Side Systems

[eager plank]

Side Systems

[opal delta]

1. PvP - PvP is mixed with advanced combat, forcing advanced combat players to deal with PvP changes, as well as PvP constantly needing entire audits on other game systems that typically are half-baked as well in order to balance it properly. Also, the reagent dropping system is poorly designed
2. Gardening - 3 plants are useful to be planted. Some plants are better planted and left to die than to actually tend to needs. The development team has accepted 69 plot stacking as a feature because of how little thought went into the gardening feature and how energy intensive it is when 99% of plants give absolutely no rewards, as well as there being absolutely no payoff for the entire system except Plant All. Additionally, seeds flood drop tables because they put a bunch of useless, no auction seeds into each generic all-mob pool. Also most seeds are no auction despite having no valid rewards.

3. Pet Training - They literally added a skip button to the minigames solely because they serve as a time sink. It's not friendly to new players, who are forced to watch as their pet gains +2 xp per snack for every snack they have available at the start of the game. It's not explained in the slightest to the player. There's like 3 separate 'exclusive' tags that all function slightly differently than the real exclusive tag. They made the hatchmaking and lending system to farm hatch peppers then made a pet talent that gives you infinite hatch peppers for free.
4. Crafting - Crafting is a slog, all recipes are outdated. There are multiple recipes in arc 1 and 2 that are technically impossible because the reagents you need from them are only found in later worlds. The reagent audit is a failure because it inroduces world specific reagents then makes them extremely rare, such as fulgurite in Mirage. Other worlds get reagents that make so sense, such as the snowy flax flowers in Wizard City or Pearls in Polaris.
5. Cantrips - Cantrips are entirely worthless aside from sigil support cantrips which are only useful for advanced combat. Non-sigil-support cantrips cant even be used for fun because of the intense cooldown on some cantrips along with the fact that these cosmetic cantrips are competing with gardening, pet training and even fishing as more useful sources to put cantrips into. Also, the latest exploit with cantrips was literally possible because of the laziness behind copy pasting the magic touch cantrip and just retexturing it to make a cannonball cantrip. Also, the sigil support cantrips being relegated to guilds with multiple upgrades or the crown shop only limits their usage. Also the crafting recipes for cantrips suck and are user-unfriendly. Also the fact that most cantrips aren't trainable and there aren't many cantrips at each level results in some levels literally being "Spam this cantrip 50 times"

6. Jewels - Jewels are a whole are useless until level 170 because the socket wrenches are designed to be significantly rarer than the gear itself, requiring intense farming to just unlock sockets on lower level gear. Lower level jewels also are rare, with the desirable jewels requiring up to hundreds of runs of bosses or dungeons to obtain due to a complete lack of pity crafting. Additionally, jewels before 170 have various useless categories, such as mana, flat damage, flat resist, stun resist and more.
7. Spellements - Spellements are a massive time sink and the way they were implemented absolutely screws casual players over, requiring level scaling to farm only benefits players who have guilds or alts and can get carried through farming spellements, as nobody is actually farming spellements 'on-level' with the level scaling elixir. Additionally, spellements for lore spells are literally just designed to take as long as possible to max out, making it so insanely unfeasible for anyone remotely casual to max any of them out. With all the bugs revolving around spellements as well, they become an inconvenience to the player more than a benefit. Most players ignore them entirely due to the lack of benefit they provide, and nearly every single actual strategy for advanced combat will require the least amount of spellements as possible due to the poor time investment that they are.

Update: Scion spellements, a very major part of raiding, after a full 139 days were completely disabled. This sort of uncaring nature towards the playerbase towards issues that actually impact them truly shows the poor foresight that doing stuff like disabling entire spells does

