This game ultimately feels demotivating to me

[Worm]

I figure this is my biggest problem with the game so I might as well mention it. Just the game as a whole is generally oppressive and pushes back too much against the player. It's fine for a bit but as you progress certain things start to just smack you in the face.

Storage

It's not just an issue of the amount but also that it's peppered around the world and often locked behind favor. Add to that the ridiculous drop tables, number of drops, and that "junk" drops replace gold in this game. Everything you leave behind is your only source of income and the game is constantly bombarding you with random drops. You won't really want to leave behind brass nails because who knows what else they go into and they're certainly not anywhere else. Invariably your inventory fills up with odds and ends that of course you want to keep because you don't want to have to farm out that Antler again. There are other problems like this like Perfect Lumber which you can't even use until a certain level of carpentry so rather than being a nice "proc" it ends up feeling like more junk in your inventory.

Favor

Favor isn't so bad when you start but eventually you get nothing from NPCs until you raise favor. All storage in Rahu is locked behind favor, most training seems to be locked behind favor as well. It's just so tiring to keep facing this mechanic. It's a novel idea that quickly just is turned into more linear grind and wikipedia visits. This of course feeds into your need to hoard items so you can more quickly raise favor.

Gold costs

Training amounts raise exponentially and with the whole game being a barter economy (i.e. monsters don't just drop gold) it's a real hassle to sell items and of course you don't know how valuable a given item is so that even adds more time as you're going to go check the player board and vendor it. Of course this goes back into the issues of Storage because you're trying to save some things that you'll need for later and you end up with tons of stuff because there are just so many materials.

I realize monsters not dropping gold is an anti botting measure or something but it just has an adverse effect on normal play. Running around with a backpack full of viscera and unloading on random merchants(if you can) until you can't anymore just feels bad.

Crafting
I have really no desire to craft but Transmutation is worth having just to be able to save space. But to make your own prisms you need to learn four other break down skills which require 5 other crafting skills be at 25 before you can progression with them on top of that all those trainers are yet again, peppered around the world.

Even though this game has a lot of modern MMO contrivances and lets you level battle skills pretty quick it somehow manages to feel more inconvenient than all of them because you have a huge number of skills, items, and no monsters just drop gold. It's unfortunate because at the start it's really fun to play but the further you progress in the game the more of a black hole it becomes.

There's some point where after killing 30 bears and still only have gotten one bear claw I really don't care about leveling shamanic infusion anymore. Because there's no only that but the cost from taking it past 50, and leveling more favor to make the higher level inventory belt. And I keep having this experience where I just don't care about any of the incentives waiting for me and simply stop playing.

Almost everything I do in the game just seems to spiral out of control. I realize it's most likely intentional but I figured I might as well offer my feedback. I fully expect this all to be debunked piece by piece by people who love this game and that's fine.

[Roccandil]

As a new player, I fully agree with your assessment! :) The more I've played, the more I've realized that PG is almost entirely NPC-gated: behind training, currency, and favor. In a way, I appreciate PG for showing me that I don't like an NPC-centric framework.

I'd much rather have recipes and abilities be dynamically discoverable through interaction in the game world. (After all, someone had to figure it out first!)

But, NPC-centric gameplay is the bones of the game, so it is what it is, and I don't expect it to change. I'm still enjoying the game, and I've gotten my money's worth, so I'm not complaining. I just don't think I'll be playing PG as long as I'd hoped when I started.

Oh, and I will say I'd pay extra money for storage! :) (shades of the Path of Exile stash tabs!) I don't see any gameplay reason to limit storage (it doesn't provide fun choices, at least for me), but I have to believe infinite player storage would stress the game's database, so tying that to micro-transactions seems fair.

[alleryn]

I think your impressions are completely valid coming from a new player perspective, but i will offer a few counterpoints coming from the vantage of someone who has played for a while:



Storage

It's not just an issue of the amount but also that it's peppered around the world and often locked behind favor. Add to that the ridiculous drop tables, number of drops, and that "junk" drops replace gold in this game. Everything you leave behind is your only source of income and the game is constantly bombarding you with random drops. You won't really want to leave behind brass nails because who knows what else they go into and they're certainly not anywhere else. Invariably your inventory fills up with odds and ends that of course you want to keep because you don't want to have to farm out that Antler again. There are other problems like this like Perfect Lumber which you can't even use until a certain level of carpentry so rather than being a nice "proc" it ends up feeling like more junk in your inventory.
For me storage is one of the best and one of the worst things about the game. I'm both a hoarder who gets obsessive about waste and someone who can get easily frustrated about micromanagement of storage. There are many many games (mostly singleplayer) i have quit because it ended up feeling like playing inventory management for most of the gameplay.

Indeed i have taken multi-year long breaks from PG over personal frustrations with how cluttered my storage became and the need to leave behind stuff i knew i would use in the future if i could hold onto it. However, the feeling of investing into storage and finally building a sort of warehouse system where you have needs that suit various locales (e.g. icefishing supplies in kur), along with a vast centralized base of storage in Rahu/Casino where you can't keep everything you'd like, but you're far from pressed for space and keep a lot of junk you don't really need, it's a satisfying transition that really imbued me with a sense of transformation from a traveling beatnik with a knapsack to a landed lady/lord (or something less pretentious-sounding).



Favor

Favor isn't so bad when you start but eventually you get nothing from NPCs until you raise favor. All storage in Rahu is locked behind favor, most training seems to be locked behind favor as well. It's just so tiring to keep facing this mechanic. It's a novel idea that quickly just is turned into more linear grind and wikipedia visits. This of course feeds into your need to hoard items so you can more quickly raise favor.

I don't really agree with this so much. Maybe it's because i can't remember just how much everything depended on favor, but i think it felt pretty reasonable to me. You need favor to sell items to vendors and to store stuff. So you go out to the dungeon, you return and -- oh no! -- no one to sell stuff to and nowhere to store it. What can i do with all this extra gear? Oh i'll give the swords to joeh and the shields to marna. Oh look! -- now i can store more stuff on joeh and marna, and joeh will buy more of my gear. Similarly i sell my extra rings to Larsan and he starts buying more of my jewelry, etc.

I'm sure there are cases where the system isn't perfect and is too monotonous, or too much of cash --> favor, but overall i think it works well.


Gold costs

Training amounts raise exponentially and with the whole game being a barter economy (i.e. monsters don't just drop gold) it's a real hassle to sell items and of course you don't know how valuable a given item is so that even adds more time as you're going to go check the player board and vendor it. Of course this goes back into the issues of Storage because you're trying to save some things that you'll need for later and you end up with tons of stuff because there are just so many materials.

I realize monsters not dropping gold is an anti botting measure or something but it just has an adverse effect on normal play. Running around with a backpack full of viscera and unloading on random merchants(if you can) until you can't anymore just feels bad.

I got most of my gold from work orders, so i probably just had a different experience here. I never felt strapped for cash after my first month of play. As with most of these things, it's something that feels hard early on but gives a real feeling of progression that i get a dopamine (or is it seratonin) fix from.



Crafting
I have really no desire to craft but Transmutation is worth having just to be able to save space. But to make your own prisms you need to learn four other break down skills which require 5 other crafting skills be at 25 before you can progression with them on top of that all those trainers are yet again, peppered around the world.

Can't really comment here as crafting is one of the things i enjoy most about PG (along with the vibrant community). So it never felt like a burden to me. I know that many feel differently (and many similarly).
_________
Again, i think you raise a lot of valid points, i wouldn't say you are flat out wrong about any of them. But i thought i'd offer some alternative (and quite subjective) opinions.

I hope you are able to find a way to enjoy yourself on Alharth despite its imperfections, or if that proves impossible, enjoyment elsewhere in your life. Good luck to you :)

[Coglin]

To be honest, I believe the things you guys are complaining about are valid complaints for you to have. On that same note, I believe they are intended hardships. I believe the game is intended to be a fair bit less mainstream. I hope you guys are having fun, but when many core design aspects of the game turn you off, it is also reasonable to look at it with the thought that maybe this game is not for you. It certainly isn't for everybody.

I hope you guys find fun in the game but do not feel bad if you decide it doesn't appeal to you because of the aspects you listed and seek out one that suits your needs better, play wise.

[Gervase]

I'll counter what the guy above me said and add that I feel like tacking on 'this might not be the game for you' isnt a valid response. I think anyone who comes to PG expects a more retro styled MMORPG. But there is stuff in this game that I believe just purposely forces you to timesink. Grinds are fine when they feel meaningful, which the game does alright at. Maybe they should feel more rewarding in all honesty.

[Citan]

Thanks for the feedback! One thought and one question. (Edit: and another thought after that, plus parentheticals.)

To some extent, item management is just something the game will have to deal with, because that's the bones of this game. There are thousands of types of items, and probably a thousand more to come, and I can't really give people enough storage to store everything they find. (And if you think managing your current storage is bad, think of what it'd be like with 1000 more storage slots! Bad.)

The intent is to get players to sell the items they don't need right now, and buy them from others when they need them, facilitating trades and transactions. But combined with not having an auction house (they speed up moment-to-moment gameplay but hyper-inflate game economies, so I'm using slightly-slower alternate sales systems), players feel friction in letting go of stuff they don't need right now, because they really will probably need that item some day in the future. It's just not worth the hassle to store it for the next 100 hours before you need it, but how do players know how soon they'll need this thing? They can't. I've been working hard to make that more obvious (with more improvements to the "Item Info" window being my next stab at it), but I don't think I'll ever perfectly succeed here.

The way items work is critical to how I want the game to evolve, with new skills and areas and content being added every month or two, literally for as long as I can keep making the game. This type of free-form expansion requires a LOT of items, so that old items don't become too over-used. Actually, there are a lot of benefits to the game's item design, and only one serious down side: the "everything is useful to somebody so nothing can be thrown away" problem. I've kind of made my peace with the fact that it will always be a sticking point, because the benefits are too important. I'm not removing a thousand types of items, and I'm not giving players a thousand more storage slots, so the problem... will always be a problem. No game design is perfect. If that's the game's big flaw, eh, I'll live.

(Just to clarify: there ARE more storage slots coming, plus more item-management tools. Mounts have a "send to saddle bag" system that I'm hoping will reduce in-dungeon item management. But in terms of the bigger picture, there will always be more kinds of stuff than there are places to put the stuff. So there will always be friction here, because players will always have to make decisions about what they want to keep and what they want to sell.)


NPC favor, on the other hand, shouldn't feel grindy. "Grindy" just means boring. Leveling anything in any MMO is repetitive, and if you really notice the repetition it's called "grindy." NPCs favor is just a generic leveling mechanism, so the actual way that you raise favor can change. Maybe I should reduce the focus on item gifts by adding a few hundred more favor quests. (They'd naturally have to be very samey, but then, so is gifting right now.) My question is: do you think having a bunch more directed leveling goals for favor (kill-ten-monster quests, fetch-the-gizmo-from-the-dungeon-chest quests, etc.) would be worth the effort?

(Some individual skills, recipes, etc. are too punitive or costly and need more tweaking, like bear claws not dropping enough. But those are individual balance problems and I'm talking about the general design here, which OP seems to be referring to.)

---

You mentioned "everything I do seems to spiral out of control" and that's pretty much the "I want to do everything" problem: the game lets you do everything, every skill, every NPC, every city faction, every dungeon, everything. But if you try to do everything at once, it means you NEED literally everything, and that just exacerbates other game problems. The design intent is that you'd pick up missing stuff from fellow players, but since you don't HAVE to do that, players tend not to. It often seems like crafting the thing you need won't be that hard, so you just take a detour and do that. And suddenly you're mired three crafting-skills deep, nowhere near the actual skill you cared about.

This isn't exactly the player's fault -- it's a sandbox problem, where the goals are nebulous and self-chosen, so the goalposts tend to move as you decide that no, what you really want is this OTHER thing first. No, wait, it's this other thing... etc. But there are tiers of "sandboxyness", and I think many (most?) players want the game to be a LITTLE bit more directed than it is right now.

So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea.

