Quote Originally Posted by Enla View Post
He's a troll. He's just poking proverbial bee's nests to see which one incites enough anger to suit his trolling purposes. If he gets a topic successfully off the ground he'll go back to his corner, satiated for the next week before doing it all over again.
Could you be more specific as to what part of his post was trolling? Someone saying critical things about content you enjoy doesn't make them a troll; if you disagree, articulate it. If it just makes you upset to hear negative things, I'd say that's more on you than him.

I happen to agree with his points.

1. The pacing is deceptive. The faster pace feels good at first, but that also means you burn through the same handful of skirmishes that pop up in your current zone very, very quickly in a short period of time. The repetition really starts to set in fast.
2. The map is small and very starkly gated, which makes it feel even smaller. And because the pacing is faster, there's also no reason to dip into lower-level zones generally since you don't have much time to kill, meaning you're running the same short loop for hours.
3. The visuals ARE ugly. It's visually samey and monotonous to look at. The physical geography and landscape is uninteresting, there's not much to see or wonder at. The mobs populating the land are all recycled from other areas of the game. Look, The Last of Us (both of them) was set in an apocalyptic wasteland and still managed visually arresting and interesting environments. Check out fields from WWII. It is very much possible to make something dramatic, war-torn, and also fascinating to explore.
4. There are some very strange choices made that feel needlessly cumbersome and don't seem to add much to the experience: needing to speak to an NPC to rank up, the RNG on top of RNG that is duels, the loss of mettle when you die regardless of whether or not you get raised, the I-V monster ranking system??, the difficulty of CEs...

The cost he points out for gear is ground we've tread before in the past. This is not the first time they've pulled these pricing shenanigans that require an unreasonable amount of time input for middling results (Unreal trials and their milquetoast rewards come to mind). The relic is billed as content you can do for fun/for people who don't want to do hardcore raiding to get top-level gear...but if you're actually going to go to the trouble of grinding Bozja to 10+ and THEN run Castrum 165 times, you'd probably save yourself a lot of time just learning to raid instead. Why spend dev time on rewards that players ultimately look at and decide is cool, but not worth the time?

All in all, I'd say this was C+ content. I understand their hesitance to repeat the same mistakes of Eureka, since its reputation never really improved in spite of the fixes they made, but I don't think this was it.