Any news on phasing?

I don't think that it is so easy.

Announcements like
"Our primary objectives are to tell a story even more compelling than Ultimas IV-VII, create a virtual world more interactive than Ultima VII..."
"Players will adventure in an interactive world where their choices have consequences"
"Shroud of the Avatar is a Selective Multiplayer game, allowing players to choose how they want to play! Whether in Single-Player Offline mode or any of three online modes, the main quest line will provide greater than 40 hours of focused, story driven Content."
"the main quest line will provide greater than 40 hours of focused, story driven content"
"A fantasy role-playing game that will focus more on player choices and discovery than on level grinding."
"Single Player Offline Mode: Players will adventure through over 40 hours of story in an interactive world where their choices during ethical paradoxes have consequences."
"Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues is a fantasy RPG that combines a single player narrative with a sandbox MMO"

All those things will be considered once the game launches. SotA will be reviewed in terms of story, choices with consequences and single-player narrative, too as this was announced. Will SotA offer fun in all of those aspects or not? This will affect the ratings of the game.

Also "time to move on" is hard for those who invested money into the game because of its description (SP, story, choices with consequences, single-player narrative) and now the MMO fans tell them "thanks for your money which was put to good use creating the MMO we wanted, now move on".

 

I'm all for a technology which can help to see consequences for our actions. Games like Gothic 3 are pretty good exemples : you were able to free villages from the orcs grasp and see the consequences.

BUT TESO technology would not be satisfactory. I explain why here.

 

The basic problem is that there was only ONE Avatar who saves the world in the old Ultima series. In SOTA you have hundreds of Avatars running around and the only way any quest or storyline to make sense is that there is eventually one Avatar who eventually comes out on top to lead the others for Order/Chaos.

That was a very informative post on concrete and comparative examples between SOTA and popular RPG/MMO games, thank you.

I'm taking the liberty of reposting a video in your post on the pitfalls of phasing in ESO:



The phasing problem also impacts guild meets and roleplaying sessions.

 

A problem is also that everyone does the exact same things. Everyone brings the murderer to justice, everyone rescues Charlotte, everyone kills the Lich Lord... This in itself is a big problem which in my opinion is not a single-player narrative. As you say there was only ONE Avatar in the SP-Ultimas. In SP RPGs there is only one hero and he kills the Lich, he rescues the child, he saves the world.
In a MMORPG this is not possible, yet it pretends to be possible. We still get the same quests but the achievement is not the same. We can never kill the Lich Lord or save the world. It is fake and thus it feels hollow and like we can never achieve anything in the world. So for a MMORPG a different approach to storytelling would be neccessary. I don't know what this approach might be but it would need to be something that doesn't give us the task to save the world when we can never save it.

 

Let's break this down.

What does "willing to wait my turn" mean? Everyone is waiting for a finished game and no one can claim any particular virtue in this regard.

I'm the one willing to allow the devs to make the game month by month without making 100's of posts that don't provide real feedback or help them make better decisions. - If this is your real issue, please report your feelings on LD to Berek and let them moderate. It's hard to claim that you are the arbiter of "real feedback". Feedback comes in a variety of forms as people have discussed in many other threads. Even oft-repeated feedback, such as someone who always tries to counter another person's posts, is feedback. What is helpful is subjective and ultimately for the devs to decide. An observation: you have posted 5 times more than LD. And let's remember, the OP was a request for information on a question the devs left open. Perfectly legitimate.

This is patently untrue. I wonder where you were from 2014-2016 with all the focus and attention Chris and the rest of the team were giving PvP? When those of us who were asking for information on the story and single-player were continually shut down with, "you have to wait!" "it's not time" "we can't give spoilers". Well, the problem is you can't push that part of the game off forever. Look at the updates on the story - delay after delay after delay. Single player - delay after delay after delay.

So here is a short list to refresh your memory.

1) PvP entered SotA on Release 8: July 24, 2014.
It's hard to track down the start of playable story lines in SotA, but they didn't really start to kick off in-game until 2016.

