3 Suggested changes to increase player numbers

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Boris Mondragon, Sep 25, 2018.

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  1. Tiki Pirate

    Tiki Pirate Avatar

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    Great ideas.

    Dungeons that evolve over time (like new passages opening up due to earth movement, kolbold mines opening a new portal/section, etc...) would be sweet.

    This would allow the devs to add on sections, quests, and lore as they are able.

    A overlying arc could be devloped little by little as the Avatar must proceed further into the underworld over time(episodes) to (fill in epic goal/quest here/save the world, etc)


    Also, a good idea for crafted junk would be to sell them to a certain faction or town guard/smith to establish a added town buff to residents, etc.. each town or faction could have a ''town defense" XP bar that slowly decreased over time, but could be increased by NPC vendor sales . The Avatar could only get the buff if they are bound to that town.
     
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  2. Miracle Dragon

    Miracle Dragon Legend of the Hearth

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    1. To me, what made an Ultima was going to a shrine holding a rune of virtue, and meditating the mantra at which point I level up, based on the chosen virtue. Here, I level up by going to a skill tree window and selecting skills to use at a generic skills trainer.
    2. To me, playing an Ultima was opening my rucksack and examining my valuables within, being sure to keep track of the 'stones weight', and yes gold has weight too. Today inventory is lists of texts and I miss having a visual represention of my inv.
    3. NPCs that could do anything and everything a player can do, and vice versa, so that the world feels real and self-sustainable. In Ultimas every NPC looked unique accept the guards. And I would often see faces that were likenesses of real life people known to the developers.
    4. Even if only placed in one zone, I'd love to see a mob ecosystem balancing system like was attempted in the beginning of UO. Make this balance a feature of the questline in that zone, and reward/punish players based on how they chose to affect that balance. I to this day lament the lesson RG and company took away from the failure of that system. They were overwhelmed by players and scrapped it, ergo, gave up on what I thought at the time was the one great idea that would have pulled me into playing the online game. So very sad. That system went directly in line with what Ultima and Origin stood for: 'We create worlds'

    In the end, I really want to see a spiritual succession to the Ultima games. A game that feels like I'm playing the games from my childhood. It's the immersive elements that drew me into the story and the games back then. A spell system with words of power and reagents that were so logical, you could figure them out without looking them up. I like the interactivity of many of the items in this game, but why are measuring systems, and even the calendar system identical to Earth? having same number of days / month, months / season / year isn't useful to the NPC scheduling which has to rush around every 30 minutes. Who says Novians need 8 hours of sleep? Maybe they only need 4.. maybe some sleep less than others. I've yet to see the phases of the moon in the night sky. All the Ultimas had his feature. Wouldn't it make sense for a society like Novia's to use a lunar calendar?

    Sorry my thoughts are a bit scattered, and I know they mostly aren't attractive to the 'new player' unless they are looking for something different. Many people play games for different reasons. I enjoy games not to rush to the end game, but to enjoy the world as I'm playing it. And that takes more work in the little things, and yes, takes more time to accomplish things within as well.
     
  3. By Tor

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    + infinity
     
  4. Rada Torment

    Rada Torment Community Ambassador (ES)

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    Personally I appreciate this kind of a very, unique, and distinctive feedback.
     
  5. Brian4

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    Quest Journal Remake/Redone better navigation Separate main storylines and sidequests
    Bring PVPer's ,PVE'er's and Roleplayers cooperative content so we come together for the same reason/goals.
    RAIDS/DUNGEONS/BOSS's THAT ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO SOLO and has a possibility of a reward that is not purchasable for money or igg only earned through accomplishments
     
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  6. Sketch_

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  7. Womby

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    1. The Elder Scrolls Online solution: make the game free to play, and place more emphasis on the optional subscription.
    2. The No Man's Sky solution: fix all the stuff that people have been complaining about, and relaunch.
    3. The Womby solution: both (1) and (2).
     
  8. Azzamean

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    Second this.
     
  9. Brewton

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    Third this.
     
  10. Fikule

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    What's keeping me away is the same things as on release unfortunately.

    The overall graphics have not improved much (still looks early 2000's) and the combat and UI still feel clunky.
    I check back every so often, as does my brother, but it's these elements that keep making us think "Maybe in another year".

    Just to expand with a few examples:
    1. The chat UI with NPCs still looks like, well, a winforms textbox. The text has no style to it and the font may as well be from notepad. The transparency detracts from it too, you don't need to see behind this thing. At the same time, black is not a great background colour either.

    Other games have scrolls with stylish text, quill scribbling noises as the text is written out (rather than just appearing), the NPCs, if not voiced, still make general noises for anger/sadness/happiness/etc. If there's a quest item, those icons can be included in the text. There are lots of options here and we have a word document.

    2. The terrain is way too busy. It might be more accurate, but the detail here is actually not great, unless the focus is meant to be the floor. The colours need to be more subdued (but not dark) and the textures need to be a little simpler. When a wall has a thousand bricks in a small area that looks pretty nice if you're stood still and specifically focused on it, but it loses a lot of charm as you move and it looks like a mass of detail scraping across the screen.