I want the game to be very free-form and open, but I don't want to burn players out with a lack of direction and a lack of movement on their goals. It may seem paradoxical, but in MMO design, adding more restrictions is often the way to help players feel less frustrated and have more fun. If you have ideas about how to approach that, please share your thoughts!

[Niph]

So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea.

I don't like this particular idea, so I'l suggest something smoother: some XP bonus in these main crafting skills, and XP penalty in others so that everything is balanced. And, of course, you could change these main skills only at a cost.

Regarding favor and quests, to be honest on my new Fairy character I completely skipped quests and focused on gifts. Unless the quest was of the "bring me X items" type. Obviously my case is special since I usually have plenty of the requested items, and can make any armor of any type and level (when the NPC likes gear of some sort, Pegast for instance).

However, I think the real issue is not that finding gifts is easier than doing quests, but that doing quests will only get you that far. For many abilities, the mid-level version that you *have* to train to get access to what is the current high-level version will require Best Friend or Like Family. I don't know any NPC where you can go that far with quests, and you'd be lucky achieving Close Friend. So, since you have no choice but find the gifts, if they are not too hard to find (gear, gems) I can see people skipping quests. Just because they don't know how long it's going to take, and for gifts they know it.

I would suggest therefore:

To provide ways to go to much higher favor with quests, for example have a "short" and "long" version, with the long version giving more XP. This simplifies creating content.
Give some indication of the quest difficulty. For instance, tag "The Weird Prism" as "Unusually difficult".

[Celerity]

Maybe I should reduce the focus on item gifts by adding a few hundred more favor quests. (They'd naturally have to be very samey, but then, so is gifting right now.) My question is: do you think having a bunch more directed leveling goals for favor (kill-ten-monster quests, fetch-the-gizmo-from-the-dungeon-chest quests, etc.) would be worth the effort?

In general I tend to ignore most of the favour quests unless they have a cool unique reward like the unique organ knife or the eye quest in rahu. Kinda like Niph said, if I'm going to have to gather items to gift anyway, it takes a lot less time just grabbing some more to give an extra 200 or 300 favour rather than doing the quests. Nearly every npc in the game has an easy way to favour them up, so typically you're talking about spending an extra 1-2k, which isn't a problem. There are obviously a few where it's more like 10-20k but I personally enjoy the challenge here and don't see it as grindy since it's relegated to only a small % of the npcs.

From a fun standpoint, it really depends, certain quests, such as the weird prism quest and the geometric rune charts quest are far harder than they should be and end up feeling quite boring. I'm also not particularly bothered by the "kill x mobs" or "gather y items" quests since they just remind me of everything I hated about wow, but they're obviously important when you're new to the game, and I enjoy that you can just ignore them. I did enjoy doing Ivyns quests, for example for the demon bean, Jara's for the bear in the barn and the main quest line. A lot of the quests also have some great dialogue/story so that's something to point out too.

All that being said, I could potentially see it being useful for noobs who don't have crafting skills levelled and can't just whisk up whatever carpentry, cooking or equipment items they need for favour instantly, so in the end, maybe it's worth it? Not for me certainly.


So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea.

I would personally hate this, I typically level at least 4-5 crafting skills at a time to make full use of the bonus exp from the poetry jam and other exp buffs. Also it usually takes at least a couple weeks to buy all the mats I need from player vendors/used tabs. So being forced to only do a couple at a time would mean I would either have more storage issues since I wouldn't be able to use up the mats I was storing, or I wouldn't buy the mats until I've finished the other skills, and then training the skills would take essentially twice as long as it does now.

Also 100 would be way too invested (or even 90, 80, 70, etc.) especially when you consider stuff like you want to get alchemy, blacksmithing, tailoring, leatherworking and toolcrafting to 25 for augmentation and then you may also want 20 carpentry to get toolcrafting in the first place. The only way I could see it working was if you had to get the skill to 20 before you could add another one, since otherwise new players would be locked out of augmentation for some equipment pieces and cooking would have to be unrestricted, since that's a need for everyone. This would still have issues, training industry where you could be locked out of doing work orders for some skills and I'm not convinced it would provide that much more focus if it was only limited to 20. Even Niph's idea of bonus exp to your focused skills and penalties to the non-focused one doesn't sound good to me, just because I know psychologically I would feel bad if I trained my non-focused skills, even if the penalty was relatively minor.

For me, I don't think I need any extra direction in the game now, but I think this is only true since I became more experienced with the game. Therefore I really wouldn't mind seeing some extra direction, I particularly enjoyed doing the tasks on the 'stuff to do' tab, so that could be expanded and I think maybe having a 'suggested content' part added to it based on your level could be good too. Stuff like, "It's time to brave the cold reaches of the Kur Mountains, see if you can reach Ukorga's inn in the North West. It's said that Hogan can sell supplies for travellers attempting to go there.", once you reach an average level of 40 between your 2 skills. Another idea could be to suggest industry to newer players once they're off the island as a way to get into crafting or display that loading screen tooltip about surveying being a good way to start crafting in a more accessible location, perhaps also hinting/telling you where you would actually go to do that. I would also like to see achievements in game which could act as another focus on stuff to do.

[Aionlasting]

Adding more structure doesn't sound bad and might be very good. I think youre on to something. My only concern would be that , especially with crafting, every craft skill requires atleast 5 others to be leveled. So now your two skills you are locked into until they are complete become difficult or impossible to complete because you cannot start leveling the other crafts you need to complete them. So all you've done is shifted the grind from a material grind through alternate paths into a gold grind... and players can be cruel ... and gold grinds can be randomly inflated by the player base so where one required a grind of fixed amount of materials the latter requires a grind for unknown amount of gold that can change at the player bases whim... which may be good... or bad. Is that a risk we are willing to take? I'm not so sure...

I think the openness of PG is its strength but maybe a railroad system in some other form other than limited a players amount of crafts... perhaps streamlining crafting materials... you don't want to limit the number of items in PG but maybe you can reduce the ones used in crafting? How about have crafting item categories you can limit such as "Skins, Monster trophies, Ores" and leave it at those shared across the crafting professions? You can still have all your billion of items but prune some out of the crafting tree and limit the categories.

[Oxlazr]

So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea.


I think you know better than anyone if you ever did this you'd get a loooot of complaints, but it's important to note that people generally don't rally to the forums to sing praises about video-games.

At any-rate, while this might've been a fair consideration earlier on, I think the game's too far along to make such a drastic change. There must be some sort of middle-ground, though: for example, what if you selected two skills to be proficient in, and they leveled significantly faster than others, had better yields, and could reach a higher cap (I.e. You could specialise in cheesemaking, which would enable you to get to 120 skill, whereas your other skills are limited to 100).

I wonder what portion of the player-base wants to be self-sufficient in that regard? For me personally, I tend to enjoy collecting materials, then throwing them at other people to do stuff with; I can't say I enjoy figuring out prices or shuffling through my inventory - which is a lot of the game at the moment.

As a bit of a tangent, it just recalls other games where you might see a locked chest - if you don't have a rogue in the party, it just.. stays locked. It might encourage someone to play a rogue, motivating them, or otherwise provide extra value outside of combat for a specific class. It doesn't translate well into Project Gorgon in that context, but it feels like everyone would want to level lockpicking if there were an option for it, and thus it adds that task to the list as another obligation rather than an option.

I think that's often what it comes down to - there's no real decision making, you just sort of feel like.. well, you need to do everything.

A lot of the time I just want to drop everything in my inventory and go on an adventure, slay a few bosses, roll the bones for some treasure & not worry about all that stuff on the side.

[BetaNotus]

So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea.

I want the game to be very free-form and open, but I don't want to burn players out with a lack of direction and a lack of movement on their goals. It may seem paradoxical, but in MMO design, adding more restrictions is often the way to help players feel less frustrated and have more fun. If you have ideas about how to approach that, please share your thoughts!

I'm not a serious in-game craftsman by any definition, but I think the freedom to decide one day to stop gathering materials for Leatherworking and heading to <dungeon> to gather different materials for <other skill> is important to break up feelings of repetition in gameplay. I know in the past you mentioned subskills for crafting skills, giving examples such as Haberdashery (mentioned in patch notes on 6/19/16 as a skill that will take over crafting of tailored animal headgear). I think these sub-skills provide the solution, not as the rail tracks themselves, but as distant stations players will hope to someday visit. Taking it a step further, what if the endgame subskills were developed similar to Sushi Preparation? Sushi Preparation requires multiple skills to unlock, but not high levels in either prerequisite skill.

Suppose Blacksmithing caps at Level 80 or 100, then players must make a long-term choice. Will they specialize in the armorsmithing subskill, or weaponsmithing? Whichever they pick, the "get a skill to X level" proposal before they can work on the other applies. At the same time, the same choice applies to other crafting skills. Will the player specialize Tailoring into Haberdashery or Modiste? Will Leatherworking become Saddler or Cobbler? I think people would be more accepting to a limit on the number of these subskills, with players only being able to pick 2-3 of them at a time and 1 from any parent skill at a time.

[overtyped]

Should go back to wow maybe. I don't want anything to change with the way the game is. In fact since this is perhaps the only mmo on steam with mostly positive reviews, i think that speaks for itself.

The thing with quality of life changes is they are not just that. They change how a game is played. Look at retail world of warcraft and classic wow. If you strip retail of all it's quality of life things then you get classic. They play like they are different games don't they?

The only thing that could use changing if any is the graphics and optimization, not anything about the gameplay itself.

[Silkt]

Just my take on 2 points:
1. Initial inventory size; I have always stated even back before we had Serbule Hills that the start inventory was too small for the amount of items that don't stack. Solution I feel the inventory size during the bonus events feels about right, possibly the starting inventory could be increased by 15 or even 20 slots but inventory increases obtained as you progress, could be reduced so at around level 50 or 60 you are still the same size as current.

2. Locking the number of crafting skills: 100% dead against this idea, unless the requirements for augmentation are removed or it is done in stages, as in 2 skills to 25 for augment training, unlocks the option for the next 2, to get the 3rd pair you need 2 skills at 50 and 2 at 25 and crafting skills not used in augmentation are untouched.

[Roccandil]

So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea.

I want the game to be very free-form and open, but I don't want to burn players out with a lack of direction and a lack of movement on their goals. It may seem paradoxical, but in MMO design, adding more restrictions is often the way to help players feel less frustrated and have more fun. If you have ideas about how to approach that, please share your thoughts!

Hmm. I feel like the favor/training system is already rails enough (if not too much). The need to unlock skill tiers and training imposes a restrictive structure:

- I need money
- I need to get favor with the appropriate NPCs

My current gameplay revolves around those two points. I'm not feeling a lack of direction or goals; I actually feel the opposite: like my options are limited if I want to progress.

More precisely, I think it's because meaningful combat progression is restricted more by NPC gates than by actually getting exp. Any skills I can level while fighting/exploring (combat skills, foraging, skinning, butchering, pathology, mycology, first aid, armor patching, etc.) I easily max them out, just while trying to get what I need to unlock high-level training at NPCs.

Crafting skills are very different, however. For most of those, getting exp is much harder due to lack of materials to grind with (tanning excepted). I don't feel NPC-bound so much with crafting skills; I tend to unlock crafting NPCs before getting crafting skills to the point where I need the unlocks. (Note that the resource limitation problem is exacerbated by NPC favor needs: many of the materials I might have used for crafting exp I've instead spent on favor.)

Crafting, though, doesn't really seem necessary unless you want to build industry exp or start crafting your own gear instead of relying on drops, making it more of an endgame skillset.

TLDR:

Crafting skills are not the issue: I'm not so NPC-gated there. Any skill that can be raised during the combat process, however, feels NPC-gated. My combat-related exp progression has smashed into an NPC wall, forcing me onto NPC-driven rails if I want to unlock more combat progression.

My suggestion? Remove training requirements for levels (you can grind combat exp straight to level cap).

[Yaffy]

I think an issue with the favor/gifting system is that it presents itself as a major hurdle for newer players, but just an extra form of payment to more experienced players. The problem stems mostly from how gifting is easily the fastest way to gain favor when simply purchasing gifts for the NPC (Essentially converting money to favor), but can appear as a huge grind when you try to collect the items yourself, ESPECIALLY when the items available to you are low value, due to how gift favor is based on item value so heavily. Let's use Marna in Serbule as an example, as many players say she's one of the more useful NPCs to raise favor with early.

