It's a difference of business models. The Korean MMO market is incredibly competitive and lucrative. It's all about extracting as much money from the players as quickly as possible before moving on to the next big title. As a result, the developers tend to throw things together in a very slapdash haphazard fashion that looks quite nice and glitzy on the surface, but has very little depth (not to mention lots of bugs that never get fixed).
Most Korean MMOs rarely receive content updates, especially if they are F2P. When they do get them they tend to be in the form of either cash shop additions, typically with those RNG boxes where you have a very low chance of getting what you want, or they add the minimum amount of new areas, enemies and the like just to keep the players going for a little longer. These updates generally bring with them a host of new bugs and glitches that don't ever get fixed, while older bugs are ignored.
Korean MMOs are developed quickly, QA'd without much care and shoved out to market as fast as possible in order to compete with the hundreds of other MMOs they're facing up against. These games are not intended to last longer than a year or two at the most, whereupon they are placed in "maintenance mode" and left with a skeleton crew to keep the lights on and keep the cash shop stocked, while the bulk of the development team moves on to the company's next title.
Korean MMOs rarely have public test servers. They rarely interact with their playerbase directly. They generally prioritize fast profit above all else, because that is the market they exist in. If a Korean MMO developer attempted to create an MMO by Western MMO rules--that is, to create a long-term service with a loyal playerbase that plays for years, even up to a decade or more--they would go out of business instantly. In Korea, it's all about mass-production, bashing out the shiniest, sparkliest costume-jewelry bauble in as little time as possible, get it on the chopping block and start pulling in revenue before their competitors can.Â
The Korean playerbase has very, very different habits than the Western MMO player. They don't care about lore, about roleplaying, about long-term enjoyment of the game. Part of this is due to their internet-cafe gaming culture versus the West's home-entertainment gaming culture, but most of it is the fault of the industry itself. In their haste to make as much money as fast as possible they've created an incredibly volatile market full of low-budget shovelware. This couldn't possibly be more different than the Western MMO market, where only big-budget titles using well-known intellectual properties are ever very successful.
The idea that Korean MMOs are "grinders" is borne out by historical evidence. It's not just Lineage. It's Ragnarok Online. It's TERA. It's Aion. It's Bless Online. Pick any random Korean MMO and count how many layers of random dice rolling is involved in endgame gearing. We'll use TERA as an example because it's the most recent one I've played.
In TERA, for endgame gear, you have these levels of RNG:
- The boss has to drop the correct item. Many bosses are not guaranteed to drop any useful loot at all. The chance to drop the actually useful items is very, very low.
- Once you obtain the item, you use an expensive consumable to upgrade it to masterwork. This has a 2% chance of success; this is compounded by the masterwork quality bonus, which can either be +1%, +2% or +3%. The chance of successfully masterworking and getting a +3% quality bonus is incredibly small.
- Once you've masterworked your item, you have to use a combination of expensive consumables to randomly re-roll the bonuses on said item. Most of the bonuses are useless. The probability of getting all the useful bonuses on one item in one attempt is <1%.
- Once you've got useful bonuses, then you have to enchant the item. Each level of enchantment has a different chance of succeeding. Once you reach +8, +9 or higher, the success rate drops so incredibly low that it's completely possible to fail hundreds of times before successfully raising the item's level.
Contrast to FFXIV's endgame gearing:
- The boss has to drop the item. Coil bosses drop two items every time, guaranteed. Primals drop one item, guaranteed, every time.
+ There are alternatives to boss drops that have absolutely no chance of failure (EX primal weapons, raid token gear, relic weapons). These alternatives are equivalent or better than the raid drops from Coil/primals.
There's really no contest here. In XIV, no matter how unlucky you might be in Coil, you can still gear. You can still get i100, eventually i110 if you buy and upgrade weathered gear. Will you be exactly as optimal as if you were lucky with drops? No, but you can be close enough. In TERA, on the other hand, there have been players who have been completely stalled progression-wise because the Random Number God will not smile upon them (I was one of them). Since each attempt to upgrade costs a considerable amount of in-game currency, an unlucky player will be forced to spend an absurd amount of time grinding--and I did. I spent hours and hours and hours, countless hours, grinding the same open-world mobs for money, only to fail again and again and again.
You say that Korean MMOs are not grinders, but by and large they are. It's possible that Blade & Soul isn't, as I haven't been able to play it yet. If that's true, then B&S is a freakish anomaly.
FFXIV may be made by Square-Enix, a Japanese company, but it is a Western MMO. Even FFXI was a Western MMO, as it was essentially an EverQuest clone with Final Fantasy flavor and lore on top. Western MMOs can be grinders, too--they aren't immune. However, since Blizzard instigated a sea change in the MMO industry with World of Warcraft, Western MMOs have focused on accessibility ever since, with a strong development focus on reducing, limiting or hiding the grind, or simply making the grind more fun. The Korean MMO industry was not affected by this; WoW was not quite so transformative in South Korea.