    At the same time the blending of textures could be improved. This is as simple as not having a cobbled road texture simply start to turn green/brown as it fades into grass or dirt. The grass and tree models could be further improved too with more natural movement and a fuller model in denser clusters. A lot of grass in games are simply flat models, but it's just more painfully obvious here, especially with how sparse it is.

    Rocks also often look unnatural, but I find it hard to explain how. It might just be how sharp the edges on most models are. Far more elements of the game could do with being softer. Speaking of which...

    3. Everything is flat. A room is a cube. You don't get much impression of depth to the walls. Stone walls don't seem shaded to appear 3D and most objects have obvious edges and points that make the game look far older than it is.

    4. The combat feels bad. I don't know how to improve this as a lot of it is built-in. Many abilities feel lackluster, especially early on. The effects don't look great. The combat damage numbers look, once again, like they come from microsoft word or notepad instead of a game. Character models, ability effects and weapons don't contrast enough with the scene, fading into the background. The card system also still feels messy and unwieldy. I was honestly amazed, the last time I played, that this system was still present at all, as it seemed like a failed concept, new for new's sake.

    I like the idea of the game very much. But I wish these aspects would improve. Unfortunately, a lot of them are either core mechanics or would require a massive graphical overhaul that is (at this stage) unlikely to happen.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2018
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  11. Nelzie

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    I wouldn't mind an "opening" for those of us with CAD skills to be allowed to provide models that could be brought into the game by Portalarium.

    Provide a scale, allowed file types for submissions and other elements needed to make the work Port would need to do for final implementation a minimum and that would be pretty solid.

    Payment in COTOs would be nice... but really that's not an immediate benefit to Portalarium as much as it would be to the submitter.
     
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  12. Joe Zhudarak

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    I love Sota but the game have a lot of issues:

    1) Bad perfomace and loading times (I still need to play Sota without shadows but i play BDO in ultra mode with 50+ fps.
    2) No demand for crafters (weapons, armors still last too long hundreds and hundreds hours)
    3) No raids and group content (now grinding in group at least for me is worthless xp and loot are reduced)
    4) No meaningfull pvp, guild wars, sieges, warfares;
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2018
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  13. Derium

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    ESO was so much more than that though, they scrapped the game and redid it because the first version wasn't working. Now they are successful when otherwise they probably would have failed.
     
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  14. Canterbury

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    And... even when you do ALL of that... and even if it ALL works... hope that word of mouth hasn't already killed things. That's another elephant in an already full room of elephants.
     
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  15. Greyfox

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    Word of mouth works very well. People who left and start hearing SOTA has changed and improved will become curious and return. No Man's Sky had extreme levels of very negative opinions. With some time and hard work a pretty good game was finally released.

    Word of mouth is a two way street and people listening to negativity will very likely hear positive news. Only the people with a true vendetta of negativity will be unwilling to reconsider if positive change occurs. No one needs that type of person in ANY community.
     
  16. Canterbury

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    No Man's Sky has become a better game, and closer to what it was promising to be at launch, but I'd wager there's a sizeable group of people who still won't touch it - ever - no matter what they hear about it.

    This is the thing. I get, and accept, that word of mouth is a two-way street. But when anger/hate/loathing/vitriol has been piled on to a huge degree, it can't not stop some from coming back. How many? Hard to say.

    And when it comes to Shroud, I don't think I saw a good review for it anywhere - if we're talking about professional reviewers, not part of the community, etc. Those coming to it as an open book at launch, panned it.
     
  17. Morgoth redbeard

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    i do agree free to play with the mecanic they have in room for optional sub and so
    think if they did so all crafted stuff that was enchanted or master worked would be able to be salaveged for spetial essences to use for some thing else
    think we shood be able to increase spawn in sertan sones i bean hunting allot of obsidain bears and they just dont spawn fast enuf i think ifthey did so it was a more dynamic spawn so if they dropt fast spawn would go up and if they did not drop fast the spawn would go down that way you would have use for both high lvl players and low lvl and for grups if spawn went up dependant on how fast they die a grup would be able to have a real big spawn think it would be fun
    fishing one world sos we need it badly
    tresure maps we need it allot love it and its some you love for years
    sadly i got nothing for pvp as i dont pvp i am sure some othere have stuff for pvp so i am not worried :)
     
  18. LiquidBlaze

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    Blarg, dev's just need more time. Sucks waiting but I know they will get it.
     
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  19. Timmy Vortex

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    Well eh i read some things about No Man's Sky, but that game got hyped. If i tell people about Shroud of the Avatar; there like "what's that?" ..plus i know Ultima Online was great, however it was to an older generation. More than half of the gamers i talk to have of course heard about it, however never played it. So getting to the point here, this game might've gotten bad reviews and some people tried to bomb it on Steam. I still think it's doing pretty ok for an indie title.
     
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