If you're an experienced player, raising favor with Marna is incredibly easy. If you know about how item rarity affects favor, you can get Marna to Soul Mates just buying a few yellow fire staves from Joeh or Elahil's used tabs. Otherwise, you can go to the player vendors and buy a bunch of middling vegetarian meals like Baked Beets or Broccoli Florets (Or the ingredients to make them). Both of these options are incredibly fast and will only cost you around 5-7k to get to Soul Mates, which is pocket change to an experienced player. Even if we're talking self found items only as a last resort, you could grind in Wolf Cave or Gazluk for skins and do it yourself in about 10-30 minutes of grinding, depending on your farming speed.

If you're a new player though, you don't know any of these strategies. You probably don't have 5k to throw around, and even then new players aren't going to risk their money buying favor items because they don't know how much favor they'll get out of it without outside help. When a new player wants to raise favor with Marna via gifts, they will try to collect those items she wants themselves.
Here's the problem though, at that point in the game, the items you can grind for Marna are practically worthless for favor, due to their low vendor value. Let's say you try cooking your own vegetarian food, so you start growing potatoes and make some potato dishes... and you get about 3 to 5 favor per food item. Skins aren't any better, with shoddy and rough skins only offering 1-2 favor. At that rate, it'll take you an hour or two of grinding at best just to reach friends, never mind soul mates.

This is exactly why the favor system can be so polarizing, because knowing how to optimally gift an NPC is so important, and because vendor value has such a major effect on gifting. It might sound silly to use Marna as an example because she's a "Low level" npc and experienced players should have her maxed out already, but favor works the same for every NPC in the game. If an NPC in a level 100 area had similar tastes to Marna, everything I said about Marna would apply to them as well.
You can definitely argue that there are some benefits to this system, for example the two hour grind is an excuse for beginners to level up their other skills and by raising those skills they can raise favor faster, but it appears as a ginormous grind to people starting out, and this repeats every time the player finds a new NPC who demands new items. This is why the favor system turns off so many newer players.

Thankfully, NPC favor quests mitigate this grind somewhat in the early game, but favor quests are limited, especially as you go further through the game. Instead of just adding a lot of extra filler quests, I would like to offer some suggestions to make the favor system a bit more natural, play better and a bit more fun:

1. Give NPCs "Levels" which make them easier/harder to gain favor with, so that lower level NPCs are generally easier to raise favor with and higher level NPCs are harder. One way of doing this for example could be making lower level NPCs "Less picky", so for example Marna gives an extra +3 favor for any skin while Sirine in Rahu will only give you a +3 bonus for Great Skins or better and a -3 penalty for low level skins. (The minimum for the bonus could be based on vendor value). This would make it more worthwhile for players to collect gift items in the area around the NPC. You can still gift higher rarity skins, but that +3 bonus doesn't matter much for an already valuable item, while it means a lot for a low level gift making it more cost efficient.

2. Normalize the favor value of items around an average, so that extremely cheap items are still worth something while very valuable items aren't worth a ginormous amount of favor. It makes sense for NPCs to like more valuable items, but vendor value is far too important, and it can still take a lot of effort to collect low value items (For example the shoddy skins with Marna). It's hard to come up with a perfect formula that works for everything, so my suggestion would be to add a flat amount of favor to each item while lowering the vendor value multiplier. For example all skins could be worth +3 extra favor, but the vendor value only gives 80% of its current value. (Just for reference, I believe it would make shoddy skins worth 4 favor up from 1, while Great skins are worth 19 favor down from 20).

3. Add more "Easy" forms of passive favor over time. Something that would make it feel like my relationship with an NPC isn't based on how many mushrooms I throw at them would be the ability to gain favor passively as I interact with the NPC. Some of the best interactions with NPCs is when you can gain favor for choosing different speech options, or even being a certain race, and I would love more like this since it adds a lot of character. One example of a system like this would be a little free daily favor just for talking to an NPC, possibly a little extra for small talking with them. The amount of favor gained could be different depending on factors like the NPC or the player's status. For example, friendly NPCs would love having someone small talk with them and would give a bit more favor, while more judgemental NPCs will give favor only to players of their race/form. This would not only make the NPCs feel much more alive, but it could also be a way of making early game favor a bit easier to gain. For example Marna is pretty friendly, so just saying hello to her each day could offer +10 favor which could help some slower players get through that early game slog. This could also be used as a method to slowly but surely gain favor with NPCs if the player cannot manage to gift them properly, although higher level NPCs should generally be a bit more stubborn.



You mentioned "everything I do seems to spiral out of control" and that's pretty much the "I want to do everything" problem: the game lets you do everything, every skill, every NPC, every city faction, every dungeon, everything. But if you try to do everything at once, it means you NEED literally everything, and that just exacerbates other game problems. The design intent is that you'd pick up missing stuff from fellow players, but since you don't HAVE to do that, players tend not to. It often seems like crafting the thing you need won't be that hard, so you just take a detour and do that. And suddenly you're mired three crafting-skills deep, nowhere near the actual skill you cared about.


I think a lot of that stems from beginners not wanting to spend money if they can acquire items themselves (Which means they are reluctant to buy materials from other players and would rather be "Self reliant" and learn the skills to collect said materials themselves) and also from issues with NPC favor. A pretty common problem in the game is that players want to train for skill X, but the NPC who does said training doesn't have many quests and demands items from a different skill for favor. If the player isn't open to buying those favor items, then they'll try to learn the skills required to earn those items themselves. If that other skill's trainer also has that problem, you end up with those giant skill learning trains where you end up learning 4 skills just so you can use one. There's also some cases where the NPC in question wants precious resources for your skill and doesn't offer you much favor for them so you want to find alternatives instead. For example Lamashu trains you in carpentry and wants wood as a gift, but you want to keep your wood because you're doing carpentry and she doesn't give you much favor for it, so you'd much rather give her onyxes instead which are from surveying.

I'm not too sure at the moment the best way to encourage players to be more open to buying items from other players, since that's a very important thing for PG and many players aren't used to doing it outside of an auction house in most mmos nowadays. However I do believe that improving the way NPCs gain favor will fix the "Skill train" problem to some extent, especially for the early game where it's the biggest issue.

[Mr. SEv3N]

ehh. Not much to say, but that everything becomes MUCH easier to manage as you level and gain knowledge about the world. You'll find better ways to make gold, a lot more storage spaces.. etc. And it might not be right away, so just know you'll have to put in the time. But you'll be better for it!

[Henrycc265]

so on point , I will have to mark this
rarely have developer have such vision anymore
I bet I am your only fans in Hong Kong , lol ... china people tend to only play on rail automatic mmo festered with in app purchase thats why even world of warcraft / everquest aren't welcomed there

[Henrycc265]

Thanks for the feedback! One thought and one question. (Edit: and another thought after that, plus parentheticals.)

To some extent, item management is just something the game will have to deal with, because that's the bones of this game. There are thousands of types of items, and probably a thousand more to come, and I can't really give people enough storage to store everything they find. (And if you think managing your current storage is bad, think of what it'd be like with 1000 more storage slots! Bad.)

The intent is to get players to sell the items they don't need right now, and buy them from others when they need them, facilitating trades and transactions. But combined with not having an auction house (they speed up moment-to-moment gameplay but hyper-inflate game economies, so I'm using slightly-slower alternate sales systems), players feel friction in letting go of stuff they don't need right now, because they really will probably need that item some day in the future. It's just not worth the hassle to store it for the next 100 hours before you need it, but how do players know how soon they'll need this thing? They can't. I've been working hard to make that more obvious (with more improvements to the "Item Info" window being my next stab at it), but I don't think I'll ever perfectly succeed here.

The way items work is critical to how I want the game to evolve, with new skills and areas and content being added every month or two, literally for as long as I can keep making the game. This type of free-form expansion requires a LOT of items, so that old items don't become too over-used. Actually, there are a lot of benefits to the game's item design, and only one serious down side: the "everything is useful to somebody so nothing can be thrown away" problem. I've kind of made my peace with the fact that it will always be a sticking point, because the benefits are too important. I'm not removing a thousand types of items, and I'm not giving players a thousand more storage slots, so the problem... will always be a problem. No game design is perfect. If that's the game's big flaw, eh, I'll live.

(Just to clarify: there ARE more storage slots coming, plus more item-management tools. Mounts have a "send to saddle bag" system that I'm hoping will reduce in-dungeon item management. But in terms of the bigger picture, there will always be more kinds of stuff than there are places to put the stuff. So there will always be friction here, because players will always have to make decisions about what they want to keep and what they want to sell.)


NPC favor, on the other hand, shouldn't feel grindy. "Grindy" just means boring. Leveling anything in any MMO is repetitive, and if you really notice the repetition it's called "grindy." NPCs favor is just a generic leveling mechanism, so the actual way that you raise favor can change. Maybe I should reduce the focus on item gifts by adding a few hundred more favor quests. (They'd naturally have to be very samey, but then, so is gifting right now.) My question is: do you think having a bunch more directed leveling goals for favor (kill-ten-monster quests, fetch-the-gizmo-from-the-dungeon-chest quests, etc.) would be worth the effort?

(Some individual skills, recipes, etc. are too punitive or costly and need more tweaking, like bear claws not dropping enough. But those are individual balance problems and I'm talking about the general design here, which OP seems to be referring to.)

---

You mentioned "everything I do seems to spiral out of control" and that's pretty much the "I want to do everything" problem: the game lets you do everything, every skill, every NPC, every city faction, every dungeon, everything. But if you try to do everything at once, it means you NEED literally everything, and that just exacerbates other game problems. The design intent is that you'd pick up missing stuff from fellow players, but since you don't HAVE to do that, players tend not to. It often seems like crafting the thing you need won't be that hard, so you just take a detour and do that. And suddenly you're mired three crafting-skills deep, nowhere near the actual skill you cared about.

This isn't exactly the player's fault -- it's a sandbox problem, where the goals are nebulous and self-chosen, so the goalposts tend to move as you decide that no, what you really want is this OTHER thing first. No, wait, it's this other thing... etc. But there are tiers of "sandboxyness", and I think many (most?) players want the game to be a LITTLE bit more directed than it is right now.

So the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted to add new restrictions to help here. Not as limits, but as structure, rails to help players. For instance, maybe I should let you only pick one or two major crafting skills at a time. When you get a skill to 100 (or whatever), you can add another skill and start leveling that, but you have to focus on only a couple at a time until they're "done". Just one example idea.

I want the game to be very free-form and open, but I don't want to burn players out with a lack of direction and a lack of movement on their goals. It may seem paradoxical, but in MMO design, adding more restrictions is often the way to help players feel less frustrated and have more fun. If you have ideas about how to approach that, please share your thoughts!

so on point , I will have to mark this
rarely have developer have such vision anymore
I bet I am your only fans in Hong Kong , lol ... china people tend to only play on rail automatic mmo festered with in app purchase thats why even world of warcraft / everquest aren't welcomed there

[Vintus]

NPC favor, on the other hand, shouldn't feel grindy. "Grindy" just means boring. Leveling anything in any MMO is repetitive, and if you really notice the repetition it's called "grindy." NPCs favor is just a generic leveling mechanism, so the actual way that you raise favor can change. Maybe I should reduce the focus on item gifts by adding a few hundred more favor quests. (They'd naturally have to be very samey, but then, so is gifting right now.) My question is: do you think having a bunch more directed leveling goals for favor (kill-ten-monster quests, fetch-the-gizmo-from-the-dungeon-chest quests, etc.) would be worth the effort?



New player here, and I'm beginning to feel the strain from having to earn everyone's favor. To me, gifting itself isn't where the problem lies.

The problem is there is rarely meaningful or useful interaction before a certain favor level is reached. Unlocking skills almost always requires at least comfortable, which would make sense in real life, but also takes away all the fun from meeting new NPCs (and from exploration without checking wiki first), as new NPCs = more running back and forth and a sense of incompletion. Quests to unlock (like the ice magic quest) would probably work as it offers a sense of direction, and a player may feel that they have at least made some small progress by discovering and accepting a new quest, instead of "I should have looked it up and brought oranges."