That means PvP has had two years of extra public focus and attention.

2) There have been incredible discussions of PvP mechanics on the forum, if you want examples, I will paste a ton of links. But don't ask, you know this to be true.
There has been no comparable discussion of story design/single player. More feedback/more discussion with the devs = a ton of time spent by the devs.

3) There has been ample feedback for the devs through things like the combat scrum (no longer exists) and all the wonderful and continual player-run PvP tourneys. There is no comparable data like this for the story.

4) I can't say it definitively, but combat has been tweaked almost every release... which is always related to PvP and balancing.

What your complaint is really all about I suspect is that PvP is not as feature-rich as you'd like it to be. Ok, but what part of the game that anyone focuses on is as feature-rich as they would like it to be right now? People have gotten tired of waiting in EVERY ASPECT of the game. PvP can claim nothing special in that regard.

By all means continue to advocate for PvP. But please don't turn the comparatively few discussions that have been raised about story/single player into a bogeyman that is ruining things.

Shifting the focus on to my experience, I waited for four years to be able to dig into the story. Are you really saying your experience on PvP is comparable?

 

Again, this is something I can’t agree with.

Being the hero is only one way to make a quality single player narrative. It’s common practice but isn’t there alternatives?

A single player narrative of being the sidekick that constantly helps move the story forward but isn’t the hero? Or a narrative that expands to the size of the playerbase?

There’s a way to pull off selective multiplayer with a single player narrative if we don’t hold a predetermined expectation that obviously conflict across modes.

 

Sure there would be alternatives. But is this the case in SotA or most RPGs? Am I not the one who rescues Charlotte? Am I not the guy who is tasked with finding the arsonist or the murderer? I'd say those are heroic quests which would make me the hero if I manage to complete them.
Yet how can I be the hero if I can't bring the murderer to justice as he can't go to jail because others want to bring him to justice, too?
If the quests in SotA would be different then maybe this wouldn't be the problem, but we do have this kind of quests in the game.

 

We are collectively providing feedback to the development team. If you're talking about "your" opinions, then it should really be "you" and not "we". But if you're talking about a collective feedback mechanism or the collective goal of having a great game then "we" seems perfectly appropriate to me.

I'm not sure why "anyone" would have a problem with that.

 

Because when you make comments like "Making NPC's walk around and do extra "stuff" is not something we have the budget for", it's actually not quantifiable or verifiable for us as players. We don't have a budget. People providing feedback have no budget. We also likely have no real world idea of what it would cost port to do so.

 

If there is no budget for such things or for detailed NPC schedules, then ok. But if such things are announced then we should be informed about changes,

For example NPC schedules - it was said that "nearly everything is possible" and that we would get detailed schedules, yet they are not in the game yet. If there is no budget for them why aren't we told? We still wait for them, we get impatient and ultimately angry.

The same for the offline part, the quests, possible phasing etc. We are left in the dark and ask ourselves what is happening. All we hear is "It's coming". But when? After some time, we get impatient and then we ask ourselves, "Is it really coming? Why don't we hear more about it? What's going on? It has been so long since we last heard about this feature."

Then there was a teaser about a possible phasing system. We haven't heard about it since. Yet we read about a new quest in which we have to rescue a knight. This brings up the question: What about phasing? Can we really rescue this knight? Will the world change when we resuce him?

 

Yep, I can’t defend the existing quests. They fall flat in line with your point.

If they did the same quest with Charlotte where poth her and her mother are in town, planning a picnic. Then we run into an overworld encounter. We have a few scenarios we can play out.

They are actually having a picnic.

A picnic that is about to be attacked.

What’s left of a picnic after an attack and the mother unconscious.

From there we could run the plot theough it’s course. Then the outcome can be more appropriate. The NPC’s won’t need to be ambiguous to it’s state

 

So they spent as much as one release turning on the ability for players to attack each other? That's your gripe? It probably took Chris like an hour to do that.

With developers? Yeah, show me one. Show me a single "incredible discussion of PVP" where a developer talks about PVP.

