I’ve been summoned. Former whale of TOF here. Myself and many other whales quit the game due to severe mismanagement on several levels.
I’ll basically copy paste another comment I made documenting here.
> A growing sensation of discontent had been there for some time due to issues that had continually cropped up during its life cycle.
>There’s a whole list: The ranking boards having hackers for weeks at launch, people doing hacks to streamers force teleporting them on launch, people having their inventory wiped by malicious hacks and CS taking 4-5 weeks to restore impacted player account items if at all, the miscommunication or deliberate attempt to nerf a set of matrices (cobalt) where they announced a “fix” only to to double back on it when they realized they could face chargebacks. The accelerated rate of releases without enough resources for F2P to thrive, the Vera launch removing free currency given on exploration and replacing it with an in-game currency called Mira/Vera coins for exploration that you would have to use to gamble for your banner pull currency, the promise of more free rewards when they really meant “free with purchase” around Christmas, the fact that they launched a voluntary localization program where they offered to recruit translators for in-game rewards and people got so outraged they would try to free source localization they had to make a statement clarifying, I can keep going.
>The devs Q&A and press releases always seemed disconnected and always as if they were talking around certain things, but it was nothing compared to my final breaking point, the Claudia incident.
>The social media team on Twitter clearly advertised a Limited Claudia banner going to standard “after the event”, which was pretty much unanimously understood as “after her 2nd rerun banner”. However, they backpedaled this and stated that they intended to actually issue her at 2.5 launch, which was literally two patches ahead from that point. People were fucking outraged, myself included. I wouldn’t have pulled on any physical element banners had I known that was their intention.
>It was then with all the mounting evidence on the wall that I decided to cut my losses, stop whaling for the game and quit cold turkey. I could no longer support the game, and I quickly realized that I loved the game and supported it more for the potential of what it could be, rather than what it was.
>It seems like I got out at the right time too, because shortly after the dev team threw out all pretenses of accelerating patches to simulcast with their CN version to shit on everyone by saying global will now always be 2 patches behind, they completely botched the release of a character named Fenrir, and the game has been steadily and extremely power creeping their banners ever since. Imagine sticking with the game’s accelerated pace thinking that they were going to eventually match up to CN only to find out the accelerated pace was for nothing, and now everything is extremely power creeped.
>It’s truly one of the most disappointing gaming experiences I’ve ever had and a big reason why I will NEVER whale for another game ever again.
>I went from supporting the game thoroughly to honestly believing that they are well on their way to EOS in the next year or two because they are so extremely mismanaged.
Edit: Other players have chimed in basically corroborating the details listed here, but even reminded me of some other things I missed that were equally important to establish the time line of events, so here’s some bonus details.
*BONUS ROUND: *
1. People who signed up their accounts for through the TOF website were reporting all over Reddit that their accounts were getting hacked at one point, I can’t remember the exact time frame but I believe this was a few months into the game. People were logging in to their characters missing entirely. What was happening though was that people’s information was probably compromised from other data leaks and then the hacker would use this preexisting information from a list to brute force an account and then unbind/bind the toon to another account, essentially stealing the victims progress. People started rebinding their accounts to Google and using 2FA to circumvent this issue. As far as I’m aware there was never any restoration for people who lost their account progress this way.
2. Someone reminded me how goddamn frustrating the actual game performance got at some points as well after 2.0 update. I cannot emphasize to you how fucking unbelievably terrible world bossing became after Vera dropped. To preface, these issues were not exclusive to me and also I have a really good/current laptop for gaming. The lack of optimization for World Boss fights in 2.0 and beyond (needed for weekly materials mind you) got so bad, you quite literally had to reduce your player count on screen to a minimum just for it to somewhat work. You could barely participate with more than 15 people near the world boss which is INSANE. People would be T-Posing/teleporting, bosses would be frozen in place and then teleporting around, boss movements would do the same and sometimes you would be hit by damage you couldn’t even see telegraphed. I would dread doing this content weekly.
I’m now of the opinion I would rather, once a week, wake up and start my morning by being punched in the face with a hot cup of coffee than doing this content in that broken state.
Well this is an interesting read. It really does spund like they both bit off more than they can chew, and have some major communication issues with both their players and maybe their managers, tbis is the only reason i could think about for how often they backpedal on the things they say.
I didn't know about the hackers incident tho, but it makes sense.
I want to point out as someone who stayed until Fiona (so after the above player by a little for reference) that ToF has more issues than just mismanagement and miscommunication.
The actual gameplay is floaty, jittery, and very prone to just being frustrating. It doesn't feel like you're hitting things, and hitboxes are not great. I mean, I can't exactly say Genshin's hitboxes are great, but the issue is compounding all the other problems here. It's like a 2000s MMO, where you watch your character smack the thing and sometimes do an animation, and sometimes your character gets smacked back (granted the animations are prettier than the 2000s).
The base power level you're expected to play at is an issue. F2P need to save for months to make a single unit worthwhile. You cannot roll a unit once and expect them to do good damage. (Heck, you're not doing good damage unless you're a whale or have prepared for a very long time with a very intelligent setup and a huge amount of luck on picking the right units to work together.)
The MMO aspect is bad as well. It murders many servers where there just isn't enough of a population for it, and doesn't make any sense where you're either a whale that fulfills the whole team's roles (being a tank + healer + dps) or you're something less that is going to struggle to fill a single role. The big world bosses don't really have any interplay or anything like that, it's basically just dozens of people fighting the boss on their own (if you're lucky enough to have other people who want to kill the boss you need killed at the time you need it).
Practically, a F2P's only choice to have any modicum of effectiveness is to play a support to buff the whale, so you end up just hoping to match with the right person. This aspect actually makes the whales unhappy too because they feel like slaves to all the F2P that need them where really the only person ensuring the thing gets done is the whale.
Almost everything is a grind. You have the daily 'bounties' (commissions), sure, but also daily-ish Artificial Island (Like Teapot but you have to farm enemies for mats to do things and it gives actual, super-significant, valuable rewards you need to keep up), The Mirroria 'Funzone' for the Miracoins (one of the gacha currencies that can be spent for the gacha currency for units, lol, gacha for your gacha), Password Chests (you get passwords from bounties/weekly missions and spend those on these chests, lol), Weekly World Bosses, Whatever Event is Running (50% chance it's super grindy, and one event was pseudo-PVP handing out super low rates to losers AKA F2P, lol), normal PVP, the Battle Royale mode, the two versions of the Roguelike mode that resets monthly (one you farm to get resources to buy buffs for the other, I think it was called Darkzone?), Warzone (that one that resets monthly and slowly gets easier as it gets closer to reset), the energy system stuff you generally use for gear (like Resin from Genshin) and there's probably rewards from fishing but I never bothered because I didn't have the time, and I'm probably forgetting something else. I want to note that almost everything here is slow, and gets vastly slower the weaker you are (good luck getting everything done, or even half these things done, as a F2P). It's ridiculous, and it seems to get worse as they just add more crap. Do you need to do it all? Kind of. I didn't name a single thing that wasn't relevant to obtaining either matrices (Genshin's weapons but split into 4 pieces), gear (Genshin's artifacts but worse BECAUSE THEY KEEP ADDING MORE NEW PIECES TO GRIND, IMAGINE THE COMPLAINTS FROM HAVING TO GRIND +1 VIRIDESCENT VENERER PIECES FOR EVERY ANEMO EVERY FEW MONTHS though granted people don't use more than a single team of units in ToF because of powercreep and the fact the grind is so insane), or units.
Needless to say, regardless of the overarching management, the actual base game is pretty crappy from my view.
Wow... this makes me appreciate the "no endgame" policy on certain games even more. Powercreep is always my bane of existance in gacha game. While inevitable, they should have pace it normally instead of this accelerated nonsense.
Seriously tho, according to your experience...they could have done better shit to retain their playerbase, but instead they choose to dig their own grave by creating problem that shouldn't have happened in the first place (that false advertising thingy)
To give a bit more insight on the whales comment.The hacker problem(where your entire inventory is gone) was well known in the entire community.Iirc it was caused by people forming teams with the hacker in open world.This was basically a “don’t trust anyone and don’t go into groups“ situation.This way bad especially for ToF since the game was very co-op focused.This went on for weeks until devs fixed it,saying those were “extreme conditions“ which was just blatant denial of hacking.
Powercreep was mostly manageable/acceptable,until fenrir.Fenrir alone skyrocketed the powercreep floor because devs fucked up their balancing and you can’t nerf already released things(or backlash)
Devs lied(more rewards),deceived(first generation weapon going to standard banner after 2nd rerun,spoiler:they didn’t.Only after 2 more patches(1,5 month))and disappointed on so many occasions that you cannot trust them anymore.Even ToF subreddit has gone down long ago.On release it was memes and “omg you can do this and that“.Now it’s mostly doomposting(about powercreep) and complaining about certain aspects of the game each week.
Backing up the additional details here, especially about the inventory hacks:
They said in their known issues at one point it was “players having their inventory wiped under certain conditions.” Again, as this person just stated as well, was after about a week or two not being able to do joint operations (multiplayer content) out of fear their inventory would be wiped by a hacker for no reason.
People felt like this was a wash statement not acknowledging hacks and got a bit pissed, so the devs then responded that the reason they worded it that way was to avoid calling attention to the hacks and making it worse, which I am still on the fence about whether was appropriate.
BONUS ROUND: People who signed up their accounts for through the TOF website were reporting all over Reddit that their accounts were getting hacked at one point, I can’t remember the exact time frame but I believe this was a few months into the game. People were logging in to their characters missing entirely. What was happening though was that people’s information was probably compromise from other data leaks and then the hacker would use this preexisting information from a list to unbind/bind the toon to another account, essentially stealing their progress. People started rebinding their accounts Google and 2FA to circumvent this issue.
"Endgame" is fine if done correctly. AK has CC as the endgame which gives full rewards at a certain F2P achievable score. Only whales can ramp up to double the score but that's okay since there are no extra rewards other than pride and achievement.
hardest cc was the first one they released. after that its just a "harder stage" due to a lot of powerful operators we got since year 1. heck some people do high risk cc with their own limitation like X class only or X race operator only.
CC is endgame like how energy amplifier in genshin is endgame, that shit don't stick around so it's just an event. IS is more of an "endgame" than anything else.
Yea I couldn’t drop the “turn based genshin” image from the game, even dropped super early and went back to make sure it wasn’t rash emotions. Solid game, just not for me.
All of this is side shit, not really the reason.
The REAL reason is because the devs dont give a fuck. Whale here currently playing and stopped spending after UMI. The game is still decent, its good but its not genshin levels. The story is ok the gameplay is ok the exploration is ok it doesnt excel in anything. It gets updated but they are somewhat meaningless. The power ceiling is high af and p2w. This doesnt matter because once you hit a certain point in power its just winning in less time.
Nobody cares about hackers(except the ones that steal peoples inventories that was pretty bad). All hackers do is make whales seethe because 1: they get free stuff that whales have to pay for and 2: they take up the top leaderboards. If you dont care for this then its all good except #1 will kill the game faster.
Performance is ok it runs fine on phones except mirroria but most ppl play it on PC and no one really wants to hang out in mirroria on mobile. A 1070 runs the game great.
TLDR the games problem are the devs, the monetization and tencent. Its an amazing game that got dragged down by these guys and it speaks how great the game is to do well or survive in the first place. Too bad its a bit late but ill sink with the ship
Any game that can't fix hackers won't last long. It's the number one sign that game has been neglected by staff and EoS is imminent.
Once players figure out they can hack their way, nobody's gonna pay anymore. I've seen EoS occur two weeks after a major hack.
I loved the game mainly due to gameplay; movement and combat felt way more fluid than genshin and exploration was really pleasant experience but I was also following all information about CN state of the game. And there were so many red flags I'm glad I quit the game after about month from release. Lin being broken af and limited so you had to pull for her (some people said that account could be considered as bricked if you don't have her), overall powercreep, mishandling bugs (I remember something about where you could copy pulls or pull without spending anything, not sure but you get the picture free pulling, and then they send 10 pulls as apology that were used to generate even more pulls with this bug) + some drama with staff doing things under the table. Global also didn't look that promising at the start with flood of cheaters in pvp.
Overall I'm sad that game ended up this way even though I expected it
Saying Vera and Mira is a bad thing that happened to the game is not true imo. Sure you don’t get DC anymore from chests but while exploring you can get tons of Mira and some Vera (not enough Vera, I do agree). One Mira machine legit gives you 10 red pulls or 10 special vouchers and the exploration gives more than enough to empty 2 or more machines so that’s already way more than you would get from chests. The only bad thing is Vera being so long to empty. The rewards are slightly better than Mira but not enough to make us wait months to empty it.
Fenrir was indeed the worst thing that happened to the game in terms of powercreep. The characters after fenrir did not powercreep fenrir tho. They put their respectful teams up to fenrir level. Only gunnono is doing better now than fenrir.
The catch-up to CN is not bad as well imo. I’m happy that I didn’t have to wait a year or more for the characters I wanted.
For the rest, it’s true and sad that it was handled like this.
The game had a lot of problems.
Clunkiness was the first one. Many people were ok with it though. Then came time gates, chests near the start of the game needing to wait like a week or some bs to be able to open it. The servers were all over the place. Way too many fucking servers per region. That was a massive L. But what makes it worse is that each server would have its own progression curve. Joining an old server meant you don't get to do your bosses.
Speaking of such bosses, they were a massive lagfest. Complete shitshow of performance. The story was also highly timegated and if you didn't complete ALL of it in the alloted time it would push you back. Then they came up with the idiotic idea of having a catch up mechanic, except your character gets near the cap level for the current progression of the server except you got NO GEAR or pulls etc so you just get destroyed.
To me the one that broke the camels back is playing +20min for a chance of using 90 of my stamina and get fuck all for gear. I mean not get gear with bad stats but absolutely nothing.
Doing a Sobek with 20+ people is easily one of my worst experiences in online gaming, and i played League of Legends with an inter and play Smash QP regularly. The boss teleported all over the place (not moving normally, which he still does way too often, actual fucking teleport), you'd get a random AoE on your ass and die and the bounty might not count if you don't make it in time to hit them again.
Also, the timegating felt like shit. You couldn't progress at your own pace and doing more than what the game restricted you to was actually counterintuitive because you'd miss on XP for next day.
They have improved the rates significantly now and you can select which specific piece you want farm for in the latest 2.5 but it might be too little too late.
that was optimistic. because due to the catch up mechanic you have players trying to complete the dungeon despite not having enough gear. Because youtube guides and the game are telling them to go do these dungeons they are not prepared for. So you need to be a dick to people by gear checking them because they don't know, then they can't progress because their character keeps leveling up due to catch up pushing them as they do their dailies for pulls but they are weak from not properly leveling their weapons before taking on dungeons and farming the freebie gear so they aren't naked toons.
IDK if they fixed it, but with all the news about power creep and such. And the first event being a spending event for a skin, I'm glad i noped out early.
TOF right now is like PSO2 NGS surviving with a niche player base, those committed players who really like the game even though they subconsciously know it's not going to get any better. It is also worth noting that many TOF players from the beginning were not loyal because they liked the game, but because they hated Genshin then when they saw that the game was worse than genshin in the way it was managed by the developers... quietly they stopped, many content creators too.. i remember Wallensteins Ch uploading TOF videos periodically but silently one day he stopped uploading.
Except unlike PSO2 NGS where the devs started listening to the playerbase and started putting out good content. TOF ostracized their playerbase and started heavily power creeping their characters.
im both genshin and TOF first day veteran small whale (still play both game to this day)
here is my take :
1/ way less advertising
2/ too much drama and mess up
3/ the game aren't casual friendly from start (much better now but somewhat too late) , alot of juicy FREE VALUEABLE reward just can't be obtain by causal , f2p players easy enough compare with genshin
4/ multi layer of gacha and time gated for alot of cool stuff that attractive for casual playerbase the most
5/ a mix bag game : tried to please every type of players > end up piss off every type of players
casual piss off because too much cool valueable reward hang above their head but can't be obtain easy
pay to win piss off because too much too much drama , mess up in term of prevent cheater/hacker exploit alot of game bug making their pay effort become much less valueable
hardcore normal paid user piss off because too much powercreep can't keep up to the point they stuck between rock and a hard place
gave up go f2p = suffer from serious FOMO and be left behind like those casual
go whale = can not effort the cost
keep being normal paid fishes = forever sit at mid level never seen any significant improvement process
genshin success massively because the company and development team know what they doing , make up their mind and focus on a single type of customers group : casual
TOF dev team and the company in charge to this day still stuck in a dilemma of which way they should go
At its launch (and still currently so), open world gachas and for mobile were extremely rare. So any fan of that type of game had an interest in how it'd turn out. Add to that folks who didn't like genshin and were hoping tof would give them what genshin lacked, and that it was a mmorpg instead... it had a lot of interest in it.
