Eidolonn
01-21-2022, 06:19 AM
Please allow me to preface this post by stating that I have been asked multiple times by different people to submit my feedback as a new player and that today marks the end of the third week of my time playing Project: Gorgon and although I wanted a more complete perspective of the game before submitting my findings I am uncertain of whether there will be a fourth week and so I am taking the time to reply as of community request before I leave.
Starting Out:
It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the game and within an hour of playing through the tutorial island I knew that Project: Gorgon had something special. I loved that I could equip any different weapon at any time and completely change how my character fought. The writing was good, the world immersive, and I was eager to find my way in the world. That feeling hit a sudden halt when I discovered that all of the loot I had been gathering was tailored to my equipped skills so when I finally did find a weapon I enjoyed using, I had no equipment for it. I deleted my character and only later found out that it is not uncommon for new players to delete their first character. "How important is having gear for my skills, in this game?" I asked myself. Begrudgingly, I decided to give the game another shot and made a new character with the skills that I discovered to be enjoyable. I believe this is where most players stop.
Serbule and the Surrounding Areas:
I'm glad that I decided to make another character because truly this is the best part of the game. I began playing on New Years Day so the population was great and everyone was having a great time. The help channel was a tremendous boon and any time I became stuck the players were there to support me. I learned a lot about the game very quickly and even met some other new players to group up with. Through following the quests I soon found myself at the gates of Serbule Crypt where I found even more people to group up with, several of which I am still friends with today! Even getting inside of the crypt without the skeletal archers and mages killing me was tricky and it became quite clear that to get far in this game you would need to team up with others.
Over the next few days I made it my mission to do as many quests and explore as much of the zone(s) as I could. I sought out a guild to facilitate this desire and because before this point I had experienced nothing beyond the help channel, nearby chat, and speaking with my friends it was a huge culture shock to find that several high level guilds were very toxic, demanding that I search the wiki for information or sign up on their website before I could be included. I did eventually find a guild after a few days of searching. I believe this is where most of those that make it beyond the tutorial island stop.
Eltibule and Sun Vale:
By the time I had reached Eltibule it felt like the player population outside of my newly acquired guild had dropped by as much as 75%. I could go hours without seeing another player, and the range between players had become so great that finding players to work on the same quests or progression as myself had become too great for both parties to benefit simultaneously. I spent a lot of time in this level range soloing, occasionally doing a single dungeon clear per day with my guild at specific hours. It seems like the questions I began to have around this point were no longer answered in the help channel and I was even met with the same animosity I found when searching for a guild for asking simple questions such as: Are the stat benefits of sitting in a chair worth leveling up carpentry? During this period of a few days I had to add as many as 2 or 3 people to my ignore list per day for soliciting to me in private messages when I spoke in the nearby or help channels. I played mostly alone outside of my guild activities and the players I met in the world began to ignore me or run past when I said hello and refused to group up, more concerned with farming art alone or power-leveling their 10th skill. By this point I would argue that 90% of the players who have started this game have quit to find more friendly, social, and fun games.
Kur Mountains:
This is where the game dies. I have played entire days without talking to a single person outside of my friends list, hours at a time without even a single living soul in sight. Nobody wants to group up, nobody wants to do the dungeons. This zone alone took more time than every zone before it, combined, and not simply because the quests are difficult and you find yourself grinding at a snail's pace between the few acts of kindness you will receive from higher level players to aid you in making progress through content that was never intended to be done alone, but because the cost to train becomes exponentially greater as all of your skills begin to hit their respective caps at the same time. With the cost of a trader being 7k per day and the number of users online at any given moment being too low to sell goods to other players via the trade channel, this truly did seem to be "the wall." I looked up and saw a lot of high level players doing group missions, dailies, and even hanging out around town, so I decided to leave the Kur Mountains as quickly as I could... Ilmari is 100% dead. The next two zones have no players in them at all. Kur Mountains is where the game dies. Player traders are asking ridiculous sums of money for crafted armor that can allow me to bypass all of that. The game doesn't mean that much to me, and if you look at the zones following this harsh wasteland you'll see that the players agree.
The Future:
I found a player in global chat that will commission me a full set of gear for a fourth of the price that the player-traders are asking, but only after dealing with the toxic attitude and nay-sayers who think you don't need to have gear to progress through dead zones alone or perhaps are too dissociated from what it means to be new again. True to my word I will be farming to purchase this set of gear over the next few days but gear won't change the number of players in those zones, it will simply allow me to access a greater amount of content alone. The reason this game seems popular is because there are 500 people packed into 3 zones like sardines. The reality of the situation is that this game has fewer players than emulators and indie-projects and in spite of it's 6.8 out of 10 score this game can't even stand toe-to-toe with "F-tier" MMORPGs like Archeage and Rift.