8. Fishing - ahahahahaha anyways complete lack of updates, extremely energy hungry. The weaving quests that make you fish in marleybone make you fish up the only 2 marleybone fish in barkingham palace because there is not a single other fish unique to that world. Additionally, it is apparently too difficult to get updated chests in housing as every new house has copy pasted fishing loot from another older house, with no update in sight to get updated loot.
9. Pet Derby - They disabled ranked pet derby because the mode was so poorly implemented that it was never worth doing. Enough said already but lemme add onto it! Pet Derby was created as a minigame that you literally need to train perfect pet derby pets. Do you know how difficult it is already to train a perfect pet and in order to get an ideal pet derby pet you not only need a full set of selfish talents but also get the pet derby talents you want? This is ridiculous. Its such an immense requirement for a mode that most players when forced to play just spam every single button that they can on their keyboard that makes the game react in some way until someone wins and 3 people quit the game.
10. Deckathalon - a game mode added to force players to use treasure cards ended up being a game mode that forces players to hoard even more treasure cards. Also, the deckathalon has not been updated in ages, with many issues still existing such as certain mobs not having right spell pools. Finally, deckathalon has the most retired badges out of every single type of content in the game due to having an ungodly amount of badges revolving around the leaderboard for some reason, which got retired because the leaderboard was abused every deckathalon event, and those badges are simply completely impossible to obtain now.
11. Beastmoon - PvE beastmoon and PvP beastmoon alike both see only a select few forms that are 'good.' additionally, pvp beastmoon suffers from a severe pay to win problem in which you can max out forms just from crowns. Also, some forms are time gated by literal years to obtain. Also, some forms are designed with anti-fun in mind, such as the form that is allowed to have a deck full of both stuns in a mode that doesnt place a stun block on you after you get stunned, along with universal ispels in a mode that doesnt place a dispel block on you after you get dispelled. Beastmoon also suffers from having a complete lack of a tutorial system or elo system, in which brand new players can get onto teams with no explanation and get turbo steamrolled by tier 5 forms while they're sitting on ice colossus

12. Housing - Housing continues to get new additions that in theory sound neat but in practice just are so buggy that not even using them interferes with how you decorate. For example, the brightness slider being added has been causing issues with items being the incorrect brightness even if you dont even touch the slider, leading to simply existing requiring extra effort on the player to manually fix brightness issues. Additionally, no new furniture sets have been added in a very long time, leaving only a small amount of new props (And in the case of wallaru actual furniture) being added each world.
13. Castle Tours - Castle Tours was forgotten about, with the only time players even visit the castle tours feature is during the spiral scene event, in which everyone clicks the dorms category and spams through ratings for points. Additionally, the leaderboard system is poorly implemented as theres no real ranking on quality, but rather on a number of stars the house obtains. Its possible for a house to get onto the leaderboard with nothing but 1 star ratings if it gets enough 1 star ratings

14. Castle Tour Games - This npc was added to the housing tours building and i swear to god i dont think ive ever seen anyone unironically speak to them to use them. This npc was given functionality to find housing tours games in progress but 1. most housing games cant even be played with too few people and 2. there hasnt been a new housing game since empyrea with khans dance game. Additionally, some housing games dont even have an ending, such as the tag game going on until someone gets tagged and ragequits the game.
15. Faireground Minigames - These games havent been updated since they've been released. Some games still have a full leaderboard obtained by someone setting up a script. Theres no reason to play any game that isnt potion motion as the only rewards are a pitiful amount of gold, low level bazaarable gear or common harvest reagents like mist wood, and mana.
16. Rate my Stitch - Rate my Stitch has all the same issues that rating houses has, on top of the fact that its even easier to manipulate the scoring as there is literally no limit to the amount of times you can rate a stitch. Also, the 'unique stitch gear items' you can craft using event reagents are usually just copy pastes of existing items with a different name, sometimes just being a direct copy paste of an eloise item without even changing its name. Like literally just an item you can buy for gold from eloise as an 'expensive' recipe in the Rate my Stitch crafting system. Also, 'judge's choice' isnt explained whatsoever to the player and the game has no notification that you've even earned it, along with the fact that if you dont earn it after your stitch has been in there for 24 hours, you might as well just remove it and re-add it because it stops showing your stitch to people.