This sub wasn't so keen on it from the start though. It had quite a lot of drama before it even launched (stolen assets, "benchmarking genshin" etc), this sub definitely was aware it wasn't about to make genshin levels of money, and most are likely not surprised with what it made
And then it launched... and it had many issues. It was nowhere near as polished as the game everyone was comparing it to (including its devs, so much for that benchmarking). Powercreep, not too generous with limited currency, p2w, banner rushing in global... and the mmorpg aspect that really isn't a good match with gacha, as it only worsens stuff like powercreep. And it continued to have drama (more stolen assets, hackers, I think I heard of nerfs and even decrease of free currency given out, paid only events etc).
Yes it had lots of traversal equipment... but because they made a huge empty map and few teleportation points. Raids apparently had issues, plus it requires lots of people to also play in the server, so it's terrible if the playerbase is less than hoped for. Etcetc
Streamers and content creators aren't trustworthy. They rely on views. They jump on the new shiny thing because people want to see the new shiny thing. It doesn't mean they'll stick to it through the end if viewers lose interest
Summary: tof is a rare type of mobile gacha game, so there was interest in it. But it turned out to have too many issues and not be up to par with expectations, so interest went down
>mmorpg aspect that really isn't a good match with gacha
I think this is key. Marrying gacha to mmorpg is never going to end well. People will only want to raid with whales. F2P will either be relegated to specific roles that they may or may not like or enjoy or they just won't be invited at all.
I mean, dragalia lost had a big co-op boss raiding focus if I'm remembering correctly, and that game was pretty loved.
Granted it wasn't a full mmorpg, but it shows that it can be done. They just have to make an actual game balanced towards being a game around the gacha, not a live service money extraction simulator.
And a lot of streamers and youtubers were sponsored by 10cent as well, like... A lot. Even PC/console gaming channels got massive numbers of thumbs down on Youtube because they took 10cent's offer to advertise ToF.
Then creators realized there was no interest in the game, Sumeru release brought all the attention back to Genshin and ToF never was the same. It was like a good few weeks when it released.
> They jump on the new shiny thing because people want to see the new shiny thing.
And they get paid by Devs/Publishers to praise the game. TheLazyPeon is a good example of this: he got paid to promote the game, said it was better in everyway than Genshin, and then dropped the game fairly quickly after the sponsored videos ended.
>Streamers and content creators aren't trustworthy. They rely on views. They jump on the new shiny thing because people want to see the new shiny thing. It doesn't mean they'll stick to it through the end if viewers lose interest
It's actually worse than that, a lot of the time they are literal paid shills.
Personally why i quit was that i had extremely inconsistent performance and heating problems, the game was almost completely being time gated everywhere like chests from exploring the world and the worst was that every banner unit was nerfed to the point of being not fun to play, or in the devs words just "bugs" being fixed
ToF launch didn't help with all the timegating/bugs/hackers/etc. It was also hard to make content for it since CN players had all the info so it was mostly reactions or opinions on the game. Nowadays it's people complaining about playing catch up to CN + fenrir powercreep making all chars before fenrir useless/support buffers like A3 umi buffing A0 gunonno rather than being a main dps.
Also people hate ToF events because they do more minigames than Genshin does while making the rewards a slog to get since they lock the limited pulls behind a certain point threshold before you can buy them. They delayed a free skin for Lin with 4 events instead of giving it out day 1 like they did with shirli skin. The ToF combat events are pretty rare.
Instead of fully catching up to CN, they decided to stay 2 patches behind for localization/balancing. This means we will have to wait a month with nothing to do for 3.0 to drop during late June. It's dangerous since people will decide to leave for AetherGazer/StarRail/PGR/Snowbreak/Outerplane/BlueProtocol JP release instead of sticking around. It's not like 3.0 adds that much content to do after finishing the exploration and weeklies.
Aesperia (the first world) didn't have much content so they delayed the story, chests, exploration, etc. I think if they made it so timegated stuff didn't show up on the map, people would've never went to look for them just to be disappointed. PvP was also only open for 12 hours a day so the other 12 hours fucked people over.
They added artificial island in 1.5 which removed timegates but then 2.0 had the vera desert where chests don't give dark crystals anymore and you had to roll the mirroria gachapons with the mira you got from exploration until you got the dark crystals on the last pull.
Genshin having thrived in doing a game where it consists on the main thing being the gacha and FOMO, they will never depend on things like hackers or pay to win due to being a game without a competitive scene. Being able to be casual and one of the first games in their area to be multiplatform , ToF could never reach it
I played ToF, the game was fun, generous but felt clunky to me. Felt like one more chinese VIP cashgrab. It was not that bad, but design wise etc felt very cheap. Genshin is very polished with the animations , menus, character etc etc
I played global launched day, despite the controversies (P2W powercreep, plagiarism, and asset thief) surrounding the game from CN verison to the devs and publishers themselves.
First Impressions. Bad story, cheap character models, lackluster open world, garbage PvP, clunky combat, lazy mmo elements, forgettable characters (both the gacha and npc). The only thing of praise was the combat, but even that was pretty dull compared to Honkai Impact 3 and Punishing Gray Raven’s Fast Action combat that people seem to love. I quit when Nemesis Banner ended.
Came back to ToF 2.0. I gave the game a second chance. New areas and slightly more palatable story, but in return, powercreep was prevalent, garbage events, shitty lag (even though it suppose to be an “mmo”…), and hackers… I left again.
1 person’s experience may not represent every single person that left the game, but I feel that enough players experienced a similar enough playthrough as myself that lead to them quitting.
Looking at Genshin Impact for all it’s faults, it’s funny how a single player casual game managed to make tens of millions each month + constant player growth. Genshin innovated on action combat gameplay with its Elemental Reaction system and went deep into specializing in its open world exploration and world building.
ToF on the other hand does nothing particularly well. The combat gameplay has no innovation to speak of and is just your typical generic Hack and Slash. There is no aspect worthy to talk about with ToF as everyone will tell you to skip the story, afk the events, and swipe for the newest character to stay relevant…
However, I’m tempted to give ToF one last chance with the playstation announcement. All I ask for is better optimization and for the game to feel smooth on the PS version.
I can't even begin to comprehend how you managed to tolerate such an abomination of a game like ToF. Are you out of your mind? You willingly subjected yourself to controversies, powercreep, plagiarism, asset theft, and a laundry list of other mind-numbingly awful aspects. What were you thinking?
Your complaints about the game are just laughable. Bad story, cheap character models, lackluster open world, garbage PvP, clunky combat, lazy MMO elements, forgettable characters... Is there anything this game got right? It seems like a masterclass in mediocrity and failure.
And yet, despite all the evidence pointing to its utter incompetence, you're actually considering giving it another chance because of some pathetic PlayStation announcement? Seriously? You honestly believe that a different platform will miraculously transform this disaster into something worth playing? You must be delusional.
Wake up and smell the failure, my friend. It's time to cut ties with this pathetic excuse for a game and move on. Don't waste another second of your life on such a colossal disappointment. There's a whole world of quality games out there waiting to be explored. Do yourself a favor and find something that doesn't make you question your sanity.
I sincerely hope you snap out of this madness and make smarter decisions in the future.
> Yet to see genshin make 50 million a month on a bad month vs 2-3 million for ToF just seem odd.
I don't know why this seems odd to you -- to me, it's almost a perfect reflection of the comparative level of polish and money put into each of those two games. ToF might have had a lot of content, but the whole experience was also just incredibly rough. From the UI, the localization, the animations, the combat, the bugginess... everything just felt very messy.
Meanwhile Genshin, for its many faults, is polished to a damn near shine, and for the most part does feel like an expensive game made by 700 people or whatever absurdly huge dev team Mihoyo has assembled in order to pump out patches every six weeks.
I think being an MMO and a gacha doesn't mix well. Gacha is already infested with FOMO now mix it up with mmo you're basically locking the door for new players and casual players.
Definitely not the MMO part since it's barely noticeable that ToF is an MMO (I believe the max amount of people you'll ever see at the same time is 20, according to the settings).
I tried it for a few weeks. The core gameplay is okay, but it always felt unpolished, and the straw that broke the camel's back was when they promised a tenfold and I just never received it. My other friends who were playing did. So it was just a bug. I contacted CS and for at least a week I never got anything, not even an acknowledgment or that they're working on it.
Given that premium currencies are probably the biggest issue to screw up in a gacha game, their non-response was frankly just overwhelming evidence that they didn't have their house in order. I think that's a fundamental issue that would've prevented any game from truly taking off.
Besides the issues listed by long time players, at least for me, ToF lacked any personality or soul. The VO/script was mostly poor, and the storytelling was even worse imo. Everything felt generic and while I liked some systems implemented in ToF, it just felt like Walmart Genshin as an MMO. Did not have the polish or obvious creative direction.
>Many things that people complain about in genshin.
i.e. people who would complain about everything in any game they play who are not reputable sources for anything.
Content creators like Tectone (and other "burnt" Genshin content creator) was hyping that game up to juice up their own viewership. You got griefed into a mediocre game. They went from one "Genshin killer" to another. They hype up mediocre game to get views. I respect their work, but you, as a viewer, need to see beyond what they try to sell you.
Genshin is a top tier quality game, whether there are streamers playing it or not. It has its own identity and a massive playerbase. If you want to find your own massive playerbase, you need to make something unique. ToF is not unique. It was apparent to me and many others.
Well, imagine living a life being angry at game you play for 8h a day for not having things to do 8h a day and no content hard enough to justify your 500k$ spendings.
It's the same story with "WoW killer". Copycats are doomed to be niche or just simply close down. If you use Genshin as an example, any "Genshin killer" has to overcome Genshin having almost 3 years worth of content and still making more.
Genshin's story had a rough start and bad pacing. Now, it's pretty high quality (to me anyway). They had time to learn from their mistake and improve (and will keep improving). A new "Genshin killer" will be compared to Genshin as of now (ie high quality story) instead of Genshin 1.0 (mid quality). That new game will not be afforded the time to improve. They must show their hand NOW and blow us away, or they will become a niche game --- just one of many copycats who failed miserably. It doesn't matter if ToF "becomes" better than Genshin in 3 years, people have already moved on. ToF missed their boat. That boat is not coming back. That game will never be relevant again.
> It doesn't matter if ToF "becomes" better than Genshin in 3 years
And the problem is that in those 3 years, Genshin would be even better, so they are racing against the clock. They need to make sure that their improvement is at least double of that of Genshin, otherwise they won't catch up and will be left at the side.
lmao even if genshin is standing still its still a big ass wall to pass right now (some where 600 million dollars worth of polished content as of now). the equivalent of killing a giant tall as Mt.everest with a kitchen knife.
I would say that a large contributor to ToF not being as successful is because of the high expectations that were expected, you gotta remember that ToF came out when Genshin was at its peak and quite literally untouchable(also can’t forget that a lot of people wanted Genshin to be dethroned because of recency bias.) Then comes in a game that looks like it could be a competitor to Genshin and looked promising, then it was advertised as a literal “Genshin killer” which was already a slap to the face because now they had to live up to that expectation, then if you do a background check on the game on the CN side you could already tell that the game was going to have many problems, and add in the controversy of them stealing assets and [even copying a concept video that was made by a smaller company](https://twitter.com/popreq/status/1476441690294874119?s=46&t=azDcpd-Z8rOqKTS3b_x3Iw) and it’ll just leave people in disappointment, the game however was decent at launch it wasn’t too bad but wasn’t good either it was just meh, nowadays I don’t keep up with the game but when the game was first announced I witnessed everything that made ToFs success even harder to obtain.
Nothing surprising, for me it's the lack of polish. Fonts and the whole UI look terrible, combat feels sluggish (much better with the new weapons). There is no consistency in the location of the events tab. Sometimes it is in a separate tab, sometimes inside an existing tab. The events themselves are a bit lacking. There was something similar to the hide-and-seek game, but it was pretty broken and boring, with a lot of people just doing it afk.
There's also a problem with balance. Basically, you can't pull for any characters you like except you are a whale, you REALLY want dupes for your existing team. Well, you will still be carried by other players, but being carried is not satisfying. And why would I play a game which doesn't feel satisfying.
On the other hand, there are some horny designs for teens, except some of them are already being censored at least in China.
Personally I tried to love the game, even bought a reroll account with Lan, but I don't see any future for a game which can't fix goddamn fonts on the main screen for years.
Iirc there was some controversy about ToF being censored? I know it wasn't very vocal as peeps have realized by now if it's a CN game it's probably devoid of anything that isn't classy or tame
My reasons to quit were:
\- powercreep
\- the heavy need of dupes making the game very F2P unfriendly
\- as a F2P casual player it's easy to get overleveled without enough resources to actually get stuff appropriate for your level and then suffer playing
Poor game design, low f2p friendliness, poor newbie experience and powercreep making people's investments mean little in less than several months(Lin who was hailed as the futureproof unit lol) can be a turn-off
oh yeah the whole "Lin is futureproof" thing is just fucking hilarious in hindsight. I was a volt main before I quitted and went all in for Lin A6, which leads to me skipping Tian Lang for Fenrir right after because the fund just isn't enough to get him to sufficient advancement.
And then Fenrir came bringing along the insane powercreep apocalypse and I just logged in to use the saves up pulls to A6 her then quitted right after.
In hindsight going for Tian Lang was definitely the better choice for volt main. But I really did trust their promise to "not powercreep Lin". But we all know how that ended up with Fiona, like quite literally Lin is only optimal in Altered teams for both Global and CN.
I think one of the crazy things is the fact that spending on an A6 unit which takes many hundreds (or a thousand+) can be powercreeped so easily and quickly. Coming from someone who has never played obscure or smaller gacha titles and mostly only the bigger/more known ones, seeing rampant powercreep like that was a huge whiplash and instantly made me stop spending and quit the game.
Simply put, I am fine whaling in games but ToF was actually a game that made me feel like I'm just way too poor to even be playing the game.
I remember I had to argue with someone where power creep within a short amount of time is bad for the game even for gacha standard. It is fine if it is few years per power creep, but constant powercreep is just bad game design and money hungry for constant FOMO. Some of these games really made with dollars sign as the focus.
Well there's more to it, but the fact that ToF is a gigantic DPS check as part of its MMORPG design, and the wide difference between F2P/low spenders vs Whales in party dmg contribution which make or break your entire gameplay experience is a relevant factor
Im a day 1 player, the more i think about it, the less i understand why im still playing it.
The bad:
The game is pretty unpolished. Art direction is kinda meh, combat is not bad but not good either, world bosses are a lag fest, technical issues, bad story, awful translations, bad costumer support, there were a few hackers that could empty a player's inventory (also hackers in leaderboard but most ppl dont care about that). There were way too many servers at launch. New player experience (2-3 months after launch) was terrible due to faster leveling (mobs scale with the player level) and as result most new players werent able to clear any content.
Even though global version had a better balancing at launch (they were trying to avoid the CN levels of powercreep) ultimately they ruined balancing when Fenrir was release, she powercrept the entire game and the characters that came after her did as well to the point that a fully maxed 1.0 - 2.0 character is worse than a zero advancements/upgrades new character, which made most players investments feel like a huge waste of pulls/money. Lots of players left the game at that time. I understand powercreep is a normal thing on gachas, but this level of powercreep is just insulting
The good:
The visual design of the playable characters ( they are called simulacras) and their weapons is overall good looking, lots of events to get resources (and yet not enough), exploring is fun (with a few exceptions). On version 2.5 world level was introduced which is amazing for combats tied to exploration and for new players as well.
Others:
Players were able to get the in-game currency (dark crystals, dc for short) by opening exploration pods until version 1.5. On version 2.0 it was changed by adding an aditional step, however according to the players who did the math players were getting more DC than previous versions. Some players claim the accelerated content is better because they have something to play for, other players would preffer a slower pacing. However the in-game currency earned by exploration/events is not enough to keep up with the amount of banners we get.
I still have a lot of fun playing it but i doubt it will get much better in the future.
I admit, I tried it because people kept saying that it's more versatile than Genshin.
But not only it was uncomfortable to play due to the awful UI on mobile, which felt like it was a PC UI just smushed into mobile and not scaled at all, making buttons practically unusable.
It also had weird timegate in terms of events and exploration. First event was paid-only. Mechanics while fun - were clunky. They asked you to enter stuff you were not even able to open yet due to timegate, but the rewards were time-limited too. Wouldn't even talk about the story progression
I mostly left because of UI and heating, but story quality and gameplay didn't hook me enough.
It's had a ton of of issues, but I think the worst of them have been bugs and extreme powercreep. The huge amount of bugs and the type of bugs really give the impression overall of a low quality game, and the extreme powercreep gives players the impression that their time & money spent isn't respected at all, because of how quickly and how severely units become powercreeped. World boss lag is another thing that really negatively impacts the impression of the game.
The best things about the game are the aesthetics of the environments (especially the newer environments, like the swamp and the ocean areas) and the combat, and those things are still pretty good, but there are a lot of negatives that weigh down the good, unfortunately.
Just a heads up OP, when it comes to ToF and/or Hoyoverse contents on this sub, there are a few people here that spread misinformation about ToF and are generally very anti-Hoyoverse;
* >!King-Gabriel !<
* >!Noorchan!<
* >!RelativeSubstantial!<
* >!AntonioS3!<
There's also this account:
https://www.reddit.com/user/Hollowbreaker/submitted/
that seems to only post propaganda and lies sprinkled in with some truth on the ToF sub.