Alternatively just make the first few recipes, the skill unlock, and the first tier of storage always available. Players would still have to earn favor as they progress in the skill or need more storage, so it wouldn't make the favor system any less important.

To sum it up, the way it's implemented currently feels like a punishment oriented approach, while most people would probably prefer a reward based system where you get something (and a reasonable vendor price) from just meeting these NPCs, and get more from befriending them.

[Aionlasting]

Honestly I think the burn out , in my opinion, would be helped, by having less crafting materials. This games item count is bloated mostly due to the crafting professions and every vertical tier having more and more unique items needed. If you prune that a bit, you'll bring down the item count required for crafting allowing for more players to have things they need or to share among themselves by trade or sale and you'll reduce the amount of anxiety around the inventory as you've reduced the total number of unique items thereby decreasing the rate at which players become overwhelmed with inventory management stress.

Crafting can still be fun, "repetatitive" (not "grindy"), with less materials and without compromising the whole system.

I'd love an explanation as to why the crafting reagents need to be bloated the way they are...

[Coglin]

I'll counter what the guy above me said and add that I feel like tacking on 'this might not be the game for you' isnt a valid response. I think anyone who comes to PG expects a more retro styled MMORPG. But there is stuff in this game that I believe just purposely forces you to timesink. Grinds are fine when they feel meaningful, which the game does alright at. Maybe they should feel more rewarding in all honesty.

I don't think valid means what you seem to think it means. The fact that it is my honest opinion and that I am a paying customer by definition defines my opinion as valid. The response from the game's creator seems to suggest a similar perspective.

You suggest that things should feel more rewarding? How so?

[Vintus]

I don't think valid means what you seem to think it means. The fact that it is my honest opinion and that I am a paying customer by definition defines my opinion as valid. The response from the game's creator seems to suggest a similar perspective.

You suggest that things should feel more rewarding? How so?

I have to say I agree with Gervase in that it's not a good response to criticism. "This might not be the game for you" is to invalidate criticism, and as someone sharing many of the concerns with the original poster, I felt unwelcome, as if I don't belong here as much as some older players do. I believe, however, that this game is as much for players with criticism and concerns as it is for those that find no flaws in its existing features.

But this is slightly off-topic. On-topic though, I think a lot of stress we have can be alleviated with a better UI. For example, I'd really appreciate if we could look up favor point without talking to the NPC, or having both favor level and skill level requirements displayed on the training tab. More advanced features can include discovered NPCs being marked on the map, and we can learn about their favor level that way. Inventory management can be vastly improved with a tab based, and not dialogue option based, menu. And looting is tedious because there's more dialogue options to choose from. This is what I consider bad limitations, as it's simply more clicks and to combine with fast respawn speed, not an enjoyable experience.

While devs can do tests they can't play the games the way players do, and a lot of features that appear to be interesting and add flavor in small scaled tests can be annoying in long term play. When the novelty of an idea is lost what's left is repetition, and one more mouse click soon becomes ten thousands and more. Gameplay is inevitably shaped and defined by this experience.

So while I understand a polished UI is likely low on the priority list, a better UI flow may be worth implementing sooner. Just my two cents.

[Coglin]

I have to say I agree with Gervase in that it's not a good response to criticism. "This might not be the game for you" is to invalidate criticism, and as someone sharing many of the concerns with the original poster, I felt unwelcome, as if I don't belong here as much as some older players do. I believe, however, that this game is as much for players with criticism and concerns as it is for those that find no flaws in its existing features.

A few problems here, the first is that you are applying motive to my statement which is both unfair and greatly dishonest on your part. Second, is that I also have my criticisms, by trying to imply I do not or that you two are the only ones who do is again, very dishonest. I was neither invalidating anyone's criticism nor was it intended to make anyone feel unwelcome. It was my perspective based on my belief of what the game designer's intentions are relative to the criticisms shared. No one is suggesting this game is not for players with criticism, I was suggesting that it struck me as if they were so negative about core aspects of NPC interaction and game aspects that I know the games creator favors. Seems to me you are looking to go out of your way to be offended by my perspective of your criticism.

[Cleo]

So the last couple posts in this thread seem to have gotten a...bit off track. I am going to ignore them and resume the original topic.

I totally agree with the OP's original position of the game seeming demotivating at times for new players. Just to give some idea of my current standing in the game and where I am coming from I will summarize my stats. I currently have ~92 hours in the game according to Steam. Been playing about a month. I have ~45 Fire Magic, ~37 Animal Handling, and have been leveling the trade skills Cooking, Cheesemaking, Leatherworking, Tanning, Surveying, Gardening and Foraging.

I have been playing the game with a RL friend who has ~35 Priest, ~40 Staff, and he has been leveling the trade skills Tailoring, Carpentry, Gardening, Surveying, Foraging and Blacksmithing.

We started out playing together and tried to pick complementary skills so we would not run into the "trying to do everything" problem that Citan refers to.

We have some observations and would like to present them and try to give some possible suggestions.

As a new player, a lot of the problems the OP was talking about present themselves. I think the Favor system is actually the root cause of a lot of the frustration. At the beginning of the game, you have no money. The vendors don't like you, so they haven't got any money either. Ok, fair enough.

So you start to level your favor with people to try and make them like you. At the start, some of the VERY beginning vendors take basic items, so this is not so bad. You give Joeh some basic food items, and you give Larsan some Rings, and you give Velkort some trophies. Ok, easy enough.

The problem is, it almost immediately hits a brick wall after these basic vendors. First of all, it takes a LOT of these basic items to make anyone like you even a little bit. Second of all, you have no money. Third of all, soon people do not want basic things. They want advanced things. Things you do not have. Things you cannot buy. Because you have no money.

You run into a conundrum...I have no money....So none of the vendors have any money...so I cannot make any money....so the vendors will never have any money....and neither will I.

Ok. So this is a problem...BUT! I will solve it!! I will start to craft stuff!! Then give that stuff to the vendors! So I try! And! The vendors want...favor....

Oh no.....

So...You try to find the stuff that those vendors want to make them like you. And they don't want basic things either. They want other crafted things. So you find more crafts. And those vendors want favor. And...you are sad.

So you go to the player vendor area, and try to BUY the things that you need (as so MANY people have so kindly suggested to you, in game and in forum) AND they want money for the items. A LOT of money. Which you don't have. And cannot make, because the few vendors who like you are broke. And you cannot make other vendors like you because you are broke. And you cannot craft...because you are broke...and you cannot really farm because you have no storage. So....

You wait for the npc vendors to reset.

Waiting to play the game is not the most inviting option for new players. It is not very encouraging. It is actually very annoying. IMO. Others may disagree.

Lets jump forward in time to week 2-3 in game. You have made some money. Maybe you took a work order on the player boards and did 300 or so surveys in order to find Rubywalls that some high level player wants...for...reasons...you don't understand....yet....but you are pretty sure you are going to regret selling them...but here is 26k or so gold so you pretend that all those rubywalls didn't matter. And that surveying for 2 days worth of game play was fun. Which it wasn't. At all. Even a little bit. Surveying is horrible. Really horrible. I will make a different thread on how horrible surveying is later. Not fun. At all. I digress.

Now we have our 26k moneys earned from torturing ourselves...I mean surveying...

I can finally purchase some sulfur and saltpeter and fire magic recipes and level that up. I have cycled through sword, bow, staff, and tried and failed to acquire ice magic cause it is way to high level for my low butt, so I get animal handling. And go dungeoning. Joeh now kind of likes me and will buy my stuff. I make a little more money. Animal handling gets to 22 or so, and now I need a string. Which I cannot buy. Anywhere. So I get my RL friend who is a tailor to level all his textiling to aquire me a string. Which costs him a lot of money. That we just aquired by surveying which we both loathe. Now he has less money, cannot make thread, and needs to grind 20 levels of gardening. Because cotton. I give him all of MY cotton. It makes no dent. I forage flowers all over and help him level gardening. My own gardening stays the same. I am alone while he gardens.

So I explore, and discover I am too low level to kill anything anywhere but Serebule and Eltibule. The vendors are all broke. I am too low level to forage half of the stuff. So I grind foraging and throw things on the ground that I cannot sell and feel sad because I know that I will want that later. I give all the stuff that I can as gifts, get 0.4 favor a piece for my items, and am sad because I need 600 more favor to get to friends level with many vendors. I am frustrated. So I try to cook the ingredients I have foraged and discover that I need Cedar chips. Which I cannot buy anywhere. Not even from other players in the vendor area because they don't sell them. So I tell my RL friend he needs to level his carpentry he said he was going to do. Because I wanted to do carpentry but he said he wanted it so I let him have it and now I have wood crowding my inventory and now we are arguing in real life.

That is not good. So I must level something else while I wait for string and cedar chips. So I try to make butter. Butter is cheesemaking. Which cooking recipes need, and no one sells, and I can make that! Right! WRONG! I need butter muslin. Maybe I should become a textiler...what is leather used for anyway??? My friend is so slow....he must be doing it wrong...but he says no, he is not, and be quiet and leave him alone. (RLFriend: "look, I was farming silver coins to give to the lady to teach me more surveying so I could learn blacksmithing so I could make nails so I could level carpentry so you could have your GOSH DARN CEDAR CHIPS")

Fine. I need new armor. All these drops are low level and the dungeons that drop stuff I might be at a level with one shot me and I cannot go in there because it will make my pet panther kitty die and then he will be unhappy again. So I will make them! Except no I won't. Because it costs 50 gagillion gold to make armor that I need at my current level, just in recipes, not to mention tannin powder, and no one will buy the armor I made because they are broke.


Here is my point. The low levels are very frustrating not only because you have no space and to much stuff to do. Part of it is as Citan said, you are trying to do everything. But even when you try to specifically not do everything, you run into brick walls. Everywhere there are brick walls. You smash into them over and over again. Normally in a game, when you hit a wall it is because you are doing something wrong. You should be doing something else, or you should be leveling something else, or you should be grinding something else. This game has no "rails" as Citan said. But I do not think adding limits to the number of crafting skills will help. There is to much stuff that you need that no one sells and no one has and no one your level can get. Asking level 80 players for stuff is intimidating, and they probably wont have a string or a cedar chip or a whatever low level item anyway because it is behind them. It isn't profitable to make a stall to sell most of these low level items because people only need one or two of them. Items that low level players need a lot of are available, like sulfur or saltpeter. I have no problem buying these things when they are available and will save me pain.

My problem is, I have no money, and cannot make any money, because no one likes me. NPC wise. I'm sure the other players think I am a delight. :D

I think what needs to happen is that the crafting lines, and combat skill lines, and favor lines need to be examined for how they web together. I do not have a problem farming stuff and even grinding stuff so long as the amount of grinding required is reasonable for the goal I am trying to achieve. I don't have a problem with buying the stuff I need to achieve my goals so long as it is available to purchase at a level appropriate price. I don't mind that sometimes I bite off more than I can chew with a crafting line, like cheesemaking, which is way to high level for me. What I mind, is that early on, you get in these infinite loops that have no exit, or at least no exit signs. The intended progression path needs to be more obvious. It is fine that I am not ready to do something, it is not fine that the thing I am supposed to be ready for requires things from high level skills that no one is selling and that I wouldn't have the money to purchase even if they were selling it.

I think the skill lines need to be categorized into Tier 1, Tier 2, etc paths that are intended for certain levels of experience in the game. The Tier 1 paths should not intertwine with Tier 2...or Tier 4...or Tier 12....skill lines unless the items that are needed are profitable enough for people to be selling them at reasonable prices in the markets or to the vendors. NPC's in the low level areas should not only want high level gifts that I cannot acquire (through farming, buying or other means) as a low level player.

I am loving the game, but the things demotivating me are getting to much for me to keep going. There just needs to be some streamlining of who needs what when. The progression system, at least within the first 200 hours or so of gameplay, needs streamlining. It needs to be more obvious to the player what they are supposed to be doing and when they should be doing it. There does need to be some rails. The rails can be branching rails where you don't really want the player trying to pursue all the branches. It is just that when I hit a wall I want that wall to be meaningful and not incidental to the entire system. If the walls mean nothing, then I don't know what I am supposed to do and just get frustrated and quit.

