Some thoughts and suggestions after 300hrs playing. Devs please read if possible

[Saltedpeppercorn]

So, I have been playing LID for quite a while now, had been climbed to 90F and I think it is time to leave a post-game review.
I am writing this because I really like this game. Although this game is almost dead on steam (active players peak is about 370 now and keep decreasing, pretty low for a f2p game), it still makes me feel fun, and fun is not a common thing anymore for a hardcore pc gamer nowadays. Acutally this is exactly the reason why I'd like to share my thoughts with people, if this game is doing well with 10k players the developers will be too busy to read player feedbacks anyway. I don't know how it's doing on PS platform but I am expecting and hoping it to be in a much better shape.

Alright now let's get to the points.

First about the death penalty. LID is a hardcore game and death can occur very quick and unexpected. Well that alone is not a problem, and even the 1 DM continue is not that bad, but the fee required to safely retrive the fighters is too high. I always have an active express pass but I can only barely afford the fee before I get to the point when I can freely raid 90% of diamond players in TDM.
The fee should probably be lowered but the unresonable feature is the 'salvage by killing hatrified fighter'. What's the point of that setting? Your primary fighter is dead, so you armed your secondary probably one star lower fighter with all you have got left, then go to the area where even your best fighter fails to conquer, and let's be nice and say you successfully killed the hatrified fighter.
Now what you get back? A naked body with no soul! Very, very inspiring.
OK, I wish one day the developer suddenly realise this and either make this option more sensible by giving back some if not all belongings or just remove this useless feature.
DM to coin convertion rate is also hilarious. 1 DM to 50K coins sounds more like a reasonable price for me.
To be honest I will not spend a single DM to buy coins even if it's 1 to 50k but some more casual and new players might find if helpful.


Then I think this game needs to provide more guidance.
In a mature and well formulated RPG game, the strength of your enemies is usually outlined by their level, but in this game character level is fake. I think boss fights and probably also floors should provide recommended attribute levels, preferably in attack power.
This will massively save some people from souls game where you can beat the final boss with bare hand, at lv 1 or very low level, and still be resonably effective. And it generally helps lots of people who are not very dedicated to search every last bit of infomation on the internet just to make sure the boss is beatable with their current equipments.
This is especially problematic on 4 forceman fights. You throw hard and nightmare forcemen into very low floor however they are only suppose to be beaten at least after you can beat floor 40? Yet you only tell players some vague words like 'they are hard, lots of people were dead trying this'.
I have seen a youtube video in which a poor man was trying hard whitesteel with irons and deals like 20 dmg per hit. Spoiler alert: He won. With tons of DM continues of course. And best part is his reward is 9k coins. I don't think he can continue playing this game anymore after that, and probably not gonna play any f2p hardcore game in the rest of his life.
Here's the link for the video, please don't laugh too hard on this poor soul, I just want to show why you need to give people more guidance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ETYDQnzC7s


Then to the most unpleasant experience I have got during my gameplay: the mats and metal grinding.
The normal mats grind are actually not that annoying, one thing is you should not mixed lower level mats into a certain mat-specific room. Personal experience: when I was grinding mineral oils in haratsuka, I found so many crude oil and vegi oil that I wish they are better simply disappear so treasure hunter doesn't detect them. I'd rather roam a room with 2 guaranteed mats that I want rather than a room with 6 mats, 2 of which are wanted.
Seriously just delete the low level mats in the rooms. It won't reduce grinding span by much but the experience will be much better for those with treasure hunter.
The metals grinding tho, is really a pain in the A.
Blue and green metals are easy grind, not fun but fine. The amount required are usually less than black and red, and corresponding bosses are in elevator rooms. It not only means less adventure distance, but also for those who are more experienced and knows how to skip, less loading screen.