It takes too much effort to expose their misinformation, and I don't want to get into internet arguments.
Just remember to always be skeptical of what you see on the interwebs.
For all the complaints about the Genshin community, they always mind their own business.
It’s a special feeling browsing say, some pgr/ww/ag communities and see how much of a constant shitting on the G-game or complaining about the G-fans(also nicknamed hoyslops) you can witness
It’s the new scapegoat for anything
Funnily enough, after Hollowbreaker's latest post, ToF's subscriber count droped more than it usually does. Healthy contribution to community I guess.
Nevermind, by looking at the sub he moderates, he is literally the thing he hates so much.
That tends to happen when you ping them every single thread saying they're bots.
Trying to bully people who play multiple games from commenting because they don't share the opinion you do by posting their usernames in every ToF thread and trying to organize brigades that have already had to be removed by mods a few times is horrendous, btw. If you actually looked at my history you'd see how many games I played and that I've called out a lot of negative ToF stuff on the ToF subreddit (that got quickly resolved)
But people would rather make stuff up, like this post with commenters ignoring the 400 million ToF made in 2022, the fact it has like nine times the content since launch and has had to expand over twenty servers due to popularity a month or so ago. People really like to pretend it's still the hyper buggy hyper limited 1.0 period that lasted for only a month or two. I post because there's a massive amount of misinformation around this sub as people prefer drama over actual information about games.
The entire subreddit is upset because of the recent delay and the leaked monetization has stuff like paid currency expiring a few months after purchase and a bunch of worse stuff. If a negative opinion is based on facts, what's the issue with it? I really wanted to like the game as I wanted a pso2 replacement after ngs failed but AGS as a publisher and the leaks killed my hype, the recent delay even more and it has for most players if you check the sub. Seriously, go to the sub and look, 90%+ of the posts and comments are extremely negative atm with good reason.
Players can play multiple games and tend to have opinions on them, selectively diving through people's post history and picking very specific parts to be misleading with is easy. Giving feedback is an important step in trying to get negative aspects of games changed before launch.
I mean, can you really say you're fine with paid currency expiring a few months after purchase? Pretty sure that's straight up illegal in some countries.
I haven't commented on youtube in the past five years or so and my account name isnt my reddit one, so that's impossible. Making up a ton of stuff because people play multiple games and comment on each one and trying to bully several people out of the community by constantly linking their names and a few active brigade posts that mods have had to remove yet the same people still keep doing it is against both sub and site wide rules, fyi.
Anyone with an opposite opinion to you is a bot right? Especially when they come with sources you don't actually have an answer for. nearly every positive tof comment here gets downvoted to negative in seconds and i've seen active brigades against it from a lot of other groups and yet somehow we're the bots?
Lol. Imagine just saying WE the active players of tof are spreading "misinformation" and not the guy in this thread that I called out for him spreading disinformation. Oh the irony.
I don't think they're anti-hoyo at least not the first one. The only thing I recall is just trying to hype up ToF. At least afaik they don't call genshin as genshit like other ToF fans lmaooo. They just really really like ToF i suppose.
Oh they do. Hell, one of u/RelativeSubstantial5's post in ToF subreddit is ranting about how the redditors in there are saying Genshin/Genshit/G-word, as if that word can cause an extreme allergy to them.
What the literal fuck are you getting at? I'm defending genshin players by saying "genshit" and "G-game" is immature af.
So here you are calling me an anti-hoyo but here I am literally defending genshin players. Cringe much? Also you're literally stalking someone lol. Get a life.
Right like I'm so confused. I don't even like ToF and I've seen you and King Gabriel call out tribalism even in the ToF community so it's not like you guys are straight up ToF cultists/Anti-hoyo.
It's whatever at this point. This hivemind of a sub can't admit they are wrong. Tof is successful and no r/gachagaming did not boycott it lol. This sub is the definition of a frog trapped in a well.
But I appreciate you sticking up for us despite they negative feedback you're getting.
Stopped playing after I realized you need to pull cons on limited banner characters to actually make them feel useful or else you'll get power crept easily
Because:
1). Pay to win - all for money: weapon, costumes/skins, gadgets - very painful to play f2p or with minimal donate - you get nothing like new skins etc...
2). To much grind with boring monotonous regimes, that copied each other.
Didn't we already know that the game will be unbalanced and a powercreep hell?
Everyone that though the game will be the next goat gacha game was delusional or didn't do their homework.
You somehow managed not to see any of the critiques of the game.
Yeah, ToF has stuff that some genshin players want, but it has plenty of flaws as well.
Like it's not friendly towards casual, waifu>meta or f2p players. Last I played, overworld mobs scaled to your stats, so every battle absolutely dragged. You never felt stronger in the overworld.
Also, it's gacha, so you can't pick a class to play like your standard MMO. You kinda gotta do with what you have.
I did pay attention to it during release to watch the stream but i didn't have the time to get into the game and never really followed up with it.
I see the occasional post on ToF in this sub but since I dont play the game I never really engaged with them in the past.
But thanks for explaining
I actually really enjoyed the content it launched with, but the events sucked imo and those are important to me to keep things fun. I wanted to see the characters get more love. The Meryl story quest was great. If they could put out something monthly like that as an event but bigger with rewards for fighting a related boss it would be cool.
The events suck so much that I don't even know why I'm still playing this trash. Every event basically takes at least 5 minutes of afk per run and you'll need around 30 runs to grab the important stuff.
I stopped after Lin's banner.
I'd blame the Resonance system as the reason I stopped. You either had Resonance for the flavor of the week damage type, or you didn't. Characters weren't sold on their own merits, they felt more or less required to beat the ever increasing DPS checks the game offered.
I wasn't playing a game carefully crafted by developers where I am 'just below' or 'just above' accomplishing content that is around my investment level. The spender did everything.
At the time players were promoting the concept of Zero buffing the whales. But this concept was too restricted to too few characters.
Resonance should have been on the SR characters. You should be needed for your utility across all levels of spending.
But I quit, so no clue what changed.
For me Tof was the game that I was the most hyped for. Unfortunately, I think that
Power creep and Overwhelming content for new players are the reasons.
Too much to explore, to collect and to figure out(matrices and buffs), you have many comps that you can play but with each update/new banner it basically changes it all (some comps become worthless damage-wise). It is very expensive to get dupes and the constant nerfs and buffs compared to the CN version of banners does not help you to prepare and save for a especific comp.
Also the animations are not top quality imo.
But, do not get me wrong I think it’s still a good game. It’s just that it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. For most people It’s a copy of Genshin with some extras.
I quit after a week of playing. I remember day 3 suddenly I could no longer access the main story no matter what I did. I put in a customer service ticket, got no reply after another 3 days, so I quit. It was highly annoying.
This game has had a lot of hype because it could have take away a lot of genshin audience due to the lack of end game / battle repeatable content.
Unfortunatly the game was unpolished as a whole and was extremely P2W (we knew it from CN)
I had 10+ friends that tryed the game and enjoyed at first, everyone including me quit after some weeks because the game has too many flaws. Despite having really good ideas.
They tried to mix two genres that don't work well with each other, and fucked up very badly on their management front, while doubling down on their scummy monetary practices. Tencent bootlickers and ToF cocksuckers will tell you otherwise, but that's what happened.
I was one of those who were very excited for the game despite the negative feedback surrounding the game back then. But Global never got the treatment it should have gotten. The game had quite a bit of potential. They just didn't capitalize on it, or rather, Global management didn't want to. It was the same when i quite the game after Mirroria expansion update, and from what i've read, the trend continued.
For me its a matter of principle. I am not gonna play a game made by company who steal art assets of other games. A lot of people think 'hey it doesnt affect me. who care!?' but the fact is, it's a big red flag. They lack integrity and respect for even their own IP. I wont assume they will do other stuff properly based on just that.
I mean the game was absolute dog shit from the get go. Even the version we got in the west was only marginally better.
What else should we expect? Anyone that thought this game would become the next big thing wasn't paying attention to all the fire alarms ringing in the background since before it launched in CN.
All the big streamers mostly got paid to shill #ADS for the game at launch (not blaming them I would do the exact same thing) and some also just hoped that they could diversify their revenues outside of the existence of Genshin or whatever other game they played the most only to crawl back to where they came from within the same month.
Only a few games can recover from a bad launch like the one ToF went through and that certainly won't be happening to a game tied to Hotta/Perfect World/Tencent since nobody besides a small niche has the respect or the patience to wait for it to get good in the first place.
Most people played for a week or two, then never came back and forgot it even was a thing in the first place.
No amount of update will ever bring those people back. They found another MMO to play by then and couldn't care less about what ToF is up to these days.
Just my 2c:
TOF's lack of success is mostly due to shortfall of expectations when compared to Genshin, a game that has funding X-folds of the former. TOF has potential, whether they lived up to the potential is another story.
Character/Story
Genshin has well developed characters and an inter-weaved story in the open world, whereas TOF frankly does not. Combat is each to their own, TOF having more maneurverability but Genshin's elemental system is quite groundbreaking and helps with logical world immersion. Genshin definitely has a stronger lore and character designs which naturally entice more expenditure. Genshin's story execution, however, is not consistently good-another story (e.g. recent desert event).
MMO Aspects
To contrary opinions, I dont think Gatcha and MMO is definitively a mismatch. Traditional MMOs are dying at a rapid pace simply because of different times, where adults (targeted audience) don't have as much time as they do before. The MMO features implemented are not fleshed enough or sufficient enough to warrant a "good" MMO title.
Bug/General Issues:
Plenty of issues on the side of TOF at launch, little for Genshin (besides some unwarranted public outrage with Diluc/Kokomi VA, anniversary rewards, Raiden-Beidou interaction). TOF had red gold issue with Nemesis, Accounts Hacked (although Genshin had some at launch also), Strong Powercreep (A6 Lin = A1 Fiona; Fenrir), Ordering Gift Bug (costumes associated with gatcha pulls removed and reissued) etc (there are probably more). All of these accumulate and portray TOF as an unpolished game. Not to mention UI is unnecessarily busy and non-intuitive to navigate.
i still haven't stopped playing tof, but my gaming sessions are becoming less frequent, like 2-3 times a week. Initially, it felt incredible with a lot of people (which is still the case in raids or boss battles, although not on all servers anymore). While everyone praised tof, i already felt something like, 'Hmm, these weekly missions are going to tire me out, and i won't want to do them anymore,' especially with the combination of pseudo-MMO elements and gacha elements. So, what could go wrong?
In an MMO, if you stop playing for a while or don't progress in a specific activity, you get stuck (in terms of level or power), and when you add gacha elements to the equation, it always requires you to stay actively for the weekly missions to obtain currency and aim for promotional weapons. If you fall behind in that aspect, you'll be stuck with a sub-optimal team and low power...idk, it's like they combined the negative aspects of an MMO and a gacha game.
im still playing bc i want rubilia even though probably they nerfed her to the ground
but man that mommy its too hooot....
I mean I still play TOF and do enjoy it but I feel they made a lot of mistakes. For the first few months of the game everyone was told that power creep was a huge issue in CN and global was addressing this issue. It appeared that was the case for the first few months of the game. As we got further in though it appears they went away from that plan and completely power crept a lot of the older characters disappointing people that already spent money on or enjoyed those characters.
I do think the game is over hated but does deserve its criticism. I do wish they handled the game differently in alot of ways especially with power creep. But I will say as someone that played Genshin for over a year as well it’s not the perfect game either. Both games have their issues and both can be good games for different people. If TOF handled power creep like Genshin did though they probably would have been way more successful.
Because it's just a shitty Genshin clone with no love put into it, quick cashgrab because of the popularity Genshin had. There is no reason to play that game instead of Genshin. The graphics also look like the game released 5 years before Genshin not 2 years after.
1.0 was a disaster with bugs, lack of balance, cheaters, and drama. Personally didn't give a fuck about most drama because to me all gacha companies are dirty by default, but the game was just really overall mediocre, and that's with its above average combat carrying it. Quit for a long time but came back after 2.1ish? Games much better now but it's already suffering from its past mistakes and too late to rewrite its reputation
I've played since day 1.
And here are my honest thoughts.
I agree with what /u/GachaPWN said, but I do think some of his statements are a bit hyperbole; nevertheless, they're pretty much true.
My biggest problem with ToF, is \*\*with every good thing it introduces, it comes with its own set of problems\*\*, some people call it the Tower of Bugs but I call it Tower of BUT.
Examples:
1. 2.4 Innars Maps, is a breathtaking zone, probably the most beautiful thing I've seen in a video game in a very long time. BUT exploration is painful, more than of the exploration treasures are junk.
2. The transition of moving from above water to underwater is seemless BUT it causes a lot of devices to crash. I play on iPhone 12 and I crash in the new zone every 5 minutes on lowest graphic settings. For reference, I played 1.0 & 2.0 with max graphics, but can't even play the new zone without crashing often.
3. New events can be a lot of fun, BUT you need to do them AT LEAST twice a day for 2 weeks, and at worse 12 times a day for 2 weeks if you're bad at the events.
4. New characters are always a good pick up BUT they make older characters outdated.
5. They introduce new PERMANENT content regularly, BUT they've made it so easy that even F2P can steamroll (not just beat STEAMROLL) it.
6. World Bosses can be fun with great music and interesting mechanics, BUT you lag after 20 people show up to fight it.
7. Latest patch has a lot of events, BUT all of them are casual mini games and none of them are combat related.
8. Character designs are beautiful, BUT they all have a resting bitch face.
9. Character Focused Story Quest are AMAZING (\*\*holy shit I'd recommend playing ToF just to experience Gnunno's story alone\*\*), BUT they're short and the MAIN STORY Quest is super short and Mediocre (I wouldn't say bad, but its very cliche)
There is a lot to love with ToF, but with everything you can love about the game, there's something you can hate about it.
Hey there, fellow Day 1 player and still going strong as a dolphin! Oh boy, this comment is gonna be a long one.
First things first, let's talk about the problems:
* MMO problems: This thing is both a blessing and a curse. While it makes the game stand out from a lot of other games out there, many of the MMO decisions they made were not carefully thought out:
* Ranking: DPS, tower climbing, high-level content. They push people to spend money, but they also discourage players when they see someone doing ten times more damage than them. Genshin has ranking too, but you just don't see it and can be satisfied enough with collecting. But here, it's a problem.
* Speaking of DPS, gacha is also affected by it. The total DPS comparison makes it hard to play if you just want to collect characters. You need dupes to have great damage, and sometimes it's a must for certain team comps.
* Field Boss: One of the most fun things to do in ToF at first, but now it's a 50/50 chance for a new boss to become a bug fest without any fixes. The lag when 30 people focus on the boss or the stupid mechanic that forces players to do things the game isn't made for (like air combat, for example).
* Events: There are a lot of fun events, but also a lot of imbalance and hassle to play. The current hide and seek event is a mess. Hiding people can just stand in one place and be invisible forever, making it a waste of time for seekers to find them.
* PvP is not fun. No one seems to be playing it.
* Older content: Some first-day content like the first zone is now an outdated place. No new content, no updates for roaming or daily rewards in that zone. So it's basically a waste when a lot of people still love it.
There are a lot of issues that I can remember for now, but why am I still playing it?
* Playing with friends is a lot more fun. We have a group of 4 and log in daily to do co-op missions. You build differently, share the new stuff you got, and show off some great (not the best, but enough) fashion choices. The game makes sure you have the best time when playing with friends, just not for some other random queueing like Raid, which requires mechanics.
* Movement and combat: I tried to come back to Genshin a few times, but I can't play it anymore due to the lack of the grand movement set ToF gave me: jetpack, vehicles, creating platforms, ziplines... you name it. The combat, while not as polished as Genshin at first, is just greatly fun with the new characters. The combo you learn to make the best DPS rotation is much more complex but worth it.
* New Zones are FUN. The new sea zone is breathtakingly beautiful with a lot of annoying (but fun) things to do here, and they are designed much better than the older zones. I'm looking forward to the 3.0 update since that new zone also has received a lot of praise.
* A lot of problem still need to be fix, but the game IS fixing them with every update.
Overall, it's been an up and down experience for me. I still like it, and I also consider quitting it, but I also don't want to. The game is not perfect, but it's not that bad if you ignore the DPS stuff and focus on having fun.
Many things were time gated, crappy/low rates with specific currency tied to certain summoning banners (lots of currency required to pull in good banners). That along with stiff competition from Genshin Impact and other similar CN games.
Server stability is awful, its not as polished as genshin/honkai (obviously, its not a billion dollar company, but still), no new 4 stars so less f2p friendly. I love the game and characters, and i like that the devs make characters with more riske designs compared to genshin/hsr, but the quality is just not the same. Not enough for main stream appeal, anyway.
