Wednesday, June 15, 2011

What REALLY Ruined Mythos

The obvious reasons for the failure of Frogster's Mythos release aren't even Frogster's fault. Lack of development, lack of updates, lack of technical support, and ignoring the community's input can all be blamed on Hanbit. The only things we can blame on Frogster are the lack of news and a poorly-moderated forum. I find it unfortunate that I spent so much time and effort helping people and trying to improve the Mythos community. Now I'm on the other side of the fence: I love what the game should have been, but am totally lost for a reason to play it in the current state. Hanbit and Frogster need to reorder priorities and fix major game mechanics before I'll play again.

With that said, here is a non-comprehensive list of conditions and events that brought about the current decline in players' give-a-shit about Mythos:


  • Beta testing did not implement any useful changes. It only had one major patch for months of testing.
  • No bug reporting system, other than the public forum.
  • Beta testing limited players to around the first half of the game.
  • Translations: incomplete and incomprehensible. An American game turned Korean, then German/English.
  • No manual for playing the game, other than a poor introduction area and simply reading the controls menu.
  • No online database, other than a poorly-updated German fansite (mostly community's fault).
  • The developers decided to push an update almost immediately before release that entirely changed the combat mechanics of the game. No player testing was involved. This update also restructured the experience-to-level curve, drawing out the leveling process into a sort of horrid bell-curve that went from fast/easy to slow/grind, then back to fast/easy at later levels.
  • Crafting is always a few levels behind the areas that drop the required materials. Many crafting options don't work correctly. Chance to successfully craft useful items is very low.
  • Level requirements were added to items.
  • Item drops were changed drastically upon release. Available properties were changed, many completely removed. Max properties and sockets were lowered. Numerous "useless" items are still available (bows, crossbows, pistols, spears).
  • Chance to add sockets is extremely low, and doesn't vary based on items' level or quality.
  • The community was split into language-specific servers, and these servers were further split into town instances and chat channels. Players have no way of switching chat channels.
  • Early item shop transactions took up to two weeks to process.
  • At release, there was an obvious glitch that allowed a player to "dupe" stackable items. Having a full stack and a partial stack, one could simply sell and buy back the full stack to create two full stacks. Therefore, 20+1 potions would become 20+20 potions. 101 of the same crafting material could turn into an infinite supply. Worst of all, 101 Runestone Powders could quickly become in infinite supply of Magical Runestone Crests. Players were duping items to sell for gold, and using this gold for everything from enchanting high-value items to ranking up guilds. To combat this exploit, Hanbit and Frogster did... nothing. (I only know of one player to get banned for abusing this glitch, and I got banned for sharing his IP. The abuser only got banned because he went to the forums to brag and flame the developers. That's one legitimate ban, out of dozens of players who exploited the glitch).
  • Numerous bugs and glitches that were reported months ago in the beta testing still haven't been fixed. Most reported since aren't fixed, either.
  • The developers seem aimed at adding content and features, instead of fixing the multitude of broken features and mechanics.
Overall, the game has had more negative changes than positive.

    6 comments:

    1. Could You describe the way to dupe the stack items?

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    2. The dupe method doesn't work anymore; it was patched.

      It's explained in the post.

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    3. all this talk about mythos being ruined and he only wants to know how to cheat :d

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    4. Dang, I just start playing for about 3 days, got to lvl 25. But now I read your post and feel like my 30 hours had been evaporating....

      Thank you anyway, when I play I found numerous bug, but I didn't know it was this many.

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    5. You should've been there for the beta. The game was enjoyable and worked great, other than a few bugs.

      ReplyDelete