The scrum had almost nothing to do with PVP. It had to do with a few players giving feedback to Chris about general combat fundamental tech.

No, not every release, and no this doesn't take much time from @Chris. In fact he often doesn't have time for it or only finds time towards the end of the month to "squeek in" combat changes.

If there's one single core feature set in this game that has been under served it's PVP. I don't make this claim casually. I don't make this claim to "win an argument". The amount of time and effort that has been put into actual PVP design and implementation is a small fraction of what has been put into story development and quest mechanics.

You said you would refresh my memory if asked. You did not do that. You provided me poor examples of things you believed to be true but were not. The fact that I've been able to attack and kill other players for years is not "meaningful pvp". I can attack players in any FPS and have more fun and more meaning than I can here. The combat system is not balanced for PVP. What little balancing there has been has been largely for PVE. The developers have said a number of times that "the reward for PVP is PVP" which is a joke. If you look back through the stand up notes, you will not find many mentions of PVP. Let's compare that to "story". This will be FUNNY has hell!

Here, I'll do it for for you:

Here's PVP:
2013: 0 mentions, 0 days

2014: 124 mentions, 46 days
Richard Garriott (Lord British)- Reviewing PvP plans (Sep. 18, 2014)
Chris Spears: Unity support & PVP design (Sep. 19, 2014)
Brandon Cotton (Bzus)- PvP meeting, combat design (Feb. 26, 2014)
Bill Kirkman (chillblain)- PvP meeting, Docs, Light component pass in all levels (Feb. 26, 2014)
Scott Jennings (Lum)- PvP meeting, NPC responses (Feb. 26, 2014)
Ken Pfile (BurningToad)- PvP meeting, Skill trees (Feb. 26, 2014)
Starr Long: AI meeting & Playtest & PvP forum review (Mar. 5, 2014)
Starr Long: R4 triage & PvP forum review & AI research (Mar. 6, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Task breakdown & Skill review & PvP planning (Jun. 27, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Weapon tuning, PvP combat prep (Jun. 30, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Summoning, new weapons, PvP design (Jul. 1, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: Avatar character updates, PvP tech (Jul. 1, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP tech (Jul. 1, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: PvP & Skills & Weapons (Jul. 1, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP & Targetting & Factions & PvP (Jul. 1, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP & Hotbar & Chat (Jul. 1, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & Performance & Playsessions (Jul. 1, 2014)
Starr Long: RTX preparation & Performanace managemnt & PvP direction (Jul. 1, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: PvP & Skills & Resistances (Jul. 3, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP & Skills & Interrupts (Jul. 3, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & R7 retrospective post (Jul. 3, 2014)
Starr Long: RTX preparation & R7 retrospective post & PvP direction (Jul. 3, 2014)
Ken Pfile: RTX & PvP & Targeting (Jul. 7, 2014)
Chris Spears: RTX & PvP management (Jul. 7, 2014)
Starr Long: RTX & PvP direction (Jul. 7, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP (Jul. 8, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & Performance & Leads meeting (Jul. 8, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP bugs & Equipment effects & Character creation bugs (Jul. 9, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP bugs & Targeting & Stats (Jul. 9, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & Performance (Jul. 9, 2014)
Starr Long: Player Pwned Towns & Guilds & PvP direction (Jul. 9, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Loot & NPC support & PvP (Jul. 10, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: Animation support & PvP & Bugs & Falling damage turned on (Jul. 10, 2014)
James Cousar: Housing smoketest & Regression & Emotes smoketest & PvP testing (Jul. 10, 2014)
Chris Spears: LOD and shadow performance tuning & PvP (Jul. 10, 2014)
Starr Long: Robot upgrades &PvP (Jul. 10, 2014)
James Cousar: Emotes testing & Regression & PvP testing (Jul. 11, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & Performance testing & PvP dev chat & Dev asset pack (Jul. 11, 2014)
