Megaten: Skill System

Not only am I a hypocrite, I also fail to meet exectations (about 2 and a half weeks since my last update?). Anyways this post is dedicated to... myself for my love/hate relationship with Megaten's skill system.

Megaten has an original skill system as far as MMORPGs go, and it also adds a sense of realism to it. It has a skill based progression where to raise "Attack" you have to attack monsters. Your skills will get experience for it and eventually level up.

The skill system is also highly customizable. It is like making a custom gun (excuse my lack of comparison) for your purposes. Just pick a part and train it to tailor for your build. This also leads to very original (albeit not very good) creations/builds for the typical archtypes.

Even though the concept is good, it is still flawed in many ways.

Because not only do you have to level up yourself, you also have to level up your skills. So the game is essentially a double grind. A very long one at that. I would love to argue that skill grinding is a lot longer than level grinding but that is personal preference and the fact that I never use incense doesn't help.

As a reference, I made a newly created character and started to attain Enhancement right away. It took me roughly 3~4 hours to get to C2-5 Enhance. In that time I could probably get from level 78->79 and wouldn't be stuck at that level.

The time will also come where you would want to polish your build too, and reseting some skills will be needed. Unfortunately, when you reset some points from a certain skill those points can not be reallocated to a different skill. So you end up having to grind more skills all over again. This has caused me to have trained for at least +100~200 hours just for skill grinding because some are more unforgiving than others (5 hours for last rank of Magic Control?).

However, if we were allowed to reallocate points it would make the skill system broken because it is very apparent that some skills are easier to train than others. Which would make the incredibly hard expertises to train infinately easier.

So while I do wished you could reallocate points, it would have dire consequences to some aspects of the game. One aspect is that Synthers would be more common, which could effectively kill the crystal market. Synthers are usually not made as alts because of how draining it is to train their skill so only a few people have atleast made characters for it (I count 6 or 7 characters? Guesstimation). However hard they are to make, they are a needed aspect of the game. But then again the crystal market probably wouldn't fail because I forgot to account of how lazy people tend to be. Training high level demons is a bore and most people would likely buy it from someone else, not to mention some of the plugin-only crystals (Bishamonten).

Oh yeah, the typical -level up and place skill points here- MMORPG format wouldn't work here either for reasons similar to reallocating points.

To conclude, I hate Megaten's skill system.

Status Report

Just to anyone that actually VISITS my blog, I am NOT dead yet. I am currently renovating my home office so I had to take down my main computer. I am currently on my laptop and I find that downloading Megaten all over again is relatively stupid when I already have the files on my main computer which I can hook up again in the next few days.

So what I am currently doing on my laptop is that I've been playing around with different MMOs. The current one I've been playing is S4.

Anyways, I've always planned for this blog to have (bi-)weekly updates but just to say in short, I have nothing to talk about. I don't care much for all the Aeria Drama that goes around because with the past 5-something companies I've been to, everyones' attitudes are synomous. Take for example, LaTale. When I read that Aeria was picking this game up I decided to snoop around a bit on the forums and what I found was (un)surprising. Everyone pretty much went: "Fuck OGP" and "Aeria are our saviours!"

The same Aeria that caused all that controversy with Megaten?...

To repeat myself, how the company acts and the attitudes' of their player base I relatively don't care much. But then again, I'm a pretty indifferent person.