My State of the Game

Hello fellow Nerds,

To start this I must say this game is unlike any. I love this game and have been playing since Sept 2014.

Now since my beginning in 14 I felt every change to the game was a positive step forward. Every release had a new beginning and a new breath to the game. Back when I started the game I was Blades it was almost the only viable build. So lets fast forward, every release other builds were getting improvements and I had grown tired of blades, so I went to archer, then death, then spears, then fire and finally landed on bludgeon as of this month. See Progression... Right?

Now last major stream about Bards ... I know there is some hype about this build but in my opinion its a wrong direction for the game. Now before you grab your pitch forks. It goest without saying that being a sun mage alone wont work, being a earth mage alone wont work, being a chaos mage alone wont work, being a water mage... you get where I’m going. Why are we focus on bringing new builds in where only a certain number of builds actually work. I had a hope once that a Air mage would work. I would love to cast lightning from the sky... but it didn’t work. Now please don’t say.. well if you take blank skill to 160 and blank to 140 it would be a decent build. I’m a father of two, a police officer and a husband. My time is very spread out as I know the normal player is, we cant judge builds the same as Fzol or Girlsname. Not saying their time isn’t as valuable as mine all I’m saying is these are high characters and the few cant be on a level of the many. Let’s fix our current builds before we go starting other fires. I will credit the taming got a massive update! I was supper excited about!

Now lets go to last few releases ... Lua and GM Powers. This was disappointing. We wanted to know the stats of our characters.. like every other game out there. We got handed Lua... here do it yourself. I don’t code I have no idea what the heck to do with that? Now I have to sit here and wait for other ppl to code for me and hope that they didn’t code in some bad stuff along with the file. We didn’t get the stats of our toons we got handed a problem with the game and was told to fix it ourself. Ah and then player made quest promise.. I know ppl are excited about that but we got handed another problem told to fix it ourself. Ask yourself how many ppl leave because of the quest system? The story? How will a new player jumping in know hey the game quest sucks you would come do the player made quests? They wont! They will follow the main broken quest, look at the broken journal and leave. So two problems were handed to players and made to look like a good thing.. in the long run it isn’t a good direction. So lets spend Dev time on bandaids when we need stitches. AH GM powers was said to have taken a lot of dev time. This one I will never use and I feel very little players will but lets spend time ignoring the main fires and put out a small one. Total waste of time.

And then to PVP and Crafting!

PVP is a joke. I have a good knowledge of pvp in the game and yes I have done pvp a great deal. So pvp sucks then we run a test to see if no loot causes pvp to be better! Of course pvp graphs show pvp increased... Wanna know the real reason ? Now sure ppl that have wanted to try it come out and try it but the main reason.... you gain more xp when flagged for pvp and now with no chance of a consequence.... all reward no risk? That will fix it for sure. I know he is looking at better ways for this but don’t be fooled by a graph. PPL are so risk adverse in this game its stupid. There wasn’t a lot of pvpers before the no loot because they would loose something if caught. Now take away the risk to that and give only reward what do you get ? I have been looking for fights for the past couple of days. Now there is two kinds of ppl I come across, 1 being the ppl that flagged for xp and I catch and kill supper fast or 2 the ppl that flagged for xp and as soon as I come into zone they cloak and run the the exit and leave. Now I will say I have had maybe 2 good fights. Now I have no idea how to fix pvp and wont claim to have that knowledge but in every game PVP is risk vs reward not just reward!
So Crafting, so silly. Elrond sits back and gets rich as blah blah and me a starting crafter waste gold for no reason. Now Elrond is a very old school player and deserves every gold he is givin but as said before on these forums novice crafters are pointless, intermediate crafters are pointless. So really I lvl up crafting just to get better odds on my fishing, better chance of mining? Really ? Why couldn’t we have gear levels like other games? All a new player has to do is have a little knowledge of the game, see the good crafted stuff and buy cotos or gold off players and buy it, now all he has to work towards is xp. Bye bye beginning crafter bye bye intermediate crafters. I love crafting but seeing that its pointless cuts out about 25 percent of the game for me and for what ? Why has this problem arrived ? Why would I wear gear that is sub par to the gear crafted perfectly by a very tiny few ? And yes blah blah I could grind xp and get as good as them in a few months if I wanted to but that still doesn’t take the broken system for the need of gear progression, I would love to RP a blacksmith from a small town that creates novice gear for the new adventures. I cant because the brand new Jimmy can wear gear that would be lvl 140 day one, but if that same Jimmy saw that he couldn’t until he was adv lvl 75 then Jimmy would seek out novice crafters and intermediate ones.