Starr Long: PvP direction & Forums & PvP dev chat & Robot repair (Jul. 11, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Loot bundles & PvP skills (Jul. 14, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP & Casting UI & PvP stats (Jul. 14, 2014)
Aaron Holden: CS & PvP tests (Jul. 14, 2014)
James Cousar: Sanity tests & PvP tests & Regression (Jul. 14, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP Map & Performance & Asset packs (Jul. 14, 2014)
Starr Long: CS support & PvP direction & UotA schedule (Jul. 14, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Loot data & R8 bugs & PvP skills (Jul. 15, 2014)
Scott Jennings: R8 bugs & Tooltips localized & PvP NPCs (Jul. 15, 2014)
James Cousar: Sanity test optimizations & Regression testing & PvP tests (Jul. 15, 2014)
Chris Spears: Performance & PvP & Slug design (Jul. 15, 2014)
Dallas Snell: PvP testing & Taking care of business (Jul. 15, 2014)
Scott Jones: PvP icons & Resist icons (Jul. 15, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: PvP skills & Character support (Jul. 15, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP (Jul. 15, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP skills and UI (Jul. 15, 2014)
Aaron Holden: CS & QA PvP & QA spells (Jul. 15, 2014)
James Cousar: Sanity test & Regression & PvP tests & R8 documents (Jul. 15, 2014)
Chris Spears: Performance & PvP (Jul. 15, 2014)
Starr Long: Forums & Schedule & Map testing & PvP testing (Jul. 15, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: PvP meeting & Skill bugs & Character support (Jul. 17, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP client code & PvP meeting (Jul. 17, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP meeting & PvP UI & Combat UI (Jul. 17, 2014)
James Cousar: Sanity test & Regression & PvP and combat deck testing & R8 documents (Jul. 17, 2014)
Chris Spears: Performance & PvP meeting (Jul. 17, 2014)
Rick Holtrop: Housing & Decoration & PvP testing & CS (Jul. 17, 2014)
Starr Long: Media support & PvP meeting & Task management (Jul. 17, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP client code (Jul. 18, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP & Combat log (Jul. 18, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & Performance (Jul. 18, 2014)
Dallas Snell: PvP & Update of the Avatar (Jul. 18, 2014)
Starr Long: PvP direction & Worldbuilding setup & Schedules & Forums (Jul. 18, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Passive skills & Character support & PvP maps (Jul. 22, 2014)
Scott Jennings: R9 dialog & PvP maps (Jul. 22, 2014)
Erik Touve: PvP zoning issues & Kingsport collision & NPC collision & AI startup (Jul. 22, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & Performance & Tab targeting tweaks (Jul. 22, 2014)
Dallas Snell: PvP testing & General business & Fire Elemental review (Jul. 22, 2014)
Starr Long: R9 plan & PvP direction & Playtesting (Jul. 22, 2014)
Scott Jennings: PvP zone support & Player documents & Ardoris NPCs (Jul. 23, 2014)
Chris Spears: Overworld & PvP & Forums & PvP tutorial movie (Jul. 23, 2014)
Dallas Snell: General business & PvP playtesting (Jul. 23, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: Focus skills & R8 bugs & PvP confirmations & Trade (Jul. 24, 2014)
Chris Spears: PvP & Tab targeting & Unity source (Jul. 24, 2014)
Dallas Snell: General business & Update preparation & PvP testing (Jul. 24, 2014)
Chris Spears: Playthroughs & PvP & Unity source builds & Optimizations (Jul. 25, 2014)
Bill Kirkman: High-density player island variant done & New underground PvP map (Jul, 28, 2014)
Dallas Snell: Update of the Avatar success & General business & PvP testing (Jul, 28, 2014)
Chris Spears: R8 postmortem & PvP (Jul. 30, 2014)
Starr Long: Combat combo designs & PvP direction & Character creation upgrade design (Jul. 28, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP stats (Aug. 4, 2014)
Starr Long: PvP direction & Reagents integration & Jira & Hangout (Aug. 4, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP stats & Consumables (Aug. 5, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: Dual wield bugs & PvP factions (Aug. 5, 2014)
Ken Pfile: NGUI upgrade & UI polish & PvP stats (Aug. 5, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP stats & Consumables & Reagents (Aug. 6, 2014)
Chris Spears: Leads meeting & PvP design & Ardoris performance (Aug. 6, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP stats & Consumables & UI bugs (Aug. 7, 2014)
