About displeasure and bad emotions ...

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Paladin Michael, Nov 9, 2019.

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  1. Paladin Michael

    Paladin Michael Bug Hunter

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    There have been a few moments in recent years that have frustrated various people.

    There were issues that surprised the backers of this game.

    I - also a backer since 2014 - would like to comment on a few points, because I believe that displeasure should not lead to disrespect.

    We are adults and should be able to communicate in a good way.

    Especially now that a developer is trying to turn things into something positive -with far less manpower than before- it would be a good idea to be more cautious with allegations.

    1. Offline game development took a back seat - Housing development became more prominent.
    I too would have imagined that the game would be developed offline and then the option of the online world would be activated. But what I imagine is my expectation. Maybe one could focus more on the central story and manage the problem of errors better. It would have been a good idea to have story NPC towns free from player housing (not only for performance issues). This could have prevented alot of frustration by Ultima story focused people! For Episode 2 this was told to be changed. I still hope, it will.

    This is not an attack against player housing. Don't get me wrong. I really appreciate POT and player housing. But if you enter Soltown in Perennial Coast it really can't provide the perennial coast feeling because of so many different buildings, black walls and other player housing stuff! Unfortunately THIS is one of the major problem for people who are here for the story part. The unique STORY RELATED towns are a kind of ... well jumbled sales stands.

    I still suppose to get rid of all player housing in story related NPC towns and build them (may be smaller) to have a unique story related look.

    Yes, there are people who would be against. But really: there are so many empty POTs!
    Having player housing only there would make those towns more alive!

    If you don't care about story and like it to have Vendor beside Vendor, let's ask this:
    Don't we have enough Vendor towns? I think, we don't need more player driven Vendors in story related towns. And it won't stop the player economy! Just visit Novia Market or Crafter's town to name just two :)

    In my view, this is one of the most annoying facts for alot of backers (still) waiting for a new kind of ULTIMA. We have wonderful designed towns and lands. Those are often ruined by stuff just dropped on a lot. To remove player housing from NPC towns could heal this - and it also would improve POT!


    2. The user interface was not changed despite repeated requests, which led to many errors in the quests.
    Yes, that's the case. We now know that work is being done on a gradual basis. In addition, the developers even go further and give players the option to implement story elements! That's a reason for great hope!

    And even though a few people telling, quests are "bugged as hell": No, they ares not.
    I did the whole quests over 5 times with different Avatars. Don't tell me fary tales, please ;)
    Not saying, there aren't bugs - watch my bug reports referring to quests - but there has been done alot of work over the last months!

    Yes, more practical and visual improvements are appreciated :)

    3. Promised things could not be delivered (in time).
    The book. Unpleasant. Not the content. I really like the story that provides a much better understanding of the history around Britain! Intangible replacement will be delivered. That may not be a substitute for those who enjoyed the printed book.
    I advise all those: Sell / trade your immaterial items to/with another player and get the book sent by him :)
    That's how I did it to make someone happy and receive the book. In change I am excited for the immaterial replacements.

    Missing boxes are for sure a reason to be annoyed. But as a matter of fact: most people got their boxes within the first and second delivery. And there was no intention of not delivering parcels.
    This is no consolation for those who are still waiting, but it's not like the team does not care!

    4. Players felt they were not heard enough
    Also, sometimes I had the impression that one did not react. But hand on heart: it is illusory to assume that all ideas could be implemented (immediately).

    The fact is that Sannio and others regularly answer bug and feedback reports - and where possible, swiftly (!) change it.

    5. Shop prices
    Honestly: HOW should this game finance? The development time has devoured the investment costs. And now? Somehow, the people who are here to develop this game for us, have to live, right? Instead of launching attacks that now no office is available, I am grateful that these costs no longer exists. This has been the right decision from a business perspective.

    If you have better ideas how to finance the game in future, feedback welcome for sure :)
    May be, the monthly rewards program will be expanded with $ for more Crowns ...