With all of that being said please allow me to more concisely describe my concerns in listed format:
- If you're going to tie regeneration to combat don't force players to stay in combat for a random duration after the fight is over.
- The pathing of mobs in certain dungeons like the goblin dungeon under Eltibule keep or the werewolf cave in the Kur Mountains is atrocious and seems like an artificial difficulty that shouldn't exist for solo players or groups.
- The primary means of making coin in this game should not be through emptying a vendors pocket. Players come first in an MMORPG and so does real-player trading. I shouldn't be selling crafting materials to vendors for money.
- Some skills like Fuel to Flesh have underwhelming values and it feels bad to even waste the time and hotbar slots to use them. Fuel to flesh is 25 more power with a cooldown long enough to only use it once per fight when after the fight is over my regeneration will kick in for 10x more power per interval of time. I can see this skill being useful with mods that are not easily available and secondary to damage. An example more players might be able to appreciate is "Dig Deep" which not only has an activation cost (time) but restores as little as 20% of your power bar every 2 minutes. Brain Scrub becomes irrelevant because a -1 power debuff means nothing when my abilities cost over 100 and my resource pool is over 400.
- Some skills, like Dig Deep or Tundra spikes will force your character to go into "walk mode" which largely defeats the point of using them. Some skills like Tundra Spikes, which is a pbaoe, require a target to activate and should not. Some skills, such as Ring of Fire, will actually put your character in combat mode and force you to suffer regeneration and movement speed penalties without using them on an enemy target.
- Due to the strict requirements to setting up and maintain a trader, quest related goods are not accessible for purchase at low levels because it is not cost or time efficient for mid-level players to list those items. It took me a week to make butter in this game for a quest I received within the first couple of days of playtime because I had to learn cheesemaking, which required me to learn textiling, which required me to grind favor, in the middle of a zone surrounded by mobs, because for all 7 days there was no butter, stools, benches, lapis lazuli, fire powder... on the market.
- I should not be forced to level skills that make no sense thematically for my character and skills that I do not enjoy and should be optional but are not. To unlock augmentation you are required to sink tons of time and money leveling skills that serve no purpose for your character, and benefit you in no way outside of augmentation. This seems like an artifical time-sink and pushes players away.
- There needs to be a way to more easily find parties and guilds. I'm not asking for a "group finder" but it's clear that you need some means of organizing people. Until I found a guild and established a retinue of friends trying to organize dungeons, even low level ones, was a near impossibility. People log on at different times, and want to go to different zones, and don't know what the requirements for activities are or if there even is any in the first place. I think a "meeting board" might help in that players can pin or post messages that they are seeking others or forming parties. Something does need to be done, however, because sitting around the entrance of a zone waiting for more people to show up only goes so far.
- This isn't a personal issue because I haven't made it to a point where I can find satisfaction in grinding out the details but I was informed that the combat logging in this game is too poor to develop a program capable of calculating DPS, HPS, or Damage received. This hurts the longevity of the game.
- If flying or swimming drains power it should also offer endurance experience. There is no swimming skill, running, or jumping skills, although these seem more optional.
- The difference between players using running speed modifications and those that are not is too severe. A player with the wisdom to equip run-speed enhancing gear that you can find at levels 5-10 alongside a running potion of trivial difficulty and a skill that provides greater movement is the difference between waiting 5 minutes for everyone in your group to arrive or 30 minutes. Finding people to group with is difficult enough without the party disbanding due to boredom. I believe mounts may help to alleviate this present issue.
- I have heard complaints from multiple people that when unlocking a new skill such as ice magic or druidism that they should not have to re-level their skills from 1. I believe this is a valid complaint that although did not affect me because I was at the time working on unlocking augmentation would have potentially caused me to quit and find a new game to "start over" in.
- I love that you can open a browser page to the wiki from within the game, but 95% of the information on the wikipedia is void. For a game that is... 8 years into development with in-game support and functionality I expect more.
- It took me 2 weeks to realize that I didn't need the crystal awl from the starting quest in Serbule and when asking in global chat I was only told that, "you cannot get another." This needs to be cleaned up.
- When attempting to use the unstuck command the game replied, "no path available" and I was forced to use teleportation that is not available to a new player to become unstuck.
