You guys all remember that in the last 5+ years of mo1 we were lucky to get a major patch a year. Looking at the patch notes we had
2019 - Haven which was ok but was mostly pointless because there were no new players coming
2018 - elementalism which was kind of cool but didn't actually change much in big fights
2017 - Modular houses
2016 - necromancy which remained broken until the end
2015 - magic revamp and steam launch
Its actually crazy how little in terms of actual new content was added to the game since steam launch. Several dungeons were redone during this time but in terms of actual end game content added worth doing more than once we only saw the underground demon area, the new relic and meteor system, and the aur pit; which was mechanically somewhat interesting but incredibly broken in many ways.
I don't think I could possibly list all of the incredibly unbalanced and broken things that were in the game for far too long, some major things that come to mind:
- Death knights - a low skilled mage with a medium value death knight could easily fight 3 people, many more if they make it into the water
- TC guards - for those of you who weren't around to see the final wars, it was literally just people building as many patrol posts as possible and filling them with guards as the guards would constantly bug out and destroy manganons and enough guards would just insta kill people that you guard called making sieging a competent group almost impossible. This was never fixed.
- Just TC in general - Many groups were able to block off content and have unsiegeable towers for years. I think in some of the last patches we saw they finally made it so you couldn't build around the highest value content in the game. Still didn't fix unsiegeable towers though most of which fell as guilds quit the game.
- Every balance patch would just change the meta broken weapon. From dual stirke, triple strike, weakspot weapons, foot lances, mc sledges, mc double kall axes. And it would usually be 6 months between balance patches.
- Many balance patches also didn't fix things retroactively, creating pre patch armor, weapons, horses, houses, TC, potions and other things. Many of these, especially horses people had banks full of and we would see used for many years after they supposedly "fixed"
- All wealth generation in the game was incredibly unbalanced. In terms of raw gold people would kill on timer the Kimuru, the elemental priestess, and the aur boss on timer by groups that had characters logged of at them each time getting 500g+. All of which could also be solo'ed in various ways. The only one regularly contested was the aur boss. Content like the risar dungeon or minotaurs was basically useless as you would get at most like 10g a kill.
Almost all of the actual content of the game was player driven. Which is fine for some, but wars can only bring so many people to play especially when the systems around it are fundamentally broken. I don't expect the game to maintain a larger community than MO1 unless they can operate totally differently than how weve seen them maintain MO1. So far they have started fairly strong with MO2 but to me it looks like they are losing momentum and making large miscalculations about the timeframes they are promising.
