State of Shroud of the Avatar. <Opinion>

lol, you completely missed the point of the post an its contained sarcasm.

 

I lose about 20K on first death and 10K on second. I typically do one or two quest portions per day. So over 10 days it's pretty easy to do. I've been working on it for longer than two weeks though. Part of it is my fault for taking a break after a particularly frustrating death instead of powering through knowing about the diminishing penalty. I know I lost at least 50K on Grannus alone. Lost 20k on Sequanna. Lost 35K on Boreas. And plenty of deaths in the obsidian ruins. Another 30k at oracle colossus. My ultimate point is that difficulty is still rather high and the lack of little xp rewards as you complete individual steps feels less than rewarding. The 10k daily login bonus was definitely a saving grace. But I wasn't counting that or what xp I could make grinding. Just expressing that the content seems aimed at optimizers.

Don't get me wrong. I like decay as a soft cap mechanism. Far preferred to hard cap by a huge margin.

Your imaginings sound based on a hardcore MMO. Last I checked, this was a solo or selectively multiplayer game. Not really a classic mmo.

 

People seem to be focusing on the Death Penalty exclusively. If there were more means of gaining XP (daily/repeatable quests, "dungeons", etc), the pain of losing XP due to death would be lessened, because there would be more entertaining ways to gain that lost XP back.

Remember, as it stands now, there are only a finite number of quests. Once you finish them all, the only means of gaining XP is grinding.

 

I was actually trying to focus on game difficulty being aimed at the optimizers and heavy grinders, and used XP and decay as a risk/reward metric for less intensive play. Folks just glommed onto the death decay opportunism. Which I guess was my mistake for bringing it up.

 

haha it is ! Cause its completely taboo here

I think it is by design... UO was like that too, there were no quests with big rewards, only monetary rewards in the case of the "live story arc".

I'll tell you the truth cause it seems to be a good day for that :

The quests we have right now is just the intro, the tutorial

Of course the game focus on optimizers, cause the limits on them are the way to force them to specialize. I think the idea is great in essence, just implemented in the wrong order, it pretty much killed the RPG aspect to the profit of the SIMS aspect.

 

@Greyfox

I agree with 90% of what you wrote in your OP. I love Shroud and given the budget, the devs have done a great job of creating a fun game. However, that is not to say that there isn't room for significant improvement. I can only speak to the areas that affect my style of gameplay, but these are things that I find frustrating and dissuade me from actually wanting to play:

1) Decay
I understand the rationale for implementing it, but as a casual player I absolutely hate it. The little bit of time I play can be completely wasted if I die more than once and that is simply not fun. So just don't die then, right? Wrong. I like to challenge myself and adventure in difficult areas to explore and fight. With decay being what it is, I simply do not waste my time going to these areas solo anymore because the risk far outweighs the fun to be had in them. So I stick to the same old stomping ground, grinding away endlessly, which I hate more than anything.

2) Looking For Group/Group XP
As I mentioned before, I love a challenge, but I only go to more difficult areas if I can find a group willing to go. Unfortunately, the way group xp works currently (which to me makes no sense) folks are penalized for getting together and grouping. The incentive to tackle fun, hard objectives like say a dragon or daemon has been removed. WHY!? You should be encouraging group play in Multi and Friends, not penalizing. What this and decay promotes, is a min/max scenario where grinding "safer" zones solo gains the best xp. Or if i'm lucky, @Sara Dreygon or @margaritte take pity on me and invite me to grind out a control point. People will most likely disagree with me and that's fine, but I don't have the time to hit up all my friends and guildies looking for a group. There needs to be a more efficient way to do this and thankfully Port is looking into it.

3) Loot/Economy
This is fundamentally a huge problem for the casual player. Loot still needs to be better. I feel like I am in Caracas, Venezuela struggling to survive under hyper-inflation. Gear is insanely expensive and I get it, crafting said gear is extremely costly and time consuming, hence the price. Unfortunately, unless I am buying gold or grinding away for hours I will never be able to afford top tier gear. Now I know what some of you are thinking, "Cordelayne, I do just fine with basic starter gear. You don't need that fancy stuff." Well bully for you, that's awesome, you probably play more than two hours a week and are a skilled Avatar . For a casual gamer, player crafted gear is a HUGE boost, yet it is a tedious if not impossible task getting said gear. Let alone finding it on the thousands of vendors scattered everywhere. Which leads me to my next point. The need for a centralized marketplace.