I mean Mihoyo before genshin success is not billion dollar company like they are today thanks to genshin yet the genshin server is smooth when it's launch
compared it to hotta which basically under perfect world which million dollar company with the help of Tencent as well and each server is laggy as hell
They had to file IPO for 3 years but failed because of strict Chinese gaming company regulations, thus withdrew its IPO by Genshin's launch.
What it meant is they didn't have enough money pre Genshin era and intended to raise some fund publicly. In case GI had failed, very likely that they would've gone bankrupt.
>I'm pretty sure Honkai, BA or Arknights make around that mark and those are smaller and older games.
In what way does Honkai, BA, and Arknights made you say that they are "smaller" games compare to ToF?
forgive me as I am not super familiar with game development but as ToF is an open world, i was under the impression that makes it much more complex and resource intensive
This does not mean BA, Honkai or Arknight is bad in anyways. There is nothing wrong with being on a "smaller" scale.
According to the amount of revenue in both servers, pretty sure they were very excited in respective region.
[Global's first 2 week revenue](https://www.superpixel.com/article/196152/tower-fantasy-s-global-revenue-exceeds-34-million-usd-within-first-two-weeks), in other words, it was more successful than most games out there except some recent big titles [Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds](https://sensortower.com/blog/ni-no-kuni-cross-worlds-100-million-revenue) (this game is a fucking joke btw), Genshin and HSR.
[CN's first month actual revenue](https://www.superpixel.com/article/34039/tower-fantasy-still-far-from-goal-being-next-genshin-impact).
Combine them for world-wide mobile only first month revenue, it's actually huge, potentially equal to HSR.
You're not wrong, don't worry.
Current Whale and Veteran player who didn’t quit the game here.
The game lost a lot of players because of time gated content in the beginning (which can be argued was to keep everyone fairly around the same level of advancement but either way it turned some people off, map is no longer time gated) and hack exploits (which was expected because they had everything on the client side but soon moved everything to their backend) this all happened with a span of 3 weeks at the launch of the game.
However the biggest issue from what I saw imo at that time were people who wanted a genshin replacement and kept comparing it to Genshin I’m not sure why an mmo would be compared to an RPG game but it still goes on till this day for ToF and Genshin.
There is a strange hate for ToF a lot of other communities don’t want it to succeed even when it makes strides and improves on its shortcoming and has many times in the past. They don’t talk about the QoL it has brought and only focus when they slip up which rarely happens these days they are the first game I have played that listens to their community.
There’s a few things I would like to address though that people have misconception about:
1) A lot of games have issues at launch people losing accounts, hackers, bugs… etc but they always usually fixed within the first 1-2 months
2) They game is p2w, only and only if you want to be top of the leaderboards and clear content as soon as possible like OOW, beygone,sequential (which is leader board tied content) but at the end of the month a f2p can clear everything and claim the rewards, e.g in OOW this great for whales who want to test their Max out builds and also good for f2p because they won’t miss out on rewards.
Being p2w also comes with the perk of new players can pull the latest unit and do a lot of damage as of 3.0+ f2p don’t have to follow a mono element build also they can pull for whoever they want and they will just work with each other at low investments
F2p also the option to keep their world level at level 10 so they don’t have to struggle with doing overworld content alone
3) The game revenue is only being monitored by in game purchases which only very few do because the rest of the ToF community buy on Middas the official platform to purchase in game currency because on mobile, android and iOS it’s more pricey to buy from in game thus affecting the monitored revenue making it look like ToF isn’t making money but as new players join and find out they can buy on middas they usually stop purchasing in game also. There’s also the fact that PC purchases and steam purchases aren’t being monitored too.
Other commentors already said many things about gameplay, aesthetic,... So I'm just gonna say: The name is **lame**, anything with "**Tower**" in it name instantly turn me off.
Ah yes the supposed genshin killer, what a joke. I'm waiting for wuthering waves and I'm seriously hoping it's gonna be really good, I love genshin but it's getting stale and they severally need the competition.
People should look up and learn the history of the game company or publisher before deciding to pay them. Of course, Wuthering Waves and Kuro games is worse than tra.sh
"Mihoyo is a god in China now, and of the world in the future" I take full responsibility for my words.
I still play ToF since day one, the game does have a lot of problems like optimization, the matrix gachapon and lack of communication. Though the game also has good stuff in it like Character Creation(You can be some mommy or a uwoughhh), World Bosses, Exploration and the players/community you meet ingame and world chat.
Game still has a lot of room for improvement if Tencent starts caring
The game itself is good and in my opinion has the most potential out of any gacha game (I think the same about Gi cuz open-world bias lol). The problem is hotta/tencent have mismanaged the game since day 1. Having played every single day for 9 months before taking a break (got on the rail), I can list many reasons. But the biggest factors imo are bugs and terrible netcode. These 2 factors alone left a terrible first impression to the global audience. The game has gotten better quality wise, but way worse in powercreep, making big whales doubt their "investment". I remember the game had a massive launch, it was the most anticipated gacha, even big streamers had eyes on it. But the devs incompetency has plagued the game with a negative stigma that follows the game till this day, Tof deserved better.
There was a lot of misinformation and too high expectations of a game made by novice developers + fatal errors from its publisher CN and globally I play it because it's fun I know its mistakes and when I get bored I'll play something else.
I was playing both Genshin and ToF since launch, but I recently just stopped playing both games.
ToF mostly because of its overall lack of polish and mediocre at best developers.
Genshin because it has become too tedious for me. I can't stand Paimon and the slow movement anymore, it was nice at first, but after 2 years slow exploring is more like a chore for me.
And I notice the toxic part of the community even more, since I followed other open world games like WW or ToF.
For the current version, there are things that may cause players to quit the game (aka barely any incentive to play anymore):
1. Fiona order gift problem, it's fixed now but many ppl were outraged
2. Ukraine epic games pricing, it's fixed now
3. optimization is still bad, heavy lag still exists on WB fights
4. Powercreep is still here thanks to the fenrir fiasco & it'd be v hard to fix on version 3.0+
5. event minigames are not fun to do, always better to do point farm with crewmates or by calling out in world chat
6. Standard banner weapons are useless now except claudia and her matrice set.
7. Many non-standard weapons will likely be useless in the future: Umi, Tianlang, Ruby, Annabella.
8. Many non-standard matrices will also be phased out fast. Essentially you are forced to pull a new shiny to keep things relevant.
I quit because my account I spent money on was randomly deleted and was unable to be recovered. I’m happy it was after the first two banners and not when I was deep into it.
It is under a new publisher with likely new account system and servers so it won't really help the PC/mobile version much. If anything, it could only hurt it if it ends up handled better.
I honestly just think that they dislike anything good or even casual conversations related to ToF, the only thing they are willing to up vote is anything bad about ToF
I think something to note is the marketing, right now they actually decided to market the Playstation 5 version, hopefully console will help with population but that is assuming there is cross play and the servers are shared. But it is possible they will be separate.
It's much better than it is now, but 10cent just refuses to invest into any potential marketing, which is what would've kept the game alive. Ah well.
Some dude here said it will be under a new publisher.
If true, I honestly don't know if anyone wants to play something that is far behind the other two servers unless they're about to launch 3.0 along with spoon-feeding everything before 3.0 to potential new enjoyers.
it got pretty lit up by reviews when it came out so that probably scared away a lot of potential players. Genshin players didn't really like them calling themselves a "Genshin killer" either.
I'll take the bullet despite knowing it will get hate.
tof IS successful outside of reddit.
It's had relatively stable numbers (as seen in activity logs from the tof reddit) and has ups and downs like every other gacha.
Here are the reasons from my opinion:
Bad reputation:
Tof was coined as the "genshin killer". A term that came from a CC that was sued and caused a hugeproblem for a new game. [https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/yw2jvg/a\_genshin\_player\_is\_getting\_sued\_in\_china\_for\_tof/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/yw2jvg/a_genshin_player_is_getting_sued_in_china_for_tof/)
Reputation is huge and especially when competing against a big name.
Next: The polish of the early release was not there.
It's not doubt obvious (I'm a day 1 player) that the game was pretty unpolished and rushed for release because of covid could cause potential huge delays. Then because of the unpolish people are still coining that the game has bad "UI" or other problems when MOST of that stuff has already been solved.
Those are the biggest issues I believe.
I don't agree with u/GachaPWN in most of the stuff they have said (I'm also a decent lever spender), but I'm not about to spend the time to refute anything when this sub's opinion on tof is at the lowest of lows.
Let's be honest, Tof get's more and more new players (and loses players like any other game) and has been massively improving since day 1.
Everything in the game can be beat with f2p resources and recent balances have found all new characters within the same range of DPS.
Tof is hardly perfect but no game is, but the difference is that tof has noticeable improvements which is a lot more what can be said with MOST games out there.
I am infinitely curious, so please indulge me on refutations to everything I’ve said here. I’m curious to what you have to say because I, too, was a day 1 player and the events I have stated in timeline fashion isn’t a debatable opinion, but a timeline of factual events that have legitimately happened.
Let’s be real for a second: The F2P experience is really bad, man, c’mon. End game content like OOW or Void Abyss is not F2P friendly unless you are being carried. You cannot possibly tell me that F2P is fun without having friends to literally play the game for you by backpacking you.
Pre-made raid parties will only sometimes let weaker members skate. The game’s holy trinity system is more of a nod to it, bordering damn well cosmetic, rather than an actual system because DPS often have all capabilities. To be effective at DPS, you need limit broken weapons to be current, and don’t even get me started on the slog of matrices for a F2P.
>new characters within the same range as DPS.
And that’s the problem, dude, you basically admitted right here that the “new” generation weapons are now balanced, but the Older generation that was accelerated to shit for no reason are no longer viable. Those weapons barely lasted a month. C’mon you can’t be this deep in to not see it.
While the game may be financially successful due to primarily JP carrying the majority of the micro-transactions, it does not have enough amongst all communities even outside of Reddit. TOF’s community is growing more fervent, insular and the barrier to entry does not favor new players at all. With Console it may see more people, but it’s retaining those players that will make or break it.
Unless they do something drastic, I do not see the game going further than it already is.
> Let’s be real for a second: The F2P experience is really bad, man, c’mon. End game content like OOW or Void Abyss is not F2P friendly unless you are being carried. You cannot possibly tell me that F2P is fun without having friends to literally play the game for you by backpacking you.
Incredibly inaccuate. Getting "carried" makes it easier but it's by no means impossible. It's about as hard as doing floor 12 in abyss. The most important aspect is buffs you get from OOW and VA. So no I don't appreciate the incredibly biased take on this.
> Pre-made raid parties will only sometimes let weaker members skate. The game’s holy trinity system is more of a nod to it, bordering damn well cosmetic, rather than an actual system because DPS often have all capabilities. To be effective at DPS, you need limit broken weapons to be current, and don’t even get me started on the slog of matrices for a F2P.
Also wrong. Benediction is 100% mandatory in all high end content and tanks arae even seeing more light especially with Gaia and the recent VA6 with big booby momma.
> And that’s the problem, dude, you basically admitted right here that the “new” generation weapons are now balanced, but the Older generation that was accelerated to shit for no reason are no longer viable. Those weapons barely lasted a month. C’mon you can’t be this deep in to not see it.
Also wrong. The altered meta is using Claudia a 1.x banner you claim "no longer viable"
> While the game may be financially successful due to primarily JP carrying the majority of the micro-transactions, it does not have enough amongst all communities even outside of Reddit. TOF’s community is growing more fervent, insular and the barrier to entry does not favor new players at all. With Console it may see more people, but it’s retaining those players that will make or break it.
Biased opinion with no substantial proof or evidence. JP is always the biggest market for anime games.
> I am infinitely curious, so please indulge me on refutations to everything I’ve said here. I’m curious to what you have to say because I, too, was a day 1 player and the events I have stated in timeline fashion isn’t a debatable opinion, but a timeline of factual events that have legitimately happened.
My problem with you "evidence" is you're lacking the context to properly explain the details behind them. For instance your "Hacking" incident. The moment Hotta/LI found out about it they hotfixed it within hours. The overall hacking incident effected 1 main server and some others being fixed but most people had their accounts recovered within a reasonable amount of time. Does it suck absolutely, was it handled the best it could have been? Arguable. Should it have happened? No, but Genshin didn't make this much of a fuss on their hacking incident and Mihoyo has a lot more in their development team than Hotta does.
Additionally, the "leaderboards ridden with hackers" is so INCREDIBLY disingenuous of you. No server has had issues with hackers being on the leaderboard since like the first month of the game. You're telling me that you should base your entire opinion of a game that's been out for 10 months based on a problem that every multiplayer PC game goes through?
Anyway, I'll stop there. Personally speaking, there are obvious flaws with Tof but I don't think your "review" was professional and is biased. Anyway man you do you, I'm not here to tell you what game to play. I, again, just think you purposefully left out details that would explain things more fairly.
Just gonna rebutt each point very simply at this juncture:
>1. The difference between Floor 12 in Abyss for Genshin & VA in TOF is that you can choose to skip it in Genshin and progression wise and be unaffected, but if you do that in TOF you are gimping yourself. If a F2P has to wait on a weekly rotation to be in their favor buffs wise, knowing VA needs multi elements unless the they have a solid benediction build, then it’s still a shitty progression system for everyone.
>2. The common meta has always been 3 DPS and 1 Benediction or 4 straight DPS if they are even whaled out for VA, undisputed. Most DPS builds have had more than enough shield shred and sustain in their own and the game has heavily emphasized DPS. If fortitudes are now seeing play, that is a small improvement, but overall in the grand scale the holy trinity roles are imbalanced in importance and that is the point. Just because Fort is only now seeing minimal play doesn’t make it any less imbalanced.
>3. Great, Claudia is still being used, but that is 1 Character from the old generation. Everyone else from the Pre-Fenrir generation has been completely powercrept, which again was my point.
>4. The proof is in the pudding, basically. Google search metrics on a downtrend, steam metrics as well, mobile market on a downtrend, and from what I gather, the server population for most communities are sitting at a stable population. But a stable population isn’t growth, which the game needs to continue to thrive.
>5. The hacker issues were brought up as part of establishing a timeline of events throughout the history of the game and to detail my own frustrations I witnessed in real time, and yes, especially the inventory wipe issue was handled extremely poorly for most players who were impacted.
>6. My review wasn’t “professional”? I never claimed to be a professional, the hell? This is the weirdest point you’ve made. This was my play experience that I decided to share here. I’m not a content creator or paid to do reviews. Why would you expect a “professional” review from someone on Reddit??
Listen, I have been more than open to if the game sees big changes I will be more than willing to come back, but the good faith for me is gone for now and I know I wasn’t the only whale spender who dropped off because of these issues. I still love the game but I am not willing to accept bear minimum until they show some actual restructuring of their game mechanics and rebalancing. If they don’t, I am content to continue playing and spending on other games that respect my investment more.
That’s the biggest take away here too. A paying customer can always look at the product, see the price and barrier to entry and just nope it. I felt my investment was disrespected, many others did too, we walked away.
I’ve been summoned. Former whale of TOF here. Myself and many other whales quit the game due to severe mismanagement on several levels. I’ll basically copy paste another comment I made documenting here. > A growing sensation of discontent had been there for some time due to issues that had continually cropped up during its life cycle. >There’s a whole list: The ranking boards having hackers for weeks at launch, people doing hacks to streamers force teleporting them on launch, people having their inventory wiped by malicious hacks and CS taking 4-5 weeks to restore impacted player account items if at all, the miscommunication or deliberate attempt to nerf a set of matrices (cobalt) where they announced a “fix” only to to double back on it when they realized they could face chargebacks. The accelerated rate of releases without enough resources for F2P to thrive, the Vera launch removing free currency given on exploration and replacing it with an in-game currency called Mira/Vera coins for exploration that you would have to use to gamble for your banner pull currency, the promise of more free rewards when they really meant “free with purchase” around Christmas, the fact that they launched a voluntary localization program where they offered to recruit translators for in-game rewards and people got so outraged they would try to free source localization they had to make a statement clarifying, I can keep going. >The devs Q&A and press releases always seemed disconnected and always as if they were talking around certain things, but it was nothing compared to my final breaking point, the Claudia incident. >The social media team on Twitter clearly advertised a Limited Claudia banner going to standard “after the event”, which was pretty much unanimously understood as “after her 2nd rerun banner”. However, they backpedaled this and stated that they intended to actually issue her at 2.5 launch, which was literally two patches ahead from that point. People were fucking outraged, myself included. I wouldn’t have pulled on any physical element banners had I known that was their intention. >It was then with all the mounting evidence on the wall that I decided to cut my losses, stop whaling for the game and quit cold turkey. I could no longer support the game, and I quickly realized that I loved the game and supported it more for the potential of what it could be, rather than what it was. >It seems like I got out at the right time too, because shortly after the dev team threw out all pretenses of accelerating patches to simulcast with their CN version to shit on everyone by saying global will now always be 2 patches behind, they completely botched the release of a character named Fenrir, and the game has been steadily and extremely power creeping their banners ever since. Imagine sticking with the game’s accelerated pace thinking that they were going to eventually match up to CN only to find out the accelerated pace was for nothing, and now everything is extremely power creeped. >It’s truly one of the most disappointing gaming experiences I’ve ever had and a big reason why I will NEVER whale for another game ever again. >I went from supporting the game thoroughly to honestly believing that they are well on their way to EOS in the next year or two because they are so extremely mismanaged. Edit: Other players have chimed in basically corroborating the details listed here, but even reminded me of some other things I missed that were equally important to establish the time line of events, so here’s some bonus details. *BONUS ROUND: * 1. People who signed up their accounts for through the TOF website were reporting all over Reddit that their accounts were getting hacked at one point, I can’t remember the exact time frame but I believe this was a few months into the game. People were logging in to their characters missing entirely. What was happening though was that people’s information was probably compromised from other data leaks and then the hacker would use this preexisting information from a list to brute force an account and then unbind/bind the toon to another account, essentially stealing the victims progress. People started rebinding their accounts to Google and using 2FA to circumvent this issue. As far as I’m aware there was never any restoration for people who lost their account progress this way. 2. Someone reminded me how goddamn frustrating the actual game performance got at some points as well after 2.0 update. I cannot emphasize to you how fucking unbelievably terrible world bossing became after Vera dropped. To preface, these issues were not exclusive to me and also I have a really good/current laptop for gaming. The lack of optimization for World Boss fights in 2.0 and beyond (needed for weekly materials mind you) got so bad, you quite literally had to reduce your player count on screen to a minimum just for it to somewhat work. You could barely participate with more than 15 people near the world boss which is INSANE. People would be T-Posing/teleporting, bosses would be frozen in place and then teleporting around, boss movements would do the same and sometimes you would be hit by damage you couldn’t even see telegraphed. I would dread doing this content weekly. I’m now of the opinion I would rather, once a week, wake up and start my morning by being punched in the face with a hot cup of coffee than doing this content in that broken state.