- Safe Fall from staff and other short-duration buffs that are innate bonuses to a character should be a toggle not something I have to cast every few minutes.
- Fire magic cannot be used in the water but levitation potions do not exist through alchemy.
- Level 1 characters using a level 50+ pet with animal handling are game-breaking.
- Utility tools such as the versatility knife should not be worse than the lower level versions which include skill or loot mods.
- The cartography report seems entirely inaccurate in most zones.
- Civic Pride should not be leveled up most easily by simply throwing high-value items into the trash. The experience gain for filling, lighting, and snuffing lamps is disproportional to the rest of a character's development.
- I should not be penalized for not wanting to play an instrument for my vegetables while I'm gardening.
- Surveys should not randomly change location after being marked on the map.
- Leather-working is extraordinarily disproportionately easy compared to tailoring and blacksmithing.
- Redwing Casino tokens largely defeat the point and interest of leveling teleportation magic for a large part of the game.
- Superjump somehow changes the functionality of jumping and causes a delay in the act of jumping when you press the jump hotkey.
- There should be no confusion about which events are ran, supported, and authenticated by GMs and which ones are player-made. A couple of days ago I went to what I thought was a GM event because I received multiple announcements in the middle of my screen while I was playing and then one of the players asked for all of the bottles that I thought I had been gifted as part of the event to be returned.
- Up to level 50 it seems that the only cloth armor in this game are dresses and heels. This is not a proper representation of "old lore" or even modern day clothing.
- Fire Walls and Frost Orbs should not be pets. They shouldn't taunt, or have an hp bar, or get in the way when I try to loot something.
- By default I should be able to move the window selector on the right hand side of the screen in the same way I do with the other windows.
- The outline around the buff/effects box needs to have a transparency option.
- RemoveHateFromTabTargetting needs to be enabled by default. It defeats the point of a reticle-based targeting system by having "target next" select a mob furthest from you in the opposite direction that you are facing.
- By default, instrument volume needs to be reduced by 50%. I almost immediately uninstalled the game when I walked into the Serbule garden and was introduced to a cacophony that could only be described as the question: "Are the developers inept?" made manifest.
The game is only as much of a time sink because it is filled with leveling up skills that you have no interest in. If I had to summarize this game, it might be:
"It's a good game, but not worth playing past level 20 until they fix the overwhelming amount of bugs, stat and ability discrepencies, and "artificial" time-sinks. For $25 I feel as though it was money well spent, but do not play this if you are looking for a long-term evolving online world."
Starting Out:
It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the game and within an hour of playing through the tutorial island I knew that Project: Gorgon had something special. I loved that I could equip any different weapon at any time and completely change how my character fought. The writing was good, the world immersive, and I was eager to find my way in the world. That feeling hit a sudden halt when I discovered that all of the loot I had been gathering was tailored to my equipped skills so when I finally did find a weapon I enjoyed using, I had no equipment for it. I deleted my character and only later found out that it is not uncommon for new players to delete their first character. "How important is having gear for my skills, in this game?" I asked myself. Begrudgingly, I decided to give the game another shot and made a new character with the skills that I discovered to be enjoyable. I believe this is where most players stop.
Serbule and the Surrounding Areas:
I'm glad that I decided to make another character because truly this is the best part of the game. I began playing on New Years Day so the population was great and everyone was having a great time. The help channel was a tremendous boon and any time I became stuck the players were there to support me. I learned a lot about the game very quickly and even met some other new players to group up with. Through following the quests I soon found myself at the gates of Serbule Crypt where I found even more people to group up with, several of which I am still friends with today! Even getting inside of the crypt without the skeletal archers and mages killing me was tricky and it became quite clear that to get far in this game you would need to team up with others.
Over the next few days I made it my mission to do as many quests and explore as much of the zone(s) as I could. I sought out a guild to facilitate this desire and because before this point I had experienced nothing beyond the help channel, nearby chat, and speaking with my friends it was a huge culture shock to find that several high level guilds were very toxic, demanding that I search the wiki for information or sign up on their website before I could be included. I did eventually find a guild after a few days of searching. I believe this is where most of those that make it beyond the tutorial island stop.