Most Korean MMOs rarely receive content updates, especially if they are F2P. When they do get them they tend to be in the form of either cash shop additions, typically with those RNG boxes where you have a very low chance of getting what you want, or they add the minimum amount of new areas, enemies and the like just to keep the players going for a little longer. These updates generally bring with them a host of new bugs and glitches that don't ever get fixed, while older bugs are ignored.
Korean MMOs are developed quickly, QA'd without much care and shoved out to market as fast as possible in order to compete with the hundreds of other MMOs they're facing up against. These games are not intended to last longer than a year or two at the most, whereupon they are placed in "maintenance mode" and left with a skeleton crew to keep the lights on and keep the cash shop stocked, while the bulk of the development team moves on to the company's next title.
Korean MMOs rarely have public test servers. They rarely interact with their playerbase directly. They generally prioritize fast profit above all else, because that is the market they exist in. If a Korean MMO developer attempted to create an MMO by Western MMO rules--that is, to create a long-term service with a loyal playerbase that plays for years, even up to a decade or more--they would go out of business instantly. In Korea, it's all about mass-production, bashing out the shiniest, sparkliest costume-jewelry bauble in as little time as possible, get it on the chopping block and start pulling in revenue before their competitors can.Â
The Korean playerbase has very, very different habits than the Western MMO player. They don't care about lore, about roleplaying, about long-term enjoyment of the game. Part of this is due to their internet-cafe gaming culture versus the West's home-entertainment gaming culture, but most of it is the fault of the industry itself. In their haste to make as much money as fast as possible they've created an incredibly volatile market full of low-budget shovelware. This couldn't possibly be more different than the Western MMO market, where only big-budget titles using well-known intellectual properties are ever very successful.
The idea that Korean MMOs are "grinders" is borne out by historical evidence. It's not just Lineage. It's Ragnarok Online. It's TERA. It's Aion. It's Bless Online. Pick any random Korean MMO and count how many layers of random dice rolling is involved in endgame gearing. We'll use TERA as an example because it's the most recent one I've played.
In TERA, for endgame gear, you have these levels of RNG:
- The boss has to drop the correct item. Many bosses are not guaranteed to drop any useful loot at all. The chance to drop the actually useful items is very, very low.
- Once you obtain the item, you use an expensive consumable to upgrade it to masterwork. This has a 2% chance of success; this is compounded by the masterwork quality bonus, which can either be +1%, +2% or +3%. The chance of successfully masterworking and getting a +3% quality bonus is incredibly small.
- Once you've masterworked your item, you have to use a combination of expensive consumables to randomly re-roll the bonuses on said item. Most of the bonuses are useless. The probability of getting all the useful bonuses on one item in one attempt is <1%.
- Once you've got useful bonuses, then you have to enchant the item. Each level of enchantment has a different chance of succeeding. Once you reach +8, +9 or higher, the success rate drops so incredibly low that it's completely possible to fail hundreds of times before successfully raising the item's level.
Contrast to FFXIV's endgame gearing:
- The boss has to drop the item. Coil bosses drop two items every time, guaranteed. Primals drop one item, guaranteed, every time.
+ There are alternatives to boss drops that have absolutely no chance of failure (EX primal weapons, raid token gear, relic weapons). These alternatives are equivalent or better than the raid drops from Coil/primals.
There's really no contest here. In XIV, no matter how unlucky you might be in Coil, you can still gear. You can still get i100, eventually i110 if you buy and upgrade weathered gear. Will you be exactly as optimal as if you were lucky with drops? No, but you can be close enough. In TERA, on the other hand, there have been players who have been completely stalled progression-wise because the Random Number God will not smile upon them (I was one of them). Since each attempt to upgrade costs a considerable amount of in-game currency, an unlucky player will be forced to spend an absurd amount of time grinding--and I did. I spent hours and hours and hours, countless hours, grinding the same open-world mobs for money, only to fail again and again and again.
You say that Korean MMOs are not grinders, but by and large they are. It's possible that Blade & Soul isn't, as I haven't been able to play it yet. If that's true, then B&S is a freakish anomaly.
FFXIV may be made by Square-Enix, a Japanese company, but it is a Western MMO. Even FFXI was a Western MMO, as it was essentially an EverQuest clone with Final Fantasy flavor and lore on top. Western MMOs can be grinders, too--they aren't immune. However, since Blizzard instigated a sea change in the MMO industry with World of Warcraft, Western MMOs have focused on accessibility ever since, with a strong development focus on reducing, limiting or hiding the grind, or simply making the grind more fun. The Korean MMO industry was not affected by this; WoW was not quite so transformative in South Korea.
attractive enmity device
