Moonwater, but even then daily quests only awards you a few silvers. I suggest increasing the rewards especially for the repeatable quests in Moonwater.

Keys

I like that there isn’t too many type of keys. However, I think having chests requiring 1 key to open then 2 keys to open the chest inside is a bit exaggerated. Spending 3 keys just to obtain 1 item worth 2 silvers or an untradeable one is excessive. I suggest limiting the number of keys used for a drop to 1.

As for Brilliant keys, I suggest there may be more ways to obtain them through the story quests. At least award 1 for each realm. Same as how we get Transformation Stones.

Unsealing charms

Same as the keys, some items require 2 or 3 Unsealing charms. With their price as it is, it is exaggerated. Taking into account other issues with not being able to preview sealed items, it ends up being a huge waste of money most of the time. I suggest limiting the number of unsealing charms used for an item to 1.

Merchants

Merchants sell their goods at high prices, yet they won’t buy anything at more than 2 coppers. I suggest having the merchants buy goods at a rate 10% lower than the marketplace rate which would give us option if we don’t want or can’t list items on the marketplace anymore. The rate could be different, this is just an example.

Warlock drops

The class hasn’t been implemented. Please remove the warlock drops as it lowers our chances of getting the right weapon and clutters the marketplace with unnecessary items which end up being bought by mistake, which is almost like a scam for noobie people.

Viridian Poison

Thorns, Horns and Soulstones are fairly easy to obtain, yet Viridian Poison can only obtained from 2 daily quests. Since this item is required in crafting, I would suggest increasing either the drop rate or the amount of daily quests that rewards you with this item, or both.

Crafting

I tried Acquired Taste and Merry Potters and found crafting less than rewarding. First of all, the dishes which can be made are really limited. I made dumplings since the beginning and that’s about it. As for Merry Potters, most items that can be crafted are really costly to make. I found some other recipes from drops than can be made, but again they are costly to make.

I suggest having a larger diversity of recipes and, in the case of Acquired Taste, different dishes with different effects would be nice.

Also have more low cost recipes that do not require too many items for levelling, while keeping some recipes costly as well.

Outfits and cosmetics

I love most of the outfits and I think a lot of work went through their design. However, there are some issues which I would like it to be rectified if possible.

Clipping

Some of the outfits and weapons have really bad clipping issues, especially with female Gons. Yes the way they stand is really sexy, unfortunately the way they push out their ass…ets and everything makes clipping a really bad issue with them. For example, some of the Knuckles with Kung Fu Master go through their waist. If possible maybe open up a bug report section in the game where we can report clipping issues (or other problems) for you to fix them when time permits. That might be the best way to do it.

Bad hair day

Some of the hair styles have clipping issues with the outfits or with the characters, usually long hair. One way to fix part of the issue would be to have an alternate hair style for when we are wearing an outfit which is clipping with the hair.

As for fixing hair which bug with the actual character models, that’s just bad design, so please allow us to report the bugs so that they can be fixed. One very good example is the braided hair that you can buy in the Hongmoon Store for 400 Ncoin. If you try it on a Yun it looks really amazing, until you look at her shoulder… it goes right through it and there is no way to unsee this. If anything, please fix this one as I would love to buy the hair style, but won’t because of this.

Weapon skins

Weapon skins are great but as your weapon evolves it becomes costly. I suggest the reskin to be at a maximum of 10 or 15 silver.

Outfit prices

I see many outfits at 1200 or 2000 Ncoins. Well I think it’s a bit exaggerated especially if the outfits are not shared through the account. I suggest lowering the cost to 800 for any outfit.

Foods and Potions

Foods

I think we need more food diversity and better recovery from it. I suggest 100% recovery in in 10 or 15 seconds would be more reasonable. Also reduce the merchant’s price.

Potions

As for the basic potions, I suggest they either recover 60% HP, or reduce the cooldown to 45 seconds. Also, same as for the food, reduce the price at the merchant.

Ncoin Gold exchange

I’ll be honest here, the exchange system is not the easiest to grasp and not friendly to use. Please simplify it to a simple box with xGold to xNCoin or xNCoin to xGold conversion depending on a supply and demand which would calculate itself as the market fluctuates.

To conclude, if you made it here, thanks for taking the time to read. I hope this feedback will be helpful to the dev to some extent and helps improve the game.

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