My thoughts on getting players to return

Note to Portalarium, please do NOT add a /floss dance emote. That would be the most cringey thing ever. Or if you do, put it on the store for $10/10 COTOs so at least we can get that sweet zoomer cash.

 

I am right there with you as I say that.

 

1) Treat customers with respect. In game and in the forums. Lots of respect when we spend money. I understand controlling trolls, but banning anyone with a negative opinion isn't going to win over and maintain customers.

2) Keep politics and political agendas out of the game and streams. I'm happy to provide details, but I don't want banned. No matter your views 50% of the people in the US likely differ. Yes I understand an LB product touches on social issues but do so smartly not smarmy and without blatant political agendas. Corporate virtue-signaling and social justice warriors are bad for business.

3) Simplify the game. The systems are overly complicated for pretty much everything. No we are not too stupid to understand complexities. We recognize a mish mash of incoherent systems. Elegant design, don't give us The Homer and tell us it's a Cadillac.

Why do we need two methods of the combat bar? The Heat System, bar is great. Randomized combat bars suck. Switching combat bars in combat should also be stopped. This would provide balancing methods where players have to strategically choose skills BEFORE combat. Think Guild Wars as an example of how to build a complex but elegant combat system.

4) If you sell something and devalue it later don't expect people to spend money again on similar or perhaps anything. Virtual goods only have perceived exclusivity. Once this exclusivity is lost, the goods have minimal value. Most of us don't care about making money, we have jobs. What most of us won't do is spend money on virtual goods if everyone can get the same goods a short time later for little to no expense.

5) Continue with the QoL changes, nice work so far.

6) Make loot great again. Artifacts were really nice additions to the game. Now they are not much better than rusty spoons. Reference #4. Everquest had an incredible system of "rares" that would keep people hunting and playing.

7) Games like Everquest, Minecraft, Ultima Online demonstrate pretty graphics are not necessarily needed to keep players happy.
Game play>Graphics. A small team with minimal funding will never produce amazing graphics like Red Dead Redemption 2. A small team with minimal funding should be producing unique, interesting, creative, and fun games. Minecraft was mostly produced by one man with a strong vision.

8) Nerf with a scalpel, not a 100 megaton fusion bomb.

9) I continue to hope for the best for this project. No one supported this game with the intent and desire to watch it fail. Remember we didn't leave you, Portalarium left us.

(Hopefully THIS message doesn't get me banned.)

 

Been playing everyday for the most part, but I do have to agree that being pulled out to the map to travel to distant lands really sucks any sense of exploration and discovery. It seems like bad design choice to begin with and for some reason, because the train had started rolling no one stopped to think about how much it added to the gameplay or lack thereof.

Portalarium has basically a second launch window by the time the new content rolls out next year. Instead of focusing multiple releases on something like fishing,... they should focus on duplicate instances, poor UI(not just quality of life, but beautiful UX design), broken quests , a new starter quest and instance - even though it's been re-worked and is better, design and overall polish still pales in comparison to the better designed levels later in the game. Just doesn't feel cohesive and polished for a game that is released and that is probably one of the main reason people try the game and quickly leave. The best part of the game is after you've obtained the Shroud and you are free to just do what you want - sort of like UO.

Certain instances look beautiful while others still have under construction message popping up after release. The wooded areas feel like a wall of 2d drawn trees blocking the player from exploring more. First impressions matter to a lot to gamers and having them plow through so many half baked instances is lot to ask for the modern day gamer. I noticed a lot of 40 somethings and older in the chat and that's fantastic, but we need to grab the younger players who love adventure games and rpgs like the rest of us. Maybe it's not this game.

I love the game, but I hope the devs can block out a large portion of their calendar to fix the basics to lure new players. I'm sure none of the devs are getting rich off this game and to work this hard to know that the community will never grow beyond what it is now and possibly less next year seems a good enough reason to re-think some of the design choices, keep the feature rich crafting, dump the duplicate instances, re-work quests, and by some miracle connect the world together where the player feels like they are exploring a world and not levels, then I wouldn't be surprised to see the population spike. It's a lot to ask and maybe it's not this game, but just putting out there things I would like to see. Some people are happy with the game now and will see this post as an attack on the devs, which it is not. Small dev teams can do some amazing things. An art director with a small team can create a palette, a design direction that can infect the entire game. That's sorely lacking in SOTA.

 

Thanks Hun and Happy Holidays!

I'm hopeful the quests and story will get their due one day! Like you said, that seems to be something they are planning on for 2019 with the lead up to Episode 2. We'll just have to wait and see until then!

As for getting my family to play Shroud, unfortunately my husband lost interest pretty quickly long ago and my son isn't much into video games. Yet who knows, if the story and quests are done better in Episode 2 he might try it again.

