Good times

Can you go into more detail about this? Holla Forums frequently misuses this term, so it's really hard to judge the game when it comes up.

WRONG
Anything that makes your character stronger in any way and is not a purely cosmetic change is p2w.

It's ok to like games
but that game is jewy

Not him but I can try my best explaining why pvp in SK is p2w shit (or more precisely pay4advantage shit):
Heart pendants are a vital meta in the game, specially in pvp. It pretty much doubles your hp which essentially lets you survive an otherwise fatal combo from one of the strongest swords as the glass cannon class in pvp (which made it op as fuck), and the slots to equip them are locked behind energy, which is the funbux of the game. you can however, buy said energy with crowns (farmable money) from other players. Not to mention of two extra weapon slots unlockable in the same way…

Then it comes UV rerolls (which are something like enchants to improve your gear further). In a later patch, OOO decided that the rng in getting 3 good UVs at once was too luck reliant and decided to allow players to pick what UVs to reroll without penalties. These 3x rerolls are paid with crowns and are pretty expensive, but of course most whales can afford it because of all the junk they can sell out of real money, including energy. This means they'd get an advantage over other players more quickly than someone who just farmslaved it too. Whales who were serious about pvp get an edge over other players by rolling max resistance on three difference CC abnormal statues on both pieces of armor (which made them immune to some CC status bombs which were used as area of denial, rendering them useless against said whales), not to mention attack damage, attack speed and cooldown reduction bonuses on their meta weapons.

And then the p2w in a real sense comes: crimson hammer dlc. After clearing it, it offers a rocket hammer as a reward. This hammer is pretty meh in PvE, but it's long range 1st attack and a fast to pull out dash for 2nd attack in it's basic string is abusable as fuck and lets you hit-and-run like a motherfucker. Did I mention the dash attack at close range really hurts too? There hasn't been a dlc like these since then, but then the devs had the nerve to release a unique new weapon behind a lootbox as the biggest prize, although I don't know how truly strong it really is since I stoppled playing the game for like a year ago. Not that it matters much since the gear balance is absolute ass anyways.

You're not wrong, f2p games will always inevitably give some sort of advantage to whales over peasants, regardless of how, even if that means goldbuying from chink slaves.

Huh really?
Oh wow, I didn't know this… guess I'll give the demo a try.

Rocket Hammer is actually one of the best swords in the game for pve- the dash and the way you can manipulate combos means it's simultaneously the most mobile melee weapon in the game and very good single target dps. It makes short work of fiends (the most threatening enemy type in the game after they gutted enemy tracking so people could braindead melee) even though its damage type is neutral towards them. the mask ghost pet works extremely well because the hammer's dash is a multihit attack, so you basically just pick something and it blows up

it can also move AFKs and this has never been patched out because the devs were lazy fucks and never bother to touch anything that actually has an affect on the gameplay

I really liked this game, but I preferred the mobileshit limited playtime model to the ridiculous grind and menuing garbage we have now. the heat rework was a mistake. health revives getting the boot in favor of more microtransactions was a mistake. UVs were a mistake.

it's like they didn't know how to properly monetize their game without dicking over literally everybody, even people who paid money, because everything just got progressively clunkier

also the black kat event where you have a 1 in 100 chance for a certain enemy to get buffed, and that enemy having a 1/100 chance to drop a key to a boss fight that 99.9% of players will NEVER SEE is laughably wasteful, just a carrot for people to chase because it has some of the most powerful armor in the game as a reward which they made even grindier to get instead of fixing the ridiculous luck factor which you can only circumvent by giving shekels to somebody who WAS lucky

they also can't optimize their game for the life of them and a variety of technical grievances that prevent even modern rigs from running smoothly was nothing short of 'wack'

oh and let's not forget shard bombs where a huge amount of the playerbase told them the rework was shit and their reasoning was shittier. Their response to this? one of the staff replied to a letter and effectively said "fuck you we're making the game the way we want to" and the buggy, unusable bombs that were the replacement that had a built in mechanic that punished you for using it effectively, preventing enemies from taking any damage if you hit them too many times in a window of time

i had a lot of fun times with this game but it felt like everything that went well was a happy accident and they didn't actually know what they were doing, not even how to make money

i wonder if anybody I know is posting here right now?

also the forums were infested with bootlicking scum that defended every bad design decision and money scheme even if it was actively hurting the game

i spend a lot of time in the suggestions board even though i knew nobody was actually reading my posts because it was fun to daydream about what could've been and how easy it was to fix what had gone wrong already, ended up spending more time writing walls of text than playing the game itself

good times

fucking kill me

Man… Games were great before they were shit.

it was nice until Nick left and virtually all content creation came to a halt.
early game is both brain-dead easy and grindy, which probably turned away a lot of players.
Rocket Hammer was my babe

annoys me that we’ll never know what went down. I like to believe he, Ian, and Harry were the reason the game even got as far as it did, given Slime Rancher is doing decently well with those three and the forums are significantly less cancerous than SK’s from what I’ve heard.

also I just remembered the UI update that made things both more intrusive and less useful. It’s like I can’t recall something I liked about the game without something equal and opposite to match it

It would have been a neat rpg without the repetitive levels and pay2continue bullshit, nice tf2 hat tho

Sounds familiar.

don't remind me

at least SK burning me so bad let me see the warning signs in warfarm early on

Fire up the ovens hans

it was, directly or indirectly, pay2progress. Your gear ranges from zero to five stars, more stars being more good. In order to make better gear, you needed to burn energy on it; you get free energy, but you have 100 max and it takes 200 to make three-star gear, so, at best, you need to have 100 energy crystals to get one piece of three-star, 400 for four star and 800 for five star as i recall. You need a full set of two-star gear or better to gain access to the second tier of the clockworks, and four-stars for the third and final tier. You can only get crystals, as far as i'm aware, from paying real money into the game, but there's also a market to trade in-game money for crystals between players. I've gotten all the achievements in SK, including the ones they removed, without spending a dime of my real money, but i guarantee you all the crystals i bought were purchased by someone else, so someone NEEDS to pay if you want to fully beat the game.

