One Month In: The "PG Noob Experience" Streamer's Long-Winded, Comprehensive Feedback

This is good feedback, thanks! It does sound like there's a couple of bugs in there: the high-level pocket gear should have a default Endurance prereq so that literally-brand-new players can't wear them. (That's a long-standing bug that I didn't address for a long time because we didn't have "default-prereq" tech, and I didn't want all crafted cloth gear to be saddled with Endurance reqs... but it's a bug I can and will fix now.)

And healing is supposed to generate a fair amount of aggro... so it's probably broken for Priest in some way that I'll have to investigate. Or it could have gotten entirely broken again. Aggro is one of the hardest systems to balance and maintain, in large part because it requires a group, which is hard to emulate during development! But we'll get it right eventually.

But anyway, thanks for the insights!

The healing thing's definitely not tied to just priest - bear in mind that half my build is "Pig" and I healed/buffed with it, too. Whatever's going is systemic and not specific. It's true that I haven't tested it with Psychology, but I'll do that today and if you see me post something like "Hold the phone, Psych is getting massive aggro" then you'll know that somehow both Pig and Priest dodged a bullet. Pretty sure it's systemic though - the odds of me getting both are a little unlikely, eh? Hehe.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about storage. I don't want to see new players given mass hoarding (because after all, they won't have access to Marna's 60 slots and so on) but I do want to see them with a temporary (because noob armor) fix that doesn't alienate them to the game. There's a tricky line between too much and too little help to a new player, and I guess we'll have to rely on the devs to determine where that is. :)

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Originally Posted by Citan

This is good feedback, thanks! It does sound like there's a couple of bugs in there: the high-level pocket gear should have a default Endurance prereq so that literally-brand-new players can't wear them. (That's a long-standing bug that I didn't address for a long time because we didn't have "default-prereq" tech, and I didn't want all crafted cloth gear to be saddled with Endurance reqs... but it's a bug I can and will fix now.)

And healing is supposed to generate a fair amount of aggro... so it's probably broken for Priest in some way that I'll have to investigate. Or it could have gotten entirely broken again. Aggro is one of the hardest systems to balance and maintain, in large part because it requires a group, which is hard to emulate during development! But we'll get it right eventually.

But anyway, thanks for the insights!

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Happy to help. :)

You uh... are gonna fix the spider-pig-harness-thing too, right? Heheh.

I guess I'd better level up my endurance fast...somehow... or I'll be losing my pockets!

Just ran a test using only pig heals and pig buffs - aggro at death, 0.30%.

Definitely wider-ranging aggro issue than just Priest. :)

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Originally Posted by Friedrick Psitalon

a) NPCs need to explicitly state what they do and don't buy in some fashion. Players trying to remember and guess when they're noobs and struggling with another dozen concepts is not good. It might also help to tell players WHY the NPC is refusing to give you full price in the tooltip. "Warning! Velkort is not giving you the full value of 9,000 because (reason)!"

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The wiki is a great repository of information (if you look). If you do a "/wiki merchants" you will get a list of all merchant that categorize, 1. what they like/dislike, 2. what they buy, and 3. how much money they have to buy stuff as their favor goes up.

The biggest problem I see with new people is that they don't do their "due diligence" and try to find information such as this out. They buy a game, jump right in, and then get frustrated because they don't know what to do. It's like giving one of my students a laptop and telling them to fix it on day 1 when they don't even know what a M.2 slot is.

I know that people will inherantly not change and start reading the information that is provided for them, but saying the game is "broke" is just ignorance. (sorry Crissa....this was not a "git good" statement.....maybe a "git common sense" :D

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Originally Posted by Friedrick Psitalon

Happy to help. :)

I guess I'd better level up my endurance fast...somehow... or I'll be losing my pockets!

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You would only lose a few pockets, as +20 slots is the "stock" enhancement when adding pockets to cloth crafted gear regardless.