@Lord Andernut does an excellent job with New Britannia Market and also Novia Market (Sorry don't know who the Governor is there, but bravo! ). These two market towns definitely make things easier, in that there are dozens of vendors to talk to. Unfortunately, the process is terribly tedious because it takes so long to find what you need. A simple solution would be to make each vendor look unique, predicated on what they are selling. It would be like opening an artisan tool bag. You would pick which type of vendor represents what you are selling. This way vendors can have normal names and the player can tell what they are selling immediately.

In conclusion, speaking only for myself and as a very casual player, decay and group xp needs to be fixed before launch/release/priority red/final actualization or whatever it's called now , otherwise I foresee a number of confused and unhappy new players. This game is so much fun to explore with friends and other players it is a travesty that these game mechanics penalize that. Remember, Shroud is a game, it shouldn't feel like a job and at times, sadly, it kind of does. Again, this is just one Avatar's opinion on a game that I love and think could be truly EPIC.

 

Don't understand whine about lose XP... If you die, you must something lose... Don't die, its simple...
If your dying, you do something wrong...

 

You say in your signature you don't feel pain

we do... lol

in UO when you died you risked losing all you carried... it was a harder punishment yet... I didn't feel any pain.

 

Also should mention, this is why I expect more than capture the flag games and duels in terms of PvP. I can already invite over friends and play chess or cards, or I can play these online on a smartphone. Give me something I need the immersive experience of an RPG for!

 

One of the key factors to MMO longevity is achievement and progress. I can stomach the grind, most of us can or we wouldn't be here. What hurts SOTA the most is that you don't keep what you earn - death decay being the foremost discourager in doing anything remotely outside your comfort zone, of sharing your 'grind' xp with others, etc. etc. and so on.. While its only a few hours setback now, in a year? In 5 years? Its going to be a penalty of a week's gameplay. That's certainly not sustainable. That and the myriad of cash sinks make the game feel indeed much like a job, especially when you factor in the real world cash value of game items - for some, it actually IS a job! I've said so before and say again, get rid of all the old school punishment systems, and LET players try content we have no business doing, let us experiment, let us learn and wipe to content, solo or together, without a "several hours grind" cost of entry. The mechanic isn't doing anything to cap the hardcore, so lets be rid of it.

 

Decay flattens out at a certain point. The higher level you are in fact the easier yoy gain ur xp back.

I think decay is pretty much where it should be atm. I would however prefered to have gear destoyed on death to stimulate economy and have made crafting less random to power up lower tier gear. Having to replace gear imho is better than decay... as you can always have spare sets with you or stored in a bank. Time invested would also be there but feel less hurtful I guess.

 

@Vallo Frostbane

Having to heal injuries on death with bandages is better than decay... And I don't agree with you about decay... But I'll get to all of this in a separate thread, because I don't want to detract from the topic and turn the thread into an entirely different discussion.

 

Along with Greyfox's post this is amazing stuff. I totally agree with this, but the problem is you wont see a Dev post here saying yep we agree and here is how we plan to fix it. Or here are some ideas we have what do you as a community think?
Sure they had a couple surveys which they did not show the results of. MY guess is it was not pretty.
You have people in charge of making this game who for some reason think that making it a backbreaking grind for little reward seems fun. I have to wonder how many of them actually leveled a character on their own from 1 to whatever level they got too. Sure at higher levels the game opens up and is a bit more fun because you can do most things we have in game.
And even though this is still in an Pre release state? The lack of players should tell them something. They can use the excuse well it is not released yet, but there is no hold back on playing now. What you do stays at launch or we hope.
Something that really ticked me off the last telethon was when @Chris said he was not changing the producer exp because you can make money as a crafter. WTF? really? This showed me that they 1 do not care about the crafting or crafters and 2 he is trying to keep people under his thumb by keeping the players broke. Yet we have what little crafters selling swords and armor at a price most could not afford after playing for months on end!
I mean I have seen weapons and armor sell for over 100k! That in and of itself should sound all kinds of alarms to the Devs. I mean sure it could be a greedy crafter, but in most cases it is not. The problem is the super stupid randomness of getting a nice piece of gear is silly, on top of that the materials are stupid out of this world hard to get. THEN on top of that you finally make enough money to get a nice piece of gear to only watch the decay go down faster then a fat kid on a see saw! because they want you to buy the obsidian potions to lower that decay.
Why does it have to be so hard? Why can I not go out and mine and feel like I accomplished something in a hour or two?
Why can I not go out and feel like I accomplished something in an hour or two when I go to fight and explore. If I die well there goes all that exp! Maybe people will not agree or simply skip over this post, but it is how I feel.
I mean I do enjoy the game, but the sense of accomplishment at the end of my night is lackluster at best.
I guess I touched more on crafting than the other aspects, but honestly it all seems to fall into one big pile of poo, as it all feels the same crafting and adventuring right now need a lot of love. I could care less about dance parties, I want to feel like I am in a living breathing world.
Give me companions that have a background story, that will go and fight with me and grow as we do. Or maybe I find a baby dragon egg and am able to raise it into a small dragon or drake and it grows over time as we fight and gain experience, give us stuff like that, where we have a connection to the world. A bond with something or someone. Stop filling the cash shop and start filling the game!