Chris Spears: Ardoris performance, reagent design, PvP design (Aug. 7, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: PvP teams (Aug. 8, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP polish (Aug. 8, 2014)
Brandon Cotton: Consumables & Creature support & PvP (Aug. 11, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP teams & Skills and decks (Aug. 11, 2014)
Starr Long: SyndCon presentations & PvP direction (Aug. 11, 2014)
Jason Yenawine: PvP playtesting & Loot bundles & Secure items (Aug. 12, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: Glyph list & PvP team scoreboard (Aug. 12, 2014)
Ken Pfile: Starter skills and decks & PvP teams (Aug. 12, 2014)
Rick Holtrop: Blackblade Pass & Team PvP map & World spawns (Aug. 12, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP team scoreboard (Aug. 12, 2014)
Ken Pfile: Combat bugs & PvP parties (Aug. 12, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP team scoring done & Tactics skill tree & Consumable skill (Aug. 14, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP party rules & Vendor UI (Aug. 14, 2014)
Rick Holtrop: Update support & World spawns & Blackblade Pass & PvP support (Aug. 15, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP team timer (Aug. 18, 2014)
Chris Spears: Ardoris performance & PvP review (Aug. 18, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PVP polish and bugs (Aug. 19, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: PvP team HUD & Bugs & Reagents (Aug. 20, 2014)
Ken Pfile: PvP playtesting & Bugs (Aug. 26, 2014)
Dallas Snell: PvP testing & Update of the Avatar (Aug. 26, 2014)
Bill Kirkman: PvP arena spectator area & Challenge map (Aug. 29, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: Character creation & PvP arena bugs & Facebook Screenshot option (Sep. 10, 2014)
Joaquin Del Canto: Facebook screenshot R&D & PvP arena spectator bugs & Pet command right-click (Sep. 11, 2014)
Abe Robertson: Vertas Pass & Castle PvP (Oct. 1, 2014)
Abe Robertson: Castle PvP review integration (Oct. 9, 2014)
Michael Hutchison: Map bugs & Crypt entrance & PvP entrances (Oct. 14, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: Basements & Item durability & Open PVP flag (Nov. 11, 2014)
Justin Gilbert: Open PvP flag & Bugs (Nov. 13, 2014)
2015: 16 mentions, 16 days
Chris Spears: Unity 5 testing & PvP design & Loot rules (Feb. 9, 2015)
Chris Spears: Performance performance & Hangout & PvP forum post (Mar. 13, 2015)
Justin Gilbert: Combat & PvP collision (May 21, 2015)
Ken Pfile: PvP property flag options (May 22, 2015)
Ken Pfile: R18 patches & PvP Basement options (Jun. 2, 2015)
Ken Pfile: Razer troubleshooting & PvP basements (Jun. 3, 2015)
Ken Pfile: Fixing some things & PvP basements & Decorations (Jun. 5, 2015)
Ken Pfile: Builds & PvP basements & Item renaming (Jun. 11, 2015)
Chris Spears: Hangout & Forums & Combat math rework for PvP vs. PvE (Jul. 13, 2015)
Brandon Cotton: Avatar skill starting loadouts & PvP trophies (Sep. 8, 2015)
Brandon Cotton: PvP trophies & Fishing & Dragon Barrens (Sep. 10, 2015)
Scott Jones: Ransom UI & PvP player corpse & Piano (Sep. 29, 2015)
Justin Gilbert: Combat tokens & Chroma support & PvP (Oct. 2, 2015)
Justin Gilbert: Temporary open-pvp flag & Phonograph (Oct. 5, 2015)
Erik Touve: House pets & Duels & PvP (Oct. 23, 2015)
Chris Spears: Build machine upgrades & Perforce hardware & Guild warfare design & PvP scoring (Dec. 2, 2015)
2016: 10 mentions, 9 days
Dan Brennan: PvP planning & Random player spawns & North Paladis (Mar. 15, 2016)
Keith Quinn: PvP planning & Battlecamps (Mar. 15, 2016)
Dan Brennan: Random player spawns for PVP PoTs (Mar. 18, 2016)
Dan Brennan: Random player spawns for PVP PoTs, Skrekk exterior spawning (Mar. 21, 2016)
Dan Brennan: Scene region data & PVP player town spawns (Apr. 5, 2016)
Starr Long: Update of the Avatar & Forums & Jira triage & Playtesting & Telethon preparation & Hometown support & Welcome Quest support & PvP event support & Patch notes (Apr. 29, 2016)
Starr Long: Update & PvP practice & Community & Telethon (May 2, 2016)
Starr Long: Over-the-shoulder camera review & PVP flagging & Forums & Weekly update (May 12, 2016)
Keith Quinn: Novia tier markers & PVP & Roving encounters (Sep. 16 2016)
Dan Brennan: POT work, Ardoris polish: PVP arena & Guard Barracks (Oct. 4 2016)
2017: 1 mention, 1 day
Travis Koleski: Bugs & Outskirts & PVP dueling (Mar. 30th, 2017)

