This game is so focused on making crafting rewarding that it makes adventuring feel pointless.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Aetrion, Sep 7, 2019.

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  1. Barugon

    Barugon Avatar

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    I fully agree with this. Character building is a big part of the fun. If you were just handed the keys to the kingdom then that's boring; why even play? Also, if you could be equally effective in every situation with whatever skill-set you chose then why have all these skills?
     
  2. kaeshiva

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    I think you're looking for "balance" in the wrong place.

    I play a mage with with int at 300ish and my attunement at 250ish. And since every boss in the game (except the troll vs. fire, which is not my spec) is extremely magic resistant, if I want to do ANY boss tier content, I have to pull out a melee weapon or bow, since even paltry GMs in those skills are still outperforming my level 140 magic skills.. If I'm in a group, I get relegated to 'healer/debuffer' 99.9% of the time.

    So, someone who has specialized life/sun magic and is using two legendary artifacts (doesn't get much higher end than that), and I'm going to go ahead and assume is also using all the other best in slot required int artifacts that are not cheap either is super effective at dropping waves of undead in UT. Sounds like they built their character for that purpose. Which is kinda the point of having a skill-based, classless system - you customize your character around what you want it to do well. But a life/sun specialist isn't going to be a lot of use against fighting non-undead, just as death specialists can solo things with great survivability but aren't much use if there -is- undead. That's the thing with specializations and magic - no matter what you choose, you're powerful a few places but near useless elsewhere. And even beyond magic, there's fights not suitable for archers and fights not suitable for melee, or at least, not optimal.

    If the game was balanced so that every build was equally effective against every target then choice would be meaningless. I find the limitations on magic-users extremely frustrating, but I don't think its the system that's the problem, its the content. If they added a half-dozen physical-resistant bosses that could only be taken down by magic,once all the crying about it stopped we'd actually achieve something closer to 'balance'.

    -------

    Your perception is that "because you can buy all the gear for cash, its not fair." And you're right, I guess if you wanted to throw money at it you could get all the shiny things. But a lot of people don't, they work their way there through dedication and time investment. So should we remove the benefits for all the players who have gotten powerful by playing the game, because some will choose to simply spend $? Bearing in mind that they are spending cash to buy things from other players - not from the game itself - devs don't see a penny of those transactions. The cash market has other problems, its why we have unreasonably insulting drop rates on everything, whereas in games that use a 'bind on equip' scenario (or even bind-on-acquire) for high tier items require you to go physically get the thing yourself, the drops can be a lot more generous as you don't deal with market flooding etc. I personally do not prefer those systems, because once you're capped out and have all the gear you want, there's no reason to play anymore unless there's another content push. At least here, if I get a lucky drop, I can sell it for gold to buy other crap that I want that never drops for me. So I mean, there's issues no matter which direction they go.

    At the end of the day, the way I keep myself from getting upset about this stuff is I just stop worrying about 'what other people are doing'. If someone wants to play 20 hours a day to get super powerful at the game - fine. I'm just ...not....going to do that.

    If someone else wants to drop a few thousand bucks buying gold/gear/arti - fine - time is money, and some people have time and some people have money. I've never seen the merit in buying gold, or even gear, since its stuff I can go get/make for myself by -playing the game- but hey, some people want to skip past the tedium and well, who cares? If a certain level of "strong!" is achievable, what does it matter how you get there? Some will want to enjoy the journey, some feel there is value in climbing the mountain, other people will just take a helicopter up there, but at the end of the day, we're both stood on the same mountaintop. And while there's this nagging voice that may be saying "well, they didn't earn it." - does it matter?

    When someone starts playing this, or any game, there's a long road laid out before them of character progression, and you gotta decide if you're going to walk, run, or rent a car to get to the end of that road. And if I choose to walk, is it annoying to see those who chose to rent cars passing me by? A little, yeah, can't deny it. Especially if they get into a wreck further up, mess up the road, and make my journey all the more harder. Would it be better if we put a 'walking speed limit' on absolutely everyone, no running, no driving? Maybe - but then you end up where we were in the beginning "the game's too hard" "the grind's too much" and so things get made easier and faster and then everyone gets to the end of the road and stands around wondering where to go now.
     
    Last edited: Sep 19, 2019
  3. kaeshiva

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    As an interesting aside, some few years ago, a work colleague of mine was playing World of Warcraft. (I know, I know, but hear me out.)
    So one weekend, mostly to placate work-colleague, I said yeah okay I'll give it a go. Apparently a new expansion had just happened and, if you bought that expansion, as a perk you got a "free" ticket to level your character instantly to level 90 (or whatever the cap was at that time) and dress it in all level 90 mid-tier gear. So I ignored that button, made a level 1, and fiddled around with it for a day or so. Well, work colleague flaked and a few weeks went by, I wasn't really playing, so, mostly out of curiosity, I went and clicked the "instantly level 90 it" thing just to see what the fuss was about.