The nightmare begins after 20F. Crowley(Candle wolf) area has the worst map in the game. Trap bars rise every time you pass, tons of mazes, narrow and long corridors , lots of mine rooms(by the way are mines not supposed to be War Ensemble faction product?), locked doors need to be unlocked manually everytime, and enemies start to use fire weapons which melt down your armors really fast. And for some reason every room is also much larger than in other stages.
And from here bosses will be placed in rooms that does not have elevator.
Those things combined makes the grinding like 3-5 times longer and the boredom rises very quick. And it is even not the worst part. Between 20-30F you start to find MILK bps which requires the notorious MILK black metal that can only be obtained through golden chest or gyakufunsha.
I have joined a discussion group and from time to time there are people complaining about golden chest never give MILK black, and for everytime I told them to find gyakufunsha and ignore the goledn chest gamble, they won't listen and the reasons are either they don't want to spend 40K for every single metal, or they can't pass floor 26 (there is a jump of enemies' strength at 25F if I remember right) so if gyakufunsha is not in moriba they simple don't have access to him.

About the money I want to talk about the TDM event for a bit now, the 1.5 times TDM points is in fact a bad thing for people under diamond. They climbed so fast that they supass their mates and weaker raid-able players and entered next rank. In the next rank they are so low and basically being free meat for others to take. Without a express pass their bank will be raided so frequently and they are unable to fight back. In this situation 40K is a huge number, don't forget they also have to take salvage fee into consideration.
Even I do have a time like that. There was a period when I can't beat anyone in diamond but can beat everyone in platium, the first time I climb to diamon at player rank about 48, there are like 40 people raided me that night, god knows what happened, I had only been raided for less than 10 times before that night.
And because most raiders have a higher TDM points than me, I lose so little points that even after 40 raids I just dropped back to platium from around 3800 or sth (ok I did beat some rank 40ish people who has less than 3k coins in diamond too, for the 10K bonus)
I had to deliberately enter and exit from raids just to keep my point below 3600. And I can not raid anyone with more than 3000 points because if I succeed it will give me tons of points that basically launch me into diamond hell again.

Back to the topic of metals. MILK black is notorious but other black metals are not much better. Even red metals are much easier to grind because the level design and tengoku drops.
MILK blue , green, black, DOD green, and Candle wolf Blue metals are metals that don't have a corresponding boss that drops it. And when they are needed in your R&D process, it becomes a fight between your ego and your body------ Do I grind for the mats, or abandon this game for an easier life?
You can't blame a player being lazy, no ordinary human beings play games to get praise of being hard working genius. They do it to get fun, or to get the pleasure of bettering others.

!!!(IMPORTANT)This game has no pvp or any form of coop, so there's only fun to be found. And this game in current state is doing a lot of works to take away the fun. This is the main reason why there are so little people playing this game.

For example, by my observation, bosses drops metals at a rate of about 80%. Why do you even bother not make it 100%? There is a 0.8% chance that no metal will drop for 3 successive bosses beaten, and 0.16% for a streak of four.
That means for every 8 in 1,000 trials of player beating 3 bosses in a row, they get no metal. And 16 in 10,000 for four. During a metal grinding process this could means around 2 hrs of effort goes in vain.
When this happen, the player's ego can be easily broken and doubt if the game is cheating on him or what.
Man, you should really hire a psychologist or at least a seasonal game manager to make the grinding unchange but more fun. For a simple alternation, you could let the boss drops nothing for 92% of the time and 10 metal rains at 8%, it will still be 8 metals drop for every 10 times on average, plus you lure eveyone to buy express pass or they will not be able to carry all the treasures back to home. No one will feel super sad anymore, only tiredness and excitment. Trust me tiredness is not nearly as a problem as disappointment, and excitment is the key to success in lots of games. (Games, gambling, life, lots of things)
Same goes to golden chests(all forms).

You really shouldn't try to extend the playing time of this game by cheesing players' experience like that. I am not a professional, but I'd like to give you some ideas that is not even innovative and had been applied by other games:
1.Add transmogrification function.
I have been wearing travis' set for the last 200 hrs simply because it has the highest def value, decent piercing resistance, less mats to R&D and doesn't take lots of War Ensemble metals like NightScout set does.
I really want to wear others sets just to look cool but the game forbids me to do so.
I mean, you can make the sets looks fancier instead of just change the color at higher ranks, and with transmogrification available, people will still go for them after they beat the game.
Just add a setting to disable transmogrification on haters, hunters, and defenders if you have concern on 'player not able to judge enemies resistance from their looks".

