As a low/mid level player - this game is fine lol

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Jekyll, Oct 24, 2019.

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  1. Astirian

    Astirian Avatar

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    Yeah, I have to admit, in terms of the Online game I'm having a great time. Bring on Treasure Hunting and it's going into overdrive! :)
     
  2. Kara Brae

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    I agree with you about the fun at mid level. I used to love playing the game until I hit a glass ceiling with regard to difficulty. I stopped playing because the new content was too hard for me and even some of my favorite scenes were made too difficult, so my options in the game shrank. But I remember all the fun I used to have getting up to that level and I still have hopes that episode two will give me new fun content that I can manage. If I were a better player I would already have loads of achievable challenges to master, so the fault is with me.
     
  3. kaeshiva

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    There's nothing wrong with having difficult content in a game that a player can work toward defeating and then feel a sense of achievement.
    There is a problem with having content that is -actually impossible- for all but a handful of builds.
    There is also a problem with creating a scenario in which a player or group of players works very hard to achieve something and they get 100 gold worth of loot to split between them as reward. How likely are they to attempt it again, or attempt the next thing?

    Right now I'm kinda feeling "why bothery" with Sota right now. Because nothing I can log in and do is going to net me any sort of reward worth my time. It used to matter less, when the experience I got doing whatever it was, was still relevant, but at my level, millions and millions of XP would make no noticeable difference, so the couple hundred K I get out harvesting/exploring is not even a drop in the bucket. The loot's no good. If I'm after in-game gold, I can go grind trivial stuff, but I find trying to locate anything on player vendors to be a tedious chore so and I have enough gold for my daily play expenses for the foreseeable. So....why bother? With specialization locking advancement into two schools, there's not even lateral progression anymore. In the past, if I had excess XP I could always work on an alternate build or try something else but pumping more XP at this point into anything is not going to bridge the gap between what I can do and I can't. This is why you hear a lot of high levels clamoring for balance, for fixes, for reviewing the economic inviability of so many crafted items, for an overhaul of all the pointless/useless items/systems/scenes that have no use or replay value. The current state of things is that there's simply nothing worth doing, there are no long term goals to work for, no achievements, and far too much of the game is based on blind chance/luck than working toward something.

    Its taken me 5 years to get to this level of complacency, which as far as MMOs go, is pretty incredible. I know this sounds negative, but the deeper point here is that with the way I play, I consume and discard most MMOs in a few weeks/months and Sota has kept me interested far, far longer. They're doing something right here, the extremely long mid-game has plenty to keep players hooked, the problem is that its too easy now to just zoom past it and once you have done so, there's little to see on the other side of that mountain.
     
  4. Steevodeevo

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    Another intriguing post, you're on a roll!

    May I ask, as I appreciate your dilemma, what do you think would help improve the game when you are between challenge levels or indeed, get rid of the issue of your Avatar being in the doldrums from time to time between challenge levels altogether?

    Sometimes I find myself sleepwalking much of the content I can handle and whilst I still have some areas where I need to stay alert and occasionally retreat, my next big wave of content is quite far above me.

    I don't mind this so much as I am not yet jaded with repetition of easy content, as I mostly try to combine my Exp runs with gathering and I'm OK with grinding my way to these scary but tempting new dungeons eventually, but it is slow going.

    My hope is episode 2 will provide story or other adventure rich content that is challenging and fills some challenge gaps and isn't just cloned and tweaked zones that are a little bit harder, though this would help.

    One suggestion I have, which isn't new or my idea, is being able to select normal, hard and insane modes when entering instanced zones. This could be awesome especially if the exp and rewards scale with the mobs. I appreciate this has some connotations, but maybe the higher level access to some selected zones could be linked to some achievement, such as clearing the zone x times or maybe just linked to your AL.

    This would really sweat some of the excelent existing maps that most don't re visit as they become too low level for their characters after a short while.
     
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  5. Black Tortoise

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    this game is super fun if you dont play like a workaholic!

    i have zero "goals" in terms of level, going beyond 100 in a skill, maxing out on things, having the "best" gear... all of that sounds maddeningly boring and self defeating. it sounds like work!

    i have lots of "goals" around having really pimp outfits, really cool public lots for people to explore and hang out in, chatting with people, crafting furniture to decorate, exploring, and adventuring-as-play, never adventuring-as-work. i have zero timeline for my goals, in fact i hope they take a really long time to achieve, so that i get the most fun out of my play.

    ...and my experience in SoTA is fun as hell and i feel quite satisfied with my investment! Been playin' since 2014 and am adv lvl 95 ;). I also only look at that when I make posts like this - now its back to being blissfully unaware of my levels while I play!
     
  6. Black Tortoise

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    P.S. pls bring back the death penalty so there is actually some meaning to the challenges faced while adventuring. thx. The only real boring part about "playtime" for me is that there is no real actual challenge and dying is completely meaningless and effect-less.
     
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  7. Violet Ronso

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    I agree, I want some sort of Death mechanic back, as long as it isnt as punitive as it was before. Right now death only means going back to an ankh, something more meaningful could help the pressure and thrill.

    Also I love your playstyle Tort! I love seeing nice decoed lots to get ideas and what not, I am so bad at it but really try, you should see how bad my stuff looks lol! Im jealous. Im also the kind of player who wants to progress in lvls and gear, but do it through other main goals, just to keep the fun in the game.
     