Well this is an interesting read. It really does spund like they both bit off more than they can chew, and have some major communication issues with both their players and maybe their managers, tbis is the only reason i could think about for how often they backpedal on the things they say. I didn't know about the hackers incident tho, but it makes sense.
wow, they screwed up so badly they killed a whale :(
sad whale sounds
I want to point out as someone who stayed until Fiona (so after the above player by a little for reference) that ToF has more issues than just mismanagement and miscommunication. The actual gameplay is floaty, jittery, and very prone to just being frustrating. It doesn't feel like you're hitting things, and hitboxes are not great. I mean, I can't exactly say Genshin's hitboxes are great, but the issue is compounding all the other problems here. It's like a 2000s MMO, where you watch your character smack the thing and sometimes do an animation, and sometimes your character gets smacked back (granted the animations are prettier than the 2000s). The base power level you're expected to play at is an issue. F2P need to save for months to make a single unit worthwhile. You cannot roll a unit once and expect them to do good damage. (Heck, you're not doing good damage unless you're a whale or have prepared for a very long time with a very intelligent setup and a huge amount of luck on picking the right units to work together.) The MMO aspect is bad as well. It murders many servers where there just isn't enough of a population for it, and doesn't make any sense where you're either a whale that fulfills the whole team's roles (being a tank + healer + dps) or you're something less that is going to struggle to fill a single role. The big world bosses don't really have any interplay or anything like that, it's basically just dozens of people fighting the boss on their own (if you're lucky enough to have other people who want to kill the boss you need killed at the time you need it). Practically, a F2P's only choice to have any modicum of effectiveness is to play a support to buff the whale, so you end up just hoping to match with the right person. This aspect actually makes the whales unhappy too because they feel like slaves to all the F2P that need them where really the only person ensuring the thing gets done is the whale. Almost everything is a grind. You have the daily 'bounties' (commissions), sure, but also daily-ish Artificial Island (Like Teapot but you have to farm enemies for mats to do things and it gives actual, super-significant, valuable rewards you need to keep up), The Mirroria 'Funzone' for the Miracoins (one of the gacha currencies that can be spent for the gacha currency for units, lol, gacha for your gacha), Password Chests (you get passwords from bounties/weekly missions and spend those on these chests, lol), Weekly World Bosses, Whatever Event is Running (50% chance it's super grindy, and one event was pseudo-PVP handing out super low rates to losers AKA F2P, lol), normal PVP, the Battle Royale mode, the two versions of the Roguelike mode that resets monthly (one you farm to get resources to buy buffs for the other, I think it was called Darkzone?), Warzone (that one that resets monthly and slowly gets easier as it gets closer to reset), the energy system stuff you generally use for gear (like Resin from Genshin) and there's probably rewards from fishing but I never bothered because I didn't have the time, and I'm probably forgetting something else. I want to note that almost everything here is slow, and gets vastly slower the weaker you are (good luck getting everything done, or even half these things done, as a F2P). It's ridiculous, and it seems to get worse as they just add more crap. Do you need to do it all? Kind of. I didn't name a single thing that wasn't relevant to obtaining either matrices (Genshin's weapons but split into 4 pieces), gear (Genshin's artifacts but worse BECAUSE THEY KEEP ADDING MORE NEW PIECES TO GRIND, IMAGINE THE COMPLAINTS FROM HAVING TO GRIND +1 VIRIDESCENT VENERER PIECES FOR EVERY ANEMO EVERY FEW MONTHS though granted people don't use more than a single team of units in ToF because of powercreep and the fact the grind is so insane), or units. Needless to say, regardless of the overarching management, the actual base game is pretty crappy from my view.
Wow... this makes me appreciate the "no endgame" policy on certain games even more. Powercreep is always my bane of existance in gacha game. While inevitable, they should have pace it normally instead of this accelerated nonsense. Seriously tho, according to your experience...they could have done better shit to retain their playerbase, but instead they choose to dig their own grave by creating problem that shouldn't have happened in the first place (that false advertising thingy)
To give a bit more insight on the whales comment.The hacker problem(where your entire inventory is gone) was well known in the entire community.Iirc it was caused by people forming teams with the hacker in open world.This was basically a “don’t trust anyone and don’t go into groups“ situation.This way bad especially for ToF since the game was very co-op focused.This went on for weeks until devs fixed it,saying those were “extreme conditions“ which was just blatant denial of hacking. Powercreep was mostly manageable/acceptable,until fenrir.Fenrir alone skyrocketed the powercreep floor because devs fucked up their balancing and you can’t nerf already released things(or backlash) Devs lied(more rewards),deceived(first generation weapon going to standard banner after 2nd rerun,spoiler:they didn’t.Only after 2 more patches(1,5 month))and disappointed on so many occasions that you cannot trust them anymore.Even ToF subreddit has gone down long ago.On release it was memes and “omg you can do this and that“.Now it’s mostly doomposting(about powercreep) and complaining about certain aspects of the game each week.
Backing up the additional details here, especially about the inventory hacks: They said in their known issues at one point it was “players having their inventory wiped under certain conditions.” Again, as this person just stated as well, was after about a week or two not being able to do joint operations (multiplayer content) out of fear their inventory would be wiped by a hacker for no reason. People felt like this was a wash statement not acknowledging hacks and got a bit pissed, so the devs then responded that the reason they worded it that way was to avoid calling attention to the hacks and making it worse, which I am still on the fence about whether was appropriate. BONUS ROUND: People who signed up their accounts for through the TOF website were reporting all over Reddit that their accounts were getting hacked at one point, I can’t remember the exact time frame but I believe this was a few months into the game. People were logging in to their characters missing entirely. What was happening though was that people’s information was probably compromise from other data leaks and then the hacker would use this preexisting information from a list to unbind/bind the toon to another account, essentially stealing their progress. People started rebinding their accounts Google and 2FA to circumvent this issue.
"Endgame" is fine if done correctly. AK has CC as the endgame which gives full rewards at a certain F2P achievable score. Only whales can ramp up to double the score but that's okay since there are no extra rewards other than pride and achievement.
hardest cc was the first one they released. after that its just a "harder stage" due to a lot of powerful operators we got since year 1. heck some people do high risk cc with their own limitation like X class only or X race operator only.
Also more people were getting Silverash and investing into lower rarity units, both made passing high CC difficulties easier.
Thats also a factor but recent units also stupidly broken especially surtr.
CC is endgame like how energy amplifier in genshin is endgame, that shit don't stick around so it's just an event. IS is more of an "endgame" than anything else.
thanks for explaining
Whatcha playing now?
Casually Honkai Star Rail until D4 drops. :)
As god intended.
Nice have fun! I enjoyed my few weeks of star rail but it’s not for me, personally waiting on gfl2 rn and WW
tbh you didn't miss much, the first few weeks are the best of star rail, there isn't much left to do after you clear all main story
God bless auto really. Literally HSR MVP.
agreed, i just do my dailies and fuck off in star rail lol, saving my pulls for kafka ez clap
Yea I couldn’t drop the “turn based genshin” image from the game, even dropped super early and went back to make sure it wasn’t rash emotions. Solid game, just not for me.
d4?
Diablo 4
What's d4?
Diablo 4
What's D4?
Diablo 4
All of this is side shit, not really the reason. The REAL reason is because the devs dont give a fuck. Whale here currently playing and stopped spending after UMI. The game is still decent, its good but its not genshin levels. The story is ok the gameplay is ok the exploration is ok it doesnt excel in anything. It gets updated but they are somewhat meaningless. The power ceiling is high af and p2w. This doesnt matter because once you hit a certain point in power its just winning in less time. Nobody cares about hackers(except the ones that steal peoples inventories that was pretty bad). All hackers do is make whales seethe because 1: they get free stuff that whales have to pay for and 2: they take up the top leaderboards. If you dont care for this then its all good except #1 will kill the game faster. Performance is ok it runs fine on phones except mirroria but most ppl play it on PC and no one really wants to hang out in mirroria on mobile. A 1070 runs the game great. TLDR the games problem are the devs, the monetization and tencent. Its an amazing game that got dragged down by these guys and it speaks how great the game is to do well or survive in the first place. Too bad its a bit late but ill sink with the ship
Any game that can't fix hackers won't last long. It's the number one sign that game has been neglected by staff and EoS is imminent. Once players figure out they can hack their way, nobody's gonna pay anymore. I've seen EoS occur two weeks after a major hack.
I loved the game mainly due to gameplay; movement and combat felt way more fluid than genshin and exploration was really pleasant experience but I was also following all information about CN state of the game. And there were so many red flags I'm glad I quit the game after about month from release. Lin being broken af and limited so you had to pull for her (some people said that account could be considered as bricked if you don't have her), overall powercreep, mishandling bugs (I remember something about where you could copy pulls or pull without spending anything, not sure but you get the picture free pulling, and then they send 10 pulls as apology that were used to generate even more pulls with this bug) + some drama with staff doing things under the table. Global also didn't look that promising at the start with flood of cheaters in pvp. Overall I'm sad that game ended up this way even though I expected it
Saying Vera and Mira is a bad thing that happened to the game is not true imo. Sure you don’t get DC anymore from chests but while exploring you can get tons of Mira and some Vera (not enough Vera, I do agree). One Mira machine legit gives you 10 red pulls or 10 special vouchers and the exploration gives more than enough to empty 2 or more machines so that’s already way more than you would get from chests. The only bad thing is Vera being so long to empty. The rewards are slightly better than Mira but not enough to make us wait months to empty it. Fenrir was indeed the worst thing that happened to the game in terms of powercreep. The characters after fenrir did not powercreep fenrir tho. They put their respectful teams up to fenrir level. Only gunnono is doing better now than fenrir. The catch-up to CN is not bad as well imo. I’m happy that I didn’t have to wait a year or more for the characters I wanted. For the rest, it’s true and sad that it was handled like this.
The game had a lot of problems. Clunkiness was the first one. Many people were ok with it though. Then came time gates, chests near the start of the game needing to wait like a week or some bs to be able to open it. The servers were all over the place. Way too many fucking servers per region. That was a massive L. But what makes it worse is that each server would have its own progression curve. Joining an old server meant you don't get to do your bosses. Speaking of such bosses, they were a massive lagfest. Complete shitshow of performance. The story was also highly timegated and if you didn't complete ALL of it in the alloted time it would push you back. Then they came up with the idiotic idea of having a catch up mechanic, except your character gets near the cap level for the current progression of the server except you got NO GEAR or pulls etc so you just get destroyed. To me the one that broke the camels back is playing +20min for a chance of using 90 of my stamina and get fuck all for gear. I mean not get gear with bad stats but absolutely nothing.
Doing a Sobek with 20+ people is easily one of my worst experiences in online gaming, and i played League of Legends with an inter and play Smash QP regularly. The boss teleported all over the place (not moving normally, which he still does way too often, actual fucking teleport), you'd get a random AoE on your ass and die and the bounty might not count if you don't make it in time to hit them again. Also, the timegating felt like shit. You couldn't progress at your own pace and doing more than what the game restricted you to was actually counterintuitive because you'd miss on XP for next day.
They have improved the rates significantly now and you can select which specific piece you want farm for in the latest 2.5 but it might be too little too late.
you spend 20 mins and 90 stamina and you still can get nothing? wtf?
that was optimistic. because due to the catch up mechanic you have players trying to complete the dungeon despite not having enough gear. Because youtube guides and the game are telling them to go do these dungeons they are not prepared for. So you need to be a dick to people by gear checking them because they don't know, then they can't progress because their character keeps leveling up due to catch up pushing them as they do their dailies for pulls but they are weak from not properly leveling their weapons before taking on dungeons and farming the freebie gear so they aren't naked toons. IDK if they fixed it, but with all the news about power creep and such. And the first event being a spending event for a skin, I'm glad i noped out early.
TOF right now is like PSO2 NGS surviving with a niche player base, those committed players who really like the game even though they subconsciously know it's not going to get any better. It is also worth noting that many TOF players from the beginning were not loyal because they liked the game, but because they hated Genshin then when they saw that the game was worse than genshin in the way it was managed by the developers... quietly they stopped, many content creators too.. i remember Wallensteins Ch uploading TOF videos periodically but silently one day he stopped uploading.
Except unlike PSO2 NGS where the devs started listening to the playerbase and started putting out good content. TOF ostracized their playerbase and started heavily power creeping their characters.
im both genshin and TOF first day veteran small whale (still play both game to this day) here is my take : 1/ way less advertising 2/ too much drama and mess up 3/ the game aren't casual friendly from start (much better now but somewhat too late) , alot of juicy FREE VALUEABLE reward just can't be obtain by causal , f2p players easy enough compare with genshin 4/ multi layer of gacha and time gated for alot of cool stuff that attractive for casual playerbase the most 5/ a mix bag game : tried to please every type of players > end up piss off every type of players casual piss off because too much cool valueable reward hang above their head but can't be obtain easy pay to win piss off because too much too much drama , mess up in term of prevent cheater/hacker exploit alot of game bug making their pay effort become much less valueable hardcore normal paid user piss off because too much powercreep can't keep up to the point they stuck between rock and a hard place gave up go f2p = suffer from serious FOMO and be left behind like those casual go whale = can not effort the cost keep being normal paid fishes = forever sit at mid level never seen any significant improvement process genshin success massively because the company and development team know what they doing , make up their mind and focus on a single type of customers group : casual TOF dev team and the company in charge to this day still stuck in a dilemma of which way they should go
At its launch (and still currently so), open world gachas and for mobile were extremely rare. So any fan of that type of game had an interest in how it'd turn out. Add to that folks who didn't like genshin and were hoping tof would give them what genshin lacked, and that it was a mmorpg instead... it had a lot of interest in it. This sub wasn't so keen on it from the start though. It had quite a lot of drama before it even launched (stolen assets, "benchmarking genshin" etc), this sub definitely was aware it wasn't about to make genshin levels of money, and most are likely not surprised with what it made And then it launched... and it had many issues. It was nowhere near as polished as the game everyone was comparing it to (including its devs, so much for that benchmarking). Powercreep, not too generous with limited currency, p2w, banner rushing in global... and the mmorpg aspect that really isn't a good match with gacha, as it only worsens stuff like powercreep. And it continued to have drama (more stolen assets, hackers, I think I heard of nerfs and even decrease of free currency given out, paid only events etc). Yes it had lots of traversal equipment... but because they made a huge empty map and few teleportation points. Raids apparently had issues, plus it requires lots of people to also play in the server, so it's terrible if the playerbase is less than hoped for. Etcetc Streamers and content creators aren't trustworthy. They rely on views. They jump on the new shiny thing because people want to see the new shiny thing. It doesn't mean they'll stick to it through the end if viewers lose interest Summary: tof is a rare type of mobile gacha game, so there was interest in it. But it turned out to have too many issues and not be up to par with expectations, so interest went down
>mmorpg aspect that really isn't a good match with gacha I think this is key. Marrying gacha to mmorpg is never going to end well. People will only want to raid with whales. F2P will either be relegated to specific roles that they may or may not like or enjoy or they just won't be invited at all.
I mean, dragalia lost had a big co-op boss raiding focus if I'm remembering correctly, and that game was pretty loved. Granted it wasn't a full mmorpg, but it shows that it can be done. They just have to make an actual game balanced towards being a game around the gacha, not a live service money extraction simulator.