Look at the web between all the skills and favor lines and trade skills and snip some of the lines. Streamline the progression and give the player some idea of what it is that you want the player to be doing at certain levels of the game.

[alleryn]

(snip)
You make a lot of good points here, but as far as not being able to make money goes, you don't seem to address NPC work orders at all. This is the main way i made/make money throughout playing PG, so i think you need to address why this isn't a viable way to make money for your argument to hold water.

I recall struggling for about 3 weeks when i started. Then i found the NPC work order board at the docks (it's now in Serbule) and within about a week (~80 hours) i felt like i'd turned the corner money-wise and haven't really looked back since.

Not that i had everything i wanted at that point or anything, but it went from feeling like i was possibly drowning to feeling like i was doing a fairly leisurely backstroke in stormy uneven waters.

[Celerity]

I've read a lot of new players complaining about the game and honestly I think the thing I see the most in common is fire magic. Fire magic is a very good skill if you're an experienced player and you see it get recommended a lot, it's actually quite easy for an experienced player to take it on a completely fresh character with no outside help, but for new players it's a complete trap.

As much as I like the freedom of experienced players being able to go fire magic on their new characters, I think it might genuinely be a good idea to just lock new players out of fire magic completely. It seems the warnings about it costing a lot of money and not being for new players achieve nothing, since you still see so many people taking it then complaining about not being able to afford anything.

Just for comparison, if you don't take fire magic and take literally any other skill as a noob, beyond some minor (by comparison) costs for stuff like archery and animal handling, you could literally never sell a single item in your life, never talk to a single npc except the one who trains the skill and never see a single council in your life (beyond initial training cost) and still be completely fine up until level 50. At which point you could then transition into doing the daily and easily favour up the few vendor npcs you need and have enough cash for your unlocks easily within a few days of absolutely nothing.

I'm not recommending anyone ever does this, I'm just hoping to get the point across that most of the time you don't even need this money unless you decided to take fire magic.

What I would recommend is doing the dailies early, even around level 15 it's possible to get carried if you're careful and I don't think too many people mind but I would ask first if it was ok. You then use the gear from that to favour npcs and get money to buy a pocket set and tool set from player vendors. You can do the daily multiple times per day too, just without the quest subsequent times which is still worthwhile for gear if you're new. From there you've basically already cleared all issues since the pocket set solves inventory and makes combat easy, the tool set lets you get even more money/favour items and you've already favoured up all the npcs you need with high level gear or sold the gear to then buy other favour items from player shops.

If you don't want to just cheese the entire game and make it far too easy, then it's a bit more difficult but still very easy to join a guild, do surveying, do gardening, do work orders, you can make your own pocket set at a very low level of tailoring, except it won't make early game combat a joke and it's essentially the same result.

I myself started again new with fairy quite recently with no help from my main character and I had over 100k cash, the main serb vendor npcs at like family or soul mates, as well as basic levels and training in a few non-combat skills by the time I was about lvl 36 and a week into it. Fairy does start at lvl 30 so it does make it easier, but like I said most of the money was just from running the daily which you can get carried through at a lower level anyway.

[Cleo]

You make a lot of good points here, but as far as not being able to make money goes, you don't seem to address NPC work orders at all. This is the main way i made/make money throughout playing PG, so i think you need to address why this isn't a viable way to make money for your argument to hold water.


This is a good point, I did not mention the NPC workorders. This is another way I tried to make money, and I think I must be doing it wrong. Question: How are you making money this way? :)

The work orders that I find are either to high level industry for me, require things in craft lines I am trying not to pursue right now, or don't pay very well. It might just be that I don't look at the boards often enough, but I have done 10-15 of these and they while they are mildly profitable, they certainly are not helping me build my pile of councils up very high. I can do the cooking, gardening, tanning and leather working ones up to about level 30 for each of those. Some of them want things that almost never drop, but I take those and wait for the items to accumulate. Mostly I do these with the idea that leveling industry will eventually be something I will want later on, not to make money. It is another thing that can kind of send a new player off on tangents as they frequently want things in various trade skills that a new player might not have unlocked yet. So then you go right back to needing money to make money and trying to do everything.

Again, maybe I am just doing it wrong. I often feel like I am playing the game "wrong". This is part of why I was saying that the progression needs to be streamlined. Not so much to make the game easier, but to make the intended progression clearer to the player.



I've read a lot of new players complaining about the game and honestly I think the thing I see the most in common is fire magic.

I'm not actually trying to complain about fire magic costs. To be honest, I feel like the fire magic costs are reasonable. Players usually sell the sulfur and saltpeter in the player vendor area at 300-400 councils a piece, the recipes cost a reasonable amount, and Velkort is pretty easy to gain favor with. I just farmed up a bunch of spider legs and spider webs, and he was happy with me.

Now, the fact that I am spending a lot of money on leveling fire magic, may be part of why I am broke and having trouble with raising favor for other NPC's and buying all the other trade skill recipes. So this may be impacting the early game gameplay more than I realize as a noob. Some things are hard to judge when you haven't played very long and don't understand what the intended progression is supposed to be.

Actually, I am not TRYING to complain at all, although it may sound like it. I am more trying to point out how if feels to play the game as a complete noob and make some suggestions about streamlining the progression and suggest that it could be made more obvious to new players what they are supposed to be doing. I felt like the very early game did that, but after about 10 hours of gameplay or so everything got very confusing very quickly.


Just for comparison, if you don't take fire magic and take literally any other skill as a noob, beyond some minor (by comparison) costs for stuff like archery and animal handling, you could literally never sell a single item in your life, never talk to a single npc except the one who trains the skill and never see a single council in your life (beyond initial training cost) and still be completely fine up until level 50.

Which skills are you talking about?

Archery seemed just as expensive as fire magic with all the fletching and arrow making that was going to be required.

Staff is pretty expensive to level because gaining favor with Hogan is pretty expensive. He wants poetry, staves and fruit. This can be pretty expensive to grind and takes a long time. His recipes aren't that cheap either and the normal unlocks for staff are mostly defensive so you want the recipes he has. Also, it is gated behind Hogan's Quest.

Priest you need to go to Kur for, and then that vendor wants pretty expensive items to gain favor with (lapis). You can grind it with surveying, but then you need to grind the surveying vendor as well. Then you end up needing to buy the flame strike recipes because the low level ones don't drop very often, and those recipes cost a lot.

Ice magic is for high level players and, gated by Kur tower, I still haven't unlocked that. Druid is for high level players and, gated by needing a level 50 skill, I haven't unlocked that. Battle chemistry is gated behind Alchemy and needing to go to Rahu, a level 51-60 area. I haven't unlocked that. Necro is gated behind the second level of the Serbule Crypt, and I haven't unlocked that. Hammer is gated behind Agrashab, who is in Sun Vale, a level 30-45 area. I haven't unlocked yet.

Psychology I did not figure out the exact conversation line that I needed to unlock. I could have looked it up, but as a new player I did not know that. I thought that there was something somewhere I was supposed to do to make Riger like me and I was just missing it. Then I never got around to unlocking psychology. Looking at the wiki, I think you are going to have to grind a bunch of vendors for favor. Mentalism I did not figure out either.

I think what you mean is that there are a couple of other skills that would be cheaper, not literally any other skill. You cannot even unlock a lot of the other skills until you are much higher level. So I guess you are saying that some of the other low level skills would be cheaper. It is not obvious to a new player that taking these other skill lines would be better, or cheaper. How to unlock some of them is not even obvious.

Again, I am not trying to complain. I am trying to point out that new players get confused and go down wrong paths and start bashing into progression walls. Most of the stuff I just wrote about I only know because I just looked it up on the wiki. If you don't know what to look up, and the game doesn't guide you, things can be very frustrating.


What I would recommend is doing the dailies early, even around level 15 it's possible to get carried if you're careful and I don't think too many people mind but I would ask first if it was ok. You then use the gear from that to favour npcs and get money to buy a pocket set and tool set from player vendors. You can do the daily multiple times per day too, just without the quest subsequent times which is still worthwhile for gear if you're new. From there you've basically already cleared all issues since the pocket set solves inventory and makes combat easy, the tool set lets you get even more money/favour items and you've already favoured up all the npcs you need with high level gear or sold the gear to then buy other favour items from player shops.

If you don't want to just cheese the entire game and make it far too easy, then it's a bit more difficult but still very easy to join a guild, do surveying, do gardening, do work orders, you can make your own pocket set at a very low level of tailoring, except it won't make early game combat a joke and it's essentially the same result.


Some of this sounds like good ideas that I should try, and I will do that. I thought dailies were for higher level players doing endgame, and I never tried to join anyone doing them. I have joined a guild, and done surveying and gardening.

Pockets are learned from a vendor in Kur, which is not something a very new player is going to know or be able to acquire. They can probably ask someone to make them for them, but only if they know they are a thing. Tailoring is pretty expensive to level when you have no money. I can try to ask someone in game to make them for me. Not sure how viable this is, but will see.



I myself started again new with fairy quite recently with no help from my main character and I had over 100k cash, the main serb vendor npcs at like family or soul mates, as well as basic levels and training in a few non-combat skills by the time I was about lvl 36 and a week into it. Fairy does start at lvl 30 so it does make it easier, but like I said most of the money was just from running the daily which you can get carried through at a lower level anyway.


Starting a new character is not really the same as starting as a new player. By the time you start a new character, you probably know what it is you should do to level the character quickly.

I am coming at this from the perspective of a new player who doesn't know how to do that stuff. As a new player, I don't know how to get around the roadblocks I am running into. I spend a lot of time feeling like I am playing the game "wrong". I spend a lot of time trying random things and running into new walls. I probably am spending a lot of money on inefficient things. There are probably better ways I could do everything. I just don't know what those things are.

I'm not trying to say the game as bad. That is not what I am saying at all. I am saying the game can be very demotivating for a new player. I think streamlining the progression and making the intended progression more obvious would really help with this.

[Mikhaila]

It's interesting. I really enjoyed the early game. Finding money, storage and favor was all part of it. Little mini games you had to manipulate in addition to just killing things. The game seemed to have many interlocking puzzles you had to solve all at once. But I really had fun at it. It was difficult, and I think that's the key here: Some of us enjoy a more difficult game, a tougher puzzle, and some of us don't.

Managing your own expectations is important. Coming into a new game and expecting it to be similar to other games may cause some frustration, because what you expect might not be what you get. Some games hold your hand and you race up to the top level to start raiding. this isn't one of them. The fun is in the playing, not necessarily at getting to level 80 in a couple of combat skills.

But there is a lot of help when you start out. The community is good. There is the wiki you can access from in game. The clues are there for everything else. There are pathways to getting where you want to go. Just might take a bit to find them.

And some things are harder than others. I think that can cause some problems. Things aren't equal, and they don't need to be. We can each do everything. It's only when you decide "I'm a fire mage" "I only want to craft" "I hate crafting" "I want to do XX right from the start" that you cause some problems for yourself. Or maybe you ignored that warning and are now a cow :) Which, holy shit, I enjoyed. I leveled up cow for a bit and went back and kicked her ass and got on with my game. Was actually great fun. And I learned to NOT ignore those warnings :)

Let's skip to level 70. I quit for a bit, came back to find out level 80 was available. I ..EXPECTED....to just go unlock my skills. And I was disappointed. I needed money to unlock them, had to bribe fairies, and learn new things to do it. I scavenged for paintings, learned brewing, did little quests....and finally unlocked my skills to start the process of getting to 80. Now I'm working on upgrading my gear. Cooking better food. And making some good beer and terrible whiskey. It was a bit like what I did when i started the game.

[Mikhaila]

I'm not trying to say the game as bad. That is not what I am saying at all. I am saying the game can be very demotivating for a new player. I think streamlining the progression and making the intended progression more obvious would really help with this.

What if there is no intended progression? It's a sandbox. Does there really need to be an intended progression?

The flip side to the game being more difficult at the start is that it offers you a lot more options. Normally, you pick a class and just like that you've locked in your progression forever. Your choices were taken away in exchange for that road map and easy access to a subset of skills. Here? You can try out a dozen different combinations and keep experimenting.