Now XP .....

Back in 2014 deep ravenswood was the place to grind xp! I remember grinding with Woftam, Justin and Eclipsy Maiden, Got my first GM with that bunch Now xp has seen a long ride with the introduction to UT I cant tell you how many hours I had in a group in that hell hole lol . To now you have tons of ways to grind xp but have you noticed for the average player he or she may never see the attn badge ? So how do we get that being a solo casual player? Join a group right? Cool but I’m a introvert and want to play the game solo. Pick up a fire mage alt? Cool but now I have two toons to play the game. Change builds? Cool now I’m playing the way the game forces me to play. See all these questions a new player will have and will come to hate. I believe in solo game play just as much as I believe in group but I feel it is to hard for solo players to advance their toons in a way to where the game doesn’t get boring and grindy. And trust me players have left the game because of XP wither that was because it was to hard to get it, or because you had to join a group, or simply because the xp cap that is in place. XP needs a look over, do we as a game care how easy it is to get xp when the tough way right now makes players leave? I met a dude the other day said he has been playing since 14 and was only adv lvl 92 because he only wants to play the game solo. Imagine how many like him were around but left ? Please please look over the way and how we get xp in this game!




So I digress I love the game and hope nothing but the best and I still think Chris and the team is the hardest working dev team I’ve ever seen. So I stay and I play the hell out of this beautiful game! No I’m not leaving the game or saying you cant have my money lol. I still think the game offers stuff that no game comes close to and for that reason is why I spent the better part of 40 min writing this. We all want this game to be the best it can so these are my two cents, be worth what they are, I’m going to bed and ill see you all in Novia tomorrow! Good night Nerds

 

You didn’t try Polearms?

Novice crafters can make exceptional items.

Control Points give a lot of XP too.

 

Lol well thanks @Rhunon for your honest and open take on things. I agree with so much of what you say. Instead of some missing basics of the game getting finished by devs it is being sent to players to find and write luas. I'm not saying that's all bad but definitely not what was expected. I don't see how it is going to get masterworking or more to the cooking tree, or even add alcohol to recipes to make brewing more viable. Or give us mounts, jousting, horse racing and even boating.

I don't see how LUA is going to give us an interesting treasure hunting system that won't be just a grind for maps that feels very like the grind for dungeon pieces. Hmm just replace dungeon pieces with treasure maps and there you go easy peasy. I say no way to that but does it matter? I think not.

Interesting, engaging, fun is missing in that equation. In fact it's missing in many places as a game for many types of players and it should be in abundance sprinkled all over. I am here to watch and hopefully things will come back around in this process to fill-in the blanks.

 

Nicely put together Rhunon .

 

We can have gear levels BUT we can not have gear levels AND diminishing returns on power as you level.

If getting higher level not only increases your skill but also opens up higher stats gear then power increase is more exponential than diminishing. Which is what most games do, and why you get nothing for killing NPCs or players X levels below you. If you implement no XP for too low a level mobs then no more high and low players grouping together.

So, yes we COULD have level gated gear, but it is a fundamental change in the game design and ethos that would then require many subsequent changes. As the whole balance and open ended progression is based on the fact that progression is diminishing.

I'm not so against the LUA, short term it is dev expensive, but longer term I think it will make the game much better and be very Dev cheap.

PS agree with most of the post, was just answering your question why has this problem arrived.

Regards
Spung

 

You make it sounds so easy ..and its not ... few days ago i made some swords ...took me like 4 hours of crafting to get 3 swords the way i wanted ... anyway im not happy either with the way the crafting system has been handled ..but it seems when it comes to crafting Bzus is immune to our feedback . We have asked for so many things that would have made crafting better and none have been implemented .

The Big Secret - Crafting is not about the levels you got ...its about the money ( in this case gold ) you are willing to invest to get that one awsome piece . Im not saying its good but its the way the system works . At any given time i have about 20-30 mil gold worth of raw materials invested in crafted gear ... thats something you build in time and not overnight .

I dont mind if they add something like this but honestly for someone active it wont matter much . I could probably make crafters account with lvl 100 , for every profession in just 1 week or 2 by crafting potions for the xp .... this way ill be present on low lvl and high lvl crafted gear market ...so not much will change just more time wasted on a redundant system that wont actually help low lvl crafters .
_________________________________________________________

The ways i see this being fixed is if dependency is created between a low lvl crafter and a high level crafter ...meaning high lvl crafters shouldnt be bothered to create some things because theyre too busy with making other things which are more profitable or high lvl crafters need services of low lvl crafters .