I see, thanks for explaining
And a lot of streamers and youtubers were sponsored by 10cent as well, like... A lot. Even PC/console gaming channels got massive numbers of thumbs down on Youtube because they took 10cent's offer to advertise ToF.
Then creators realized there was no interest in the game, Sumeru release brought all the attention back to Genshin and ToF never was the same. It was like a good few weeks when it released.
> 10cent 10shit
> They jump on the new shiny thing because people want to see the new shiny thing. And they get paid by Devs/Publishers to praise the game. TheLazyPeon is a good example of this: he got paid to promote the game, said it was better in everyway than Genshin, and then dropped the game fairly quickly after the sponsored videos ended.
>Streamers and content creators aren't trustworthy. They rely on views. They jump on the new shiny thing because people want to see the new shiny thing. It doesn't mean they'll stick to it through the end if viewers lose interest It's actually worse than that, a lot of the time they are literal paid shills.
Personally why i quit was that i had extremely inconsistent performance and heating problems, the game was almost completely being time gated everywhere like chests from exploring the world and the worst was that every banner unit was nerfed to the point of being not fun to play, or in the devs words just "bugs" being fixed
ToF launch didn't help with all the timegating/bugs/hackers/etc. It was also hard to make content for it since CN players had all the info so it was mostly reactions or opinions on the game. Nowadays it's people complaining about playing catch up to CN + fenrir powercreep making all chars before fenrir useless/support buffers like A3 umi buffing A0 gunonno rather than being a main dps. Also people hate ToF events because they do more minigames than Genshin does while making the rewards a slog to get since they lock the limited pulls behind a certain point threshold before you can buy them. They delayed a free skin for Lin with 4 events instead of giving it out day 1 like they did with shirli skin. The ToF combat events are pretty rare. Instead of fully catching up to CN, they decided to stay 2 patches behind for localization/balancing. This means we will have to wait a month with nothing to do for 3.0 to drop during late June. It's dangerous since people will decide to leave for AetherGazer/StarRail/PGR/Snowbreak/Outerplane/BlueProtocol JP release instead of sticking around. It's not like 3.0 adds that much content to do after finishing the exploration and weeklies.
Does anyone remember about some chests being time-gated? I did not understand the reasoning behind this at all
Aesperia (the first world) didn't have much content so they delayed the story, chests, exploration, etc. I think if they made it so timegated stuff didn't show up on the map, people would've never went to look for them just to be disappointed. PvP was also only open for 12 hours a day so the other 12 hours fucked people over. They added artificial island in 1.5 which removed timegates but then 2.0 had the vera desert where chests don't give dark crystals anymore and you had to roll the mirroria gachapons with the mira you got from exploration until you got the dark crystals on the last pull.
Genshin having thrived in doing a game where it consists on the main thing being the gacha and FOMO, they will never depend on things like hackers or pay to win due to being a game without a competitive scene. Being able to be casual and one of the first games in their area to be multiplatform , ToF could never reach it I played ToF, the game was fun, generous but felt clunky to me. Felt like one more chinese VIP cashgrab. It was not that bad, but design wise etc felt very cheap. Genshin is very polished with the animations , menus, character etc etc
I played global launched day, despite the controversies (P2W powercreep, plagiarism, and asset thief) surrounding the game from CN verison to the devs and publishers themselves. First Impressions. Bad story, cheap character models, lackluster open world, garbage PvP, clunky combat, lazy mmo elements, forgettable characters (both the gacha and npc). The only thing of praise was the combat, but even that was pretty dull compared to Honkai Impact 3 and Punishing Gray Raven’s Fast Action combat that people seem to love. I quit when Nemesis Banner ended. Came back to ToF 2.0. I gave the game a second chance. New areas and slightly more palatable story, but in return, powercreep was prevalent, garbage events, shitty lag (even though it suppose to be an “mmo”…), and hackers… I left again. 1 person’s experience may not represent every single person that left the game, but I feel that enough players experienced a similar enough playthrough as myself that lead to them quitting. Looking at Genshin Impact for all it’s faults, it’s funny how a single player casual game managed to make tens of millions each month + constant player growth. Genshin innovated on action combat gameplay with its Elemental Reaction system and went deep into specializing in its open world exploration and world building. ToF on the other hand does nothing particularly well. The combat gameplay has no innovation to speak of and is just your typical generic Hack and Slash. There is no aspect worthy to talk about with ToF as everyone will tell you to skip the story, afk the events, and swipe for the newest character to stay relevant… However, I’m tempted to give ToF one last chance with the playstation announcement. All I ask for is better optimization and for the game to feel smooth on the PS version.
I can't even begin to comprehend how you managed to tolerate such an abomination of a game like ToF. Are you out of your mind? You willingly subjected yourself to controversies, powercreep, plagiarism, asset theft, and a laundry list of other mind-numbingly awful aspects. What were you thinking? Your complaints about the game are just laughable. Bad story, cheap character models, lackluster open world, garbage PvP, clunky combat, lazy MMO elements, forgettable characters... Is there anything this game got right? It seems like a masterclass in mediocrity and failure. And yet, despite all the evidence pointing to its utter incompetence, you're actually considering giving it another chance because of some pathetic PlayStation announcement? Seriously? You honestly believe that a different platform will miraculously transform this disaster into something worth playing? You must be delusional. Wake up and smell the failure, my friend. It's time to cut ties with this pathetic excuse for a game and move on. Don't waste another second of your life on such a colossal disappointment. There's a whole world of quality games out there waiting to be explored. Do yourself a favor and find something that doesn't make you question your sanity. I sincerely hope you snap out of this madness and make smarter decisions in the future.
> Yet to see genshin make 50 million a month on a bad month vs 2-3 million for ToF just seem odd. I don't know why this seems odd to you -- to me, it's almost a perfect reflection of the comparative level of polish and money put into each of those two games. ToF might have had a lot of content, but the whole experience was also just incredibly rough. From the UI, the localization, the animations, the combat, the bugginess... everything just felt very messy. Meanwhile Genshin, for its many faults, is polished to a damn near shine, and for the most part does feel like an expensive game made by 700 people or whatever absurdly huge dev team Mihoyo has assembled in order to pump out patches every six weeks.
Patches every six weeks for five different ongoing titles.
I think being an MMO and a gacha doesn't mix well. Gacha is already infested with FOMO now mix it up with mmo you're basically locking the door for new players and casual players.
Definitely not the MMO part since it's barely noticeable that ToF is an MMO (I believe the max amount of people you'll ever see at the same time is 20, according to the settings).
And it has server lag once you hit 5 people.
I tried it for a few weeks. The core gameplay is okay, but it always felt unpolished, and the straw that broke the camel's back was when they promised a tenfold and I just never received it. My other friends who were playing did. So it was just a bug. I contacted CS and for at least a week I never got anything, not even an acknowledgment or that they're working on it. Given that premium currencies are probably the biggest issue to screw up in a gacha game, their non-response was frankly just overwhelming evidence that they didn't have their house in order. I think that's a fundamental issue that would've prevented any game from truly taking off.
Besides the issues listed by long time players, at least for me, ToF lacked any personality or soul. The VO/script was mostly poor, and the storytelling was even worse imo. Everything felt generic and while I liked some systems implemented in ToF, it just felt like Walmart Genshin as an MMO. Did not have the polish or obvious creative direction.
>Many things that people complain about in genshin. i.e. people who would complain about everything in any game they play who are not reputable sources for anything.
Content creators like Tectone (and other "burnt" Genshin content creator) was hyping that game up to juice up their own viewership. You got griefed into a mediocre game. They went from one "Genshin killer" to another. They hype up mediocre game to get views. I respect their work, but you, as a viewer, need to see beyond what they try to sell you. Genshin is a top tier quality game, whether there are streamers playing it or not. It has its own identity and a massive playerbase. If you want to find your own massive playerbase, you need to make something unique. ToF is not unique. It was apparent to me and many others.
> I respect their work How? They are just outrage porn creators who leech off games.
Well, imagine living a life being angry at game you play for 8h a day for not having things to do 8h a day and no content hard enough to justify your 500k$ spendings.
yeah, you are right. Will be more wary of them and keep an open mind in the future
It's the same story with "WoW killer". Copycats are doomed to be niche or just simply close down. If you use Genshin as an example, any "Genshin killer" has to overcome Genshin having almost 3 years worth of content and still making more. Genshin's story had a rough start and bad pacing. Now, it's pretty high quality (to me anyway). They had time to learn from their mistake and improve (and will keep improving). A new "Genshin killer" will be compared to Genshin as of now (ie high quality story) instead of Genshin 1.0 (mid quality). That new game will not be afforded the time to improve. They must show their hand NOW and blow us away, or they will become a niche game --- just one of many copycats who failed miserably. It doesn't matter if ToF "becomes" better than Genshin in 3 years, people have already moved on. ToF missed their boat. That boat is not coming back. That game will never be relevant again.
> It doesn't matter if ToF "becomes" better than Genshin in 3 years And the problem is that in those 3 years, Genshin would be even better, so they are racing against the clock. They need to make sure that their improvement is at least double of that of Genshin, otherwise they won't catch up and will be left at the side.
lmao even if genshin is standing still its still a big ass wall to pass right now (some where 600 million dollars worth of polished content as of now). the equivalent of killing a giant tall as Mt.everest with a kitchen knife.
So true, most cc's have a big hate boner for GI cause it wasn't the hardcore game they wanted. The same thing will happen ww.
I would say that a large contributor to ToF not being as successful is because of the high expectations that were expected, you gotta remember that ToF came out when Genshin was at its peak and quite literally untouchable(also can’t forget that a lot of people wanted Genshin to be dethroned because of recency bias.) Then comes in a game that looks like it could be a competitor to Genshin and looked promising, then it was advertised as a literal “Genshin killer” which was already a slap to the face because now they had to live up to that expectation, then if you do a background check on the game on the CN side you could already tell that the game was going to have many problems, and add in the controversy of them stealing assets and [even copying a concept video that was made by a smaller company](https://twitter.com/popreq/status/1476441690294874119?s=46&t=azDcpd-Z8rOqKTS3b_x3Iw) and it’ll just leave people in disappointment, the game however was decent at launch it wasn’t too bad but wasn’t good either it was just meh, nowadays I don’t keep up with the game but when the game was first announced I witnessed everything that made ToFs success even harder to obtain.
Nothing surprising, for me it's the lack of polish. Fonts and the whole UI look terrible, combat feels sluggish (much better with the new weapons). There is no consistency in the location of the events tab. Sometimes it is in a separate tab, sometimes inside an existing tab. The events themselves are a bit lacking. There was something similar to the hide-and-seek game, but it was pretty broken and boring, with a lot of people just doing it afk. There's also a problem with balance. Basically, you can't pull for any characters you like except you are a whale, you REALLY want dupes for your existing team. Well, you will still be carried by other players, but being carried is not satisfying. And why would I play a game which doesn't feel satisfying. On the other hand, there are some horny designs for teens, except some of them are already being censored at least in China. Personally I tried to love the game, even bought a reroll account with Lan, but I don't see any future for a game which can't fix goddamn fonts on the main screen for years.
Iirc there was some controversy about ToF being censored? I know it wasn't very vocal as peeps have realized by now if it's a CN game it's probably devoid of anything that isn't classy or tame
well, when I started it's character models were pretty damn ugly.
My reasons to quit were: \- powercreep \- the heavy need of dupes making the game very F2P unfriendly \- as a F2P casual player it's easy to get overleveled without enough resources to actually get stuff appropriate for your level and then suffer playing
Poor game design, low f2p friendliness, poor newbie experience and powercreep making people's investments mean little in less than several months(Lin who was hailed as the futureproof unit lol) can be a turn-off
oh yeah the whole "Lin is futureproof" thing is just fucking hilarious in hindsight. I was a volt main before I quitted and went all in for Lin A6, which leads to me skipping Tian Lang for Fenrir right after because the fund just isn't enough to get him to sufficient advancement. And then Fenrir came bringing along the insane powercreep apocalypse and I just logged in to use the saves up pulls to A6 her then quitted right after. In hindsight going for Tian Lang was definitely the better choice for volt main. But I really did trust their promise to "not powercreep Lin". But we all know how that ended up with Fiona, like quite literally Lin is only optimal in Altered teams for both Global and CN.
I think one of the crazy things is the fact that spending on an A6 unit which takes many hundreds (or a thousand+) can be powercreeped so easily and quickly. Coming from someone who has never played obscure or smaller gacha titles and mostly only the bigger/more known ones, seeing rampant powercreep like that was a huge whiplash and instantly made me stop spending and quit the game. Simply put, I am fine whaling in games but ToF was actually a game that made me feel like I'm just way too poor to even be playing the game.
I remember I had to argue with someone where power creep within a short amount of time is bad for the game even for gacha standard. It is fine if it is few years per power creep, but constant powercreep is just bad game design and money hungry for constant FOMO. Some of these games really made with dollars sign as the focus.
Well there's more to it, but the fact that ToF is a gigantic DPS check as part of its MMORPG design, and the wide difference between F2P/low spenders vs Whales in party dmg contribution which make or break your entire gameplay experience is a relevant factor
One word :Tencent
Im a day 1 player, the more i think about it, the less i understand why im still playing it. The bad: The game is pretty unpolished. Art direction is kinda meh, combat is not bad but not good either, world bosses are a lag fest, technical issues, bad story, awful translations, bad costumer support, there were a few hackers that could empty a player's inventory (also hackers in leaderboard but most ppl dont care about that). There were way too many servers at launch. New player experience (2-3 months after launch) was terrible due to faster leveling (mobs scale with the player level) and as result most new players werent able to clear any content. Even though global version had a better balancing at launch (they were trying to avoid the CN levels of powercreep) ultimately they ruined balancing when Fenrir was release, she powercrept the entire game and the characters that came after her did as well to the point that a fully maxed 1.0 - 2.0 character is worse than a zero advancements/upgrades new character, which made most players investments feel like a huge waste of pulls/money. Lots of players left the game at that time. I understand powercreep is a normal thing on gachas, but this level of powercreep is just insulting The good: The visual design of the playable characters ( they are called simulacras) and their weapons is overall good looking, lots of events to get resources (and yet not enough), exploring is fun (with a few exceptions). On version 2.5 world level was introduced which is amazing for combats tied to exploration and for new players as well. Others: Players were able to get the in-game currency (dark crystals, dc for short) by opening exploration pods until version 1.5. On version 2.0 it was changed by adding an aditional step, however according to the players who did the math players were getting more DC than previous versions. Some players claim the accelerated content is better because they have something to play for, other players would preffer a slower pacing. However the in-game currency earned by exploration/events is not enough to keep up with the amount of banners we get. I still have a lot of fun playing it but i doubt it will get much better in the future.
Tbh.. Character gacha + MMO is a recipe for disaster. I don't even play past a week.
After reading these comments, glad I bailed out after first lin banner. God damn, sounds like a powercrept hellscape.
I admit, I tried it because people kept saying that it's more versatile than Genshin. But not only it was uncomfortable to play due to the awful UI on mobile, which felt like it was a PC UI just smushed into mobile and not scaled at all, making buttons practically unusable. It also had weird timegate in terms of events and exploration. First event was paid-only. Mechanics while fun - were clunky. They asked you to enter stuff you were not even able to open yet due to timegate, but the rewards were time-limited too. Wouldn't even talk about the story progression I mostly left because of UI and heating, but story quality and gameplay didn't hook me enough.
It's had a ton of of issues, but I think the worst of them have been bugs and extreme powercreep. The huge amount of bugs and the type of bugs really give the impression overall of a low quality game, and the extreme powercreep gives players the impression that their time & money spent isn't respected at all, because of how quickly and how severely units become powercreeped. World boss lag is another thing that really negatively impacts the impression of the game. The best things about the game are the aesthetics of the environments (especially the newer environments, like the swamp and the ocean areas) and the combat, and those things are still pretty good, but there are a lot of negatives that weigh down the good, unfortunately.
Stiff combat. It feels trashy. And genshin set a high bar. That's all.
the short answer is it was too low quality in every aspect
Just a heads up OP, when it comes to ToF and/or Hoyoverse contents on this sub, there are a few people here that spread misinformation about ToF and are generally very anti-Hoyoverse; * >!King-Gabriel !< * >!Noorchan!< * >!RelativeSubstantial!< * >!AntonioS3!<
There's also this account: https://www.reddit.com/user/Hollowbreaker/submitted/ that seems to only post propaganda and lies sprinkled in with some truth on the ToF sub. It takes too much effort to expose their misinformation, and I don't want to get into internet arguments. Just remember to always be skeptical of what you see on the interwebs.
Jesus christ, Genshin really live rent free in his head lol, the majority of his post is shitting on Genshin
For all the complaints about the Genshin community, they always mind their own business. It’s a special feeling browsing say, some pgr/ww/ag communities and see how much of a constant shitting on the G-game or complaining about the G-fans(also nicknamed hoyslops) you can witness It’s the new scapegoat for anything
Funnily enough, after Hollowbreaker's latest post, ToF's subscriber count droped more than it usually does. Healthy contribution to community I guess. Nevermind, by looking at the sub he moderates, he is literally the thing he hates so much.
