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Thanks, @Khaylara, but it's okay. @kazeandi, @Atis, let's move this back to useful update discussion.
Edited to add the actual important bit: Citan and I may get backhanded by Irma in passing, but we should be fine. And the game servers are not in Florida and shouldn't be affected at all. Fingers crossed. :)
I doubt if these devs would do such a thing considering how they cleared things up earlier in the thread (just a few posts earlier). However, I think it is perfectly fine to be blunt in confronting developers about the threat of P2win type mechanics particularly when they impose large limitations like with inventory in this game. I have had doubts recently and was expecting (til that post from Srand) that they will have these features as something like "$5 for +5 inventory, etc." just because of the heavy limitations in game. This is based on my history with MMO's lately figuring out they can impose limitations and then milk people for money from them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khaylara
To question if this will be the case during an Alpha of all things isn't just acceptable, but I would say it is mandatory for us to be blunt if we want a good game. I didn't see anything that was insulting or over-the-top from these posters - I just saw a few guys who are exhausted with P2win mechanics ruining games wanting honest feedback. All that said, I'm feeling safe that the devs will only have these features in the VIP which to my understanding is a once per month fee that gives a set bonus (this is how every other MMO I know of does it). I think that kind of "P2W" is fine because it helps them generate consistent money, which funds the game, and it also cannot be purchased over and over like typical P2W mechanics (as in my example of $5 for 5 inventory, the player buys this 500 times and has infinite space).
Patch feedback: I haven't had time to test the new zones due to work but I am not a fan of the changes that added more prisms and beads. We are already short on inventory and this just made it even more annoying. I don't even understand how this was necessary or improved gameplay at all, I feel this was a waste of development time and didn't help. I'd ask the devs seriously consider reverting it if for no other reason than the absurd amount of inventory these now take up.
It seems whole concept of "example" eludes you. Also being surprised that RANTS are negative... were you expecting to see rants like "OMG this game is so good, I dont even.... OOOOOHHHH!!!!!" When something is done right, ppl just go and use it, why would they discuss it extensively? Its natural to discuss flawed parts, because you dont want to use them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Khaylara
@srand
useful update feedback: newbies in genchat sounds more lost after update, at least those who left Anagoge via dungeon. SerbHill NPCs and mob spawns are far from being noob friendly. many just dont understand what CAN they do after dungeon. Skills useful for them are still taught in Serb town, aggro mobs besides spiders are too tough, lack of shops and storage options. If idea was to show them some hardships before getting to safe town, it should be be conveyed more clear, at ELI5 level. Anagoge takes few hours for actual newbie, add an hour or 2 wandering in SH and many players would think they saw enough to judge game. You might lose some positive first impressions with that. I'd suggest to not wait till next big update and add in some dialogs and road signs that clearly point in Serb direction as temporary fix.
Actually, I haven't ruled out selling a few slots. It may happen. But if you think that's what "pay to win" means, you're wrong. Look, this thread already set me off on a bad foot by calling me Hitler -- as you no doubt know, that term "pay to win" is very offensive to game designers, and this thread is already Godwinned. Calling my game p2w shows a deep misunderstanding of what the term means.
P2W means pay to WIN. Have you ever played a p2w game? Try beating the best players in a p2w game without paying lots of cash. You literally can't. P2W means that to be competitive, in whatever form competition takes, you have to pay more.
That is not what's going to happen here.
"But slots are power!" no. Stop it. That argument is nonsense. People don't seem to understand just how many items are in the game, and how many more are coming. At least 1000 more types of items.
Let me repeat: THERE WILL BE AT LEAST 1000 MORE TYPES OF ITEMS. Probably far more than that.
You will not be able to store all the items. Even if you send me $1,000,000 and the deed to your house.
My job as a designer is to convince you to sell your shit. Not hoard it. I am working on tools to help, and that's a major focus on game systems going forward.
I will have tools that show you exactly what each item does, and help you quickly determine if it's something you'll likely need in the near future. If not, you will need to sell it, and I will make it easier to sell your items.
I will NOT be giving you inventory slots to store all the items you want to store. Not ever. I simply can't, and I wouldn't want to if I could. I want you to sell shit, because that's the only way the economy will work.
Why more items? Because it will make your life easier in the long run. As we progress into beta, individual items will fill FEWER roles than they do now, not MORE roles. That will help you make decisions faster. Right now, say you find a piece of worthless green glass, and you know it's used in three or four alchemy recipes. You go "Eh, I may need this some day" and you spend 30 minutes trying to store it somewhere. (Hint: you don't need it.) In the future, the game will make it as clear as I can make it that you should sell it. The green glass won't secretly have a special use at level 502 that compels you to save it forever just in case. All of its uses will be listed when you right-click the item.