    6. Bug Hunter Rewards are frozen - Customer care
    Reporting alot of bugs over months, I haven't heard about for months. I suppose it was also problem of viewing people who reported bugs and deliver something.

    I expect this will be done again with the new team member is on board :) And yes, it will take some time to get him involved with all those things we are waiting for ...


    Last, but not least:
    It is understandable that some backers are unpleased, because of made decisions.

    But to question everything and the whole game, because of
    - known errors are corrected
    - made mistakes (yes, developers are humans too!)
    - something has not happened within a few days
    is an expression of frustration and disproportionate to the situation (in most cases).

    The remaining team tries - and I rely on the words of Chris - to correct the existing frustration zones. And recent releases show that this is happening.

    It should be clear to everyone that everything takes a bit longer with fewer people.

    I am not a developer, but I had to endure a true "Sh*tstorm" when I posted a comment on the game on Steam years ago. It was no longer about the game itself, but about venting the pent up frustration.

    And as understandable as that is, it is useless to shoot those who seriously (!) try to change things for the better.

    All frustrated personalities:
    Either you manage to pull off the past and - maybe after a while of abstinence - give people and the game a chance to start a development in a better direction, or take a pillow and beat the devil out of yourself...
    [To honor Bob, you also can beat the devil out of a brush, if you use to paint ;)].


    Again, this is a process, mistakes are made here as well. Or, just call it "happy accidents!" ;)
    We are all humans. Also I am not enthusiastic about some things and there are (game) moments that are just frustrating.

    For example: I've never made a secret of the fact that I do not like the XP pool system!
    (I also mentioned several times, why - alot of useless time with no skill improvement).

    But those (missing) things will not let me judge the entire game.

    I like the story, the lands, the music, the skill system (yes, even if it can -and will- be improved!) and possibilities of housing. And yes, more text for books would be fine and heraldry for book cover, too.
    And if we get an auto-fade function for all screen elements, I'm even happier ;)


    A recommendation for frustrated people:
    Transform frustration by using the energy to make CONSTRUCTIVE suggestions.
    But, please, do not expect that your unique ideas will be implemented immediately ...
    Just ask yourself how many times YOURSELF have been disparaging the ideas of other players, negatively judging, because you disagree?
    And you seriously believe that the developers should immediately ACCURATE to YOUR expectation immediately?

    Let's try to be more friendly and respectful to each other. Wasn't that one good reason to back a game of Lord British about Virtues? :)
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2019
  2. CarlNZ

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    It may be fine for some, but even recently I've been unable to get through the quests. It's still buggy as all get out leading to several quests being unable to be competed. New players are still going to be lost thanks to buggy markers, journal issues etc. So no, not a fairy tale .
     
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  3. Aetrion

    Aetrion Avatar

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    The biggest thing that would stop people getting frustrated with the game would be if the devs just stated what their intended audience is so everyone else can just move on. It's their inability to decide who this game is for that is causing most of the problems. It's like "We want to be an expressive game with heavy character customization, costuming, housing and player generated content. You earn these things through heavy economics simulation that requires you to manage your character like a small business and do constant upkeep." Ok, cool. You lost everyone who is only into one of those two things.
     
  4. Paladin Michael

    Paladin Michael Bug Hunter

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    First: thank you for reading through the wall of text. I really appreciate this :)

    I am just wondering: if quests can be done from NEW created Avatars (what I did with two new Avatars), may be it happens just to old Avatars?

    I don't want to say, there are no bugs at all (as I told: watch my bug reports). I just say, I found no quests while doing the main paths, which I couldn't finish.
    And yes, some quests are too difficult for the Adv. lvl. a player could reach at that time (I also gave feedback about this to Sannio).

    But it would be very interesting for me to know, where exactly you got stuck?
    (And I hope, you reported those bugs? Easiest way: right mousekey on quest task)

    Happened it offline or online? On which path?
    May be there is a mechanism which could explain, why some people have issues, while others don't.
     