17. Raids - Void raid has been out for years and still has multiple problematic spells, such as gobblorean bandit, unfun guy and nullity all having spells 'not fit for advanced combat' such as aoes that destroy blades/traps in fights that otherwise would have blades/traps allowed, or weakening mantle, a spell that gives a massive accuracy debuff on an aoe. It is possible to play perfectly in a raid and be completely shut down by an accuracy debuff on the final fight of the raid. Also, both CR and VV have the issue of most players not even doing anything for a bulk of the raid. VV is especially guilty of this, in which its possible for players to afk for 10+ minutes at a time just because absolutely nothing is going on in the raid. For CSR specifically, the polymorph aspect of the raid is so poorly implemented that most players completely forgo the usage of these decks, with the only fight the polymorph deck is truly used in being the fight against the basic mob at the top of the pyramid to clear the pyramid. In my first run being storm vanguard, I was explicitly told that after I polymorphed into Ixta, I would be joining no more fights as I was literally "a burden to the team with the deck provided." This is obviously an issue! But besides that, CSR, VV and CR all have multiple issues with bugs being left into the raid just because repro steps were never found to fix them, such as the void map being completely absent, or the token in the south puzzle for CSR just randomly not existing despite checking every valid spawn location. Players have also experienced issues in CR in which sigil support spells just don't get sent, cannons not being sent despite cannonballs being deposited, players being kicked out of fights entirely, players being placed into jail for no reason and stack overflow cheats being triggered when stack overflow conditions are not met.
18. Monstrology - Monstrology suffers from a lack of updates as well, with Selenopolis not even being fully finished after a patch specifically adding in entries to most creatures and Nightmare dungeon took ages AFTER Selenopolis to get it's missing entries. Monstrology as a whole already is inconveient for the player, with extracts competing with damage enchantments. Item cards were added for monstrology that served as both an extract and damage boost, but were put on a set of energy gear which completely defeats the point of having these spells.

19. Scroll of Fortune - Most rewards on the entire scroll of fortune are useless. 90% of the scroll is filler with the only real rewards being the cosmetics, unique housing item, emote, teleport effect, and beastmoon rewards. There have been rewards on the scroll that are literally just a single bazaar furniture item, or a single wooden key that just don't make sense being on there. Additionally, if you miss a scroll of fortune cosmetic, they are time-gated by over a year to obtain at a non-massive-inflated price (Being in the crown shop vs being in a crown spending event.)
20. Daily Assignments - Daily Assignments are setup in such a way that the player gets trash from the rewards until the gold key. There are housing items unique to daily assignments that quite literally can take years to get while doing dailies on every wizard. Not only that, but there is still a unique housing item that each wizard can obtain a single time, the Arcanum Topiary, in which a player is time gated by literal weeks of dailies just to get a single one from the solo fight, once per wizard.
21. Badges - Badges are inherently unfair to the player, with the badge leaderboard counting retired badges towards its extra credit leaderboard, which defeats the purpose of even having the extra credit, unobtainable badges. To this day, there have been dozens of badges retired, including bugged badges that some wizards cant even get in conjunction with other badges. All deckathalon leaderboard badges, Mussel Head x2, the Karamelle prequest badges and more are fully retired and unobtainable to the player. Post-FTUE wizards also are naturally some badges behind at all times due to the fact that instead of fixing badge issues with FTUE, a band-aid fix was instead provided that made an extra set of 4 different Wizard City badges, with Savior of Wizard City even having 2 copies of the badge. It is possible for one wizard to have 3 copies of the exact same badge. This is just stupid.

22. Silver Chests - Silver Chests contain no rewards worth opening them for, with the same two minigames for years. The only time a player ever opens a silver chest are if it was on accident or it they need shocked keys for the singular recipe that requires them. Silver chests in lower level worlds additionally dont even give rarer rewards, completely discouraging the player from the start to continue opening them as they level up
23. Cantrip Chests - Cantrip Chests are designed in a neat way, to encourge teamwork! Except they require 3 players so a full team dont all get cantrips. And a duo doesnt get to even open the chest. Most players are either questing solo, in a duo or in a full group, not in a trio. They are simply designed to force players to waste energy and time to obtain spellements. The fact that they exclusively contain spellements and absolutely nothing else remotely unique is also extremely boring and makes them feel rushed and poorly implemented.