I'm hoping that simplifying items' roles will help. But it will also mean there are a lot more items, because we won't reuse items as much. And there are a LOT more skills coming, all of which have their own items. So you will never be able to store all the items you want to store.
If I add a few more storage slots as part of the monthly VIP pass, or some other little thing, it will be a small benefit, and it won't scale -- you won't be able to just keep buying slots. In other words, it will not solve many players' fundamental desire, which is to store literally every single valuable thing you find, and conveniently to boot. You will not be able to do that. If that's a deal-breaker for you, I can accept that, and you should look for another game.
But if your main inventory concern is that it's just hard to manage, I agree, and as I've said before, we're going to improve things. We'll be addressing problems like these:
- it's hard to tell what items will be useful to you in the near term,
- hard to find where you left your stuff,
- hard to find a buyer for your items,
- hard to clear out your inventory quickly so you can go adventuring
Stay tuned and please be patient. We will be working on those problems in lots of ways during beta.
Okay (I'm trying to contain my excitement here) so we're going to have an item, let's say "Mutton" and it's gonna be listed on it that it's used for "Lamb roast" and"Mutton leg" and if I don't intend to cook those dishes I can get rid of it? Please say yes and it would be the best thing ever after the storage search function.
(edit-I got rid of tattered books then i had to buy them with 1 to 3 k a pop when I realized what they were for so yup, very exciting news for me)
Okay general discussion about the latest update:
When it first came out I was upset (mostly because bat was not ready yet, and the prism and bauble system), but was quickly reminded... I am here for testing a game that is not done yet.
The Prisms and the Bauble system ... my opinion: Its not a bad thing. I Do Carry Medium Prisms and large prisms with me because all I need is Nice Phlog at this time. I do wish it could of been the same kind of prisms for the same Phlog though, it would of simplified things a little bit.
Now I want to give my opinion on Serbule Hills... I brought a new friend into the game today from another game I play. She wanted to pretty much play the game on her own... with very little help. She found her way to the dungeon on starter island... then she says "oh look I found my own way out". Well she was no longer on starter island, she was in Serbule Hills. Everything was killing her, even the rats (IMO there needs to be a certain level in your fighting skills that you reach before you can go through the portal). I went and got her and brought her to Serbule, where she could kill the pigs but at least it was something to help her level. But I will say I enjoyed her going through as a new player this morning, (I was on Discord with her the whole time). Everything was so exciting to her, she loved mushroom gathering.... picking apples... and after she got a saw chopping the wood. I was seriously laughing so hard to hear her running into something new... it was like listening to a kid on Christmas Day (yes she is an adult lol). She was so surprised to hear this game was in Alpha though. "But it is so advanced!"
Okay now that I rambled forever... here is my actual suggestions
First make the prisms the same size for the same kind of phlog
Second make a skill level requirement of some sort to get into Serbule Hills (not like level 3 that she was)
Third Please get Bat done as soon as you can so I can be full time animal :P
Other than that mad respects for the small team that is working on something so large!
I forgot the feedback for the new dungeon exit. I made a new character before the update and posted her at that passageway towards the Serbule Hills tunnels (it wasn't working at that time ofc). I logged her there and made my way through spiders and darkness towards Serbule Hills. I was able to kill the stuff there but Serbule itself is a much better choice for newbies. NPC's in Serbule are much more beginner friendly, it's easier to get their favor and most skillsets are beginner friendly. Serbule Hills has...Rappanel and Tyler Greene, none of the combat skillsets being taught by them being very newbie inclined (prerequisites and favor). I tried to get to Serbule portal by dying but I got sent back at the cave entrance every time. The portal is rather hard to see and there's nothing to get a new player's attention towards that spot.
It might mess up with the Lore and the maps a bit but my suggestion is to move the cave opening where the old tutorial cave was (east of Serbule, on the Serbule map). Serbule Hills is more fun now but for a character that's at least level 20 imo.
@Khaylara - yep, that's the plan. If you didn't have one of the recipes yet, it might say it's needed for "Unidentified level 40 cooking recipe" or something like that... I haven't decided if it will spoiler undiscovered content or not.
But there will be other tools also. You'll be able to right-click an item and get a list of vendors who will pay full price for it (and have remaining cash to do so), NPCs that it will be an especially-good gift for, and barter options it's needed for.