Over 4 years of development and PVP has been mentioned as an activity for just 151 mentions in 72 days. In comparison, " story " was mentioned considerably more. Here's the summary breakdown, there were just too many mentions for me to waste more time cutting and pasting all this:

2013: 21 mentions, 19 days
2014: 56 mentions, 41 days
2015: 31 mentions, 23 days
2016: 45 mentions, 32 days
2017: 16 mentions, 14 days
For a total of 169 mentions and 129 days.

This is just tracking instances of the word " story " in the stand-up notes. It's not looking at words like "quest" or "NPC dialogue" or any of the work involved in creating scenes, all of which are needed to actually play the story. This shows that JUST THE STORY has almost half as much development time as PVP does, and it's been consistently worked on all four years where PVP was really only worked on in a significant way for about two months in 2014. You can also see from the detailed notes that when people worked on PVP it was usually in conjunction with something else, or they were playtesting.

There's really no comparison.

Again, I'm waiting my turn.

 

Frankly at this point, I would settle for cutscenes depicting what you described above. Better some emotional impact than nothing.

 

Girls, you're both pretty.

 

Lets cut to the meat and bones here. LD has made his position clear about story and SOTA for years now. Hes a single player focused player who wants a good story.

I have been harsh on him over the years but I'll again say a year ago, I told him that the dev cycle for story line was just really kicking in and he should give it a year. If it was bad in a year, I would agree with him.

Its been a year and I spent some time myself trying to get into the story and I quit, I personally think the story line is absolutely terrible (all around) so I now have to agree with his stand on this. Now, I don't care that much about story any ways (or single player) and I still like playing this game and will continue to do so, I'll just ignore the story (unless they do a lot to it in the next year).

I still like the game and have fun playing the many other things that can be done and will continue to do so. I play it a lot like I played UO, mostly solo and no story line at all. I am actually perfectly happy doing this.

But I can understand why he is unhappy.

 

Most of this has already been said here:

1. This world is completely static. Nothing anyone does changes anything.
2. Because of point 1, the story is vary unsatisfying. (for the charlette point, no matter HOW you rescue her (be it via a whistle or walking her back) if it doesn't change anything it's not going to be satisfying)
3. This materially affects any type of story in multi-player, and realistically the story in multiplayer is going to be identical to that of offline.
4. As things stand, it is highly unlikely that the story will be made compelling for multi-player OR offline.

Here's the first two bullet-points on the kickstarter page:

• Shroud of the Avatar is infused with rich storylines, deeply integrated into game play, developed by Best Selling Author Tracy Hickman and RPG legend Richard Garriott.
• Players will adventure in an interactive world where their choices have consequences, ethical paradoxes give them pause, and they play a vital part in weaving their own story into the immersive world and lore surrounding them.