The biggest problem we have with crafting atm is overabundance of raws which result in overproduction of goods couple that with the low number of players and the result is obvious .... milions ( maybe bilions ) of crafted gear pieces sitting in chests or on vendors waiting for people to buy them ( which is never gonna happen).

So what we need to do first for the crafting system is to introduce scarcity .

How do you add scarcity ..by limiting the number of raw materials people can obtain / hour ( which has already been done with raising respawn timers for nodes from 2 mins to 7-8 mins ) or by introducing a system or more systems that require even more raw materials then before to make something .

I already posted a suggestion about how to introduce scarcity to the crafting economy can read more about it here

CRAFTING - Tiered Ingots System
If we had a system like that it would change crafting overnight same as it happened with artifacts ...

 

You can already see people posting what you have missed or might be doing wrong or countering your argument but the reality is your post is pretty much word for word what most other people have said before. The only difference I see is that most other people left the game rather than staying like you and I do. Will the past path and future ever change for this game? Doubt it, but it's still playable all the while still frustrating. You just have to learn to bare with it.

 

I can't say I've understood arguments like this. Yes, you could do that... because you have a gargantuan amount of money, materials, unbreakable tools and knowledge that your new character can tap into.

If you can do that from scratch, making as you say ALL professions level 100 in a week doing nothing but crafting potions... you're using an exploit that needs to be fixed.

 

You understand but you like to pretend .

When a new system is suggested im interested in its effectiveness . In this case suggestion was to limit the gear a character can wear based on his level and crafter level because it would supposedly allow low lvl crafters to enter the low lvl market for crafted goods . This is obviously not gonna happen and i explained in detail why ... and its not because im an evil guy or because im against it ...but id prefer devs to focus on real solutions for fixing this problem then having them waste time on adding another redundant system .

Also the difference between me having 150 mil xp in a profession and a crafter who has 1 mil xp in a profession is 1 strength max ... so you want a low lvl character to not be able to equip my gear because it has 0.1 more avoid and 1 STR more ? Like i said...waste of devs time as far as im concerned .

Just craft resto potions 2-3 mil xp/day easy thats 50 mil craft xp for 14 days . Exploit or not people do it so i assume it works as intended.

 

This I agree with. The relience bit is hard though in a game that allows you to create stuff so quickly, after the refine to component steps. Eve and swg are the only games I have seen this work well in, and that is because you are limited by concurrent crafts you can be doing and crafting takes real life days to elapse. So works like brewing in this game but with limit per character on how many you can start until others have finished.

I would however flip the overabundance of resource and overproduction on it head. Instead call it a lack of demand. Making stuff there is already huge stockpiles on players accounts (I include myself in this) in the game more rare will do nothing. Well except maybe give players like me windfall one off bonus as the price increases, but that is not what this post was trying to achieve, it was trying to help newer players. What is needed is an infinite demand mechanism at a return that is not optimal, but is acceptable. Ideally reward for that demand is not igg, this just causes inflation, but is something else that players consider worth enough to trade in.

Ideas have been said before for rewards like
Crafting recipes.
Crafting XP.
Crafting buffs.
Tier 3 components.

Regards
Spung

 

I wish.

I am fortunate to have two monitors, so I can do something else while crafting. Or, more like I can crafting while doing something else. The important part being, while crafting, I am not really DOING Shroud. It's the secondary activity.

It must be very annoying to anyone who has only one monitor.

Second reason to go this route is that it creates a log in incentive. Yes, something the devs have been looking for! Just like agriculture, an offline crafting queue is a great incentive to log in. That was my favorite part of Eve.

 

It's why I put in after the craft to component steps. It is refining and making the components that takes time. In fact the ONLY reason I have an alt is to refine materials while I do something more fun on my main. Then once my alt has made all the components my main heads back for 15 minutes and does final stages, as my main has much higher skills.

Regards
Spung

 

Fair enough. I misread what you wrote.

Yeah, that's not how that works. Otherwise, all exploits that have been fixed were working as intended also. I wouldn't say I like or approve of soft caps, but yeah, they're doing their job, as conceptualized by the devs. Exploits that the devs didn't know about, not so much.