R43 playthrough thoughts

Some feedback since playing through R43 a lot more than previous releases.

* Mailboxes - I read about this in the instructions (not terribly well, admittedly), but read a few days ago that the mailbox is in a bank. I went to send a frustrated note to froji but then found out the mailbox requires paper. What the? Where do I get paper? A provisioner? My expectation here was that I could just write a note directly in the mailbox with someone's name on it and click send. I get paper is more realistic, but it's an unnecessary chore that made me give up on a little bit of humorous gameplay altogether, likely permanently if it stays that way.

* Combat - I have no idea where to find Adventurer Level anymore; it may not matter. In any case, I've tried to build up some defensive skills (Dodge, Evasion) but with cloth and magic, I can barely kill timber wolves. 3 skulls is too much for me. I have every arrow spell in each tree and searing ray; no summons yet. Raising my combat skills has been very tough considering most fights mean death. Recharging focus between fights is incredibly dull. The focus tree needs a way to very quickly regenerate it, ala Meditation.

* Finding NPCs - Specifically town criers due to the mail delivery thing has been a nightmare. There's no easy way to explore huge cities to find a town crier. As far as I can tell, they are not labelled until you talk to everyone. That's a huge undertaking for 200 gold (or 100 gold? I chose the bigger reward delivery, I think). Talking to NPCs to say "where is the town crier" doesn't work. The map doesn't have any indication either.

* The (sota)map - Pressing M. I actually counted how long this takes to load - 20 slow mississippi seconds. No indication that it's loading. If I wasn't familar with what was going on, it just looks like broken functionality. Implementing it directly in-game was a good idea at first, but this has to be resolved, or it should seriously consider being removed altogether.

* The overworld map - I've got to say, when people talk about this game having bad graphics, all I can think about is how amazing the overworld map looks. It's truly a pleasure to walk through. My only gripe is when you slow to a crawl when you're not on a road - this isn't necessary and makes an otherwise perfect aspect of the game a pain.

* Random encounters - need to be re-thought. The 2 load screens aren't worth it if you just want to escape. Getting "caught" adds nothing to the game. Funnily enough, these are sometimes easier encounters for schmucks like me who can't take regular combat, but I'm still not interested considering the lack of rewards inside.

* Sieges - I really hated these when they first came out, but I'm able to completely evade it now, and it doesn't take that long to do so. Downgraded from a disaster to a minor annoyance, but at least an atmospheric one. There's one qualm I had, which was more of a bug - the tooltip to a siege-laid area just says something like "Under Siege" instead of what town I'm trying to enter. Both bits of info need to be in that tooltip, notably on boats.

* Aerie - this rates a mention only because it was in one of the recent newsletters. Firstly, I didn't see much blue at all; I was going to take a screenshot of how much red I saw. I honestly don't care a lot about that, but it was advertised as "more blue! truth!". More importantly, I couldn't find an alchemy table anywhere. City of truth, of mages? The crafting pavilion doesn't have an alchemy table, most player houses are empty (it seems players really only own houses so they can own a player vendor, full of things I cannot afford). Getting to the oracle shrine is awkward; there's a bit of jumping/running around involved because of the smallish cliff-face next to it.

* Resources - there's so few choppable trees, there's so few cotton spots. I want to get into crafting, but nodes are few and far between. It's absolutely crazy that more trees can't be chopped down. In any case, there needs to be more nodes of all types in more areas, all over the world. Reagents, too. A lot, lot more.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

 

* Daily XP Bonus - This deserves a mention. What a godsend. Considering I have little time to play and I'm forced to regularly flee from combat, this just makes the game more fun to play. I use this and the oracle bonus daily, and it makes the difference between loading up the game and giving up on it. Props to whoever thought of this. I feel like the mechanics with how the bonus is obtained can be flexible if anyone's thinking of changing it a bit. Pooled XP has always been an awkward idea to me; free "macroing" might be the better option since I'm doing a lot of that now anyway, I don't know. I always preferred the current system of raising skills to the old system, but I've also felt something is still missing and pooled XP hasn't really been the answer. The daily XP bonus goes a long way to band-aiding this, but - just as a relatively weak suggestion - if I set a skill to "raise" without actually using it, and having it go up over time by itself seems like it could be the best solution. Periodically seeing skills go up this way would still feel rewarding, and you wouldn't need pooled XP because it's already on a timer. And no macroing.