  5. Anpu

    Anpu Avatar

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    There’s a common misconception that in SotA “the quests are broken and buggy “. The quests work, and finish just fine (ask Mac, he’s done it 16 times). I can confirm this as well. I have 5 characters.

    What people mean to say is “I still have blue markers showing for quests I already have finished.”

    This is usually an issue that effects people with older accounts and did the quests a long time ago. But Sannio has actually been putting in fixes for these. To clear these blue markers:

    Go to the area where the blue marker is showing. And then go to the NPC and speak to them. Click or type the word help. You then might discover you didn’t turn in that quest and will get xp for completing it. Or they might not say something else, like they don’t need any more help. Then click on goodbye.

    The marker should now be cleared. If it does not, leave the area. That should clear up most all the stuck blue markers. If it doesn’t, report that please so Sannio can fix that.

    I can confirm with 2 new characters, that were created quite recently, they have no stuck blue markers. For new users this should no longer be an issue.

    There is however one other option you can do, but be careful because you can only do this ONE TIME. And that is a quest reset. This will completely remove all quests, markers and quest items (like the shroud). Just think very carefully before you use that option.
     
  6. Astirian

    Astirian Avatar

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    We need a Simon Cowell type QA guy who approves player houses in NPC towns haha!

    [​IMG]

    This is good to know! I'm gonna do my first real playthrough when the new system comes online and I have some ideas on a few custom dialogue box concepts I'd love to implement via Lua. And to be fair, they have made improvements to the UI, getting rid of that ghastly yellow was a top move:

    [​IMG]

    And they did have a brief crack at the dialogue box too:

    [​IMG]

    Agreed, it's rough being a dev these days.

    There's two constants for me with SotA:

    1. The devs work really hard.
    2. The game is always improving.

    I think that most of us can agree that we see the potential and I really hope they tough it out and come out smiling on the other end. Come Hell or high water as LB put it.

    I really love seeing the passion on the forums too, even if sometimes we can get a little overzealous. This is the only forum online that I participate in, so that's saying something!
     
  7. Scoffer

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    Unfortunately port/catnip games have brought these bad emotions and displeasure upon themselves and we have seen a steady decline over the last few months with no indication that this will improve. To expand on the list presented on the first post:

    Patch notes:
    It wasn't too long ago when new release patch date was a big deal. We used to go through at our guild meeting telling people what was coming. People would jump on QA for data gathering and bug finding and it would generate excitement about what is coming up. Now most of is "we patched this in last week" or "Feature x will be coming" but its not actually made it into this release and it comes out a week or two later. Features slipping is understandable but when it becomes the norm something needs to be done about it. I was speechless the other day when a small update was put out so that the Ardoris teleporter actually teleported you to Ardoris (and not the Fall which is a higher end PVP zone). It was a new item added which had one purpose, to teleport you to the Ardoris. You would think that someone might have actually clicked it during development to see if it worked. Failing that someone on QA should have easily picked it up. This wasn't added to QA so absolutely zero testing was done and it was simply pushed to live with the typical "this should work" attitude that people are getting tired of seeing. We saw it with the obsidian bears when they were introduced, creepy dolls, envy bow not dropping.......the list goes on. It seems to have slipped from What is new and exciting this month? to What is going to be broken now?

    Communication:
    Other than the patch notes there is very very little communication that people can look into without having to watch through 20+ hours a week of various streams to see if someone may have mentioned something and its simply not good enough. Take the following example from Twitter
    [​IMG]

    First off, there is no mention anywhere else about limiting artifacts to only one instance. This might be useful information to those people who are spamming the Trade channel every day buying them up for 100k, 400k for a rare (and presumably 1.2m for a legendary). Also, second ring slot? Where is this mentioned other than here? I'm assuming it was a discussion on one of chris's streams but don't have time to go through all of them to see if its mentioned.