 

Well i for one will put my money where my mouth is. I asked for a respec, i received a respec (never actually thought it would happen, Merry Christmas TO ME) now to pull my finger out and get back into the game, i never left because of the game, i left cause my guild disbanded and i had nothing left to do apart from kill random mob A, now i have a new purpose, a new beginning

 

Welcome back! There are other great guilds out there, time to feel 'em out!

 

Artifacts I use all the time : bacchanal belt. belt of patient harvesting. carnal vile shield (for mvt). fleet flute. belt of the ox. belt of the butcher.

They're still useful, just not as weapons or gear.

 

Well I have drifted away from the game over the last few weeks after a year and a half of playing it. The reasons are numerous and have posted plenty of things on the forum about what I personally think the game needs but by and large the Devs seem set on a different set of policies and priorities.

Can't say I miss playing the game at all right now and the last few releases (other than the very welcome QoL improvements) and the frankly disappointing 2019 plans suggest that for me at least the game is never going to be what I want it to be. It's a big shame but think I will not be back anytime soon, if at all.

 

I find for me the biggest frustration is that loot is all completely luck based and inconsistent. There is no way to acquire, or even incrementally work for, something specific. Knowing for example that a particular boss can drop a particular artifact (take cabalists, for example) - it is possible to repeatedly kill something over and over and over and OVER again for over a YEAR and still not get the desired item. While I understand you want some things to be rare, making them a complete crap shoot eventually turns "keep farming it" to "ugh, don't bother."

New exciting bosses are being added - like pumpkin head for example - requiring a group effort, and you get a full group of people standing around for four hours repeatedly killing this thing for four hours and getting absolutely nothing to show for it, or even if you do manage to get one single drop, then the other 7 people in the team just wasted most of their evening. I was excited for pumpkin head, but when Krampus was announced, it was like "meh" it is just going to be another long waste of time, standing around waiting for respawn, getting nothing to show for it situation. That's pretty much how most boss content is in this game. There needs to be an overview of 'rarity' vs 'pointlessness.'

Drop rates for rare fish are another example.
You've finally added fish recipes that people might actually want to eat. Great.
Except that since the inception of fishing, with hours and hours spent, and thousands of fish (and boots) caught, I had exactly 2 fish I could cook for the new recipes. 3 I guess, I mounted a pike on the wall.

This makes them completely unmarketable and little more than 'novelty' items. Its not like a fisherman can go out and fish up marlins and cook them and sell them. You might get one marlin every 20 hours of fishing. Maybe. For that sort of time investment, you're going to want a pretty penny for it, but nobody's going to pay that kind of price for a small 4 hr buff. Except maybe people hoarding them for pvp, I guess. For everyone else, these are just a waste of time.

Loot / reward in MMOs is often compared to a hamster hitting the feed button. You don't necessarily want it to spit out a pellet every time, or the hamster has no reason to log in every day and keep hitting that button. But also you don't want to make it spit out the pellets too infrequently, or the hamster will lose interest entirely and/or starve to death. I've for a long time felt that we're wayyyy too far on the 'starve to death' side, that everything in the game is far too focused on random number generator and blind luck (look at the crafting system for example) and after two years of dumping time, effort, and materials into something, rarely getting what you want out of it.

The 'drop' dungeon rooms are another example. Its bad enough that some of these things are dropping from creatures that most solo players can't kill. I don't object to requiring / encouraging group content, but because there's a what, 1% chance for a recipe to drop, off of something that it takes 30 minutes to get a group together and go kill, and if you haven't got level 120 players it will probably be difficult to do besides, the whole thing just feels terribly unrewarding. Like the aether creatures. Same deal. Basically, the way the system is designed, you have a handful of extremely hardcore players who go farm the stuff through mindless repetition and sell it to the rest of us. the drop rates on well, everything, are far too low for the average player to get any enjoyment out of farming it. I say this having spent over 17 hours of mindless killing to get a creepy doll, but at least I knew that at some point, it WOULD drop. I kept pressing that pellet button. And because the child zombies were reasonably killable, I could press that button as many times as I needed. I could kill dozens of these per hour so the 1% was ...tolerable. On things that you can't kill as frequently, due to long respawn times, general difficulty, or need for group cooperation, the 1% is untenable particularly in cases where you have 8 people there needing some loot.