2. Add more seasonal items, cosmetics, and probably pets in the future
If you are being kind to your players, they will stay tuned and invite their friends to play this game. I can't say everyone can accept the price of 1$ per DM, but those DM in bundles are much more affordable by f2p standard.
Periodicaly releaseing event maps, bps, decals that are half-free , half-charged will for sure be an attraction to veteran players.

3.Holds compitions between players, on PVE content
This is pretty simple, reform the tengoku into new content and call it tournament tower. And the ones who climb the highest during the tournament period get handsomely rewarded. DM, primo stew tickets, tournament winner series bps, etc.

4.Add coop, chating, probably pvp
These are probably too hard to achieve in LID, but it is still the things that should be concidered if you are going to make a LID 2 in the future.
I understand all console ported games have issue on player communicating with each others, but coop should be no problem even without in-game typing.
On pc we have discord and other softwares that can easily bypass this issue, if there's content that require coop that is.
See destiny and monster hunter world for examples as well.

You see, you have soooo many better ways to keep the players playing and earn money at the same time. If they like the game they will at least keep the express pass rolling. Don't just trying extract maximum labour value from players like you are doing now.

p.s. the whole article is too long to be posted at once, I'll post the rest in comment.

[Saltedpeppercorn]

I understand you want this game to be unique, but you still should be nice to the players.
The things that I think can be done to make this game much more fun to play:
1. Mat exchange
Higher level mats naturally worth more than lower level's, so they should be exchangeable to lower level mats 1:1 (1:more is probably too kind) and same level mats should be exchangeable between each other 2:1
Same with metals. And please include mats downgrading for good. It will solve the MILK problem forever.
It will probably makes people stocking much less garbages in their storage, but as I said, you should be nice to players. If no one is playing anymore, you are not gonna get a penny from storage expansion fee that players paid.
It is really frustrating to go down so many floors to farm some low lv mats.
When I climbed to 65F, I took like 15 hrs back to lower area again to farm masses of iron bolt,
mineral oil, some black metals and even farmed gyakufunsha on Wed for green MILK.
This is just stupid to do. Tengoku is really much better and more interesting than the pre-40s. The game finally adds some excitment, and even some simple loot system. Great. But then you kick me back to the boredom hell again? Not so great.
I do get tons of red metals from all factions in tengoku, but when I need green and black verson of them? No I won't even think about it.


2.The shroom stew
This is a decent hardcore pc game, not a cheap duplicate of Japanese mobile game like FGO.
Gacha should not be the main source of tears. The decal pool is so large now that it is so hard to get a specific 4-star decal without tons of investment.
I had paid 14.4M on shroom stews, and got 19 4-stars, the chance is 6.6% let's say it's 7%.
7% chance with 82 4-stars in the pool, so if you are looking for 1 specific decal, the chance of getting at least once after 50M stews is 57.43%, 81.88% after 100M.

I have played 300 hrs and had been actively raiding every worthy alive diamond players most of the days (the player list is effectively finite on pc because only that many players are playing and you can raid a player only once a day, twice if your teams started battle that day. I even have created a list of all players above rank 82 with 40k+ value, recording their defence compositions) , and I only got 14.4M into the stews after all those gameplays.

It will take months for me or any players to get their decals if not lucky. This process will at least be acceptable if other parts of the game is interesting enough. But now it is like 'I can only improve that much by enhancing equipments, to get higher I need that decal', and there's nothing to do other than getting as high as possible.

I think it is a good idea to add a recycle function for decals. Not for recycle points but for decals. eg. 3* 1 star decals + 50k SPL for a ramdom 1 or 2 stars decal, 3* 2 stars+100k SPL for 2 or 3 stars, 2* 3 stars + 250k SPL for 3 or 4 stars, and 2* 4 stars + 500k SPL for a random 4 stars.