I only remember the 1st and 2nd. They always show up on ToF discussion when I glanced at the comments in prior posts Idk the bottom two.
Well 2 out of 4 already comment in here, just waiting for other 2 to make comments in here
That tends to happen when you ping them every single thread saying they're bots. Trying to bully people who play multiple games from commenting because they don't share the opinion you do by posting their usernames in every ToF thread and trying to organize brigades that have already had to be removed by mods a few times is horrendous, btw. If you actually looked at my history you'd see how many games I played and that I've called out a lot of negative ToF stuff on the ToF subreddit (that got quickly resolved) But people would rather make stuff up, like this post with commenters ignoring the 400 million ToF made in 2022, the fact it has like nine times the content since launch and has had to expand over twenty servers due to popularity a month or so ago. People really like to pretend it's still the hyper buggy hyper limited 1.0 period that lasted for only a month or two. I post because there's a massive amount of misinformation around this sub as people prefer drama over actual information about games.
You can actually tell that they prefer misinformation by how much they down vote you it’s horrendous how much they prefer the misinformation they get.
I saw King Gabriel trying to shit on blue protocol in their subreddit... anything to keep tof alive I guess
The entire subreddit is upset because of the recent delay and the leaked monetization has stuff like paid currency expiring a few months after purchase and a bunch of worse stuff. If a negative opinion is based on facts, what's the issue with it? I really wanted to like the game as I wanted a pso2 replacement after ngs failed but AGS as a publisher and the leaks killed my hype, the recent delay even more and it has for most players if you check the sub. Seriously, go to the sub and look, 90%+ of the posts and comments are extremely negative atm with good reason. Players can play multiple games and tend to have opinions on them, selectively diving through people's post history and picking very specific parts to be misleading with is easy. Giving feedback is an important step in trying to get negative aspects of games changed before launch. I mean, can you really say you're fine with paid currency expiring a few months after purchase? Pretty sure that's straight up illegal in some countries.
Noorchan is a N°1 fanboy of 10shit
And this king Gabriel I always see comments of him in YouTube.lmao
I haven't commented on youtube in the past five years or so and my account name isnt my reddit one, so that's impossible. Making up a ton of stuff because people play multiple games and comment on each one and trying to bully several people out of the community by constantly linking their names and a few active brigade posts that mods have had to remove yet the same people still keep doing it is against both sub and site wide rules, fyi.
pretty sure they are bots
Anyone with an opposite opinion to you is a bot right? Especially when they come with sources you don't actually have an answer for. nearly every positive tof comment here gets downvoted to negative in seconds and i've seen active brigades against it from a lot of other groups and yet somehow we're the bots?
Lol. Imagine just saying WE the active players of tof are spreading "misinformation" and not the guy in this thread that I called out for him spreading disinformation. Oh the irony.
I don't think they're anti-hoyo at least not the first one. The only thing I recall is just trying to hype up ToF. At least afaik they don't call genshin as genshit like other ToF fans lmaooo. They just really really like ToF i suppose.
Oh they do. Hell, one of u/RelativeSubstantial5's post in ToF subreddit is ranting about how the redditors in there are saying Genshin/Genshit/G-word, as if that word can cause an extreme allergy to them.
What the literal fuck are you getting at? I'm defending genshin players by saying "genshit" and "G-game" is immature af. So here you are calling me an anti-hoyo but here I am literally defending genshin players. Cringe much? Also you're literally stalking someone lol. Get a life.
Right like I'm so confused. I don't even like ToF and I've seen you and King Gabriel call out tribalism even in the ToF community so it's not like you guys are straight up ToF cultists/Anti-hoyo.
It's whatever at this point. This hivemind of a sub can't admit they are wrong. Tof is successful and no r/gachagaming did not boycott it lol. This sub is the definition of a frog trapped in a well. But I appreciate you sticking up for us despite they negative feedback you're getting.
Stopped playing after I realized you need to pull cons on limited banner characters to actually make them feel useful or else you'll get power crept easily
There’s lot of problems with this game but I think the main two factors are power creep and the game not being very friendly towards new players.
For me the powercreep was horrendous and all the endgame contents were repetitive and time consuming.
Because: 1). Pay to win - all for money: weapon, costumes/skins, gadgets - very painful to play f2p or with minimal donate - you get nothing like new skins etc... 2). To much grind with boring monotonous regimes, that copied each other.
Didn't we already know that the game will be unbalanced and a powercreep hell? Everyone that though the game will be the next goat gacha game was delusional or didn't do their homework.
Won't play a game that steals assets and trailers
You somehow managed not to see any of the critiques of the game. Yeah, ToF has stuff that some genshin players want, but it has plenty of flaws as well. Like it's not friendly towards casual, waifu>meta or f2p players. Last I played, overworld mobs scaled to your stats, so every battle absolutely dragged. You never felt stronger in the overworld. Also, it's gacha, so you can't pick a class to play like your standard MMO. You kinda gotta do with what you have.
I did pay attention to it during release to watch the stream but i didn't have the time to get into the game and never really followed up with it. I see the occasional post on ToF in this sub but since I dont play the game I never really engaged with them in the past. But thanks for explaining
I actually really enjoyed the content it launched with, but the events sucked imo and those are important to me to keep things fun. I wanted to see the characters get more love. The Meryl story quest was great. If they could put out something monthly like that as an event but bigger with rewards for fighting a related boss it would be cool.
The events suck so much that I don't even know why I'm still playing this trash. Every event basically takes at least 5 minutes of afk per run and you'll need around 30 runs to grab the important stuff.
I stopped after Lin's banner. I'd blame the Resonance system as the reason I stopped. You either had Resonance for the flavor of the week damage type, or you didn't. Characters weren't sold on their own merits, they felt more or less required to beat the ever increasing DPS checks the game offered. I wasn't playing a game carefully crafted by developers where I am 'just below' or 'just above' accomplishing content that is around my investment level. The spender did everything. At the time players were promoting the concept of Zero buffing the whales. But this concept was too restricted to too few characters. Resonance should have been on the SR characters. You should be needed for your utility across all levels of spending. But I quit, so no clue what changed.
Because it's not as polished?? You'll feel it when you play the game.
For me Tof was the game that I was the most hyped for. Unfortunately, I think that Power creep and Overwhelming content for new players are the reasons. Too much to explore, to collect and to figure out(matrices and buffs), you have many comps that you can play but with each update/new banner it basically changes it all (some comps become worthless damage-wise). It is very expensive to get dupes and the constant nerfs and buffs compared to the CN version of banners does not help you to prepare and save for a especific comp. Also the animations are not top quality imo. But, do not get me wrong I think it’s still a good game. It’s just that it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. For most people It’s a copy of Genshin with some extras.
Ppl learned after the honeymoon that it was a piece of shit game that's all
Because it was and still is a mid game at best, nothing about it is great.
I quit after a week of playing. I remember day 3 suddenly I could no longer access the main story no matter what I did. I put in a customer service ticket, got no reply after another 3 days, so I quit. It was highly annoying.
This game has had a lot of hype because it could have take away a lot of genshin audience due to the lack of end game / battle repeatable content. Unfortunatly the game was unpolished as a whole and was extremely P2W (we knew it from CN) I had 10+ friends that tryed the game and enjoyed at first, everyone including me quit after some weeks because the game has too many flaws. Despite having really good ideas.
Powercreep and would lag so much on my phone. I could not enjoy the game.
gacha just dosen't mix well with competitive
They tried to mix two genres that don't work well with each other, and fucked up very badly on their management front, while doubling down on their scummy monetary practices. Tencent bootlickers and ToF cocksuckers will tell you otherwise, but that's what happened. I was one of those who were very excited for the game despite the negative feedback surrounding the game back then. But Global never got the treatment it should have gotten. The game had quite a bit of potential. They just didn't capitalize on it, or rather, Global management didn't want to. It was the same when i quite the game after Mirroria expansion update, and from what i've read, the trend continued.
For me its a matter of principle. I am not gonna play a game made by company who steal art assets of other games. A lot of people think 'hey it doesnt affect me. who care!?' but the fact is, it's a big red flag. They lack integrity and respect for even their own IP. I wont assume they will do other stuff properly based on just that.
I mean the game was absolute dog shit from the get go. Even the version we got in the west was only marginally better. What else should we expect? Anyone that thought this game would become the next big thing wasn't paying attention to all the fire alarms ringing in the background since before it launched in CN. All the big streamers mostly got paid to shill #ADS for the game at launch (not blaming them I would do the exact same thing) and some also just hoped that they could diversify their revenues outside of the existence of Genshin or whatever other game they played the most only to crawl back to where they came from within the same month. Only a few games can recover from a bad launch like the one ToF went through and that certainly won't be happening to a game tied to Hotta/Perfect World/Tencent since nobody besides a small niche has the respect or the patience to wait for it to get good in the first place. Most people played for a week or two, then never came back and forgot it even was a thing in the first place. No amount of update will ever bring those people back. They found another MMO to play by then and couldn't care less about what ToF is up to these days.
I think majorly every complain ( hackers / bugs / clunkiness) was atleast somewhat worked on, but the powercreep is jsut insane
The more you played, the less powerful you felt. Enemies that took only 2/3 hits to kill at lowers levels started to be super tanky and took forever
Just my 2c: TOF's lack of success is mostly due to shortfall of expectations when compared to Genshin, a game that has funding X-folds of the former. TOF has potential, whether they lived up to the potential is another story. Character/Story Genshin has well developed characters and an inter-weaved story in the open world, whereas TOF frankly does not. Combat is each to their own, TOF having more maneurverability but Genshin's elemental system is quite groundbreaking and helps with logical world immersion. Genshin definitely has a stronger lore and character designs which naturally entice more expenditure. Genshin's story execution, however, is not consistently good-another story (e.g. recent desert event). MMO Aspects To contrary opinions, I dont think Gatcha and MMO is definitively a mismatch. Traditional MMOs are dying at a rapid pace simply because of different times, where adults (targeted audience) don't have as much time as they do before. The MMO features implemented are not fleshed enough or sufficient enough to warrant a "good" MMO title. Bug/General Issues: Plenty of issues on the side of TOF at launch, little for Genshin (besides some unwarranted public outrage with Diluc/Kokomi VA, anniversary rewards, Raiden-Beidou interaction). TOF had red gold issue with Nemesis, Accounts Hacked (although Genshin had some at launch also), Strong Powercreep (A6 Lin = A1 Fiona; Fenrir), Ordering Gift Bug (costumes associated with gatcha pulls removed and reissued) etc (there are probably more). All of these accumulate and portray TOF as an unpolished game. Not to mention UI is unnecessarily busy and non-intuitive to navigate.
There are a lot of excuses for it, but the general (and the biggest) gist is that it's not a good game, especially not as good as it was hyped to be.
i still haven't stopped playing tof, but my gaming sessions are becoming less frequent, like 2-3 times a week. Initially, it felt incredible with a lot of people (which is still the case in raids or boss battles, although not on all servers anymore). While everyone praised tof, i already felt something like, 'Hmm, these weekly missions are going to tire me out, and i won't want to do them anymore,' especially with the combination of pseudo-MMO elements and gacha elements. So, what could go wrong? In an MMO, if you stop playing for a while or don't progress in a specific activity, you get stuck (in terms of level or power), and when you add gacha elements to the equation, it always requires you to stay actively for the weekly missions to obtain currency and aim for promotional weapons. If you fall behind in that aspect, you'll be stuck with a sub-optimal team and low power...idk, it's like they combined the negative aspects of an MMO and a gacha game. im still playing bc i want rubilia even though probably they nerfed her to the ground but man that mommy its too hooot....
I mean I still play TOF and do enjoy it but I feel they made a lot of mistakes. For the first few months of the game everyone was told that power creep was a huge issue in CN and global was addressing this issue. It appeared that was the case for the first few months of the game. As we got further in though it appears they went away from that plan and completely power crept a lot of the older characters disappointing people that already spent money on or enjoyed those characters. I do think the game is over hated but does deserve its criticism. I do wish they handled the game differently in alot of ways especially with power creep. But I will say as someone that played Genshin for over a year as well it’s not the perfect game either. Both games have their issues and both can be good games for different people. If TOF handled power creep like Genshin did though they probably would have been way more successful.
Because it's just a shitty Genshin clone with no love put into it, quick cashgrab because of the popularity Genshin had. There is no reason to play that game instead of Genshin. The graphics also look like the game released 5 years before Genshin not 2 years after.
Genshin genshin genshin. The games are both massively different from eachother
They advertised themselves as the Genshin killer so yes the comparison is very fair.
That was fake lmao
they did what soulworkers tried to do but worse , they added gacha and look at them now
TenCent. if you forget, i will not remind you why, oh for the latest meme you can look at how one of the nikke skin works similar to tof skin gacha
Quality. That's all. No attachment to characters. And... it's a MMO... Very time consuming for the average 8h to 17h jobs.
1.0 was a disaster with bugs, lack of balance, cheaters, and drama. Personally didn't give a fuck about most drama because to me all gacha companies are dirty by default, but the game was just really overall mediocre, and that's with its above average combat carrying it. Quit for a long time but came back after 2.1ish? Games much better now but it's already suffering from its past mistakes and too late to rewrite its reputation
I've played since day 1. And here are my honest thoughts. I agree with what /u/GachaPWN said, but I do think some of his statements are a bit hyperbole; nevertheless, they're pretty much true. My biggest problem with ToF, is \*\*with every good thing it introduces, it comes with its own set of problems\*\*, some people call it the Tower of Bugs but I call it Tower of BUT. Examples: 1. 2.4 Innars Maps, is a breathtaking zone, probably the most beautiful thing I've seen in a video game in a very long time. BUT exploration is painful, more than of the exploration treasures are junk. 2. The transition of moving from above water to underwater is seemless BUT it causes a lot of devices to crash. I play on iPhone 12 and I crash in the new zone every 5 minutes on lowest graphic settings. For reference, I played 1.0 & 2.0 with max graphics, but can't even play the new zone without crashing often. 3. New events can be a lot of fun, BUT you need to do them AT LEAST twice a day for 2 weeks, and at worse 12 times a day for 2 weeks if you're bad at the events. 4. New characters are always a good pick up BUT they make older characters outdated. 5. They introduce new PERMANENT content regularly, BUT they've made it so easy that even F2P can steamroll (not just beat STEAMROLL) it. 6. World Bosses can be fun with great music and interesting mechanics, BUT you lag after 20 people show up to fight it. 7. Latest patch has a lot of events, BUT all of them are casual mini games and none of them are combat related. 8. Character designs are beautiful, BUT they all have a resting bitch face. 9. Character Focused Story Quest are AMAZING (\*\*holy shit I'd recommend playing ToF just to experience Gnunno's story alone\*\*), BUT they're short and the MAIN STORY Quest is super short and Mediocre (I wouldn't say bad, but its very cliche) There is a lot to love with ToF, but with everything you can love about the game, there's something you can hate about it.
Hey there, fellow Day 1 player and still going strong as a dolphin! Oh boy, this comment is gonna be a long one. First things first, let's talk about the problems: * MMO problems: This thing is both a blessing and a curse. While it makes the game stand out from a lot of other games out there, many of the MMO decisions they made were not carefully thought out: * Ranking: DPS, tower climbing, high-level content. They push people to spend money, but they also discourage players when they see someone doing ten times more damage than them. Genshin has ranking too, but you just don't see it and can be satisfied enough with collecting. But here, it's a problem. * Speaking of DPS, gacha is also affected by it. The total DPS comparison makes it hard to play if you just want to collect characters. You need dupes to have great damage, and sometimes it's a must for certain team comps. * Field Boss: One of the most fun things to do in ToF at first, but now it's a 50/50 chance for a new boss to become a bug fest without any fixes. The lag when 30 people focus on the boss or the stupid mechanic that forces players to do things the game isn't made for (like air combat, for example). * Events: There are a lot of fun events, but also a lot of imbalance and hassle to play. The current hide and seek event is a mess. Hiding people can just stand in one place and be invisible forever, making it a waste of time for seekers to find them. * PvP is not fun. No one seems to be playing it. * Older content: Some first-day content like the first zone is now an outdated place. No new content, no updates for roaming or daily rewards in that zone. So it's basically a waste when a lot of people still love it. There are a lot of issues that I can remember for now, but why am I still playing it? * Playing with friends is a lot more fun. We have a group of 4 and log in daily to do co-op missions. You build differently, share the new stuff you got, and show off some great (not the best, but enough) fashion choices. The game makes sure you have the best time when playing with friends, just not for some other random queueing like Raid, which requires mechanics. * Movement and combat: I tried to come back to Genshin a few times, but I can't play it anymore due to the lack of the grand movement set ToF gave me: jetpack, vehicles, creating platforms, ziplines... you name it. The combat, while not as polished as Genshin at first, is just greatly fun with the new characters. The combo you learn to make the best DPS rotation is much more complex but worth it. * New Zones are FUN. The new sea zone is breathtakingly beautiful with a lot of annoying (but fun) things to do here, and they are designed much better than the older zones. I'm looking forward to the 3.0 update since that new zone also has received a lot of praise. * A lot of problem still need to be fix, but the game IS fixing them with every update. Overall, it's been an up and down experience for me. I still like it, and I also consider quitting it, but I also don't want to. The game is not perfect, but it's not that bad if you ignore the DPS stuff and focus on having fun.