24. Challenge Modes - Challenge modes are designed in such a way that theyre impossible without a coordinated team that knows each other before the dungeon starts. No potions, no gear swapping, no deck editing and more discourages team ups for challenge modes, completely locking off casual players from even dipping their toes into more difficult content without getting slapped across the face multiple times by questionable design choices. Additionally, one specific challenge mode still doesnt even work properly, with its badges being marked as extra credit as they are literally not even possible to obtain (Hall of Heros). This has been left like this since Hall of Heros challenge was released. Additionally, all Advanced Combat (Including raids) retains beastmoon chat for its quick-chat system, rather than making any sort of new chat messages designed for advanced combat specifically. In no situation does anyone need to say "Spiral needs Sutr's [sic] Wrath" in a Medulla challenge mode for example.
25. Gold Key Boss Portals - Gold Key Boss portals were implemented in such a way that its almost like who designed them thought that guilds could pool keys together to craft the guild key. Instead of that though, we need one person to sacrifice ten of their own keys to make a key for everyone else!
26. Spell Fusion - Spell Fusion is completely useless in PvE due to the complete lack of PvE focused spell fusions. Additionally, all spell fusions included as part of weaving polymorph fights are completely ignored as the game does not explain them whatsoever to the player, as well as them being worse than just casting one of the 2 unfused spells separately in most cases.

27. Weaving - Weaving in general is designed to inconvenience the player as much as possible. The pets added with weaving are locked to a specific school and weaving combo despite just being reskins of existing pets with a single different item card (Not even good item cards mind you). Polymorph dungeons are designed to show off the weaknesses of each weaving combo by forcing them to fight against over-statted enemies with a poorly built deck, along with other poor design decisions such as not even gaining mastery over the school you're supposed to be playing as. Weaving dungeons also are prone to a lot of breaking, with players experiencing issues like being split up mid dungeon, enemies respawning for no reason, npc companions following players out of the dungeon, and more.
28. Archmastery - Archmastery was added then promptly thrown in the dumpster, with it being super overvalued on any gear item except decks. No player builds archmastery as the benefit it provides is near none in all situations. Archmastery has not been fully updated in arcs 1, 2 and 3, with enemies not even being able to cast all their spells in some cases. Additionally, archmastery requiring your deck to be fuller in order to be as effective in advanced combat is 1. explained nowhere and 2. actively detrimental to the player to build for, which makes archmastery spells either used in every single strategy if the enemy has no archmastery (Like in void raid) or being completely unusable if the enemy has any amount of archmastery (Almost anything else). This of course has the "dev-intended" solution of just packing more cards in the deck, but has the drawback of deck failing which can cause raids to be fully lost due to not drawing the required spells on time due to needing to bloat your deck up severely in order to generate archmastery faster. This need for both 'deck efficiency' and fast archmastery generation was solved (exploited) in the form of monstrology cards contributing to archmastery generation but not to deck bloat, but of course this was patched out without actually addressing the underlying root issue regarding archmastery in advanced combat.

[sterile rampart]

nightmare has its monstro added btw, but yeah, it needs more consistent updates fs

[opal delta]

This was written a year or so back so some stuff might be a lil outdated but the point still stands either way yea

Fixed it

[tropic lagoon]

this is a great write up

thank you for taking the time to compile it

[opal delta]

https://forms.gle/aaeXNpKSXANiuQPP8

Putting this link in here too, this is a feedback collection form for anyone who wants to contribute to me rewriting this whole mess of side systems criticism and feedback

the only section written currently is gardening, but I will be slowly writing about each section and including information and feedback and criticism people send me via the form as time goes on

[dim sphinx]

@opal delta Please don't forget about the newest side system, Fantastic Fight Fest

[opal delta]

God i wanted to write about that one first but I'll let more opinions come in

[dim sphinx]

I mean it incentivizes players to oneshot crap quickly, while also not incentivizing players to actually be the one to create the team up itself, I wonder where this could go wrong!

[opal delta]

dude the team ups were filling in literally under 3 seconds people are just sitting there spam refreshing

its so good

[dim sphinx]

ah, when I was on in the morning none were being created. it makes no sense that you incentivize people to spam team up but don't reward the person creating the team up