So... this is rather old feedback. My fairy was created on March 27, 2020 and I've been sitting on my comments pretty much since then. My apologies if anything major has changed since the time I actually played.

To hopefully keep this somewhat useful, I'll start with some suggestions that would make me a happier fairy:

- Allow us to drop the racial quests, e.g. "A New Life". This is really the big one for me - fairies are supposed to be an advanced race, so allow the players to make advanced choices and decline quests. I'd be fine if I got a big warning about missing out on valuable game lore by dropping the quest. I'd be fine if the quest list was implemented as a "Stuff to Do" item instead of a quest. Just, pretty please, let me get it out of my quest log.

- Save tutorial type messages somewhere where they can be reviewed later by the player. I'm fairly sure I got info on using fae stuff at some point but I have no memory of what it was and no in-game way of finding it again.

- Maybe have more equipment drops or more gear quest rewards in the fairy newbie area. Better food would also have been welcome.

- For special racial abilities in combat skills, maybe allow fairies to use either the racial or the non-racial version of the ability? I'm torn on this one since it makes sense to me to have the races be different and have fairies use a different Slice than humans or elves. On the other hand, it doesn't feel very fun to be stuck with the Slicing Ice variant when what I really want to use instead is the plain old Slice.


On to feedback about my experience in the fairy starting area. The tl;dr on this is that I did not have a good time which is obviously highly subjective, so I'm trying to break it down into particular stuff that bothered me (which may of course not apply to other players):

- Combat was too hard for me. This one is probably largely my fault since I couldn't make up my mind what combat skills I wanted to use and opened the two fairy gear chests while using different skill combos, so at any time, half the gear I had was completely useless.

My /age info says my fairy killed 49 mobs and died 17 times. That sounds about right. I may have killed a couple pigs in Serbule and died once or twice after leaving the fae lands but dying for every two or three mobs I killed in the initial area sounds spot-on. I hit the max death timer cooldown multiple times, and ended up doing the fairy area in segments of maybe 10 minutes a day, both to reduce the death cooldown and to try to reduce my overall frustation with the zone.

I had the newbie area largely to myself which contributed to a lot of adds. I could barely kill a single mob, and an add was deadly. One time, there was another player there slaughtering things which helped me a lot since I could actually move places without being attacked by something every couple steps.

While my gear problem was mostly self-inflicted, I wonder if maybe the fairy starter gear is a bit too weak. A full set of blues sounds good but the ability boosters ended up being all over the place. If my fairy had leveled to 30 normally, I would have had a few items that are better than blue, and I would definitely have collected items that complemented each other and the abilities that I wanted to use. Even a green is better than a blue that doesn't actually boost any abilities I find useful.

The starter food was likewise disappointing - I'd definitely be using better food by level 30 normally. I would have loved something with a higher power regen to maybe allow me to fly over the mob zone and land when I'd found a mob/item I needed.

I suspect that using animal handling might have helped a lot and the fairy area did seem to try to steer me in that direction. However, I'd just done pretty extensive ah playing on two other characters, and ah was the one skill I was positive I didn't want to use on my fairy at that time.

- I don't like chore lists. Achievement lists in other games usually drive me crazy because I read them as a long chore list of tedious stuff that must be done. The fairy meta quests that consist of a list of "talk to a and do x, talk to b and do y, talk to c and .... " have the same effect on me.

I guess part of it is that it doesn't really feel like progression or discovery. If I just do a quest, and then get a followup quest, it feels like I'm progressing in a story line of some kind. If I get a list of quests to do, it feels like a mechanical exercise in ticking off the boxes, so I can complete the list and be done with the chores.

Eh, just a personal quirk I suppose. P:G's "Stuff to Do" doesn't have this discouraging effect on me for whatever reason, maybe because it feels to me like it's just helpful hints on what to do if I'm stuck rather than a prescription of what I must be doing. I usually end up doing the Stuff to Do list at some point but it doesn't feel forced or urgent.