That way it also adds a tunnel to get rid of all those excessive SPL in the game.

3. Improve the weapon mastery system
The current weapon mastery system is plain and dry. What is really doing is forcing you to increase the mastery to lv 20 or you get a penalty on attack damage.

I mainly use assault rifle so I will take it as an example.
Assault rifle does not consume stamina while shooting, thus I don't understand why there's even reduce stamina consumption perks in the mastery ranks. The melee attack might do consume some stamina but no one use it anyway.
Some better replacement would be reduce bullet spray, reduce durability lose or reduce the recoil.
It might be unfair to the melee weapons if you do change it like that, but you can also simply remove stamina consumption reduction on all weapon mastery, replace them with something more unique and interesting, and reduce the base stamina consumption of all weapons by 30%.

4. Tengoku and potentially su-oi problem
Now that's talk about the things I found in tengoku.
One of the most serious problem is that almost 90% of the red name haters above floor 80 are from YTYM family. I think I had even encountered the same YTYMer 2 or 3 times on the same floor.
Here's the quote from Let it die Wiki of developer haters:

Developer Haters are a special type of enemies, signified by the phrase YTYMk-(#) in front of their names. Developer Haters will appear if the game can't find any player Haters to spawn. They're often much stronger than player Haters and pose a significant danger to low-level Fighters. However, if you can defeat them, Dev Haters reward more SPLithium and Kill Coins than player Haters and have a chance to drop much stronger equipment than you may normally have access to.

From my experience, those YTYMers are indeed much stronger than those occasionally spawned player haters, but 200 coins and 3 bloodium is not anywhere close to be better reward. They don't really pose threat to me personally, but they pose huge threat to my ammo conservation and weapon durability.
Most YTYMers holds either fire weapon that will destory your armor, meanwhile some of them are super, super tanky.
Josh in specific gave me the most headache. If I understand correctly, YTYMers only kick in when the system can't find player haters, so as a token of apology, shouldn't they be weaker or at same power level with player haters? Why they are not only stronger but also have settings that against the player logics?
I mean, no real player will take super helmet into tengoku, because it doesn't have effect on controlled character! Some people may use tank build but definitely no super helmet. You can't even send hunters to tengoku so in a normal gameplay there should be no super helmet anywhere in tengoku.
But look at how it goes now, 90% red haters are YTYM power rangers and 50% of them are using super helmet super tanky builds to devour my ammos and good mood.
It seems to me like the system is bullying the rest of alive players by spaming those stronger haters and taking advantage of the lack of pc player base. I am pretty sure YTYM haters are harder for melee players as well if there is any.



5. Some bugs I found along the way
AI controlled characters will often (like 30% of the time) shot explosive projectiles, namely rocket luncher and assault rifle's grenade luncher, into the sky.

In tengoku, If you aggo a hater from distance, he will very often (60% of the times) stucks on the ground and runs in place for about 5 secs. The spacewalk won't be cancelled even if you attack the hater at that time, but they know to use guard.


------------------------------
That's all I come up with for now. I hope the developers read this and either agree or disagree with me, at least I let them know my needs.




TL;DR:
Game should treat players nicer.
Mats exchange and downgrading should be introduced.
Lots of ways to make this game more fun to play.
Adept to this game's current status and make changes accordingly.

[Vinnolo]

well said, i agree

[Grim Sorrow]

I agree with lot of thing he said. Game is harsh ,even for people with express pass. 175 000 killcoin is so painfull Lot of stew and alway same decal.....

[cassiels]

引用自 Gera 56：

Game is 100% beutiful
you are absolutely wrong

+1

[Salestax1]

He cried about the difficulty and called them cheaters because they were tough. (and went at everyone in that thread with similar language to what he just said)

[Salestax1]

I agree on the stuff to reduce grinding. It's not real difficulty to the game, and reducing it (the exchanging faction metals for lower tiers, exchanging decals for others of similar tier, boss drop for faction metals needing to be changed) I feel would be good. Making it take 3 hours instead of 6 to get an outfit upgraded to tier 3 doesnt make the game easier, it just makes it shorter and less bad frustrating.

