Why DNF Stopped Being Fun (It's Not Nostalgia)

You're sitting in Grandine. One full fatigue bar is gone. A few fake purples lie on the ground. You don't pick them up. In your storage, you still keep the chainsaw, the flamethrower, the Ice Dragon greatsword you dropped back then. Back then, when a boss pink dropped, you could type three lines in guild chat, hands shaking. Now you open the equipment dictionary. Those things are still there. No one talks about them.

Old DNF was a street with many forks. You farmed dungeons for boss pinks. A chainsaw, a flamethrower, an Ice Dragon greatsword counted as graduation. You ran Hell mode and dropped a specific epic. Instant graduation. You messed around in Otherverse with a few buddies, pieced together a set day by day. That could also be graduation. You weren't on the fastest path, but you were on your own path. Every option was valid. Some took time. Some took luck. Some took friends. The first raid, Anton, had room for everything: mixed Otherverse sets, the Legendary Great Curved Hook, manual-cast light sword, Ghost Step Warrior, Fury Warrior, Z Fighter. Too many to count. Twenty people each had a role: control, DPS, support, sub-DPS. Even a “crane” could find a spot. The raid leader shouted on YY: “You in Otherverse gear, go in and control.” You typed: “Got it.” That was the first time you felt that even with bad gear, you could be needed.

Then Luke came. Twenty people became eight. No more leech slots. No more control slots. Margin for error got smaller. Gear requirements got hard. Raid leaders only looked at your stat panel. They only looked at damage. They only looked at whether you had that set. You clicked into the channel in your Otherverse set and whispered the raid leader: “I can control.” He replied: “Stats not enough, next.” You switched characters. You switched channels. You whispered again. You got rejected again. You started running Hell mode to put together an epic set. Log in. Run Hell. Gather gear. Raid. Upgrade. Raid again. Multiple choice became single choice. The game turned into an assembly line. You were no longer playing an action game. You were clocking in for work.

Character identity was disappearing too. Back then there was katana bleed, short sword pseudo-fixed damage, Ghost Step Warrior, Fury Warrior. Each playstyle let the same class live a different life. Now, for balance, equipment trigger conditions were deleted. Skill cooldowns, ranges, and special effects were standardized. Every class chased pure damage numbers. You play Berserker or you play Blade Master. In the end, maybe only the skill animations are different. In essence, it's all break guard, hit the dummy, spam skills. Dungeons are stuffed with Thunder Fighter-style bullet dodging, tile walking, circle stepping. What you miss isn't some skill. It's the version of yourself that had to predict, combo, control, and save the run. Now you just memorize mechanics, memorize the timeline, and press your skills once the guard is broken. The action feel was drained bit by bit. DNF went from an action game to an MMO wearing an action game's skin.

That is only the Korean server's problem. The Chinese server, or the Ma server, made things more complicated.

On the Korean server, emblems can be bought in shops. Avatars could be traded on the auction house very early. Farmers bought avatars and disassembled them for emblems. People who needed gold traded avatars for gold to reinforce. That was a healthy economic cycle. Gold produced by players consumed resources produced by players. On the Ma server? Avatars took forever to become purchasable. Emblems were stuffed into packages. Enchantments were stuffed into packages. Titles, pets, auras, beads. All became Chinese-server special features. The emblems you got from disassembling avatars were no longer worth looking at. If you wanted to be strong, you had to buy packages. Later there were special enchantments, special beads, and special stats that didn't exist on the Korean server at all. A long time ago on Bilibili, I saw a clip. A Korean-server streamer went on the Chinese server to review an account. From title to emblems, from emblems to enchantments, his eyes widened again and again. His expression seemed to say: What the fuck is all this? How can this thing even exist?

These things directly led to the later equipment inheritance incident. It should have been like pouring beans out of a bottle, one by one, slowly. The Chinese-server planners thought that was too slow. They reached their hand into the bottle and grabbed. When they tried to pull their hand out, they found they couldn't. So they planned to smash the bottle. Chinese-server players refused. I bought this package and that package, and now you tell me they won't work later? If you want to smash it and start over, don't blame me for chopping off your hand.

So equipment inheritance was kept. But that meant players no longer had any need to build new equipment. Package features were embedded in equipment. Old equipment could be inherited. New equipment didn't need to be re-amplified, re-enchanted, or re-emblemed. The gold sink shrank. And the gold source? Dungeons like Enshan overproduced gold. Production far exceeded consumption. Gold prices kept crashing. Ordinary players' farming income was diluted. The in-game economic cycle lost balance. The tail was too big to wag. From then on, anything good had to be stuffed into the cash shop, because normally produced gold could no longer be consumed. Once you've spent money, you won't pay for the same thing again. If you want players to keep paying, you have to give them something better. Stats stack higher. Thresholds get raised more brutally.

Dungeon difficulty was propped up the same way. On the Korean server, dungeon difficulty is 10. Their starting point might be 4 to 5. They slowly build up to 10 and then clear it. On the Ma server, rich bros start at 10+. They blast through immediately, so the planners just jack up HP. Plenty of people aren't big spenders. Their starting point isn't that high. Their daily output can't produce the things rich bros get from buying packages. Poor bros are indispensable to the game. You have to give away all kinds of things to keep them from leaving. That means dungeon difficulty has to be set even higher. You can't give everything away at once. You have to give it bit by bit. But that creates a new problem: what about newbies just starting? So this shit mountain became harder to adjust. One move affects the whole body. One bad patch would crack it.

You open your friend list. Row after row of gray names. Last online: three years ago. You remember him. During Anton, he played control. You played DPS. You cursed out raid leaders together on YY. You cleared the raid together. Later he got married. On the day of his child's full-month celebration, he sent red packets in the group and said, “Bros, I'm out first.” You replied, “Waiting for you to come back.” He didn't come back. You didn't wait for him either. You just kept logging in, running Hell, raiding, buying packages. You don't know what you're waiting for.

Before, you played a character. Now you play numbers. Before, a raid was a bonfire party for a group of people. Anyone could add a piece of firewood. Later, the fire was put into a boiler. Only those who fed enough coal could keep warm. Raids saved DNF. They also blocked the road ahead. The game turned from an action game into a raising game. Multiple choice became single choice. A mess of viable builds became one uniform set. It's hard to say exactly which day it started to go bad. Maybe it was the day Luke removed control slots. Maybe it was the day package beads became a threshold. Maybe it was the day equipment inheritance was kept. Maybe it was the day you realized every class was chasing the same set and the same damage number.

DNF didn't die suddenly. It blocked itself to death bit by bit.

You close the game. An update notice pops up in the bottom right corner of your desktop: New Year packages are live, buy more get more. You dismiss the pop-up. You open short videos. The homepage recommends “Why DNF Is Dying.” You swipe away.

On the screen, your character still stands in Seria's room. In the storage, row after row of package beads have expired.