Eltibule and Sun Vale:
By the time I had reached Eltibule it felt like the player population outside of my newly acquired guild had dropped by as much as 75%. I could go hours without seeing another player, and the range between players had become so great that finding players to work on the same quests or progression as myself had become too great for both parties to benefit simultaneously. I spent a lot of time in this level range soloing, occasionally doing a single dungeon clear per day with my guild at specific hours. It seems like the questions I began to have around this point were no longer answered in the help channel and I was even met with the same animosity I found when searching for a guild for asking simple questions such as: Are the stat benefits of sitting in a chair worth leveling up carpentry? During this period of a few days I had to add as many as 2 or 3 people to my ignore list per day for soliciting to me in private messages when I spoke in the nearby or help channels. I played mostly alone outside of my guild activities and the players I met in the world began to ignore me or run past when I said hello and refused to group up, more concerned with farming art alone or power-leveling their 10th skill. By this point I would argue that 90% of the players who have started this game have quit to find more friendly, social, and fun games.
Kur Mountains:
This is where the game dies. I have played entire days without talking to a single person outside of my friends list, hours at a time without even a single living soul in sight. Nobody wants to group up, nobody wants to do the dungeons. This zone alone took more time than every zone before it, combined, and not simply because the quests are difficult and you find yourself grinding at a snail's pace between the few acts of kindness you will receive from higher level players to aid you in making progress through content that was never intended to be done alone, but because the cost to train becomes exponentially greater as all of your skills begin to hit their respective caps at the same time. With the cost of a trader being 7k per day and the number of users online at any given moment being too low to sell goods to other players via the trade channel, this truly did seem to be "the wall." I looked up and saw a lot of high level players doing group missions, dailies, and even hanging out around town, so I decided to leave the Kur Mountains as quickly as I could... Ilmari is 100% dead. The next two zones have no players in them at all. Kur Mountains is where the game dies. Player traders are asking ridiculous sums of money for crafted armor that can allow me to bypass all of that. The game doesn't mean that much to me, and if you look at the zones following this harsh wasteland you'll see that the players agree.
The Future:
I found a player in global chat that will commission me a full set of gear for a fourth of the price that the player-traders are asking, but only after dealing with the toxic attitude and nay-sayers who think you don't need to have gear to progress through dead zones alone or perhaps are too dissociated from what it means to be new again. True to my word I will be farming to purchase this set of gear over the next few days but gear won't change the number of players in those zones, it will simply allow me to access a greater amount of content alone. The reason this game seems popular is because there are 500 people packed into 3 zones like sardines. The reality of the situation is that this game has fewer players than emulators and indie-projects and in spite of it's 6.8 out of 10 score this game can't even stand toe-to-toe with "F-tier" MMORPGs like Archeage and Rift.
With all of that being said please allow me to more concisely describe my concerns in listed format:
- If you're going to tie regeneration to combat don't force players to stay in combat for a random duration after the fight is over.
- The pathing of mobs in certain dungeons like the goblin dungeon under Eltibule keep or the werewolf cave in the Kur Mountains is atrocious and seems like an artificial difficulty that shouldn't exist for solo players or groups.
- The primary means of making coin in this game should not be through emptying a vendors pocket. Players come first in an MMORPG and so does real-player trading. I shouldn't be selling crafting materials to vendors for money.
- Some skills like Fuel to Flesh have underwhelming values and it feels bad to even waste the time and hotbar slots to use them. Fuel to flesh is 25 more power with a cooldown long enough to only use it once per fight when after the fight is over my regeneration will kick in for 10x more power per interval of time. I can see this skill being useful with mods that are not easily available and secondary to damage. An example more players might be able to appreciate is "Dig Deep" which not only has an activation cost (time) but restores as little as 20% of your power bar every 2 minutes. Brain Scrub becomes irrelevant because a -1 power debuff means nothing when my abilities cost over 100 and my resource pool is over 400.
- Some skills, like Dig Deep or Tundra spikes will force your character to go into "walk mode" which largely defeats the point of using them. Some skills like Tundra Spikes, which is a pbaoe, require a target to activate and should not. Some skills, such as Ring of Fire, will actually put your character in combat mode and force you to suffer regeneration and movement speed penalties without using them on an enemy target.
- Due to the strict requirements to setting up and maintain a trader, quest related goods are not accessible for purchase at low levels because it is not cost or time efficient for mid-level players to list those items. It took me a week to make butter in this game for a quest I received within the first couple of days of playtime because I had to learn cheesemaking, which required me to learn textiling, which required me to grind favor, in the middle of a zone surrounded by mobs, because for all 7 days there was no butter, stools, benches, lapis lazuli, fire powder... on the market.
- I should not be forced to level skills that make no sense thematically for my character and skills that I do not enjoy and should be optional but are not. To unlock augmentation you are required to sink tons of time and money leveling skills that serve no purpose for your character, and benefit you in no way outside of augmentation. This seems like an artifical time-sink and pushes players away.
