Ambivalent for most of it since if players want more incentive for their hard-earned cash, so be it. But the one thing that struck me was replacing MVP buff with a chair version that can only be given if you fame the person (REMINDER: you can only fame a player once per day, and cannot fame the same person more than ONCE A MONTH). If I'm not mistaken, these high lvl MVPers also get a coupon version that is tradeable, which is..."all well and good" for normal servers, but even so, all around, this all seems quite dubious for us normal folk. Whether this goes through or not, or if they're just testing the waters, I can't help but feel sad about it. If they have enough incentive to even announce this makes me feel really on edge, and just makes me think "I guess just making the game good enough, isn't just good enough".
My thoughts: For some reason, Nexon has no intention of releasing any more PQ content. For what reason, I'm not entirely sure. Maybe they feel they've made enough, or are content the way they are and are just moving in a different direction. Perhaps they have a view that not enough players do them or even think the content is too good or exploitable for players. My gut is telling me it's a combination of Nexon not wanting to mess with spaghetti code any further and not seeing enough value for making them. In fact, if I wanted to by cynical, I'd go so far as to say it's a tactical decision; by eliminating PQs and increasing the importance of dailies and damage, it conditions and herds players to be more vulnerable to spend more time and money on the game.
Their thoughts for PQs also seem to be intrinsically linked with their disdain for party-play in general and unjustly sharing their same fate. They've certainly tried to sublimate PQ's absence with other player-to-player interactions with event mini-games, or bossing parties, but these simply do not fill the same niche as PQs do. They have an interest with party-play, but the type they envision for the game is not something where PQs can exist.
Whatever lack of purpose Nexon has seen in PQs, I see no reasoning to completely eliminate it from the mid-game to late-game meta and heavily disagree with its treatment. It is a unique and purposeful type of content that lends more variety and charm to the game. Instead, CWKPQ has been gone for longer than they promised, other PQs dropped entirely, and the rest languishing in their own decay, separated from all other content. The only limelight PQs will seemingly ever receive nowadays are through PQ events and event buffs, hypocritically instead of actually buffing the PQs themselves.
As far as I'm aware, top 5% get the Azure Sunset Sword, right? What I don't get, is that currently, the ranking numbers are assigned once per person. Does that mean it's not really a % and more of a competitive rank? EDIT: Whoops, looks like it is % based. If so, I'm out, I can't deal being the top 5 or 10 for 20 days, that's too high a number for being competitive for a dinky cs sword. It wasn't like this with the Invincible Katara. Oh wait, I still can't do it, if only it was top 20% or something.
Screw all of that, with the combination of lines and damage, and no point cap, the top scorers can top 100k+ (or so I'm told). I just witnessed someone get 40k despite being ping ponged around too. Forget anything skill-based, this is basically free hand outs to all the damage whales out there. I wouldn't be so sore about if it didn't have a veneer of competitiveness, as in equal opportunity involved. Anyways, this post is for anyone who might think "maybe I can reach it", to which the obvious answer for me would be "no".