That being said, you can see three of the four normal bosses with just two-star gear and most of the areas are same-y enough that you hardly need to access tier three before you feel like you've played this game thoroughly. Also, they changed the upgrade system when they got rid of the daily energy costs, so i got no idea how it all functions now.

Guild Wars 2 is my version of that.

To me it was hands down the greatest MMO that had ever been made, but it only really existed for 3 months from the middle of August when it came out to the middle of November.

It was made with the ideals of personal responsibility for failure, non-reliance on the trinity system, no arbitrary lockouts.
No chase the carrot.

Then they backpedaled on practically everything because people were paying the base price, playing, hitting the cap, getting a full set of top tier gear and quitting because they already did all the content.
Not paying into their kike-ass micro-transaction bullshit.

They kept making new content and then getting rid of it to arbitrarily created limited time only content.
Took them longer to make one expansion where the original guild wars had 3.
Was a very small expansion and all it really did was add not-Death Knights.

They have a new one this year and all that really adds is mounts and a new spec for every class.

Big problem is how PoZ'd it got.
They changed female human running animation because they thought it was too feminine.
Removed an idle animation for female humans because they thought it was too sexually suggestive.
Censored female armors that triggered them.
Had an NPC that practically goes "I'm trans!" leading to faghole journos showering Arenanet in accolades for being so progressive.
Practically got rid of the central characters who were members from every race to focus on 2 completely unlikable human lesbians.
Story went from "Lets take down world eating dragons" to "Lets create a mary sue antagonist who is a hyper intelligent zanny mass murdering plant woman".

In the recent expansion one of the only two male gods becomes the main antagonist who is trying to kill one of the dragons and killing the massmurdering dragons is a bad thing now.
There are a bunch of Elonian refugees because everything has to be political commentary.
Balthazar dies and some of his power is absorbed by the dragon he was trying to kill but more importantly an OC girl dragon.

stopped here

There was so much to like about Spiral Knights. Great artstyle, great monster designs, fun concept, tight core gameplay… but they just bungled the whole fucking thing, somehow.

Everything after that is why it turned into a complete garbage fire and you are not wrong in any way shape or form to resent Guild Wars 2 at any level of guile.
Level cap is still what it was in 2012.
Still only 5 races and the game has not improved since it was released, only horribly horribly ruined.
It wasn't TORtanic, but is easily perhaps the 2nd worst MMO made in the last decade.
WoW is immune to death and FFXIV has a reason to exist.
Black Desert at least has a robust character creator.
ESO and GW2 still continue despite having no reason to do so.
Everquest Next was aborted.
Wildstar ate all of the dicks it deserved to eat.
Western release of Phantasy Star Online 2, Dragon's Dogma Online and Monster Hunter: Frontier G, never.

>ywn relive the comfy feels of finding this game on newgrounds no less and spending all your time exploring the comfy types of dungeons

The a e s t e t i c s are what really did it for me, even the annoying intro stage was still very pretty and comfy.

Ahh fuck I miss this game so much. It feels like it has so much potential they never ran with

Also Snarbolax a qt and has a huge knot

youtube.com/watch?v=aQin7uUlZ7c

I bet you have a big dick too faggot

If you're not going to embed, at least use hooktube links instead.

Even the music is pretty damned comfy.. Makes me want to make some gondola webms with it.

This game had potential. Too bad they actively sabotaged it.

I can answer that: they moved the jewry to upgrading weapon levels. You know how you'd get "heat", and your equipment would go from L1 to L10 easily and automatically? Well, now when you get enough heat, you have to go through a menu and spend some Embers to level up your stuff.
Technically, there's a tiny chance for Embers to drop in-game, but you need tons and tons of them, so you're basically going to have to pay energy for them.

Fuck that system and fuck the upgrde orbs that came with it. The drop rate was so rare it became a pain in the ass.

The game was very aesthetically pleasing, had nice music, had cool combat but the devs had no idea how to monetize it and kept making the game worse and worse. it also had some glaring balance issues, which wouldnt be that big a deal if development wasn't pretty much halted.

The heat system isn't so bad since there's farm levels scattered around the game, but the alchemy system is irredeemable and I wish they'd either do away with it or condense it all into one type of alchemy orb (or alternatively increase the fucking droprates so I don't have to farm vanaduke a million times to get one orb)

If one were to fix Spiral Knights in order to monetise it without too heavily hurting the quality of the gameplay, what would one do?

Wow. I have nothing to say. I'm just amazed. I'm also amazed by how you get that information because this is the first I've heard of it. Nobody mentioned anything like this back in 2013.

kek

I'm still surprised they somehow made an MMO out of a fucking suit 2-3 people wore in Dark Sector while having it in the same universe.

As one that never played SK is it worth playing? How much content are there until i will hit the grind/p2w wall?

I used to play this shit religiously with a group of friends. I think the most any of us ever dropped was $10-20 on the game . For the most part we ground everything out though, had huge reserves of crystal energy. At one point we auctually did a run from the first floor to the core in one go.
Then they added the update that changed how CE and stuff worked and it just killed it for us. There was no teamwork in resing or distrubiting hearts, it felt impossible to level up any of our gear, and there really felt like to reason to group up outside of some utility provided by my status bombs.
The game will forever have a top tier asthetic though.

I also really wanna dick down gremlins.

...

People like you are the reason this game's porn is all shit.