This mode has potential to be good, but it's mired by indecisiveness and poor decisions made on how it works. The devs clearly wanted to design an extraction gameplay mode and not another Battle Royale like Shadow Arena. That's fine and perfectly good, but as it's currently designed, it's heavily limited, extremely flawed, and just really unfun as a gamemode. Let's go over the issues with this game mode.

1. Limited Class Selection

This is the biggest issue bar anything else present in this game mode. With how grindy and time intensive this game is in general and peoples' identities being tied to their main class, it's really short sighted to limit the class selection. Especially when the gap between a seasoned player on the available classes and a new person picking them up is so large that it makes it an unsurmountable obstacle. You will lose 999/1000 to someone who knows their class better than you. The only exception is if the newer person is more geared or has a set of buffs that make the fight trivial.

Suggested fix: Allow all classes within the game mode and change the seasonal rotator to instead grant a temporary and small head start to people who play that season's set of classes.

2. Absence of Crit/Attack/Movespeed Stats on Start + Alch Stone/Food Buffs, and Overpowered Buffs

Right now, classes play too differently from the real game due to 2 factors - A. the complete absence of the crit/move/attack speed 1-5 stats at start. Being 20% slower at base than the real game is just not fun. Not having food or alch stone buffs also make the game radically different. B. There are random buffs that you can gain, which include one of up to 300 human dmg and another for, I believe, 200 ap currently. That is massively out of band for balance and allows players to effectively one shot the other person with a basic attack. That's unacceptable.

Suggested fixes:

A. Set all characters to 5 move speed, 5 crit, and 5 attack speed. Allow alch stone buff as baseline and foods as a drop.

B. Remove the random stat buffs or massively nerf them by 80-90%. You can replace these with elixirs as drops, as well.

C. Add auto pot like AoS and remove the current pots. Some classes have massive mp issues, and the 20 second pots are too strong.

D. Make addons an unlockable feature in HC server. It could be something you need to grind for, just like gear.

3. PVP is Heavily Punished

As it currently stands, you are not incentivised to fight anybody at all. The penalty for fighting another player and losing is too high while the gain for killing somebody else is too low. The entire point of the server should be to fight other players and compete against them. If you lose, your gear can and will break as well as losing near a third of your points.

There are also punishing systems in place to make players at high point counts avoid players with low points entirely. If they kill them, they lose points.

Suggested Fixes:

A. Reduce the penalty for losing to another person to 10% of your points, and increase the point gain for winning against another player to 30% of their points.

B. Remove any point loss for killing low point players, and increase the win bonus to 50% of the loser's points in events that the point difference is big and the low point player kills the high point player. If the high point player loses, he should lose 20% of his points. If this server is about survival and being the best, players should be incentivised to go after high value target and for high point people to defend their points.

C. Remove gear breakage/durability loss on pvp death on all gear up to blue gear as well as dura loss when fighting pve mobs. Replace gear breakage with durability loss on yellow gear. Make it lose 20 durability per death and require more yellow gear to repair. If there's a large difference in points, there should be no durability loss penalty for the lower point player.

D. Allow us to repair our gear with additional pieces.

4. PVP Mode Is Too Focused On PVE and Events Are Too Sparse

The spawn timers for bosses are too far inbetween. You get up to 2 boss spawn timers per day in HC server, and it's very limited. There should be more events that force people to come together to fight instead of spreading out. Most of the content in this mode is just farming regular mobs for gear and potions.

Suggested Fixes:

A. Increase boss spawns to be more frequent.

B. Include a drop that can forcefully spawn the dark fog mechanic and force players to battle. There should be a timer on this item to prevent carrying it permanently to force fights and abuse it.

C. Design more pvp events within the mode for better point gain than just fighting mobs and avoiding fights.

D. Make it possible for players to drop gear boxes equivalent to their highest equipped piece of gear.

5. Limited Entry Time and Reward Structure Encourage Extremely Short Sessions

2 hours is the length of a moderate siege and the total length of old nws. That can work for a giant structured form of pvp, when you have hundreds of attendents. For an extraction game mode, this is unacceptable. As things currently are, the longer time you spend in HC server, the less rewards you earn. It does not matter if you kill a bunch of people, are farming for better gear, etc. The maximum reward as it currently is is to spend the shortest amount of time within the mode, which is whatever it takes to complete your daily and then exit the game mode. Your time would be better spent once again, just running in circles and killing mobs outside of this mode if the daily is completed.  The game mode should not be restricted to only 2 hours of access per day nor should it reset only after a full day has passed since initial entry. The format itself is problematic, too.

Suggested fixes:
A. Remove the daily entry lock.

B. Remove the 2 hour timer.

C. Change the mode structure from a constantly running event with entry and time limitation to an instanced entry match akin to rbf with a max participant count. Matches should run from 30 minutes to 2 hours, do not start without enough participants, and the match closes when all participants exit. Whoever stays the longest with the most amount of points earned within the match wins the match and gets the highest reward, scaled to their time played and point coint.

D. Extraction should not be available until after you reach a minimum participation time. You can leave early, but you will not be allowed to keep any points, quest progress, or rewards for participation. Reconnection should be possible in the event of a disconnect with no penalty or loss of progress.

E. Change the daily reward quest to be more akin to rbf, changed to be a tally of total survival points gained towards a maximum count for completion.

F. Scale the rewards as such that it gives a nice payout for participating and for completing the daily quests, but for the best ratio of rewards, you want to stay longer, play the mode, and actually win.

G. End of season rewards should be improved and gear progress should be kept between matches, but limited to the second highest tier so the PvX nature remains.

+1

That's a pretty good summary of all the major problems with hardcore servers. Good work!

Let's hope PA does their part to fix them...

I would add:

- allow skill Add-ons

- better mp recovery 

- dark fog needs to happen more often, ppl do team ups unpunished

Still would just prefer they scrap it and give back shadow arena and altar of blood as permanent queuable modes 

The biggest problem hardcore faces is gear breakage. Gear boxes are super expensive when bought from the store, rare as drops from enemies, and break frequently. Overall, progression is difficult, and it's best to simply clear the daily and leave.

Well, the "dailies" are for the PvEers who don't want PvP but want the rewards.

The rest of the janky game is thrown to the PvPers who like and excel at the four current classes.

Everyone's happy right?........

Right........

All I wanted was a hard-core open-world server.  Was that too much to ask?  Could have taken a week to create.  Maybe a month tops.

But PA had to give us this........ It's like when they broke the trade system when all we wanted was updated prices....

Edit: to stop team-ups, fog mode should automatically happen when three players come in the same area.  This mode doesn't have enough players on at the same time for more than three people getting together anyway.

i like the lack of adons, foods and ect. skill (and selfbuffs) should work as described in the text tho...

Perhaps instead of using 4 existing classes, they should make 4 new classes for the hardcore server then they can be fully tailored to the experience.

No.

says "hardcore" and then...

"A. Reduce the penalty for losing to another person to 10% of your points, and increase the point gain for winning against another player to 30% of their points. "

So if someone kills you you lose 10% but if you kill someone they lose 30%? hilarious

Honestly i hope this is the first and the last time for HC server, is totally unfair and frustrating,  i suggest to don't put anymore effort on it, and remove it after the end of this "pre-season"