[Cleo]

Coming into a new game and expecting it to be similar to other games may cause some frustration, because what you expect might not be what you get. Some games hold your hand and you race up to the top level to start raiding. this isn't one of them. The fun is in the playing, not necessarily at getting to level 80 in a couple of combat skills.

Raiding. LOL. Yeah, I don't raid. I'm what you would call a hardcore casual. I have over 1k hours in GW2 and have never raided, never pvp'd, never map completed, never really done any endgame content.

I like to walk around the maps and talk to npcs. I like doing all the small quests and seeing what NPC's say when I finish them. I like to explore every nook and cranny of every map. I like crafting. I think I am probably exactly the kind of player this game is aimed at.

I don't care if I ever hit 80 in a combat skill. I don't care that I cannot do the harder dungeons yet. I don't care if it takes me months to max out a single trade skill.

I care that I cannot figure out how to do anything and am always broke and the vendors don't like me and I feel like I am playing the entire game entirely wrong and cannot figure out what it is I should be doing to not feel that way.


What if there is no intended progression? It's a sandbox. Does there really need to be an intended progression?

The flip side to the game being more difficult at the start is that it offers you a lot more options. Normally, you pick a class and just like that you've locked in your progression forever. Your choices were taken away in exchange for that road map and easy access to a subset of skills. Here? You can try out a dozen different combinations and keep experimenting.


I totally get that the game is a sandbox, and I do not feel that people should be locked out of doing anything, or locked in to doing anything. I guess I feel that there should be some SUGGESTED paths of progression that help new players get into the game. Entry points, if you will, that start you out with some guidance.

I think there does need to be some intended progression, at least early on. Otherwise you will lose new players before they get a chance to really get into the game. Guide players down paths that will help them get established and committed to the game. Leave the player free to ignore the suggestions, but add some rails to pull new players into the game with less frustration. Once they are pulled in, the rails can go away.

[ErDrick]

I actually quit this game over money, the amount needed was just too much trouble to be fun any longer especially since I didn't find the combat to be all that satisfying.

If you do not enjoy work orders you are closed off from making it in meaningful amounts, all other avenues have been systematically eliminated. Personally I hated work orders because crafting any simple item is a mess of you need these 6 items, which also have to be individually crafted ...some of the sub-components need to be crafted, and then some of the sub components of those sub components also need to be individually crafted. Some people enjoy that sort of thing but not everyone is going to. The main draw of this game is that you can do so many things, but if there is only ONE way to make the money to afford doing all these fun things, and you don't enjoy it ...you are fucked.

It actually gets worse if you are trying to level up a skill such as augmentation because you must choose weather to sell your gear for money or disassemble it for experience. Oh you need both? have fun buddy.

When I heard that favor would eventually be reset it was basically the last straw for me, since I enjoyed giving gifts for favor exactly ....zero amounts. You know what made that suck less though? ( and also eliminated the problem of you must use X skill to beat Y dungeon - you know like ghost war caches ) was belts that determined what gear types would drop for you, because then you could continue to progress the skills you wanted and enjoy the game even if it meant temporarily switching to something you didn't want to actually use, but nope... fun is not allowed.

If money was less of a huge barrier to unlocking combat skills this game would have remained fun for a much longer amount of time, there are tons and tons of skills I still wanted to play with but the prohibitive costs, again, made it no longer worth the effort. This was especially bad for me because I have no way of knowing if skill A+B would even be viable after all that effort, and after years of doing it anyways I decided enough was enough. I stuck with it as long as I could, because the game has some really cool ideas and I still think Citan is a cool ass dude as far as game developers go. ( plus the community, you guys are awesome for the most part.)

You may not agree with what I or the OP are saying here, but they are valid complaints. Try to especially look at this from the perspective of a person who is actually new to the game, being able to do work orders require huge amounts of storage. Most of the people saying just do work orders, have several tradeskill mules+ their associated storage just to make that viable, it's a bit hypocritical. ( especially since in most cases this was built on the back of other alternate forms of money making that used to but no longer exist. )

How much grinding is acceptable just to be able to do the one thing you actually wanted to do? Way less then the game forces you into. Currently you have to grind money for several tradeskills so you can grind the favor to unlock the trainers, then grind more money to pay those trainers, and then you can -finally- start grinding the skill you actually wanted to play with and maybe have some fun.

This was a problem for me and I had been playing since I dunno, 2014? So I can sort of put myself into a new players shoes and see how it would be much, much worse for them.

[alleryn]

Question: How are you making money this way?

The work orders that I find are either to high level industry for me, require things in craft lines I am trying not to pursue right now, or don't pay very well. It might just be that I don't look at the boards often enough, but I have done 10-15 of these and they while they are mildly profitable, they certainly are not helping me build my pile of councils up very high. I can do the cooking, gardening, tanning and leather working ones up to about level 30 for each of those.
Maybe part of it is that by the time i realized that NPC work orders were a thing, i had a lot of raw materials saved up, and the work orders just provided an outlet to use the stuff up (i had no intention of selling a bunch of oak wood to an npc when i knew i'd want to use it to level carpentry at some point, but i also didn't want to just make a bunch of chairs and sell those because it didn't seem profitable. Finding NPC work orders let me turn the raw materials into cash and get xp at the same time).

Also, some of the work orders are less-than-break-even (in the sense that you could simply sell the ingredients for more than the work order will get you from crafting them into something). And some only make a little money. So the trick is doing the ones that make you a good chunk of cash. For that starter board, the carpentry work orders are fantastic. There are also some very good cooking work orders and alchemy work orders. Those are the ones that come to mind.

Also it doesn't take long to level up industry, so you will gain access to more boards that provide additional opportunities.

This is the method i've used to make most of my money, but there's also the Casino now, which i hear can be used to make cash (i tend to just break even more or less, but i'm terrible at match 3 games). There's also the daily dungeon which can give somewhere around 10k per day and doesn't require much, since strong groups offer to carry people through quite frequently throughout the day.

[Celerity]

Now, the fact that I am spending a lot of money on leveling fire magic, may be part of why I am broke and having trouble with raising favor for other NPC's and buying all the other trade skill recipes. So this may be impacting the early game gameplay more than I realize as a noob. Some things are hard to judge when you haven't played very long and don't understand what the intended progression is supposed to be.

I of course don't understand your exact situation but I would estimate just getting all the spells up to lvl 40 fire magic would have cost you somewhere in the region of about 30k, which is a cost that other skills available to new players simply don't have. That 30k alone could have gotten you soul mates with probably 3 key npcs. Once you then consider that the earlier you favour up the npcs, the more money you make in a snowball effect, I think it is significant.

As for the complaining part, sorry but I wasn't picking you out specifically, I've just read more posts than I can count where people have talked about struggling for money simultaneously with fire magic.


Which skills are you talking about? [...]

I think what you mean is that there are a couple of other skills that would be cheaper, not literally any other skill. You cannot even unlock a lot of the other skills until you are much higher level. So I guess you are saying that some of the other low level skills would be cheaper. It is not obvious to a new player that taking these other skill lines would be better, or cheaper. How to unlock some of them is not even obvious.

Sorry, little bit of an exaggeration, the only skills on the same level as fire magic in terms of cost are ice magic, archery and battle chemistry. No other skills require you to pay money to unlock the abilities pre-level 50 and both ice magic and battle chemistry aren't available to new players. I would also say archery is probably about half the cost of fire magic, at least maybe to about level 40 or so. In fact you can actually get to about lvl 20 of archery completely for free like any other "normal" skill just using the arrows you get off the starter island.

As for the other skills, favour for hogan is irrelevant since you can get the quest to learn staff at neutral favour, sword, unarmed, psychology and archery are all free trains on the island (or if you missed them, still very cheap), shield, knife fighting, necromancy, druid, all animal forms and bard are all either free or close to free to train, and animal handling, priest, hammer and warden are all cheap to train, compared to the cost of fire magic and all of the above skills have 0 usage costs unless you optionally choose to use throwing knives with knife fighting,which arguably aren't even that good. Now obviously some of these are locked from new players as you already mentioned and a few have some extra optional abilities you may want to buy, but in my opinion you'd be looking at something like a few thousand spent, maybe up to 10k to get these to lvl 40, so I would say you're spending about 3-10x as much on fire magic as you would on *nearly* any other skill in the game.

An example would be flamestrike for priest as you mentioned, but the point is you really don't have to buy flamestrike to still be able to use priest effectively, especially at the lower levels, whereas for fire magic it's sort of an unavoidable cost that also manages to be probably the 2nd highest in the game after battle chemistry. And this is true for the psychology, mentalism, sword, hammer, archery etc. skill unlocks too.


Some of this sounds like good ideas that I should try, and I will do that. I thought dailies were for higher level players doing endgame, and I never tried to join anyone doing them. I have joined a guild, and done surveying and gardening.

Dailies are lvl 40-50 dungeons so actually they're for about mid-game players currently, and in the future I'm sure it will even be considered early game when there's level 100+ content around. I think it should be advertised better, maybe alongside the work order board and pocket gear, because they are things that people should be doing/using, but nothing actually inside the game tells you that you should be doing/using them unless you talk to other players.


Starting a new character is not really the same as starting as a new player. By the time you start a new character, you probably know what it is you should do to level the character quickly.

I am coming at this from the perspective of a new player who doesn't know how to do that stuff. As a new player, I don't know how to get around the roadblocks I am running into. I spend a lot of time feeling like I am playing the game "wrong". I spend a lot of time trying random things and running into new walls. I probably am spending a lot of money on inefficient things. There are probably better ways I could do everything. I just don't know what those things are.

I'm not trying to say the game as bad. That is not what I am saying at all. I am saying the game can be very demotivating for a new player. I think streamlining the progression and making the intended progression more obvious would really help with this.

I think you're correct, but it's about simplifying the problem from: it's not possible to do anything in the game since you just run into brickwalls everywhere, to: the methods exist in game to allow you to progress quickly, just the information about how to do so isn't communicated clearly enough, or sometimes at all.

I know that when I was a noob, it was a bit of a different world with barely any people online to even ask advice from or trade with but there were also no player vendors and I didn't know that pocket gear was even a thing that existed. I'm just not sure how you would communicate that information without it being too crude or in your face. I don't remember having any problems with favour though since I just tried everything the person liked and just used whatever worked the best for me. In case you're wondering, 9/10 times it's either gems or gear, with the higher rarity gear giving sometimes ridiculous amounts of favour. Skulls and skins can also be good since they're easy to farm en masse, but low level skins are usually bad. Maybe it's just because I actually somewhat enjoyed surveying that I was able to try the gems as a noob, but they're easy enough to buy from the player shops even if you don't.

[Mikhaila]

I think there does need to be some intended progression, at least early on. Otherwise you will lose new players before they get a chance to really get into the game. Guide players down paths that will help them get established and committed to the game. Leave the player free to ignore the suggestions, but add some rails to pull new players into the game with less frustration. Once they are pulled in, the rails can go away. Well, there is. What do you learn in the tutorial? Sword, unarmed, psychology etc. Those are decent skills to get you started in the game.


But in any case, you are asking for rails on the sandbox? saying 'suggested skills' and not 'intended progression'?

[Coglin]

If you do not enjoy work orders you are closed off from making it in meaningful amounts

This is absolutely false. I have never done any work orders to date. I hit 70bard/70psych in about my first month of playing with 1 million+ councils in my pocket. All I did was a little research on the wiki, reading some guides on making money to educate myself from other players, as well as asking some friends I made in-game and simply asking a few questions in chat.

Skinning is very easy. It can be learned as you go and put skins in your pocket. The NPCs that buy skins tend to take them as favor too. you can sell almost 265k of skins to NPCs each week.

Surveying cost very little to get into but the majority of NPCs take either gems or even slabs of some kind for favor. They both sell easily on the player vendors as well as many NPCs paying for them.

let us take player vendors out of this. The sam NPCs that buy armor or jewelry, for example, take armor or jewelry for favor. You sell some for cash and gift some for favor, unlocking more cash.

[Roccandil]

The easiest way to make money in the game (that I've found) is skinning. I bought an amazing skinning knife from a player merchant (+10 to skinning level), and never regretted it. I've found three NPCs who will buy skins/leather, and all of them are easy to level to Soulmates, and once you do, that's a lot of councils per week, enough that's it hard for me to get it all. (And, of course, while you're getting skins, you're also getting other things to sell.)

I also note that tanning skins to leather makes you even more money (the leather is worth more than the skins + tannin), and you grind tanning at the same time.

My problem is that I'm tired of NPCs dictating how I play. :( That doesn't feel like a sandbox to me, and if I unlock everything I care about and largely free myself of the NPCs, I'm not seeing an endgame I would enjoy (gear gambling isn't my thing).

The fact that everyone has to craft their own endgame-gear (if they want the best) is a warning to me. Otherwise, if there were a viable endgame beyond crafting the best gear, the attunement restriction could be lifted, allowing that gear to enter the economy (like Albion Online).

I really wish the world wasn't static. I envision something like the AI playing Civilization or Master of Magic or Stellaris, while we play in their ever-changing world as single characters, that can contribute to the world-changing in a small way. :) (I've been looking for that endgame for a long time!)

[Coglin]

The fact that everyone has to craft their own endgame-gear (if they want the best) is a warning to me. Otherwise, if there were a viable endgame beyond crafting the best gear, the attunement restriction could be lifted, allowing that gear to enter the economy (like Albion Online).

No one has to craft their own end game armor, anyone can do it for you.

The fact that crafting armor is the best is a boon to me. I am sick of games making crafting useless in endgame.


My problem is that I'm tired of NPCs dictating how I play

That seems fairly disingenuous considering selling all of your items to NPCs was clearly your individual choice as your path to money when you can run dailies, do work orders, and of course manage your own player vendor which makes massive amounts of many by anyone who puts any thought I to it.

[Roccandil]

No one has to craft their own end game armor, anyone can do it for you.

You can transmute/augment items for someone else, without locking the item to your toon? (Ideally, you'd be able to sell items like that in a vendor stall to anyone.)


That seems fairly disingenuous considering selling all of your items to NPCs was clearly your individual choice as your path to money when you can run dailies, do work orders, and of course manage your own player vendor which makes massive amounts of many by anyone who puts any thought I to it.

Regardless of how I make money, I can't progress without raising NPC favor levels.

[cr00cy]

You can transmute/augment items for someone else, without locking the item to your toon? (Ideally, you'd be able to sell items like that in a vendor stall to anyone.)


Transmutations bind sitem to you, agumentation don't. Few NPC even offer to agument item for a fee (usually gear vendors).

[Roccandil]

Transmutations bind sitem to you, agumentation don't. Few NPC even offer to agument item for a fee (usually gear vendors).

All the augments I've seen trigger attunement. Is there a way to do an augment without attuning an item?


No one has to craft their own end game armor, anyone can do it for you.

A few more things:

I realize you can buy crafted gear from players, but as far as I can tell, it has to be non-augmented and non-transmuted, so to me, that's just buying a base item that will need a lot of work done to it to get the mods you want.

I expect finding an item with mods for your build for sale from a player would be rare.


That seems fairly disingenuous considering selling all of your items to NPCs was clearly your individual choice as your path to money when you can run dailies, do work orders, and of course manage your own player vendor which makes massive amounts of many by anyone who puts any thought I to it.

Let's see:

- I don't like dailies in any game: to me, they seem like a cheap attempt to get players to play, and ultimately result in players feeling like they have to do them. I'd rather a game stood on its organic gameplay.
- NPC work orders are, well, NPC driven. :) They don't seem to make much money, though I've done them just to get industry experience. The best ones I've done rely on crafting, which drags you into the whole NPC favor nightmare.
- Player work orders are very nice, and I've filled quite a few and gotten good money that way (though it's not as reliable as skinning). And even if I don't have what folks are looking for, it's good to get an idea of what's valuable to players (so I know what to bank up or look for).
- A vendor stall would be cool, but the Serbule vendor area is lag hell, and I avoid it as much as I can. :( (The casino area doesn't seem to be used much, though it's not as bad.)

Again, what I dislike most about PG's game mechanics is the favor trap: I wouldn't mind spending money on training so much if I could just buy it outright, but having to raise favor with NPCs just for the privilege of buying something isn't fun for me. I've burned out doing that, and have taken a break from playing.

Would be nice if you could distill your training into books to sell at vendors, and thus bypass NPCs entirely for others.

[Coglin]

All the augments I've seen trigger attunement. Is there a way to do an augment without attuning an item?

I realize you can buy crafted gear from players, but as far as I can tell, it has to be non-augmented and non-transmuted, so to me, that's just buying a base item that will need a lot of work done to it to get the mods you want.

I expect finding an item with mods for your build for sale from a player would be rare.



And dropped gear isn't non-augmented and non-transmuted? You will not ask a friend or pay someone to make a 6 modded item that is non-augmented and non-transmuted but you feel a drop one serves you better?

Can you explain the logic to that please?



Let's see:

- I don't like dailies in any game: to me, they seem like a cheap attempt to get players to play, and ultimately result in players feeling like they have to do them. I'd rather a game stood on its organic gameplay.
- NPC work orders are, well, NPC driven. :) They don't seem to make much money, though I've done them just to get industry experience. The best ones I've done rely on crafting, which drags you into the whole NPC favor nightmare.
- Player work orders are very nice, and I've filled quite a few and gotten good money that way (though it's not as reliable as skinning). And even if I don't have what folks are looking for, it's good to get an idea of what's valuable to players (so I know what to bank up or look for).
- A vendor stall would be cool, but the Serbule vendor area is lag hell, and I avoid it as much as I can. :( (The casino area doesn't seem to be used much, though it's not as bad.)

Whether you like dailies or not is not particularly relevant. It simply supports my point that you chose to use selling to NPCs as your access to money.

"NPC" work orders generally pay very well. I am a little unclear how you determine they do not.

I barely get any lag in Serbule. maybe a little while moving. Sounds to me like a bad excuse to justify your not using it and thus trying to disingenuously stick to your position of claiming the only way to make money is by selling to NPCs.

You do not have to like all the options or any of them for that matter. The point is that it was originally claimed that THE ONLY option was favor with and sells to NPCs which we clearly have determined is not the case.







Again, what I dislike most about PG's game mechanics is the favor trap: I wouldn't mind spending money on training so much if I could just buy it outright, but having to raise favor with NPCs just for the privilege of buying something isn't fun for me. I've burned out doing that, and have taken a break from playing.

Would be nice if you could distill your training into books to sell at vendors, and thus bypass NPCs entirely for others.

Enjoy your break, but otherwise I agree that earning favor can be tedious and annoying at times. i do not agree about the perspective with books.

[Mikhaila]

(In reply to no one in particular. )


No one has to earn favor.
No one has to earn money.
No one has to grind exp and slay monsters.
No one has to work on more than one class.
No one has to do trade skills.
No one has to learn transmutation to play endlessly with your gear.
No one has to explore, forage, skin, butcher, stare at dead things guts, talk to dead people, die and get experience from it, become an animal, or find all the cool lore in the game.

NO ONE HAS TO DO SHIT!!! Just don't play the game at all.

You GET to do all these things. You don't HAVE to. The game is an opportunity for entertainment. It gives you a lot of options to do things. Or to not do things. Complaining about the options for playing the game is just useless. If you don't like something, don't do it.

Part of my attitude is from running a game store. We sell a huge amount of models and paints. But I hear "Do I HAVE to paint these?" Nope, you GET to paint them, it's a hobby, people enjoy painting. If you don't like painting, don't do it. But for some reason I'll have people rant forever about 'Having to paint models', and I'll tell them something similar to what I tell people in this game: "It's your hobby, paint or don't paint, whichever you like. But don't complain loudly that you hate painting, when other people enjoy it."

Here we have a fairly unique game. it offers a lot of skills and mechanics. Often they can take some time and work, but offer a lot of benefits. I've seen some long term players do amazing things because they have the best food and snacks and cheese. Make potions. Use sigils. And a dozen other things that made me think "I want to be like that guy when I grow up". It encourages me to keep working on things, and as I get better, the game becomes more and more fun.

If you want the enjoyment of overcoming obstacles , you have to have obstacles. If you just see a lot of the game as a grind and it isn't fun, then absolutely a time for a break and play something like wow.

[Cleo]

Snip

You seem more than a little bit hostile. Maybe take a breath?



NPC favor, on the other hand, shouldn't feel grindy. "Grindy" just means boring. Leveling anything in any MMO is repetitive, and if you really notice the repetition it's called "grindy." NPCs favor is just a generic leveling mechanism, so the actual way that you raise favor can change. Maybe I should reduce the focus on item gifts by adding a few hundred more favor quests. (They'd naturally have to be very samey, but then, so is gifting right now.) My question is: do you think having a bunch more directed leveling goals for favor (kill-ten-monster quests, fetch-the-gizmo-from-the-dungeon-chest quests, etc.) would be worth the effort?


I personally would like having a bunch more favor quests. I like those way more than just giving gifts. The NPC's in this game are funny, and I love reading their dialog when I pickup and return quests. I think it would make the favor leveling feel less grindy and add more immersion in the game. I like talking to NPC's.



Dailies are lvl 40-50 dungeons so actually they're for about mid-game players currently, and in the future I'm sure it will even be considered early game when there's level 100+ content around. I think it should be advertised better, maybe alongside the work order board and pocket gear, because they are things that people should be doing/using, but nothing actually inside the game tells you that you should be doing/using them unless you talk to other players.


I did my first daily yesterday, and I definitely feel this was an activity I was missing. A fun dungeon with lots of quick councils. Running it with the higher level players in my guild gives you some sense of where the game is going later on and is very motivating. It provides the money I need to keep my trade skill leveling going, and helps with favor leveling. And it gives you something else to do while leveling that stuff. It is good to do a couple different types of gameplay to keep things from getting monotonous. Maybe they could add some in game hints for players around level 40 that they should look into starting running the dailies?

[Lyesea]

Hey everyone!

Quite the thread; actually made a forum account to reply.

So I am a brand new player, started around the 25th as a demo account and purchased a day or so after.

Now I'm far from even mid level, sword/dagger around mid 20s.

I have LOVED the new player experience, I have tried hard to avoid any online resource and to try and utilize the exploration, sandbox, and community avenues first.

I have read a bunch of reviews so knew of the inventory and storage woes. I went in with a mindset of being a new green horned adventurer.

I set myself a goal, explore the map, find monsters that were challenging but didnt take consumables. After my first death I realized my trusty rat minion wasnt too fond of death and left. So then I found I needed to train animal handling. I asked another player i happened upon in sewers to join a hunting party and soon thereafter my inventory was full

I sold literally everything to every vendor I could find in the starting keep. Quickly made enough to train, but ate my last cheese! I recalled how I got some.cave cheese in sewers so trekked back. During a harrowing encounter where i was able to tame a rat with less than 5% health remaining.

With the trusty sewer rat I trained sword and dagger one at a time, scouring the sewers. When I felt both were strong enough I left the rat in town and soloed the sewers for a few hours. Enjoying the life of a novice adventurer clearing a semi dangerous place and selling the spoils.

It was then I decided to explore this favor, I enjoyed the quests and appretiate the downtime activities, I think they are a great Avenue for alleviating any favor challenges. After some hours ranking them up I felt like I really did become.comfortable and friends with these NPCs.

Buying some stuff from other players and the used tab felt great, like I was really interacting with a community.

I have started branching out and exploring all the dungeons in the starting area. Can always find people to hunt with and try to get all the way through these areas.

I love the lack of rails, as when I get bored of hunting I try to make some new food to try or go fishing for an hour.

I just wanted to chime in and Express my delight and that I havent felt the sentiments expressed by other new players.

Granted I've played loads of sandbox MMOs but PG has the benefit of not being a full loot pvp!

[Mikhaila]

lol, no cleo, not hostile at all. Have a wonderful day.

[Figger1]

When people say a game is too hard, I always say "If it was easy, you would be looking for another game to play". Sure, some things are hard but after completing them, you have the feel of accomplishment. And I should know, I have 3 characters, so I have to do almost everything 3 times.

