Leaderboard

Just thought I’d add some of my thoughts as someone who tried to get into the game recently with one of my friends. We started playing a couple weeks back and put in quite a few hours into the game, probably somewhere around 4-5 hours a day when averaged out. I played through the early levels (1-15 or so) a half dozen to a dozen times and the 20s and 30s on a couple different characters. I was having a lot of fun trying out the different villages and the different early level jutsu but there were a few things that eventually made things feel a lot less enjoyable. One, as Cosbo mentioned, some masteries just can’t grind very well early. Whether it’s the lack of lower level multi target abilities or the cost of supplies, there are some masteries that just outright suck early, especially for someone new to the game. If you don’t do your research before hopping into the game, you could end up tainting your experience without even knowing any better. As an example of this, my first character I wanted to be a bubble user. I got to 10, chose water, put my points in Strength and went to get my bubble pipe only to realize I needed 500 ryo before I could buy it. Eventually someone was kind enough to buy one for me but I sat around for an hour wondering how I was supposed to earn that money and if it was better to just start over with a different mastery. Two, some villages just feel objectively better than others. My friend and I decided to start playing as part of the Mist village and didn’t really think too much of the smaller population and how isolated it was until we got a bit further into the game. I know it’s been stated many times by many people but that boat ride, actually awful. You don’t even realize it in the early levels because you don’t have much reason to go to the rest of the map until missions start sending you out there constantly, but that boat ride or run across the water is obnoxious. It makes it feel extremely bad when you finally get to the point where your missions are across the world only to realize they take way longer because of the village you chose. That’s also not even taking into account how much more punishing dying feels as part of the Mist village because you spent 10+ minutes running all the way to Tanzaku, only to get killed by some level 60 right as you were about to enter (more on this point later). Eventually, my friend and I started some new characters in the other villages to see how they felt and it was like night and day, particularly the Sand village. The low-level grind spots for the Sand village felt like they had way better mob density and scarabs just felt infinitely better for farming than tigers or boars. I will say that the ants felt nice to farm as part of the Mist village though. Third, not a huge deal breaker or anything but the pacing of gaining experience feels... unsatisfying I guess is the best way to put it. 1-10 as long as you research and put your points in agility feels pretty decently paced. 10-15 feels like you do a couple missions, kill a couple mobs and you’re done. 15-20 feels glacially slow after those early levels only to rocket back from 20-25. 25-30 then feels awful again before the 30 arc sends you pretty quickly to 34 or so. It’s like a roller coaster of fast and slow leveling that makes the slow periods feel worse after cruising through a few levels right before that. Fourth, as I mentioned earlier, and ultimately the biggest reason that I probably won’t be continuing to play the game, getting farmed like you’re just a mob that increases bounties by people 30+ levels higher than you. It feels like going to an open gym somewhere to play pickup games only to get absolutely destroyed by professional athletes every time. Eventually, getting destroyed every single time I show up gets a bit old so I’ll just stop coming to gym. Listen, I get it. The entire game is more or less based around world PvP and faction vs faction conflict. I’ve played my fair share of PvP focused MMOs so I know that getting killed by higher level people is just part of the game. The issue is that at times it feels quite literally impossible to make any progress because of it. It’s honestly not that bad below level 20 because the grind spots are decently separated and spread out, with lots of zones to choose from to level, but once we got past that, it felt like we spent way too much of our time waiting on death sickness. As an example, over the past couple days my friend and I have got on, did the missions we felt like we could reasonably complete, went to grind ants only to get camped by some ??? ninja. The next day rolls around. Okay, well our missions got us out of XP range for ants so let’s go farm snakes for a bit. Same thing, different person. A ??? ninja comes in and kills us a few times before we give up on that. We decide to try arctic wolfs for a bit instead but that same ??? guy comes and kills us again. Well dang, what if we just grind some bears. Nope, killed by some other people presumably out doing missions. At this point, I just didn’t feel like continuing to play while my friend hopped onto a low-level character where he could try to do some grinding without spending more time with death sickness than killing mobs. We can’t even actively avoid the people who are constantly killing us and grind when they aren’t on because we don’t even know who it is. Like I said, I get it's more of a PvP game but it really does feel extremely unwelcoming towards new players. Ultimately, some of these things feel like they could be very easy to fix. I don’t feel like smoothing out the early leveling of the different masteries would really take all that much. The different village imbalances also don’t feel like a crazy complex issue either. I feel like the experience pacing might be a bit trickier to nail down and perhaps others don’t feel like it’s even an issue at all. I really don’t know to go about making the last point better for newer players though. There are also probably some people who don’t see it as much of an issue and feel I’m just overreacting or crying over getting killed in a PvP game. Just thought I’d add my two cents as someone who really wanted to like the game and get into it but likely won’t be sticking around.