Eventually we'll have a very robust database, basically, that lets you quickly figure out whether you need the item or not.
@Citan first things first: nobody calls PG p2w (yet?), what we say is "please don't do X, Y, Z, as that's what p2w games do" - that's a fundamental difference right here and has nothing to do with "calling you Hitler" (that escalated quickly).
Now for your idea of item management and inventory slot sale:
In this game, which is niche, has peaks of 100 players online (and I don't see that becoming 1000, unless you beef up models, animations etc considerably), the economic system is such that you need a certain degree of independence. The market doesn't provide a lot, and what you can get is limited and mostly overpriced (because players are greedy).
You also need crafting skills as direct prerequisites for combat skills. Some (like fletching) are strongly recommended for above-mentioned reasons.
Ergo, everyone will end up with a number of crafting skills to various degrees.
In this case, we have a flood of useful items (and you announced 1000 more), which might be worth a lot (stomach 1200c each anyone?) - you won't throw them away lightly.
Then you have items worth nothing, useful for nobody, like "matted hair", which also contribute to inventory problems (and I mean inventory, not storage). This compounds to a huge pool of drops with many useful items, many of which you will want to pick up.
Now, many people already go around with chest and legs with pockets instead of mods, else their combat sessions would be riddled with inventory overflow all the time. The influx of items/time is bad already and you intend to make it worse.
Sorry, but take your "inventory upgrades are not p2w", stuff it in the next trash bin and sit down to think again.
You don't win against mobs with inventory slots. You don't win against players.
You win against crappy game mechanics, intended to goad you into buying more slots!
Much as you don't like to hear it, this is what you claim not to do: monetizing solutions for intended problems. That's like dropping people in a desert, then selling water at every corner.
I won't tell you how to fix that, because I now came to believe you do know that already and create the situation with eyes wide open, hoping you can deflect criticism by calling your inv slots "convenience items". Call it p2w, convenience, whatever. All that is just semantic. What sticks is the impression of "f2p schemes again".
Don't get me wrong, the game is fun in many ways, else people like me wouldn't bother, and just move on.
I've been paying for subscriptions since UO 1998, $15 a month doesn't hurt me. I will not, however, buy "convenience" via cash shop. All that has to be included in the subscription. Sell me mounts and purple firewalls and gear reskins and extra emotes on top of that and I'm cool with that.
But make sure not to call a mule a horse. We are NOT stupid.
And don't think your "you didn't play real p2w games" was all right, because, frankly, you don't know shit about what we played, how many good games we saw wither away after devs tried to cash in in horrible ways, and returning the "Hitler" love to your preceived enemies doesn't sit well with me. Swapping the victim role can not work when it's you who are in control.
Now that I got that out of my system, I'd like to ask you why you discontinued the coin drops and why everyone HAS to love crafting in this game.
Why is ut that, from 50 onward, you can't progress combat by combat alone anymore?
Examples would be Bard (raise prereqs by making us perform better/more) or Battle Chemistry (diversify Alchemy and make us level through that instead).
You said some of these cases are placeholders. What do you plan to replace them with?
@kazeande - ah, I see what the problem is: you want me to balance the game around the current user population! That's absolutely insane.
First, there's absolutely no reason we can't reach 1000 concurrent users. That's a very modest goal. We had 250+ concurrent users TWO YEARS AGO, the last time we did a small marketing push. Those players ran out of content and wandered away a few months later, and we haven't done much to bring new users in, because the game isn't finished yet. But I am going to finish the game.
And when the game is finished, if we can't get a measly 1000 concurrent users at peak play hour, then the game will have failed, and we will have to shut it all down. We can't even cover costs with the current user base. But I'm not fretting about it right now, because we aren't trying to bring in new players. Because the game is not finished.
So no, I'm not going to spend any time making your life easier right now. I know Alpha is hard because there's no players to buy or sell to. You can either deal with those frustrations, or not, that's up to you.
But seriously. Cut it with the p2w bullshit. Suggesting that a few inventory slots is p2w is VERY insulting. You insinuate you've played p2w games, but a p2w game requires thousands of dollars investment to win. It won't even be possible to spend thousands on this game after launch. So it will obviously not be p2w. And since "this game is going to be p2w" is pretty much the most insulting thing you can say to me, you need to stop, please.
Edit: I reread your post and I think it's best that we admit this is not your game. You actually think I'm making game design decisions in order to bilk money out of people... that shows such a lack of trust that I don't think we need you here any more. Your feedback has helped in the past, but it's time to admit that this is not the game for you. Go play something fun! Something without any crafting!