 

Paper is at a bookstore. Owlshead has one close by the blacksmith area

write your letter and publish it.

click on mailbox adressee and type adressee name wait a moment for the continue words to turn green.

Drag your letter over to the mail where it says drag here.

give your mail a title.

then click send and wait for it to calculate your fee for mailing your letter.

Instead of a letter you can say a few words in the title to describe what you are sending and drag items to the drag place.

it could be sheet music or whatever you want to drag from your inventory or it could be gold if you look to the middle where it says gold and click there to add gold to send to someone.

Great feedback the Sota map is not all that easy to use, but I am happy to have it. It does take me a moment to load it and the overworld map is not for everyone. I think we need a better travel mode too. New people are not liking it and are lost and confused and I get that way quite often too. It does not make our world fun, why pretend it does. Not everyone is hardcore.

edit

 

I forgot bookstores exist. Why is sending mail so convoluted? I thought I'd just go to the mailbox, type in a name, a message, and press send, and the recipient would get some sort of notification mail is waiting for them. If there's a small fee, fine. It's just sending a message. Make it fun!

Why don't they like the overworld map? The only complaint I've seen is that it's too dissimilar to UO's full world, which I think is fair, but I have to admit I hate crossing big towns (even Brittany). And the slow speeds, which is very fixable.

 

* Camera - I play with the camera zoomed out as far as possible as often as possible. There used to be a bug where if you went into conversation, the camera would reset to its default zoomed-in state until you zoomed back out again. This was fixed for the most part, but occasionally I find the zoom still resets. I haven't been able to pin down what causes it; by the time I've noticed and it bothers me again, I've already been doing other things for 5 minutes.

 

It's coming NEXT release... from the update:

For Release 44 this includes polishing the visuals for three of the towns you visit along the Path of Truth: Aerie, Vertas, and Jaanaford.

 

Hi,

Thought you might be interested:

You can just type a subject and send. I had thought it was suppose to work that way the first time, send an expensive one liner. There should be improvements to mail in the future releases.

type "/stats" in your chatbox. then type "/datafolder" -> adventurer and other hidden stats are in the chatlogs found in the folder.
You gotta start eating food to regenerate health and focus faster. Ya I know... I have them, but never remember to consume them until i am about to quit.

Isn't the town crier on the compass by default?

Somebody mentioned its opening a browser in game, I doubt it can get any faster for now. I am already thankful i have that map available.

Great posts. I think developers need to be reminded what needs to be improved on. (Though I think they'd appreciate if these posts don't come so near to release dates. )

 

Just to add...

Quite certain there's a Alchemy station in one of the magic shops. Like cooking stations are found in cooking shops. (Why not come Soryn Fields (near Resolute). I'll give you a place to stay, with crafting stations and lots of vendors you can use. ) There's going to be a face lift in Aerie next release. You should give another feedback after that.

You got to find the right zones. I think its easier to grow cotton. Most people are actually harvesting for beetle carapace rather than cottons. Trees can be endless in the right zone. Serpent's spine have lots of wood. they respawn by the time you make a full run of the scene.

Hope this helps.

 

Yep. Prepare to have that feedback ignored as everybody will claim that it "fine".

Finding anything anywhere is a pain to do and nearly impossible without being omniscient.

 

It is actually wonderful once you get used to it. Much more than I ever thought possible in this game. I thought it would be that we'd just send a letter or something and it would be the barest of bones integration, but nooooo we can send everything even gold. So hopefully you will see, but feedback of course is helpful to iron out details and improve on what is there.

 

These are all such awkward ways of doing things. Once you know them they're easy enough, but players shouldn't have to accommodate so strongly to a game's awkward UI.

The mailbox thing is like typing up a whole forum post using only the heading, or going to do 3 other things before you can actually type up a message, every time you write a post.

The town crier in Britanny showed up when I went near him, accidentally, like any other point of interest. You have to find them first. Possibly bugged for some areas? That's how it was in the capital of the world, though.