    And so, I have a level 90 character. That I have no clue how to play, no clue how to build, and I'm teleported to some high level scene I've never been to and I'm hitting mobs for thousands of damage. Oh, and I have a flying mount thing, COOL. At least, it was for about an hour. So I spent some time trying to figure out what I was doing and catch up on the 80+ levels of missed character development. Then you realize the only way forward from this juncture (since you can't 'buy' high end gear in that game with gold or otherwise) is to get yourself into some of the tedious raid content and spend weeks smacking the vending machine hoping for a drop. Probably need to find a guild for that. Oh, and most of them use some sort of points system based on attendance to figure out whose turn it is to loot the whatever. And they have 'schedules' and attendance requirements and I come to the realisation that this level 90 character I have, will never get any better, because there's no more levelling up, and nothing I can do on my own is going to make my character any better. Going back and revisiting earlier content is equally pointless, because in a system where "you must be at least this level put on this item on" ...nothing but the last tier of items matters. Take this a step further and realise in most MMOs, its the same thing. Race to the end, get the things, and then a) make another character and do it again or b) quit.

    I'm not saying SotA is perfect. But I've never just felt that logging in was completely pointless, like I did in the above scenario. Even though my progress in Sota at this point is minimal, there are still goals I can achieve, and all the experience I earn while out messing around, giving people tours of the mine, trying to get materials, etc. - well it can go somewhere. It wont do much, but its not -wasted-. Its not just absorbed by an artificial cap. And while I do all the random things I do in my day to day sota 'life', I earn some gold, which I can use to buy the things that I can't get because I refuse to respec into the op build of the month. Logging in, and doing anything, is me achieving something. And that's what keeps me here.
     
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  4. Elrond

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    Thats because hes got 2 legendary Ankhs with max int - these are artifacts not crafted gear so all your rant about crafted gear should have been about legendary artifacts .... Then again you probably have no idea why someone is doing x amount of damage and you picked what you thought was the cause for such high damage ...crafting ....
     
  5. Sulaene Moon

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    Elrond's correct.
    When I grouped some UT runs with him and EZ, I noticed that he was doing pretty awesome numbers. So I talked with him after our run and he gave me his stats. He has incredible Int numbers that help, plus his two ankhs. I can say that he has put in the time and sweat to get his character to where it is. He didn't buy those stats nor the Ankhs, he worked his hind end off for them. He gave me a few pointers that have helped me considerably.
     
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  6. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    Hard work should be rewarded, yes. But if the amount of hard work that leads to a reward is too big for the majority of people to still want the reward that's just as destructive to the game as if it's too small for anyone to value the reward. It has to be a careful balance, and this game expects way too much for most people, and as a result has a tiny community, which costs it the money it would need to develop new content.

    Also no, this isn't about making everyone equal, but the differences between people in an RPG should come primarily from build choices, not simply from whether or not they have hundreds of thousands of hours in the game. It's completely ridiculous to act like wanting a game to respect people's time is automatically some kind of participation trophy scheme that eliminates all achievement in it.

    If 99 out of 100 people think the ammount of effort it takes to max out a character isn't worth it. you wind up with ten times more players if you just change it so 90 out of 100 players think it's not worth it. You don't have to shoot for 0 to do better.

    Everyone wins when the game has enough players to hire a bigger team, get some animators in there to make new monsters etc.
     
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  7. oplek

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    I don't want to speak for Aetrion, so I go out on a limb. Elrond's not correct, because he hasn't rebutted a thesis anyone made.

    The assertion isn't that good (or even best) craftable items don't exist. It's more about how they're distributed. Suppose there was an elite item - the Clockwork Wings of Awesomeness.
    • If the only way to get this is by defeating the Clockwork Dragon, this is conducive towards Adventuring.
    • If this item doesn't load anywhere specific, but randomly, with maybe higher level changes with higher tier zones, this is conducive towards Grind.
    If all you get from the Clockwork Dragon is it's lunch money, there's not a lot of reason to adventure there. You can get money and items almost literally anywhere. Player crafting makes this worse, because the point is that the adventure zones wouldn't drop any equivalents at all. The fact that Portalarium has these powerful artifacts is actually them going against that model, which is at best, a step in the right direction, for making adventuring fun.
     
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  8. oplek

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    We have the two models - Defeat boss ABC and get item/spell XYZ, and all the best stuff is player crafted. Artifacts seem to be almost universally disliked because they're a bizarre compromise between the two, that doesn't really solve either's concerns.
     
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  9. Aetrion

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    Yea, I was wrong about classifying what I was criticizing as crafting, what I should have said was "trading", because Elrond is correct about the fact that many of the most powerful items are in fact not crafted. The method by which they are acquired and distributed is effectively indistinc from crafting to an adventurer though.

    Artifacts hurt both adventurers and crafters in their present form.
     
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  10. Sulaene Moon

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    This I can agree with, although I think it hurts crafters the most.
     
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  11. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    In some way maybe, but if you just don't at all enjoy grinding, trading, shopping around etc. and want some gear progression instead the game doesn't offer anything at all for you in its present state, and given that that's the paradigm of all the most popular games that's a lot of people left completely out in the rain.
     