Unfortunately, while I feel they would be great quality of life improvements, this game is built as a free game with currency being able to be bought with money. While I think it would be better for the game if those things were worked on, I feel it would end up netting the company less money by doing so.(the more time you spend on a game the more likely you are to put money into it)

[Ruin N Gaun]

Another thing that LID can do is giving a decent login reward. Currently, we only got a decend login rewards when there is event. Maybe use a login streak so that player will at least open the game once a day.

I'm currently in floor 20-30 and it's just ridiculous. Enemies take too much to kill, meaning weapon that you bought from chokufunsha will only last about 2-3 floor max. I was able to beat level easily because I made death burner iron from event login rewards, but I can't that for newcomers since the event probably ended when they start the game. So it's better that they reduce the enemies health, making the game a bit more bearable.

The end game that the game told that is floor 40th is not even end game anymore since there are around 200+ floors. Maybe at least make the journey to 40th not that frustating since the hard part is the floor above 40 game.

[Frosty Grin]

引用自 Saltedpeppercorn：

For example, by my observation, bosses drops metals at a rate of about 80%. Why do you even bother not make it 100%?

This is where I disagree. If you win all the time, it won't feel like winning. 80% is good enough, and more importantly it's much better than grinding for a small chance to win a specific blueprint, as in other games.

This is why it's rather puzzling why that's what they decided to do with the Forcemen. Once you win two or three White Steel blueprints, it's pretty senseless to fight him on Hard - your chances of winning a blueprint you still need are pretty small. It's about the only thing in LID that feels like grinding to me.

[Анатолий Шарий]

Welcome to 41f
https://imgur.com/k7acts1
This is your typical enemy
enjoy
I'am "crying about cheaters"

[Frosty Grin]

You just need appropriate weapons and fighters for the 41F. Bronson Magnum plus a six star fighter plus a couple of damage decals make things easy enough. Then you level up to Bronson Magnum E - and it becomes a breeze up to 60F at least.

On top of that, 41F is not even the main game anymore. You can - and some people should - just... let it die. :) There are only two ways to make the endgame out of the same locations - make it crazy difficult (41-50F, early on) or make it an endurance run (51F+). It's not for everyone - and it shouldn't be. Honestly, it takes about 200 hours to get to 40F - and that's more than you can expect from a game.

[Saltedpeppercorn]

引用自 Salestax1：

I agree on the stuff to reduce grinding. It's not real difficulty to the game, and reducing it (the exchanging faction metals for lower tiers, exchanging decals for others of similar tier, boss drop for faction metals needing to be changed) I feel would be good. Making it take 3 hours instead of 6 to get an outfit upgraded to tier 3 doesnt make the game easier, it just makes it shorter and less bad frustrating.

Unfortunately, while I feel they would be great quality of life improvements, this game is built as a free game with currency being able to be bought with money. While I think it would be better for the game if those things were worked on, I feel it would end up netting the company less money by doing so.(the more time you spend on a game the more likely you are to put money into it)

I would not suggest them to do that if the game is in green.
However this game is very unpopular on pc port, they can't keep new players playing and veteran players are being pushed away. If they still only focus on the the theoretical profits, then they are going to let this game dies.

[Ruin N Gaun]

引用自 Frosty Grin：

You just need appropriate weapons and fighters for the 41F. Bronson Magnum plus a six star fighter plus a couple of damage decals make things easy enough. Then you level up to Bronson Magnum E - and it becomes a breeze up to 60F at least.

On top of that, 41F is not even the main game anymore. You can - and some people should - just... let it die. :) There are only two ways to make the endgame out of the same locations - make it crazy difficult (41-50F, early on) or make it an endurance run (51F+). It's not for everyone - and it shouldn't be. Honestly, it takes about 200 hours to get to 40F - and that's more than you can expect from a game.

