Hi all,
If you're not a Sryth player, past or present, you probably won't get much out of this. Apologies in advance.
But I was playing the other day, fiddling with a quest, looking at things I hadn't explored in awhile, and it came to me. My love for this game is virtually dead.
What follows is some of my musing as to why that happened.
1. Competition
I didn't start playing Sryth in order to compete against people with bigger wallets, more time to click buttons or both. I started playing because I loved the idea of being the hero in a story, and because the writing is good. I still get to be the hero, and the writing is still decent - albeit it's getting stale nowadays - but it seems like the fair majority of things being done now are archery competitions, duels or other multiplayer scenarios. And that's cool, but it's not what I wanted.
2. Pay to win
I haven't dropped thousands upon thousands on Sryth and I've finished almost all of the in-game content. I've got a character with something like 330 melee and stamina as well as 92 nevernel reserve. She can take pretty much anything the game throws at her. But I keep seeing money grabs (new packages, new sales, repetitive prods to donate money, capped off by the Titans of Tysa thing from a couple of months back), and it makes me sad. I understand that the developer wants to make his game profitable, but combined with point #1, this is very disheartening.
3. Heart
I feel like the heart has gone out of this game. Once upon a time, delving deep into a dungeon or forest meant something. You'd find all sorts of weird stuff, get lost, die horribly if you found the goblin warband at the wrong time or fought the Vorin Thul before you were ready, or half a hundred other things. I loved the idea of that nearby realm we could teleport to, the demonic symbols we could insert into weapons, familiars, the Adventurer Collective, all the weird stuff in the Proving Grounds...and then suddenly that all faded away. Now, we get sporadic adventures which, to my eye at least, all look basically the same. It culminated in an adventure the other day called Untold Heaps of Bone. Small spoilers here. You eventually unlock a ten-floor dungeon with some nice rewards and half-decent story. Sounds cool, right? Wrong. You have to do a puzzle on floor 1, and then the same one on every. single. floor thereafter. The location of each of the puzzle elements changes, but the mechanics are identical. It felt like busywork because it -was busywork. I got similar feelings when I had to fight massive armies of Oakaruk one at a time, as well as other similar things.
4. Loose ends
There are hundreds of them, literally, and some of them are pretty damn big. I'd really love to see some of them resolved or expanded upon, but I feel like the GM has this bad habit of becoming enchanted by a new idea, going to town on it, getting roadblocked, then skating off in a whole new direction when something else comes to mind. I've been waiting for the Tome of Attainment for about nine years now. I've been waiting to find the other pieces of Doomwall for about twelve. There are a couple of adventures that have been listed in the adventure finder for well over a year now as "not yet available", and I'm so, so tired of those three words.
All of this paints a pretty grim picture. For me, at least, Sryth isn't fun anymore. Instead of delivering on weird bits of lore, fleshing out back stories, giving good puzzles and maintaining a decent pace, development has slowed to a crawl while archery tournament after archery tournament awards special bows to people. We wait for the finishing of long-dangling plot lines, but instead we are told about all the new and wonderful packages we can spend RL money on. And I'm...just not feeling the magic anymore.
This has been a long time coming. I'm not quitting outright, but I think I'm going to be playing it a lot less from here on out.
Wondering what everyone's thoughts are. Do you feel I'm being too harsh? Do you agree with me? Let me know.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1