    These sorts of things are what is leading people to lose faith in the project and eventually move onto something else. We see it time and again with people leaving and while its understandable a lot of the reasons can be mitigated by A) Giving people information about whats happening and B) Actually doing testing or allowing the players to test, many things don't make it onto QA due to time constraints which should be a clear indication of its not ready and if they DO make it to QA AND they get bug reported they still get pushed to live anyway and shoved under "known issues we will fix at some point"
     
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  8. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    Its not just lack of communication ...for me it just seems lack of insight.

    Take the amount of effort to create dozens of new recipes using fish ...not a single one of which is economical or viable. Beyond 'first time crafting XP' these are just more useless items.
    Or look at the 'use explosion potion to shatter gem' addition. I can see making it a little lossy, but the cost of doing this is just downright silly.
    We have potions we can combine that reduces their value - you're better off selling the crap ones and buying mats for the big ones. Recipes using scraps (cloth/leather) that still cost more in fuel than not using them at all. Things like the 'bacon' recipe which nobody would actually make to eat for any purpose other than RP. Cooking in particular is one area where it seems like things were just made up with no consideration to the complexity or difficulty of the recipe other than the obsidian foods, which when used as a benchmark, make 99% of other recipes completely pointless.
    Or adding a new mining scene and filling it with death metal slimes that can 2-shot you wearing heavy armor and having 1400+ HP and have no meaningful reward for killing them.
    Or adding silver/gold scraps but making them so rare its more cost effective to just smelt using ore eliminating the need for them entirely. Or adding 'young dragons' which have 5x the HP of a normal Tier 5 mob and are reasonably annoying to kill, and give less skinning xp and less loot than stuff you find in the outskirts.

    STOP wasting resources/time adding stuff that nobody will use/do beyond the initial novelty. If you don't have time to math it out or play the game to figure out if something's worth doing, then ask!
    You have a very involved, very willing playerbase of people who will happily numbercrunch, make suggestions, give explanations as to why/why not.
    "We're thinking of adding a new recipe using wyvern haunches. The process should go something like this: These are rare-ish drops off of mobs that have 3 to 5 times the HP of an obsidian creature that hurt considerably more. Lets think, where this should fit in the overall reward-vs-effort scheme? What effects are currently under-represented in food? (like, not having any INT food that doesn't require a rare boss drop or "ultrarare-never-caught-one-in-thousands-of-fish" fish.). Then fill the gaps.

    Modifying outputs and improving existing things would probably take less time than coming up with brand new stuff and would improve the game considerably.

    I get really frustrated when I read the early release notes and I see:
    • Cycling out pointless holiday boss with a 1% drop of a holiday rare to replace with next pointless holiday boss that, at least last year, only required killing 20 times or so to get the novelty holiday item for your full team.
    • Adding 2 new foods that probably wont be worth making.
    • Adding a new big spider that will be incredibly difficult to kill, and have the same loot as the 300 hp brown spider, 99% of the time, for 1 person only in your group.
    • Adding a bunch of stuff you can buy for $.
    I know the team is working hard. I know Chris especially is working 'round the clock. I do not question their passion or their industriousness. And if you look over the past year, there have been a LOT of improvements to the game. But we still have very basic, very low hanging fruity things, wrong, and what seems to be a huge amount of effort put toward things that end up just getting ignored. It used to be I read the patch notes, and I made myself a shopping list of where to go, what recipes to get, what quests to try, what emotes to learn, what new scenes to explore, etc. And I appreciate its a smaller team and we can't deliver a lot of new content. Which is why its even more important now to ensure that the content we do spend time creating is worthwhile.
     
  9. Spungwa

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    These type of problems are exactly the type of problems early eve online had. Out of wack power balance, reward per time, crafting cost Vs return.

    They all got fix within few years when the Devs did one thing. Unfortunately something this games has stated they don't want to do.

    They released all the maths, exposed the the item database and attributes used for that maths, recipes as a data dump.

    This lead the community to make tools to model income per hour, DPS of different fits against eachother to min/max this stuff.

    Guess what happened next....
    The game designers started using these exact community build tools to balance and pre-evaluate changes by linking then up to there proposed change data dumps.