  8. Black Tortoise

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    it also makes it simple to kill powerful mobs that are close to ankhs - since there is no penalty for dying, i can take things like a darkstarr corpion down to 50% health, die, and when i run back to it, its at 70% health and im fully healed and buffed. then i win, i get all the exp and lose nothing.

    zzz...

    deco is more exciting than fake adventure ;)
     
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  9. kaeshiva

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    For me personally, the answer is goal-setting, or rather more specifically, the ability to set out to achieve X and be able to do so over a course of days/weeks/months depending on your playtime with tangible, visible progress toward the end goal. In most cases in Sota, this is not possible due to the heavy RNG reliance in everything.

    Let's say I'm after sage's sashes so I can work on upgrading to a legendary, for example. Since this is a random, low % world drop off of "whatever" there's no way to say, right, I'm going to go work on that sage's sash problem and set out to do it. You simply get lucky, or you don't. Or let's say you're after a piece of particular crafted gear - same problem - its a matter of try, try again, and the time spent failing does nothing to advance your goal except sap your will to live and motivation when you're sent yet again to grind money to feed the RNG god.

    Now, we have seen some things move in this direction, such as essence drops to work on dungeon rooms, and I see this as positive progress. You know what drops what you need, its a matter of killing it until you get the required amount. At least at the end of an hour's play session (or an 8 hour session, whatever), you can see that you had more than you did yesterday, you've made progress, you haven't just been spinning your wheels.

    Its not enough to simply localize drops onto particular targets, though that helps. Cabalist gear, for example - it took me over two years of pretty heavy sieging to finally get the hood I wanted, and this was long after I'd been given one by another player out of pity. I'm not saying things can't be rare, but there are less soul-destroying alternatives than "today, I logged on and achieved nothing" 600 days in a row. Most people will bail after a couple weeks of that. Most players are willing to put in the time to get the things. I certainly am. What I'm tired of, and what's got me in this why-bothery-place, is that the game continues to -waste- my time because everything boils down to "did I get lucky today." I'd much rather a system that rewarded persistence and hard work than one that could give player A something after an hour's effort and player B is still trying after 500 hours of effort. Dropping rare cosmetic variants of things, mountable trophy heads etc. - fine, let them be rare. Making absolutely everything rare and random stops being "The day is full of possibilities!!" and starts becoming "Eh, this crap again."

    I remember going with a group to kill a seasonal event boss and after several hours and 30 or 40 kills, we finally got one drop. For one person in our party of 6. Small wonder that the next day nobody wanted to go do it. Or ever again.

    The easiest way to regularize this is instead of relying on a 0.1% lucky drop chance of an item, instead give a 100% drop chance of a fragment-of-said-item that you need to collect 1000 of to make whatever it is you are after. If the dev vision is that this item takes 1000 kills, then lets at least make it semi-reliable.

    Goal-setting doesn't just have to be about items, either. There are many paths that players could be put on to achieve all manner of things. Unlockables at achieving a certain number of kills of a certain creature, such as titles, special achievement-bestowed, account-bound recipes, whatever. Some games with earnable-titles give a small bonus when you display a particular one. Let's say I've skinned 10000 wolves (or whatever, pick a number), if I run around sporting "Wolf Slayer" lets say it gives me a 5% skinning speed bonus. Or after killing some absurd number of elves, I earn an elf Slayer title that makes me more effective at killing them in some way. These sorts of things - while extremely long term - give goals to strive for that you achieve, bit by bit, while doing other things - so even if you don't make much progress toward whatever cash, item, or material acquisitions you're after, you at least are progressing -something-.

    The problem we face now at the high end is that "adventure experience" is no longer worth much in terms of motivating. I'd have to pump about 100 million into earth skills at this point to up the base damage of my spells by a single point from attunement. That makes getting a few hundred K an hour killing normal stuff feel a bit pointless. Its even made going and getting the 2million attenuation feel pointless. Same deal in crafting except a lot slower. Oh, another 50 million producer XP and I can up my % chance by 1%. Yippee? I'll get right on that. Now, if while I'm out mining or skinning or smelting or while I'm sitting down preparing to batch up a thousand pie dough, if I'm progressing long term goals it somehow makes the whole thing a lot less distasteful. What if after making (some absurd number) of pie dough, cooking oil, etc. you got a sous chef title, or skill, or passive, or something, that made you do these tasks faster, or in higher batch rates, or something?

    With progression in the game being accelerated to the point where what once took years can now be achieved in a couple of caffeine-intense weekends by new folks coming into the game, what reason now is there to continue to play for years? Functional stuff is key, but in the realm of "bragging rights" cosmetic stuff the sky's the limit in terms of things long-term players could earn.
     
    Last edited: Nov 4, 2019
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  10. Steevodeevo

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    Awesome stuff. @Chris @DarkStarr ? Pls read, its on the nail.
     
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  11. Sketch_

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    I should also mention I have a lot of luck in this game by playing in phases - I won't play for an extended amount of time (like if I get bored and find myself on the forum making grand plans about how to fix things)

    then I'll play something else.. anything that is engaging and enjoyable..

    Then, wouldn't ya know it - somehow, miraculously, I feel like playing SOTA again for an extended and intensive amount of time.

    If you get bored stop playing - but don't uninstall and CIHYS, necessarily.
     
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