- There needs to be a way to more easily find parties and guilds. I'm not asking for a "group finder" but it's clear that you need some means of organizing people. Until I found a guild and established a retinue of friends trying to organize dungeons, even low level ones, was a near impossibility. People log on at different times, and want to go to different zones, and don't know what the requirements for activities are or if there even is any in the first place. I think a "meeting board" might help in that players can pin or post messages that they are seeking others or forming parties. Something does need to be done, however, because sitting around the entrance of a zone waiting for more people to show up only goes so far.
- This isn't a personal issue because I haven't made it to a point where I can find satisfaction in grinding out the details but I was informed that the combat logging in this game is too poor to develop a program capable of calculating DPS, HPS, or Damage received. This hurts the longevity of the game.
- If flying or swimming drains power it should also offer endurance experience. There is no swimming skill, running, or jumping skills, although these seem more optional.
- The difference between players using running speed modifications and those that are not is too severe. A player with the wisdom to equip run-speed enhancing gear that you can find at levels 5-10 alongside a running potion of trivial difficulty and a skill that provides greater movement is the difference between waiting 5 minutes for everyone in your group to arrive or 30 minutes. Finding people to group with is difficult enough without the party disbanding due to boredom. I believe mounts may help to alleviate this present issue.
- I have heard complaints from multiple people that when unlocking a new skill such as ice magic or druidism that they should not have to re-level their skills from 1. I believe this is a valid complaint that although did not affect me because I was at the time working on unlocking augmentation would have potentially caused me to quit and find a new game to "start over" in.
- I love that you can open a browser page to the wiki from within the game, but 95% of the information on the wikipedia is void. For a game that is... 8 years into development with in-game support and functionality I expect more.
- It took me 2 weeks to realize that I didn't need the crystal awl from the starting quest in Serbule and when asking in global chat I was only told that, "you cannot get another." This needs to be cleaned up.
- When attempting to use the unstuck command the game replied, "no path available" and I was forced to use teleportation that is not available to a new player to become unstuck.
- Safe Fall from staff and other short-duration buffs that are innate bonuses to a character should be a toggle not something I have to cast every few minutes.
- Fire magic cannot be used in the water but levitation potions do not exist through alchemy.
- Level 1 characters using a level 50+ pet with animal handling are game-breaking.
- Utility tools such as the versatility knife should not be worse than the lower level versions which include skill or loot mods.
- The cartography report seems entirely inaccurate in most zones.
- Civic Pride should not be leveled up most easily by simply throwing high-value items into the trash. The experience gain for filling, lighting, and snuffing lamps is disproportional to the rest of a character's development.
- I should not be penalized for not wanting to play an instrument for my vegetables while I'm gardening.
- Surveys should not randomly change location after being marked on the map.
- Leather-working is extraordinarily disproportionately easy compared to tailoring and blacksmithing.
- Redwing Casino tokens largely defeat the point and interest of leveling teleportation magic for a large part of the game.
- Superjump somehow changes the functionality of jumping and causes a delay in the act of jumping when you press the jump hotkey.
- There should be no confusion about which events are ran, supported, and authenticated by GMs and which ones are player-made. A couple of days ago I went to what I thought was a GM event because I received multiple announcements in the middle of my screen while I was playing and then one of the players asked for all of the bottles that I thought I had been gifted as part of the event to be returned.
- Up to level 50 it seems that the only cloth armor in this game are dresses and heels. This is not a proper representation of "old lore" or even modern day clothing.
- Fire Walls and Frost Orbs should not be pets. They shouldn't taunt, or have an hp bar, or get in the way when I try to loot something.
- By default I should be able to move the window selector on the right hand side of the screen in the same way I do with the other windows.
- The outline around the buff/effects box needs to have a transparency option.
- RemoveHateFromTabTargetting needs to be enabled by default. It defeats the point of a reticle-based targeting system by having "target next" select a mob furthest from you in the opposite direction that you are facing.
- By default, instrument volume needs to be reduced by 50%. I almost immediately uninstalled the game when I walked into the Serbule garden and was introduced to a cacophony that could only be described as the question: "Are the developers inept?" made manifest.
The game is only as much of a time sink because it is filled with leveling up skills that you have no interest in. If I had to summarize this game, it might be:
"It's a good game, but not worth playing past level 20 until they fix the overwhelming amount of bugs, stat and ability discrepencies, and "artificial" time-sinks. For $25 I feel as though it was money well spent, but do not play this if you are looking for a long-term evolving online world."