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  12. Sketch_

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    @kaeshiva is right, as per usual - despite being incredibly verbose... She hits the nail on the head pretty often in regards to what it "takes" to play this game... which, tbf, requires rather verbose expositions to describe the underlying essence to people who don't get it, or are approaching the game from the AAA gaming scene.

    Ok well, thats up to them - Its better for the development team to stay faithful to their vision than to succumb to trying to please as many people as possible. Truth. *fist bumps himself*

    But, Idk, wasn't this thread about how awesome crafting is? That's definitely a form of gear progression!

    I'm not very far along - but ive been crafting my own armor the whole time. Its had a steady progression as i learn new recipes and combinations of parts.
    And how do I get the recipes I need for better stuff? Adventuring, duh. That's ironic.
     
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  13. Aetrion

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    Crafting does give you a progression to follow that rewards actually being into crafting and trading and doing it a lot, yes. That's the part that makes me think the devs tried harder to make the crafting experience satisfying than the adventuring experience.
     
  14. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    So does Adventuring .
    What suks is 99.9 % of the loot. And with Chris stating that there are "daily limits" on rare drops, you never know if you're 100% wasting your time trying to get some things because the daily limit has already been reached ( unbeknownst to you ).
    Now THAT takes all the fun out of getting good enough to tackle the bosses that drop said loot.
     
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  15. Aetrion

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    I just don't consider standing in the same place and using combat skills to farm to be adventuring. I think there should be a series of personal achievements that allows you to earn the power to tackle new challenges. Endlessly whack-a-moling monsters to gain the money needed to buy the artifacts and gear pieces you need and then immediately doing it again so you can replace the stuff when it breaks just isn't as much fun as a well designed dungeon and raid progression.
     
  16. Sulaene Moon

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    YIKES! Didn't someone post not too long ago that the best time to get the drops was after midnight US time? That explains why, if the limit reset at midnight in TX, then the first few people who farm rares after that time will get it and others who log in later that night won't.

    *cries* No wonder I seem to have no luck with rare drops.
     
  17. bugmaster77

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    I've been away all summer (PNW--You take advantage of summer by getting out of the house when the sun is out!), but I've been following the forums occasionally, including this thread.

    Can someone confirm the above statements? If this is true, I'm unlikely to ever log in again.

    This is probably the most egregious example of how this game is rigged to support veteran players at the expense of new-comers. No new player is going to know about drop-caps and reset times. So, as a result, every new player that isn't aware of this (and doesn't play just after midnight) gets rusty spoons instead of artifacts.

    I assume it has always been this way. This basically means that the people that knew about this and took advantage of it in a big way (group farming end-game mobs at the stroke of midnight, etc) have been economically privileged. They in turn sell these items to new players for IGG, which the veteran player then sells for real dollars.

    I can't think of a better example anywhere in the gaming world of RMT transactions being not only allowed but encouraged, directly effecting new-players game-experience in a negative way. It stands to reason that there are people taking advantage of this as there is real dollars to be made by doing so. That being said, any drop cap is nothing more than a limitation on NEW players. Amazing. Just...amazing.

    Honestly, at this point I should just shut up as I have nothing to really add. In short, I'm speechless.

    Cozy
     
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  18. Traveller13

    Traveller13 Bug Hunter

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    I did get a lot of COTO drops in the wee hours, US time, back in the day. Hmm. Now I know when I'll try for my mosasaur.
     
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  19. Mishikal

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    Ah man, this post was a great laugh, thank you. Unsurprisingly, given your lack of experience of WoW, it's full of utter misunderstandings of how that game works. ;)

    a) As much as I preferred to start from 1 and level my characters up when I played, it really gives you little knowledge on what's necessary to play the character. This is because of the way in which talent points/specializations work in wow. How you play your character depends entirely on your end level goals. Changing specializations/talents (and thus how you play the character itself) are an integral part of that game, and people frequently change things up. Really the best way to understand how to play a given class is to use a site like icy-veins.

    b) I never did raids, nor is it necessary. If your desired purpose to play wow is to be a raider so as to get all the top end gear blah blah, then your correct, being in such a guild used to be necessary. But such gear was never necessary to do the majority of the content in the game, and if PvP is your thing, not required at all. Last I played (Legion), even that was no longer the case, as they introduced PUGs for raids, and most people just raid in that fashion. Additionally, WoW's loot drop system ensures that you periodically will get high powered gear for your character as a drop even just doing PvE normal world content.

    All that being said, WoW is of course, nothing like SOTA and probably not useful for any type of comparisons, other than perhaps the fact that it does have rewarding loot tables, even for junk items.
     
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  20. Aetrion

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    Raiding in WoW is kind of a shadow of it's former self anyways, because they added the group finder and made all the raids so easy that you can actually complete them with a randomly put together group. The whole appeal of raiding in the early days of WoW was that it was content that required you to make friends and all work together to become a well oiled machine on the battlefield. The social aspect of the game wasn't just tacked on, it was the real path to power. Whether you were in a hardcore raiding guild that expected its members to compete for raid spots and show up daily or in a guild that took it easy, raided sometimes on weekends and just saw how far they could get for the fun of it, it made friends the most powerful thing you could have in the game.
     
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