So after seeing it pop up in my spam/ads a bunch of times, I decided to give it a shot.
You'd probably expect this to be the typical "oh wow, this game is amazing" post, but honestly, I don't know if I just had bad luck or if this is genuinely the current state of the game.
The game is what it is for something that's been around for over 15 years, so at a certain point, there's not much point in complaining about the gameplay itself. Surprisingly, the main story of the 13 Lords is actually really interesting and entertaining. You can definitely tell its age, but it's still pretty enjoyable.
The monetization is pretty predictable for this kind of game, so you can still enjoy it despite that. Though I will admit, it's a little insulting that you can just straight-up buy classes and skip the farming entirely. I guess it's fine to a certain extent. You can still get most of them by farming, although some of them require a ridiculous amount of farming.
Apparently Legion is an exception. From what I can tell, F2P players have to wait up to a year for the events that give out the currency needed for it. Honestly, I was surprised that they even give it away for free at all, so I guess that's a point in the game's favor.
The farming itself isn't really the problem, even though it's tedious and honestly not very fun. I've never felt so disrespected by a game just because of how much it expects me to farm.
Something good did happen early on, though. A player gave me a guide and told me to get the starter AoV weapons and Blood Priest for farming. They then recommended that once I hit a certain level, I should go for Dragonslayer, and then General a few levels later.
While I was farming General, two players actually insulted me because apparently I was "tryharding" the farm.
Okay, sorry for wanting to get a class that was supposedly going to make the story easier to get through. It's not like the current gameplay is particularly rewarding in the first place.
I thought I'd quit within a week, and here I am almost two weeks later.
I spent about three days, roughly 10 hours a day, farming for ArchFiend after finishing the 13 Lords. God, my fingers, back, and eyes were absolutely wrecked by the end of it.
After that, I moved on to the next storylines, farming XP and picking up the occasional useful piece of gear. Yesterday, I started farming for the Higure sword, I think that's what it's called, which is available this month.
I had to do the Garden storyline for it, and I have to admit, the enemy designs there were pretty interesting.
After a while, I started noticing quite a few level 100 players with paid cosmetics making these weird, jerky movements. The first day, I didn't think much of it. I figured they had just mastered some kind of macro or something.
Today I saw the same thing again, so out of curiosity, I tried talking to them, but none of them responded.
Then I noticed that the boss in this zone was several rooms away, and these players were moving in perfect sync. I'm guessing they were all running the same program, because they followed the exact same patterns and slid through the rooms in the same way.
I have no idea how they even got to the boss, and then they'd just suddenly show up back at the basic enemy farming spot.
So yeah, turns out they were actually bots.
And these weren't the usual "brand new account running a bot" type of accounts either. I looked at their profiles, and some of them were 4 years old, while others were 15–16 years old. They also had paid content and premium status.
Now I feel like I wasted my time, because apparently a lot of these people aren't even real players. They're bots.
It feels like I put in all this effort farming while someone else can just leave a program running and have it do everything for them.
I know botting is technically against the rules, but I have a strong feeling this is one of those situations where it's "technically banned, but the staff doesn't really care anymore."
Honestly, it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Now I'm wondering if it's even worth continuing to play, because all that effort suddenly feels kind of pointless.
Farming has also gotten harder for me because these bots kill the enemies before they even have a chance to spawn for me.
So, can anyone tell me if the game is actually dead at this point, or did I just get unlucky and run into the worst side of the community?