    Regards
    Spung
     
  10. Xee

    Xee Bug Hunter

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    Because people were complaining about the streams all the information on what chris is working on is in twitter. So you have that simple place to look for information. This was posted in the forums and mentioned in stream, not sure if it was message of the day in game. I thought this was great to get info on changes they are working on.
     
  11. Astirian

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    I wonder why they're reluctant to do something like that... Sounds like an awesome idea! And I didn't know Eve was in a similar boat in the early days, man I'd kill to have a player-base helping out with balancing things.
     
  12. Arkah EMPstrike

    Arkah EMPstrike Avatar

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    I think chris talked about very recently the possibility of doing that
     
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  13. Mishikal

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    Brewing is another excellent example here. ;)
     
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  14. Gageman

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    OMG! That was brilliant.
     
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  15. Gageman

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    OMG, what a completely worthless endevour that was. I brewed 25 year whiskey for a REAL LIFE YEAR and it did NOTHING. Sweet job fellas!
     
  16. Spungwa

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    The early years of Eve the forums were full of "Eve is dying" because of many of the issue people complain about in this game. When tech 2 was first introduced it so unbalanced the game that they had to add fitting restrictions that did not used to exist and in fact only nearly a decade later were taken out again. First stiletto interceptor i had was a 100MN MWD for making book marks, could go nearly 200km/s, which makes it impossible to kill. It was not really fully working and in a good state until they finished the multi year process they called "tiericide", where they ensured that every ship and item had a role in the game. What it did was take every item and ensure it had at least a niche, ie something it was best at, even if that niche only had limited situations it would be useful in. If item X existed that was just better in all respects than item Y, they either changed item Y to have a new niche or if no new niches exist for that type of item they just removed the item and updated all instances of item Y into item X. There rationale was, why are we supporting (that cost them continual dev time) ships and items that after you skill to a certain level no one uses.

    What they had realised by that point is that in game currency cost can only go so far in balance. Just because something is in game expensive in player time (and therefore expensive in game currency) players will find a way. When they first put titans in they were sooo OP, but they thought only a hand full would ever be made because of the cost, real time to build (took 3 real months to build not including collecting the materials etc), logistics, player coordination, player skill points required to build, fly and support them. A couple of years after the first was build there was fights with a hand full of titans on each side of a single battle and that just escalated.

    Never underestimate gamers capacity to find the best way to game a system. This is especially true of MMO gamers, as they usually invest more hours to a single game than most other gamers.


    Regards
    Spunng
     
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  17. Spungwa

    Spungwa Avatar

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    This, to my mind, is the long laborious process that the food buffs need to go through. Most are useless, only a small subset are of any use.

    Regards
    Spung
     
  18. Gageman

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    agreed. We have 90 recipes and people use 4 maybe 6
     
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  19. D'Weasel

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    Take the endless grind out of the game so that the high end content really is high end content and not able to be soloed. Encourage game play and not anti-social behavior (Upper Teirs, Zombie Room, etc). The original purpose to all of the skill trees was a sort of rock/paper/scissors that required people to make decisions. Unlimited XP takes away the need for most decisions (specialization excluded). I like playing the game - grouping to go on higher level bosses, exploring new zones to look for something that makes that one special, questing, and basically interacting with other players (in good or bad ways(PVP)). I hate grinding.
     
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  20. Paladin Michael

    Paladin Michael Bug Hunter

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    Recipies should be unique depending on cooking skills of the creator of the food. Fix stats for foods are destroying this chance.

    A special skill depending on the kind of animal (wolf, fish, bear, spider) would be fine to lower or raise, like : The bigger the bear, the meat is from, the higher the Str-factor *0,5 or 1,5, but Dex-factor - 0,5, -1,5, for example.
    Or:
    Spider meal: Sprint skills + ...
    Fish meal: Int +

    But all should depend on the (master) abilities of a good cook, with separate skills for "fish", "meat", "vegetables" ...
    And may be specialication for one category of water / air / earth / fire beings ...

    So all recipies would be usefull - depending on the skills a player could train :)
     
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