The end result is it feels like most of the content is a waste of time. I'm not saying make all the rare stuff common, but often this can be addressed with incrementation. Instead of having a cabalist drop a hood 100%, when it doesnt drop a hood, have it drop a few scraps of evil pulsing fabric or w/e. When you get 100 of those, you can go do some ritual there and craft the hood you want. At least this way you wouldn't feel like you'd been kicked in the teeth for having killed Dolus no less than 300 times and still fail to see him drop anything more interesting than a ward gem. At some point, you're just going to not bother. I know that a lot of my core group of friends have reached the "lost interest" stage and are seeking their pellets elsewhere in games where things are more rewarding, or at least you can work toward a goal, instead of just playing RNG simulator.

 

So, I was a kickstarter backer, I am a seed investor, I have played for years and have over 1700 hours played. I have read these boards for years. I have toured the Portalarium studio. I have met LB, Starr, Chris, and many others on the team. This is my first post on these boards. I have presented my concerns to this team numerous times in face to face conversations. The reason I feel compelled to post now is to ask LB, Starr and Chris to please read the post above this by kaeshiva and please pay attention because EVERYTHING started in that post is 100% how I feel.

 

If I had a word for how Port approaches everything from rewards, to skill gains, to the ability to obtain loot drops, it would be "stingy".

• It should be that, for instance, if you're GM in fishing, you're getting the good fish 50% of the time. You're a freakin grand master at it, after all. Not a 1% better chance.. not 2%... your chances should be octupuled. Grandmastering should mean something, even if they make it more difficult to obtain.
• Humans seem to perceive things exponentially. That's why the "xp doubling" events were popular. If I increase my +polearm damage skill from 20 to 40, I expect my damage output to double from where it was at 20. If the gains are too subtle, it feels like I'm not making progress.
• All non-vendor recipes should come from specific zones/areas, like the obsidian recipes. I'm wondering if their aim is to let the market handle the distribution, and not the loot drops themselves.
• I like the idea of being able to incrementally achieve the goal of unlocking certain items/quests, like the griffon feather. It could also be that if you achieve GM in the prerequisite skill, it automatically unlocks.
• If you spend hours figuring out a quest, you should be getting 20-30k gold... not the pathetic 250g, if you're lucky.
• I *barely* managed to solo the fire elemental quest... and now don't use it. I use the water elemental, and that's about it. The different elementals need to be beefed up. Maybe the fire elemental can be summoned twice. Maybe the earth elemental has much more tank and aggro. Etc. Make them interesting and fun.

 

Also, I tend to think that the tiering system should be exponential too. A tier-5 zone should be twice as difficult as a tier-4, which is twice as difficult as a tier-3, etc. It may be that you have to be AL90-100 to do a basic T5 zone. There's a lot in the game that seems to be a very casual linear progression from 1% to 20% advancement, as opposed to 1% to 20,000%

That's the sort of thing that puts me into the "why bother" camp. So I leveled skill XYZ from 90 to 100. Did that unlock more zones I can do? No. Did it make me perceptibly more badass? No. Can I do new, cool things? No. (unless it unlocked another skill) I got a 1.3% increase in DPS.

 

Come back? EH. They lost me when the game morphed into a clunky, ugly, mediocre MMORPG that seemed to concentrate more on cosmetics and what more you could sell to the people who already committed a lot of money to the game. Make this into a full-fledged single player RPG and that would get some of us back. Heh.

Seriously though .. the game turned into something I didn't want (mainly due to not having the time for anymore) -- a grindy MMORPG without a subscription fee.

I did that a decade ago.

What I was looking for when I kickstarted a game by the maker of my beloved Ultima games -- I got (with much better quality and speed) in other "nostalgia-based" kickstarter campaigns like Wasteland 2, Bard's Tale IV and Underworld Ascendant.

 

Well, theres always legends of aria. that is the next game that the perpetually malcontent will jump on and tear down within a year. See: Black Desert, SoTA, Crowfall, Project Gorgon, Pathfinder, etc

 

Whats even worse is I spent hours and hours and hours trying to get drops they forgot to put in game....

 

Amen @kaeshiva , Amen !!!!!!!!!

Perfectly stated and I agree with you 1000% . @Lord British @DarkStarr @Chris

 

Fix the combat/skill system. Put in whatever is going to replace decay. I feel that I'm playing a very broken and incomplete game lately. The pixel crack and new bosses are fine, but skill progression is wacked. This feels like the dance party at the end of TR.

 

Fantastic Post. Every paragraph is packed with great ideas and analysis

 

I talked to one player who said he was busy enjoying doing work orders on LOA and won't come back until Shrouds gets something to do. Well what he likes to do is dailies and non combat crafting types of things.

So this is a player who wants crafting work orders and tasks given by NPC's. Also recipes are acquired through gaining crafting skill instead of grinding for them. So again many different requests for players staying away to com back.

Putting recipes in the loot cycle was one of my least favorite things we did. It took that away from crafting and put it into combat grinding.