Emphasis mine, but do any of you think that's true right now? Do you see any deep, rich story? Do you feel like any of your choices have consequences? Do you think, as the game stands, they ever could? Without consequences, in a world most notable for its complete absence of change the player can affect, can the result of any ethical dilemma ever give you pause? How could you ever (even feel like you) play a vital part of anything if what you do has no noticeable effect?

Phasing is a way to provide consequences for actions. Consequences give actions meaning; they make us actually worry about which action we should take. That worry connects us with the story, and makes it feel deep and compelling; that's something SotA needs desperately.

 

Very well put. The hard truth is even if this thread makes it to 50+ pages. What is to come from it. Will we get a dev in here to address this topic? It doesn't happen.

 

About the point "Players will adventure in an interactive world where their choices have consequences ..."

I answered to a question in another thread about Inconsistencies:

This is the fact, that our actions will have consequences for our life ...
This is, what was told and a lot of people were asking for

Well, I think there will be a possibility to walk back to the path of virtues ...

In the mentioned thread, Richard himself told some interesting things about this ...

 

I am sorry BDF, but I can't accept your arguments. Why? You continue your effort to try to make up things I didn't say, and you define terms in a way that fits your own personal bias. You cherry pick data, and then you don't see how it disproves your own statements.

So....

Where did I say that was my gripe? I have no gripe at all with time spent on PvP. Again you don't read, you just assume what I say. What I am responding to is your words here:

I showed that PvP came first in one very important way. It was in-game first and that does matter. Being able to interact with an aspect of the game for a longer period of time is important. Story may have been discussed early internally, but what of it was in-game until 2016? The point I am trying to make is that we couldn't even give feedback on story until that time. You had years to think about, suggest, recommend changes to PvP - whether or not you feel that made any difference.

On to the next unfair part of your argument:

So we could include combat, balancing, loot, price of the oracle, and other things related to PvP too. You are trying to stack the deck of the data in your favor. It's a very common and invalid tactic these days, but you should at least be honest about your bias of how you try to narrowly define PvP and broadly define story. I get that you don't believe work on combat is work on PvP but that is totally stacking the deck in your favor. For example:

You do like to define things in a very fluid way that presents the data in your favor. Another example:

So we were talking about PvP and now we're talking about "meaingful PvP". Nice switch. I can agree with you that SotA's PvP might not be "meaningful", but if that's what you mean by using the term PvP simply, you're really confusing things.

So, your data comparison is helpful, regardless of the fact that stand-up notes don't capture everything. (If we were going to be comprehensive we'd include post-mortem/telethon questions, the survey, forum posts, etc.)

Even if you take your highly biased perspective and restrict PvP to whatever you consider "meaningful" with none of the time spent on combat and make the story definition as expansive as possible to include the whole game, you proved the following statments untrue:

151 mentions in 72 days doesn't seem immaterial to me. Thanks for the data!

What I said was true, the real issue is that you twist the definitions until it fits your preconceived notions, so you can claim they are poor. E.g., The combat scrum had "almost nothing" to do with PvP. Only the forum discussions in which devs substantially participate matter. But then please apply the same logic to the story - how many story/single player discussions have the devs responded substantially to? But you can hang yourself by your own gyrations. I don't need to explain further.

If you want to have a substantial argument based on data - please first, define terms in a way that can be generally accepted. Then don't switch them when it suits your interests. And two, don't just cherry pick one piece of data and claim that it's definitive. Especially when that data disproves your attempts to claim that PvP has received "immaterial" focus.

Your continual attempt to shut down all of LD's posts really doesn't look like "waiting your turn". Should I pull up the data on how you try to do so every time LD posts? It seems a lot like trolling. LD has been very patient with it, I am losing my patience with it as your can tell.

You continually claim to be the virtuous one "waiting your turn", when you're just like all of us - trying to advocate for what you consider important. I will say it again. LD is not the bogeyman, nor is the story. You make your requests, let LD make his.

Your best option here, unless you really want to continue arguing unfairly, is to just avoid these posts completely. Would there be any harm in that?

 

Lead by example.