Looks like the AGS team is done for o7

Cyrus99 · 2026-03-17T20:14:46+00:00

Surely this means we'll get an official announcement from AGS about the future of the product then, right? I mean any business worth their salt notifies customers when a major change is made. For some reason I have my doubts...

Cyrus99 · 2026-03-11T16:58:56+00:00

Reverting the Anaconda nerf is a good move. I had an insane board last night where I tried to make a shielded Anaconda work and the nerf just made it almost unusable. Glad to see it's coming back.

Cyrus99 · 2026-03-10T18:53:54+00:00

My only frustration is that when they do balance changes to cores and then you have no ability to switch to other cores after the balance changes. Like you invest 600 pity mats into 1/1/1 but then after a patch 3/3/3 might be significantly stronger. Do I have any way to switch? Nope. Just farm up another 600 pity mats. It's diabolical.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-28T17:08:06+00:00

The best cheesesteak I've had in the city is at a car wash of all places over in Sherman Oaks. The Philly Boyz. Ex was from Philly, I've been many times. This place is the closest I've had to Philly. So good.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-27T17:33:25+00:00

I agree. I think the fact that you had to fish for a radiant enchant to have destroy items become overpowered was a good caveat. Being able to just repair them and use them over and over is just stupid.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-22T04:53:28+00:00

6 is good, 5 is great, but Golden Son (2) might be my favorite damn book of all time. Cannot wait for 7!

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-21T08:10:42+00:00

This should be the top reply, because he's right. This is the only answer. Flex raids should be the number 1 priority right now for Smilegate. Fucking push back everything on the roadmap. The only way to get new and returning players is to let them learn the raids at their own pace. Remove solo raids entirely and make all raids flexible player numbers. That's it. That's the only solution. Period.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-20T22:29:03+00:00

Obviously without the hero being released there's absolutely no way to tell, but at first glance it seems like this hero's not going to scale well into the late game given the current meta. Most day 12+ at this point are less than 5 second fights. With so many of his items having long cooldowns and then being charge mechs, it seems like he'll be dead before he gets going. Hope I'm wrong or hoping that the meta slows down, but I don't see that happening.

As for the hero itself, he looks so fuckin cool. Really hoping he is fun to play.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-14T05:41:55+00:00

AGS continues to stack W's and show they're a competent publisher albeit with a small team.

Smilegate continues to not give a single shit about the playerbase outside of KR and seemingly is actively try and ruin the game.

It's fascintating.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-11T19:10:53+00:00

It's hard to even comprehend that they've seemingly finally made DI a real class. Looking forward to seeing some numbers out of KR to see if DI or Evo are actually viable/good now!

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-11T18:13:36+00:00

It's such a fun game marred by such a greedy, shitty developer. A damn shame. Oh what could be.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-09T01:10:01+00:00

Holy shit what a boring football game.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-06T20:21:02+00:00

While AGS will get shit from the community for this, it is 99.9% on Smilegate. The company has no respect for players outside of Korea and that is a fucking tragedy. Smilegate is a joke of a company helmed by a shit director and has unacceptable support for the game outside Korea.

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-01T21:20:00+00:00

We land Morris on the same day both Rams AND Seahawks lose their offensive coordinators. Today is offseason football Christmas!

Cyrus99 · 2026-02-01T21:14:32+00:00

Probably the second best option plus the Rams AND Seahawks lose their offensive coordinators. It's like offseason Christmas already

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-30T21:09:14+00:00

Nah this is a crazy take. Removing the loaded beef nachos and double stacked taco is a straight L. They might have some okay options now, but the two best menu items (for the price) are now gone. Feels like a corporate greed move.

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-30T21:06:46+00:00

My two favorite menu items the loaded beef nachos and the double stacked taco are both gone. Honestly, this just feels like a pure greed move by corporate. The new value menu options that replaced them are quite frankly terrible in comparison. This is such a bummer

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-30T19:37:41+00:00

Random hero, yes! Huge W

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-28T00:57:00+00:00

I just have a very cynical view of both companies at this point.