So basically the endgame is not the main game experience but just for some people who enjoyed it. But why did the dev create like 160+ floors (total I think is 200 floors) if the main game is just floor 1-40, I don't get the logic of the dev :P

[Saltedpeppercorn]

引用自 Frosty Grin：

引用自 Saltedpeppercorn：

For example, by my observation, bosses drops metals at a rate of about 80%. Why do you even bother not make it 100%?

This is where I disagree. If you win all the time, it won't feel like winning. 80% is good enough, and more importantly it's much better than grinding for a small chance to win a specific blueprint, as in other games.

This is why it's rather puzzling why that's what they decided to do with the Forcemen. Once you win two or three White Steel blueprints, it's pretty senseless to fight him on Hard - your chances of winning a blueprint you still need are pretty small. It's about the only thing in LID that feels like grinding to me.

Forcemen drops are reasonable to me. The duplicate bps can be sold for 50k and when you have all bps, it is simply a 44ce metal grind. Forcemen are designed to be beaten on NM difficultiy at the beginning, it is not an issue but a setting.

The problem with 80% drops is, metals are actually not rewarding drops. When you are grinding metals, you don't feel winning when you get one metal, but you will feel beaten when you don't.

In other games, the drops can be legendary weapons, gems, or some kind of token which can be use to exchange good things.
Metals are plainly common materials, they are not legendary at all. Not even works like tokens because you also need tons of others things to upgrade your equipments.

[Saltedpeppercorn]

引用自 Ruin N Gaun：

引用自 Frosty Grin：

You just need appropriate weapons and fighters for the 41F. Bronson Magnum plus a six star fighter plus a couple of damage decals make things easy enough. Then you level up to Bronson Magnum E - and it becomes a breeze up to 60F at least.

On top of that, 41F is not even the main game anymore. You can - and some people should - just... let it die. :) There are only two ways to make the endgame out of the same locations - make it crazy difficult (41-50F, early on) or make it an endurance run (51F+). It's not for everyone - and it shouldn't be. Honestly, it takes about 200 hours to get to 40F - and that's more than you can expect from a game.

So basically the endgame is not the main game experience but just for some people who enjoyed it. But why did the dev create like 160+ floors (total I think is 200 floors) if the main game is just floor 1-40, I don't get the logic of the dev :P

Floor 41-50 is the first expansion, this game is a online mmo and they need to release new contents once in a while.
Floor 51-251 is the second expansion I believe, it works like the endless mode on other rogue-like games. You don't need to beat that area if you are not comfortable with grindings.

[Saltedpeppercorn]

I have read all the replies and I want to make some declarations:

I am not crying for this game being difficult. It is only too grindy and unfair.

I climbed to 90F with build of 2 raging bulls, osok, barbarian and treasure hunter, on a lv 110, 6-stars COLLECTOR, no DM spent on continues too (used a free one).
Kamas RE+ 6 or 7, full travis' set which is not uncapped yet.
And the reason why I stopped ther is mainly because my bag is full and my guns were running out of ammos. With collector I need a lot of ammos to take down bosses and those YTYM meat walls.
Oh and I forgot to mention that there's a type of YTYMer that have 30% invincible rate. With bad luck, they can negate 2 out of 3 of my grenades.
Also from this point, kamas haters will probably kill me with one single bullet because my def value is so low.
I am pretty confident with my skills, I only get hit once or twice every few floors by those kamas haters' random shots and YTYM shotgun bullets (No real player uses shotgun, at least I have seen none).
Without all those super helmet super tanks, I can run double osok and ravaging through tengoku until I got killed by bosses.
I have talked to people on PS platform, they don't see YTYM often enough to even remember them. Their concerns are mainly on 'enhanced haters' above 150F.

And I am not saying this game is bad.
There are only a few single player games that I have spent more than 100 hrs on and still playing. If this is game is a garbage I will not spend more than 2 hrs on it. Neither will I write such a long review to state my thoughts.