- I was stuck. Normally, if I reach high levels of frustration and/or boredom, I'd move on and do something else, and then maybe come back later. My fairy couldn't - I had to do these quests first before I could try anything else. ( I did have a friend offer to port me out of the newbie area and seriously considered it. I ultimately declined since if I died, I'd just be in the same situation again, so it made more sense to try to complete quests until I found the exit.)

- The quests were boring. I don't generally mind kill x and collect y type of quests, but in combination with the above they were really grating. I couldn't drop the quests or move on to something else if I got bored, I had to do them, and I had to spend a lot of time doing them since I died a lot. And there was really no story reward for all of this.

I did enjoy the bee hive quests since it felt they had some story and purpose behind them.

Zone layout didn't help on this - it was get quest, go into small boring area, kill one type of mob. Get fresh quest, go back to same area, kill more stuff. Where stuff included mobs I'd just killed on the previous quest since there was no way to avoid them. If I'd just been able to get all the quests at once,I would have been done with this so much faster. Obviously, there's a reason not to give out all the quests at once, but sending me back to the same area over and over just made me feel like it was all mindless makework and I wasn't making any progress.

- I hated the quest rewards. I enjoy leveling skills and particularly like the lower skill levels since getting a ding there is quick and easy. Having the game take that away from me and force me to start a skill at level 30 is pretty much the ultimate anti-reward for me.

Also, well, I needed better gear, and I wasn't getting any.



Going into outright whine for a bit:

So, overall my fairy experience felt like I was just logging on to get my face smacked in, and grind my way through minor progress in the hopes of eventually getting done with this area. I cringed every time I completed a quest and had the game give me yet another magic skill level up that I really didn't want. Eventually, I did complete enough quests and was told about the portal to Sun Vale, and then promptly escaped to Serbule to finally do the stuff I wanted to do. Except now:

I'm afraid of doing anything on my fairy since I might die and get sent back to hell/fairyland. I'm dimly aware that there's stuff that might allow me to anchor to someplace else, but my impression is that it involves doing quests in the fae realm.

I don't want to go back to the fae realm. On any character. Probably not "ever" but ... not yet. Definitely not yet.

I have a fae energy bar and no idea what to do with it. I might have gotten game info on it at some point but ignored it because everything required far more than the 1 point of fae energy I normally had. (Yes, I know there's a Wiki and I love it. I just don't care enough about fairies currently to go read.)

I still have a quest chore list for Sun Vale stuck in the top position of my quest log and I cannot get rid of it which now makes Sun Vale a no-go zone for me since I might accidentally do one of the quests. My overall feeling is that I will "Talk to Squidlips to learn fishing" over my cold dead body and, really, not even then. Anything that the game wants to force me that badly to do can't possibly be any fun. Plus, I already know how to fish: I pick up a crab from the beach, easy.

I'm kind of bummed because I was looking forward to playing a new character and the fairy seems like she would be a lot of fun. ( I love the backwards flying animation.) I tried to revive my fairy interest by making her a nice set of twink gear and picking a nice safe skill like knife that I'm comfortable with, only to discover that my possibly favorite knife ability, Slice, got replaced by some useless version requiring a consumable. The fairy version might well be objectively better but I'm just not a consumable user - with some limited exceptions, I'm always afraid of running out and because of that end up never using my consumables at all.

So, I'm whiny and frustrated about the whole fairy thing, and every time I was thinking about playing P:G in the last year, I ended up going into a long rant about fairies to myself instead. With this essay off my chest, maybe I can finally get over it and do some actual playing. ( Not saying faires made me quit PG - I was ready for a break.I'm just feeling a bit stuck now thinking about getting back into it since I'm in this mental loop of "alts are fun!" vs "don't touch the fairy!!" )

I really liked the Anagoge newbie experience: It felt wide open, with intriguing puzzles, and the game let me do whatever I wanted. If I could figure out the target dummy - great, I got to feel clever and got a reward. If I couldn't - whatever, lots of other things to do. In contrast, the "advanced" fairy newbie experience felt far more constrained, with far more handholding and shoehorning me into doing things in a particular order and way.