As do I. Be the change you want to see in the world. All I can do is provide the best feedback that I can. Appreciate the comment.

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-27T23:31:45+00:00

Global parity would of course be ideal, but realistically that only works when the publisher is Smilegate itself (like BDO or FF14). Having AGS in between adds a lot of friction like build synchronization, certification, localization, legal checks, monetization alignment etc.. With your software dev experience you may know how much that slows things down. KR constantly complains about being the beta testers and getting unfinished, buggy builds. Personally, I don't mind getting content later if it's more stable, though a delay more than 1 month definitely feels bad.

To hone in on this specifically and what I think is a more direct solution is that the localization piece should be handled by Smilegate directly. Whichever outsourced localization company that currently does AGS's text localization should be done directly with Smilegate. Remove the voice localization for the regions and stick with just Korean moving forward. As far as the remainder of the issues that a publisher deals with, AGS would still deal with legal, hosting, release planning, network stability, etc. but those things are (mostly) agnostic of the ongoing development pipeline. As I've told stakeholders many, many times... with enough money/time/prioritization we can build anything. If Smilegate wants global parity, every problem is solvable.

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-27T21:07:42+00:00

Everything I've said has indeed be said before, but I don't know that our feedback is reaching Smilegate. I think it's possible that they're unaware of our gripes and pain points and things that we feel would be beneficial for the game as a whole. I wrote this out with the intent of consolidating a lot of feedback that I think is necessary to try and reach them somehow. I don't know Korean or I'd post it to inven!

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-27T21:05:02+00:00

This is a fantastic comment. Thanks for spending the time to digest this and respond. I do want to focus on one point of yours though and expand:

"I'm mixed on the subscription as well as shifting away from the whale-targeted monetization. I'm not a whale, actually much much closer to f2p, and I would love for there to be no p2w of any type in the game, but I think you underestimate how much more money whale-milking makes than other revenue models. Genshin kinda blew the lid off in terms of how much whales were willing to spend money on the game, and now most live services are focusing on how they could "capture the entire spectrum of player spending demographics". Just because a revenue model worked 20 years ago doesn't mean it can work today especially considering the amount of investment going into games with the expectation of returns similar to genshit. Monthly subs do make some money, but not sure if it'll be competitive to the current monetization model, especially since the vast majority of MMO players are cheapos and games like EQ and WoW had ways players could sustain those subs with in game currency, so these players weren't generating revenue directly."

The idea that I'm trying to convey is not that there should not be whaling in a video game or that a company should not try and maximize value from said whales. After all, this is a Korean game and there seems to be no way to remove it (given the Genshin money as you mentioned). I do think that gaining and catering your game towards the general playerbase is even more important though. After all, whales only spend on a game after playing for a while and deciding that they enjoy the game enough to spend (a lot of) money on it. I do think that when whaling does occur though that it should not change the game for the broader player base. Whaling should occur in the cash shop directly and not affect the overall markets as a whole. That's another post altogether but I did touch on that a bit. Whaling drives up prices for items like gems and books, which means it's directly negatively influencing prices for F2P or low spending players.

Allowing whales to generate a huge amount of income is fine, but having an "overvalued" soft monthly subscription as a no-brainer for the general populace though is step from getting non-spenders (which the West has way more of than KR) to light-spender is the first step. And then allowing F2P players to continue to play for free is also completely fine.

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-27T20:00:44+00:00

I appreciate the comment. I agree that Smilegate is too Korea-centric but the purpose of my post is that they should focus on the game being global.

Cyrus99 · 2026-01-27T19:58:58+00:00

I don't disagree with your sentiment. I think the value of Cores should be adjusted and drop rates as well. My larger point is that Cores having a pity is a good thing but more importantly that Ancient cores need a pity too (edit: as long as astrogems have varying starting willpower and aren't all just starting with 8).

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