[Dumdidum]

The way i started this game and started making money was as follows. I chose Animal handling (the game already hints at giving it a go in the tutorial island) and psychology as 2nd (again, a suggestion from doing the starter island). The great thing about AH is that you basically can run around naked forever with your rat doing the work. No gear is needed to level your toon to 50. It will, obviously, help if you do get your hands on gear with useful mods, but is isnt needed hence no costs involved if you choose not to.
After levelling up to around 15-20 on easy mobs in serbule, i would go to the brain bug dungeon and do my thing there over and over. This dungeon has dead corpses in it, that drop stomachs, sulphur, brass gears, fire dust, metal bars, in other words items that are very useful for yourself or easy to sell to other players.

Once you have some levels (30 +) you can alternatively farm the goblin camps in serbule hill or some other dungeons.

"easy ways to make money":
- farm stomachs in the way mentioned above and sell
- farm fire spiders and fire rats in eltibule for fire dust, sell to other players
- fill workorders from other players
- skinning, selling hides to NPC
- farm skulls, trade them for potions in rahu (the dead mage wandering around) and sell the potions to NPC
- industry
- start a player vendor (if you do this on an alt, and have him get the dance buf at poetry jams that splits the vendor costs in half) you can basically run that vendor at half the cost for as long as the buf stays - usually 2.5 hours)
- buy items from the NPC buy used tab to save costs (in stead of buying at player stalls)

[Roccandil]

And dropped gear isn't non-augmented and non-transmuted? You will not ask a friend or pay someone to make a 6 modded item that is non-augmented and non-transmuted but you feel a drop one serves you better?

Can you explain the logic to that please?

Whether you like dailies or not is not particularly relevant. It simply supports my point that you chose to use selling to NPCs as your access to money.

"NPC" work orders generally pay very well. I am a little unclear how you determine they do not.

I barely get any lag in Serbule. maybe a little while moving. Sounds to me like a bad excuse to justify your not using it and thus trying to disingenuously stick to your position of claiming the only way to make money is by selling to NPCs.

You do not have to like all the options or any of them for that matter. The point is that it was originally claimed that THE ONLY option was favor with and sells to NPCs which we clearly have determined is not the case.

Enjoy your break, but otherwise I agree that earning favor can be tedious and annoying at times. i do not agree about the perspective with books.

It seems very unlikely that I can buy the best gear for my build. Almost certainly I'll have to transmute and augment it myself (however I get the base item). That endgame is not interesting to me.

Money has been fairly easy to get (I've gotten hundreds of thousands, maybe a million+, and pretty much spent it on favor/training as fast as I've gotten it). NPC work orders haven't paid well compared to other activities, however, and the better orders I've seen, for the most part, require good crafting skills, which requires favor. Mostly I've done work orders for skills I'm grinding anyhow.

The lag for me is Serbule is horrible. If it's not for you, great!

TL;DR: The favor system is really what gums things up for me. Earning money isn't that bad, but having to earn favor too is a double whammy, and I've just gotten bored with the repetition.

[Coglin]

It seems very unlikely that I can buy the best gear for my build. Almost certainly I'll have to transmute and augment it myself (however I get the base item). That endgame is not interesting to me.

I am sorry that it doesn't interest you, but it is a core aspect of end game.



The lag for me is Serbule is horrible. If it's not for you, great!

I agree, it is great. I get a hair occasionally in the player vendor area, but nowhere else in serbule. I truly feel for the folks that do, I imagine it sucks.



TL;DR: The favor system is really what gums things up for me. Earning money isn't that bad, but having to earn favor too is a double whammy, and I've just gotten bored with the repetition.

How would you suggest improvements?

[Lyndshade]

Its pretty hard to make suggestions with these types of games. By type I mean the ones classified as hardcore by having a mechanic that is viewed to be repetitive or extremely difficult for some. Providing feedback is also difficult in that 9/10 times a player-base will just say "well that feature is in such and such game go play that instead" or "if its too hard just leave". Any new player that enters has to deal with the difficulty barrier and while help is appreciated the 100+ veterans have to understand this is a niche game with a lot of moving parts. I myself have tried to play the game over 3-4 times through out its lifespan. Just for the record I think the game is great but it falls hard after you leave starter island.

Where most people hit the wall is with fame/inventory. First time I tried the game was with 2 other friends (i never tried playing it solo for whatever reason) and we had the most fun in that starter island oh boy! From collecting numbers from the pillars to getting cheese and taming a rat. My other friend was so excited he was saying "this game is amazing, I just gave this depressed dude some potion now I learned psychology!" Point is we all had the same feeling and thought of that starter island and expectations of what was next was super high. When leaving the island we are riding high! Then we arrived at Serbule.

After 2 hours of killing and banking with my friends at the new town you can sense the immediate problem already. "Do we keep this item?".. "Oh wait you need that for fame for an npc"... "the one in serbule?"... "nop the one in hills".. "listen lets just sell everything for now"
Then some npcs start to not give money so you go into this juggling mode of I am out of bank space and after each exp run having to check inventory for about 10 minutes. Maybe I put something in share bank and login/out 2-3 times passing items. It just killed the mood of group play and we all felt like man what happened after we left the island? This turned into a fame/inventory online game.

Along the years we revisited but this last time it was just me. Went in again and seen the usual number I see when I often log in to check 100-200 players. Not bad for a small community but I seen plenty of feedback to help increase player-base and doesn't really get any attention. These are all things that can make this game flourish but instead continue to be. An example is just google "project gorgon ugly box" and read just how many players find that target box not pleasant to look. Start with the little things and work on the way up. Almost every content that is released feels unfinished and then more new things come out and the rest feel ignored. Every feature in this game is probably at 50% completion. Crafting, fame, skills, maps, new races all not complete yet new feature animal husbandry coming soon along with more new races and housing for a 2 person team? One of these should be at 100% or close to it after so many years.

I went on a rant my point is new players go from seeing something incredible to arriving at Serbule and being disappointed, while its not immediate, after 1-2 days of seeing how it all works you are left with a huge letdown. The entry to having "fun" should be lowered a little if you want to see an increase in player-base numbers. Having to fame and increase my inventory just to quest and play a higher tier class should be more accessible. Currently it is way to tough especially for anyone who wants to start with animal forms.

tldr:
hard to make suggestions with hardcore veteran players around;
new player feels nice at the start but hit with reality once u reach serbule;
Inventory/fame is rough entry level wise;
2 person dev team with too many features none with 100% completion;
Animal forms should be more new player friendly

[Mikhaila]

To play devils advocate, I'd argue a few points from a different view.

1. Yeah, it is harder to argue with older players. Partly because many folks have a lot of experience with the game and with these points. not the first time they've come up. Worth talking about, but you won't find everyone agreeing.

2. Part of the mechanics driving the game are exactly the things you think are bad. How favor drives money and access. How storage affects everything. The need for more vendors. The need to interact with players to get more done.

3. Inventory and Fame can be rough at any level :) It's one of the things that keeps people doing stuff. I just came back a few weeks ago. I'm running around like crazy to get the storage set up in the casino because I need more room for tradeskills.

4. The game isn't finished, and 2 people is reality. The game may take a decade to complete. At the same time, it's very playable. There are some other games I've looked forward to in the past couple of years that have millions to spend and dozens of programmers....and are dead and will never be played. Looking at the landscape of failed MMORPG's , I'm satisfied with what two people are doing.

5. Animal forms weren't even supposed to be a thing. We just pushed for the devs to make the fun curses into permanent ways to play. They were not designed to make them playable, although they get better over time. Animals and Fairies aren't intended to be easy for new people.

ymmv

[Murk]

I figure this is my biggest problem with the game so I might as well mention it. Just the game as a whole is generally oppressive and pushes back too much against the player. It's fine for a bit but as you progress certain things start to just smack you in the face.

Favor

Favor isn't so bad when you start but eventually you get nothing from NPCs until you raise favor. All storage in Rahu is locked behind favor, most training seems to be locked behind favor as well. It's just so tiring to keep facing this mechanic. It's a novel idea that quickly just is turned into more linear grind and wikipedia visits. This of course feeds into your need to hoard items so you can more quickly raise favor.


Hello Folks. I've been out of the game for quite a while now. I went back to play AC. I came back in today to have a look around, and then I saw this item on favor. I would just like to say that I found leveling up favor quite boring, and to be fair I couldn't face doing it.

- But to be clear. I think the concept of favor is good. I don't have a problem with it. It's just that I can't face giving 100(x,y or z) to NPC A. It's not for me. However. The hang-outs are good, and in fact, being a slow as it goes sort of player, I don't mind waiting for things sometimes.

If only there were some other ways to get favor then I think it might make things more interesting. I understand the tie in with improving your skills, but well I've said what I needed to.

On a related note I found leveling Leatherworking had the same feeling, but it's isn't something you have to do.

[Lyesea]

More hang out, more quests, and maybe implementing a deeper small talk system where dialogue choices can raise/lower favor as well as an opportunity for world lore expository, a la romance games. I also liked the quests that explore the relationships between the NPCs in the world.

[Mikhaila]

On a related note I found leveling Leather working had the same feeling, but it's isn't something you have to do.

Leveling leather working should be a bit tough, as currently it lets you make your own set of end game armor, and has the easiest materials to gather by just killing stuff. But, it really isn't that tough. By the time i got my two skills from 70 to 80 I had already easily finished leatherworking.

As to favor, sure, it would be wonderful if the Devs hired a couple of more people to go through all the NPC's and added more stories and quests. And everyone would like more hang outs so you just earned favor while asleep. But seriously, while it would be nice, it falls under "wish list". The devs are working on game mechanics, new dungeons, new areas, expanding to level 90 and then 100, giving us more content. Those are the important things.

When that's all done, they will work on fixing small bugs, polishing the game, better graphics, optimization and getting it ready for release. Very important work.

After that, sure, it would be nice to revisit npc's, stories, hangouts etc. But these are really low on the totem pole.

[mogamir]

I will give my opinion in this thread instead of making a new one.

I think that gatekeeping skill level with currency is a bad design. I've been playing for a few months now and my fun in this game is to dive in dungeons. I really like to spend my time exploring and killing mobs on a dungeon and my plan is to finish them all.

Found myself now capped at lvl 60 without enough money to buy my skills even though I saved every dime from 50-60, didn't even buy skill from 50's. I only care for my 2 combat skills and pathology, but I need arround 300k to keep progressing. In my opinion it makes no sense that I should farm something, like surveying, in order to keep doing things I have fun with.

Assuming that those gates are a tool to dry money from the economy, my suggestion without changing the system would be remove lvl cap skills and raise the price of individuals skills. This way I can still do things I like, feel my character progressing (HP and MP will raise) and my currency will be used if I need more damage.

[Mikhaila]

In reply to Mogamir:

I think the money needed to get over skillcaps isn't so simple as taking money out of the system. I think they also function to push people to do different things to make money. While you and others might want to just run some dungeons and advance only in combat skills, ultimately if that is easy to do, then the game suffers overall. Part of the problem with many MMO's is too easy of a rush to max level. And part of the success of early mmo's like EQ, was the long time it took to get to max level. PG doesn't really have an endgame. You aren't missing out on a huge amount of raid content by not being level 80. So a system focused on pushing players into a longer game may be the objective. It may not work for some people, but may be better overall.

It can be hard though, if only playing part of the game. But there are some very good ways to raise money.
-Are you skinning and butchering mobs? I'm starting to level priest today. I already accumulated 20k in skins killing wolves in kur, and priest isn't up to 30 yet. Stomaches from killing dinos in Elt bring in a ton just from the stomaches. 1000 each, up to 1500. and easy to sell.
-Learn transmutation, now you can run dungeons much easier. When you get to GK, the loot really piles up and you'll lose 2/3 of it if you don't have transmutation.
-If you start skinning, fill work orders for trophy hides.
-Milk the cows and sell the milk. Always work orders up in serbule. Bottles cost 50, milk sells for 200.
-Run the dailies and make 10-20k a day for an hours work, and it's running dungeons which you like.

lots of ways to make that 300k and start saving for unlocks at 80.