 

I have given up hope that the Dev's get rid of XP decay. It is such a game killer, and a turn off knowing at some point I will start losing a significant amount of time every time I die. As someone mentioned above... I don't mind the grind; I just don't want to lose XP of ALL things. Jeez us. And you want to get a return on hard work put in, right? I don't want to lose XP, so I won't try anything worth going outside the box. This would be a reason I can't recommend this game. It takes a special person who wants that kind of punishment... very few and far between. Not enough to carry the financial backing for the long term. There are so many alternatives available. Whatever... you can only tell a person so much that they are going down the wrong path. I guess we all have to learn the hard way.

 

I think this post is one of the best examples of proper, insightful and constructive criticism that, if acted upon, could make this game in a class of its own. Counsel given is only helpful if acted upon.

 

I agree w/ the OP... all of these points/ concerns have been hashed and rehashed but not near as many as the times they have been censored and silenced for the crime of "that may be misconstrued" or "that may trigger someone". What a shame; maybe had they respected the opinions of their customers...

Take a non play tested (by devs) game where the few that do run it through the paces are silenced when they bring home the bad news and this is what you get.

SotA:

a) little to no competitive play - this spans from weak incentives for group play in pve to the same in pvp
b) a decay mechanism that punishes players unnecessarily and sends them a nice message re how important their time is (just how many threads were locked sending a tidy message of "we don't want to hear it" re this issue? lol come and get it; dinner is served)

Work on those things and you won't lose people as if SotA was the mother of all sieves.

 

I highly doubt that!

Tell me how all the other games with caps survived that long?
The key factor to longevity are well fleshed out sandbox gamemechanics and an even endgame playfield what everybody is able to reach in some Month or a year if one is very casual.
With a maximum of participants in this varied and well connected endgame where everyone is important and able to make a contribution to other players, the community, the guild, the group.

To me it would only stimulate Coto economy

Because those who play 10+ hrs a day and love their grind have then exhausted the content in less than 3 days.
But i'd allways say they are the wrong measure.
And to have them not exagerating things and especially with RMT on stuff i would prefer hard caps. Point.
And i would prefer this for online modes only.
Those who like to grind all to 200 can play offline.
To have an interesting online game we need far lower effort needed to reach endgame, have a balanced and even playfield with dependencies and hard limitations to encourage people to interact, to have a economy and a more balanced open pvp field.

 

Balance can also mean one side advantaged if it it in relation to playtime. Having equipment getting destroyed and in exchange make crafting less random makes lower enchated gear mire powerful overall. If you want to emulate a virtual world through a sandbox you will never get an equal state. You just can make sure it is distributing everything fair not equal just like in real life. If you play a lot less.. you have to maybe life with being less powerful in a sandbox. However that doesnt mean that there shouldnt be a place for you and that ur playerskill doesnt matter at all.

Taking everything to the extremes both ways however is always stupid. Even playfields just are not compatible with emulating a virtual world. You can argue about the max difference though.

 

I dont complain, I have still only died maybe 5 times since persistence (adv lvl 100) so it doesnt really effect me at all.

 

Additionally Id like to point out that SotA has no real endgame content yet. The mechanics for that wont come until q2. So the req to participate in the endgame are not yet set.