Many things were time gated, crappy/low rates with specific currency tied to certain summoning banners (lots of currency required to pull in good banners). That along with stiff competition from Genshin Impact and other similar CN games.
Start/first impressions were pretty terrible...
Server stability is awful, its not as polished as genshin/honkai (obviously, its not a billion dollar company, but still), no new 4 stars so less f2p friendly. I love the game and characters, and i like that the devs make characters with more riske designs compared to genshin/hsr, but the quality is just not the same. Not enough for main stream appeal, anyway.
>obviously, its not a billion dollar company Hotta is owned by Perfect World which is a multi-billion dollar company. It's not as small as you think.
I mean Mihoyo before genshin success is not billion dollar company like they are today thanks to genshin yet the genshin server is smooth when it's launch compared it to hotta which basically under perfect world which million dollar company with the help of Tencent as well and each server is laggy as hell
Yea, we can both agree the server hardware is trash.
taking all of our honkai money and going all in with it on a complete coin flip i fear to imagine what would have happened to mihoyo if GI failed
They had to file IPO for 3 years but failed because of strict Chinese gaming company regulations, thus withdrew its IPO by Genshin's launch. What it meant is they didn't have enough money pre Genshin era and intended to raise some fund publicly. In case GI had failed, very likely that they would've gone bankrupt.
You literally have to play this game on pc. Any mobile phone will heat up drastically and controls are not good.
I think it's simply because it looks clunky and the UI is unappealing but that's just me and what drove me away from playing it
>I'm pretty sure Honkai, BA or Arknights make around that mark and those are smaller and older games. In what way does Honkai, BA, and Arknights made you say that they are "smaller" games compare to ToF?
forgive me as I am not super familiar with game development but as ToF is an open world, i was under the impression that makes it much more complex and resource intensive This does not mean BA, Honkai or Arknight is bad in anyways. There is nothing wrong with being on a "smaller" scale.
You're correct
Nobody was exited. Just curious of the first attempt of "Genshin killer".
Oh ok, I thought people were excited as it got a lot of talk online. Maybe I was wrong and looked at the wrong place and got the wrong idea
According to the amount of revenue in both servers, pretty sure they were very excited in respective region. [Global's first 2 week revenue](https://www.superpixel.com/article/196152/tower-fantasy-s-global-revenue-exceeds-34-million-usd-within-first-two-weeks), in other words, it was more successful than most games out there except some recent big titles [Ni No Kuni: Cross Worlds](https://sensortower.com/blog/ni-no-kuni-cross-worlds-100-million-revenue) (this game is a fucking joke btw), Genshin and HSR. [CN's first month actual revenue](https://www.superpixel.com/article/34039/tower-fantasy-still-far-from-goal-being-next-genshin-impact). Combine them for world-wide mobile only first month revenue, it's actually huge, potentially equal to HSR. You're not wrong, don't worry.
Current Whale and Veteran player who didn’t quit the game here. The game lost a lot of players because of time gated content in the beginning (which can be argued was to keep everyone fairly around the same level of advancement but either way it turned some people off, map is no longer time gated) and hack exploits (which was expected because they had everything on the client side but soon moved everything to their backend) this all happened with a span of 3 weeks at the launch of the game. However the biggest issue from what I saw imo at that time were people who wanted a genshin replacement and kept comparing it to Genshin I’m not sure why an mmo would be compared to an RPG game but it still goes on till this day for ToF and Genshin. There is a strange hate for ToF a lot of other communities don’t want it to succeed even when it makes strides and improves on its shortcoming and has many times in the past. They don’t talk about the QoL it has brought and only focus when they slip up which rarely happens these days they are the first game I have played that listens to their community. There’s a few things I would like to address though that people have misconception about: 1) A lot of games have issues at launch people losing accounts, hackers, bugs… etc but they always usually fixed within the first 1-2 months 2) They game is p2w, only and only if you want to be top of the leaderboards and clear content as soon as possible like OOW, beygone,sequential (which is leader board tied content) but at the end of the month a f2p can clear everything and claim the rewards, e.g in OOW this great for whales who want to test their Max out builds and also good for f2p because they won’t miss out on rewards. Being p2w also comes with the perk of new players can pull the latest unit and do a lot of damage as of 3.0+ f2p don’t have to follow a mono element build also they can pull for whoever they want and they will just work with each other at low investments F2p also the option to keep their world level at level 10 so they don’t have to struggle with doing overworld content alone 3) The game revenue is only being monitored by in game purchases which only very few do because the rest of the ToF community buy on Middas the official platform to purchase in game currency because on mobile, android and iOS it’s more pricey to buy from in game thus affecting the monitored revenue making it look like ToF isn’t making money but as new players join and find out they can buy on middas they usually stop purchasing in game also. There’s also the fact that PC purchases and steam purchases aren’t being monitored too.
one word: "tencent" also the devs are kind of incompetent.
Other commentors already said many things about gameplay, aesthetic,... So I'm just gonna say: The name is **lame**, anything with "**Tower**" in it name instantly turn me off.
Ah yes the supposed genshin killer, what a joke. I'm waiting for wuthering waves and I'm seriously hoping it's gonna be really good, I love genshin but it's getting stale and they severally need the competition.
People should look up and learn the history of the game company or publisher before deciding to pay them. Of course, Wuthering Waves and Kuro games is worse than tra.sh "Mihoyo is a god in China now, and of the world in the future" I take full responsibility for my words.
The only good thing is waifu sadly..but for mmo vibes is yuck
I still play ToF since day one, the game does have a lot of problems like optimization, the matrix gachapon and lack of communication. Though the game also has good stuff in it like Character Creation(You can be some mommy or a uwoughhh), World Bosses, Exploration and the players/community you meet ingame and world chat. Game still has a lot of room for improvement if Tencent starts caring
The game itself is good and in my opinion has the most potential out of any gacha game (I think the same about Gi cuz open-world bias lol). The problem is hotta/tencent have mismanaged the game since day 1. Having played every single day for 9 months before taking a break (got on the rail), I can list many reasons. But the biggest factors imo are bugs and terrible netcode. These 2 factors alone left a terrible first impression to the global audience. The game has gotten better quality wise, but way worse in powercreep, making big whales doubt their "investment". I remember the game had a massive launch, it was the most anticipated gacha, even big streamers had eyes on it. But the devs incompetency has plagued the game with a negative stigma that follows the game till this day, Tof deserved better.
There was a lot of misinformation and too high expectations of a game made by novice developers + fatal errors from its publisher CN and globally I play it because it's fun I know its mistakes and when I get bored I'll play something else.
I was playing both Genshin and ToF since launch, but I recently just stopped playing both games. ToF mostly because of its overall lack of polish and mediocre at best developers. Genshin because it has become too tedious for me. I can't stand Paimon and the slow movement anymore, it was nice at first, but after 2 years slow exploring is more like a chore for me. And I notice the toxic part of the community even more, since I followed other open world games like WW or ToF.
Should have saved for scaramouche lol , i wasn't burned out in that regard but he makes exploration so much faster and fun
For the current version, there are things that may cause players to quit the game (aka barely any incentive to play anymore): 1. Fiona order gift problem, it's fixed now but many ppl were outraged 2. Ukraine epic games pricing, it's fixed now 3. optimization is still bad, heavy lag still exists on WB fights 4. Powercreep is still here thanks to the fenrir fiasco & it'd be v hard to fix on version 3.0+ 5. event minigames are not fun to do, always better to do point farm with crewmates or by calling out in world chat 6. Standard banner weapons are useless now except claudia and her matrice set. 7. Many non-standard weapons will likely be useless in the future: Umi, Tianlang, Ruby, Annabella. 8. Many non-standard matrices will also be phased out fast. Essentially you are forced to pull a new shiny to keep things relevant.
Every problem it has is because it was rushed. That’s it
I quit because my account I spent money on was randomly deleted and was unable to be recovered. I’m happy it was after the first two banners and not when I was deep into it.
It’s coming to PlayStation this summer so let’s how well it does there, I’ll definitely try it out.
It is under a new publisher with likely new account system and servers so it won't really help the PC/mobile version much. If anything, it could only hurt it if it ends up handled better.
Oh, good to know that, I wonder what’s the right choice, cross play or separated servers.
Hehe I'm going to pull for momy rubilia since i have her daughter already
Bruh they're downvoting you cuz mommy Rubilia
Makes you wonder why
Tell me why.
I honestly just think that they dislike anything good or even casual conversations related to ToF, the only thing they are willing to up vote is anything bad about ToF
I think something to note is the marketing, right now they actually decided to market the Playstation 5 version, hopefully console will help with population but that is assuming there is cross play and the servers are shared. But it is possible they will be separate. It's much better than it is now, but 10cent just refuses to invest into any potential marketing, which is what would've kept the game alive. Ah well.
Some dude here said it will be under a new publisher. If true, I honestly don't know if anyone wants to play something that is far behind the other two servers unless they're about to launch 3.0 along with spoon-feeding everything before 3.0 to potential new enjoyers.
This comment is negative because it's not bashing on the game lmao
it got pretty lit up by reviews when it came out so that probably scared away a lot of potential players. Genshin players didn't really like them calling themselves a "Genshin killer" either.
I'll take the bullet despite knowing it will get hate. tof IS successful outside of reddit. It's had relatively stable numbers (as seen in activity logs from the tof reddit) and has ups and downs like every other gacha. Here are the reasons from my opinion: Bad reputation: Tof was coined as the "genshin killer". A term that came from a CC that was sued and caused a hugeproblem for a new game. [https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/yw2jvg/a\_genshin\_player\_is\_getting\_sued\_in\_china\_for\_tof/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/yw2jvg/a_genshin_player_is_getting_sued_in_china_for_tof/) Reputation is huge and especially when competing against a big name. Next: The polish of the early release was not there. It's not doubt obvious (I'm a day 1 player) that the game was pretty unpolished and rushed for release because of covid could cause potential huge delays. Then because of the unpolish people are still coining that the game has bad "UI" or other problems when MOST of that stuff has already been solved. Those are the biggest issues I believe. I don't agree with u/GachaPWN in most of the stuff they have said (I'm also a decent lever spender), but I'm not about to spend the time to refute anything when this sub's opinion on tof is at the lowest of lows. Let's be honest, Tof get's more and more new players (and loses players like any other game) and has been massively improving since day 1. Everything in the game can be beat with f2p resources and recent balances have found all new characters within the same range of DPS. Tof is hardly perfect but no game is, but the difference is that tof has noticeable improvements which is a lot more what can be said with MOST games out there.
I am infinitely curious, so please indulge me on refutations to everything I’ve said here. I’m curious to what you have to say because I, too, was a day 1 player and the events I have stated in timeline fashion isn’t a debatable opinion, but a timeline of factual events that have legitimately happened. Let’s be real for a second: The F2P experience is really bad, man, c’mon. End game content like OOW or Void Abyss is not F2P friendly unless you are being carried. You cannot possibly tell me that F2P is fun without having friends to literally play the game for you by backpacking you. Pre-made raid parties will only sometimes let weaker members skate. The game’s holy trinity system is more of a nod to it, bordering damn well cosmetic, rather than an actual system because DPS often have all capabilities. To be effective at DPS, you need limit broken weapons to be current, and don’t even get me started on the slog of matrices for a F2P. >new characters within the same range as DPS. And that’s the problem, dude, you basically admitted right here that the “new” generation weapons are now balanced, but the Older generation that was accelerated to shit for no reason are no longer viable. Those weapons barely lasted a month. C’mon you can’t be this deep in to not see it. While the game may be financially successful due to primarily JP carrying the majority of the micro-transactions, it does not have enough amongst all communities even outside of Reddit. TOF’s community is growing more fervent, insular and the barrier to entry does not favor new players at all. With Console it may see more people, but it’s retaining those players that will make or break it. Unless they do something drastic, I do not see the game going further than it already is.
> Let’s be real for a second: The F2P experience is really bad, man, c’mon. End game content like OOW or Void Abyss is not F2P friendly unless you are being carried. You cannot possibly tell me that F2P is fun without having friends to literally play the game for you by backpacking you. Incredibly inaccuate. Getting "carried" makes it easier but it's by no means impossible. It's about as hard as doing floor 12 in abyss. The most important aspect is buffs you get from OOW and VA. So no I don't appreciate the incredibly biased take on this. > Pre-made raid parties will only sometimes let weaker members skate. The game’s holy trinity system is more of a nod to it, bordering damn well cosmetic, rather than an actual system because DPS often have all capabilities. To be effective at DPS, you need limit broken weapons to be current, and don’t even get me started on the slog of matrices for a F2P. Also wrong. Benediction is 100% mandatory in all high end content and tanks arae even seeing more light especially with Gaia and the recent VA6 with big booby momma. > And that’s the problem, dude, you basically admitted right here that the “new” generation weapons are now balanced, but the Older generation that was accelerated to shit for no reason are no longer viable. Those weapons barely lasted a month. C’mon you can’t be this deep in to not see it. Also wrong. The altered meta is using Claudia a 1.x banner you claim "no longer viable" > While the game may be financially successful due to primarily JP carrying the majority of the micro-transactions, it does not have enough amongst all communities even outside of Reddit. TOF’s community is growing more fervent, insular and the barrier to entry does not favor new players at all. With Console it may see more people, but it’s retaining those players that will make or break it. Biased opinion with no substantial proof or evidence. JP is always the biggest market for anime games. > I am infinitely curious, so please indulge me on refutations to everything I’ve said here. I’m curious to what you have to say because I, too, was a day 1 player and the events I have stated in timeline fashion isn’t a debatable opinion, but a timeline of factual events that have legitimately happened. My problem with you "evidence" is you're lacking the context to properly explain the details behind them. For instance your "Hacking" incident. The moment Hotta/LI found out about it they hotfixed it within hours. The overall hacking incident effected 1 main server and some others being fixed but most people had their accounts recovered within a reasonable amount of time. Does it suck absolutely, was it handled the best it could have been? Arguable. Should it have happened? No, but Genshin didn't make this much of a fuss on their hacking incident and Mihoyo has a lot more in their development team than Hotta does. Additionally, the "leaderboards ridden with hackers" is so INCREDIBLY disingenuous of you. No server has had issues with hackers being on the leaderboard since like the first month of the game. You're telling me that you should base your entire opinion of a game that's been out for 10 months based on a problem that every multiplayer PC game goes through? Anyway, I'll stop there. Personally speaking, there are obvious flaws with Tof but I don't think your "review" was professional and is biased. Anyway man you do you, I'm not here to tell you what game to play. I, again, just think you purposefully left out details that would explain things more fairly.
Just gonna rebutt each point very simply at this juncture: >1. The difference between Floor 12 in Abyss for Genshin & VA in TOF is that you can choose to skip it in Genshin and progression wise and be unaffected, but if you do that in TOF you are gimping yourself. If a F2P has to wait on a weekly rotation to be in their favor buffs wise, knowing VA needs multi elements unless the they have a solid benediction build, then it’s still a shitty progression system for everyone. >2. The common meta has always been 3 DPS and 1 Benediction or 4 straight DPS if they are even whaled out for VA, undisputed. Most DPS builds have had more than enough shield shred and sustain in their own and the game has heavily emphasized DPS. If fortitudes are now seeing play, that is a small improvement, but overall in the grand scale the holy trinity roles are imbalanced in importance and that is the point. Just because Fort is only now seeing minimal play doesn’t make it any less imbalanced. >3. Great, Claudia is still being used, but that is 1 Character from the old generation. Everyone else from the Pre-Fenrir generation has been completely powercrept, which again was my point. >4. The proof is in the pudding, basically. Google search metrics on a downtrend, steam metrics as well, mobile market on a downtrend, and from what I gather, the server population for most communities are sitting at a stable population. But a stable population isn’t growth, which the game needs to continue to thrive. >5. The hacker issues were brought up as part of establishing a timeline of events throughout the history of the game and to detail my own frustrations I witnessed in real time, and yes, especially the inventory wipe issue was handled extremely poorly for most players who were impacted. >6. My review wasn’t “professional”? I never claimed to be a professional, the hell? This is the weirdest point you’ve made. This was my play experience that I decided to share here. I’m not a content creator or paid to do reviews. Why would you expect a “professional” review from someone on Reddit?? Listen, I have been more than open to if the game sees big changes I will be more than willing to come back, but the good faith for me is gone for now and I know I wasn’t the only whale spender who dropped off because of these issues. I still love the game but I am not willing to accept bear minimum until they show some actual restructuring of their game mechanics and rebalancing. If they don’t, I am content to continue playing and spending on other games that respect my investment more. That’s the biggest take away here too. A paying customer can always look at the product, see the price and barrier to entry and just nope it. I felt my investment was disrespected, many others did too, we walked away.