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Originally Posted by Kryshael

The wiki is a great repository of information (if you look). If you do a "/wiki merchants" you will get a list of all merchant that categorize, 1. what they like/dislike, 2. what they buy, and 3. how much money they have to buy stuff as their favor goes up.

The biggest problem I see with new people is that they don't do their "due diligence" and try to find information such as this out. They buy a game, jump right in, and then get frustrated because they don't know what to do. It's like giving one of my students a laptop and telling them to fix it on day 1 when they don't even know what a M.2 slot is.

I know that people will inherantly not change and start reading the information that is provided for them, but saying the game is "broke" is just ignorance. (sorry Crissa....this was not a "git good" statement.....maybe a "git common sense" :D

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I'm not sure I ever said the game was "broke." I said "the game could be improved if we want wider appeal." There's a pretty big gap between those two statements. The objective facts on the ground that we both acknowledge are that most people don't raid the wiki early and often... and, if you'll forgive me, that wiki is... in need of some improvement in places. (Yes, I plan to do some of that myself.) The numeric information on the merchants is definitely wrong in several places as well. Ideally, everyone drives the speed limit and doesn't do anything stupid... but we design cars for the fact that people ARE going to be stupid fairly often. Ideally, everyone hits the wiki and is an informed player, but we design MMOs to be self-sufficient because we know a lot of people with cash in their pocket don't and aren't. (shrug) Sounds like you're a fellow educator; if so, you know all about how common sense isn't. ;)

Now having said that: this simple command (/wiki merchants) is amazing and does solve a lot of problems. It might be handy if the in-game tutorial (or some later approximation thereof) pointed to exactly this command. I mean, I've been playing for a month, and while I knew a few /wiki commands, I didn't know this one. It's super handy. Thanks! :D

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Originally Posted by Friedrick Psitalon

You uh... are gonna fix the spider-pig-harness-thing too, right?

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I can't speak for devs, but this game uses different designs for related things. You can get your loot from mobs, tradeskills, quest, favors, players and so on. So a boss dropping an item that is useful only to spiders is (I guess) one of these design decisions.

This means there will be something you don't like in this game. For you, it's apparently boss dropping stuff you can't use. That's completely fine imo. There are things I don't like too, but maybe you like them? P:G has variety.

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Originally Posted by Niph

I can't speak for devs, but this game uses different designs for related things. You can get your loot from mobs, tradeskills, quest, favors, players and so on. So a boss dropping an item that is useful only to spiders is (I guess) one of these design decisions.

This means there will be something you don't like in this game. For you, it's apparently boss dropping stuff you can't use. That's completely fine imo. There are things I don't like too, but maybe you like them? P:G has variety.

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Nope. This wasn't a case of "I don't like it personally." I can accept a design decision to have bosses drop inappropriate-to-me items. May not like it, but that's life.

This was:

"Here is an item only a spider may equip." (Spider Harness)

"Here are abilities that only work when you are in Pig Form." (I don't remember which ones anymore, but they were specifically pig abilities.)

There's simply no way to ever utilize that item. If you're in Spider form - so you can wear the thing - you can't use Pig abilities. If you're in Pig form to use those abilities, you can't wear the item.

I can respect "sometimes you don't like things." An item which functions for 0% of players in 0% of situations isn't really in that category. ;)

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Originally Posted by Friedrick Psitalon

Now having said that: this simple command (/wiki merchants) is amazing and does solve a lot of problems. It might be handy if the in-game tutorial (or some later approximation thereof) pointed to exactly this command. I mean, I've been playing for a month, and while I knew a few /wiki commands, I didn't know this one. It's super handy. Thanks! :D

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The commands for /wiki and /forum work just like a basic search engine. For the wiki, typing in a precise wiki topic like gems or town name or zone name will take you directly to that specific page, otherwise you get a standard search results page as if you were using google or bing. /forum just does a general search as if you used the search bar on this site. /help would have pointed you to these commands btw :cool: