Hope we do!! Tier 5+

Of course, but why so many? Remember that these are instanced and can handle many people.

Shouldn't it be something more like say

200 areas:
Tier 1, average time in one: 10 hours: 15 zones (say 3 per main land area)
Tier 2, average time played in one: 5 hours: 10 zones
Tier 3, average time played in one: 5 hours: 10 zones
Tier 4, average time played in one: 5 hours: 25 zones
Tier 5, average time played in one: Thousands of hours: 75 zones
Tier 5+, average time played in one: Thousands of hours: 65 zones.


Wouldn't it be nice for a new person to enter a tier1 zone and it have lots of people in it which would give them the impression of population playing the game? On the flip side, anyone over what adv lvl 60 is in a tier 5 area and would probably prefer less population. I know Ulfeim is getting annoying to me since it seems to be only one of maybe 3 good 5 skull areas to farm.

 

I think you are right and I think too that the problem is simply that many avatars are already playing the game for such a long time.
It may look like there are not many possibilities to level up…but that is just the case for the avatars that are playing since FW as normally you would just have started to explore Novia and the areas below T5 are important for the new avatars as they should always find a spot to explore and play as new avatars shouldn’t be forced to grind all day in one and the same scene until they are strong enough for end content to explore the world.
I would guess in the following episodes there will be no T1-4 starter areas. You start in the area of EP1 and if you are strong enough for this area you can proceed to the next, more dangerous continent(s).

 

Good... Quality...

T5'S PLEASE!

 

These areas often or will contain side quests, quite often unique resources or are rich in one particular resource. They may contain hidden walls or underground tunnels linking zones. They offer environments for future features. These areas are fine for crafters, questers and explorers alike and offer a refreshing change from time to time.

I'm sorry but I couldn't agree less with the premise of this thread unless all one does in SOTA is swing a weapon. The game offers much more than that. I'm sure as the level demographic of the entire player base creeps upwards the Devs will move development that way as well.

I'm being a bit inflammatory here, especially given the recent furore about the changes to combat resists and avoids making combat a bit tougher, but perhaps the real problem (if there is one), is people are levelling through these lower tiers too fast and the game is still too easy or perhaps levelling exp too generous?

 

Lets reason through this though lol.

Why would I want to do all of that in a tier 2 zone as a adv lvl 105 player?

Why wouldn't I ask that the zone be at least tier 5 with critters that actually challenge me and yet I still have side quests, unique resources or rich in one particular resource?

I just did some of the quests in the beginner adv areas that are tier 1. The quests were awesome and I had a fun time, but running around one shotting mobs with 50 hp with my bows autoshot was not much fun at all. The XP was terrible and it was no challenge. Yes, this works for that new player who just started, but in 10 hours even they are going to look for the same things in a tier 2 zone for 5 hours... then a tier 3 for 5 hours, then a tier 4 for 5 hours and the *VASTY* majority of players are then going to be looking to spend thousands of hours doing it in a tier5+ zone.

Where are the tier 5 zones now with heavy quests??? Maybe Seq colossus (which actually kinda sucks as a tier 5 zone). Ulfeim and the others are just farming locations.

Maybe I missed something, but where is the "backstory" and "quests" in the Rise? Me as a RP player.... what rational do I have to go to the Rise?

 

I can't disagree with what you say about backstory and quests. There are locations that are conventional MMO playgrounds and locations that are to host the story stages, sometimes they don't seem to fully hang together or further the lore and there is a general shortage of questing, which is being worked on. At this point i'm not sure how all the locations and the challenges in those locations hang together as an RP/RPG whole, but I digress....

I don't often bite on these threads , but what got me going was that the criticism is really one that could be levelled at all MMO's not just SOTA, many of which that have been out for a while and have been patched and upgraded for years. Its a criticism that crops up all the time; 'where's my end game dude?' There doesn't seem to be anything particularly unique or worse with SOTA than what faces the general MMO world as a whole, where advanced players struggle to find end game content on large multi-difficulty maps designed to assist and channel players characters from level zero to zillion.

Just about every MMO I've ever played has zones where I hike around for hours through herds of 'grey' mobs that don't react and offer no experience at all and drops of no value. Sometimes they're ok for harvesting or interacting with key NPCs for quest lines, or form social player hubs.

SOTA does place a few named boss mobs in low tier areas that can draw players back with some purpose, I'm sure they will do this more going forward. Resources are also topography and zone type specific. FFXIV uses both these mechanics a lot.

With a decent budget and plans for expanding the Continents, I expect that's were the next challenge lies along with the future main story Chapters, all subject to us putting our hands in our pockets and funding and influencing what we want to see going forward..

That reminds me, I needs some more COTOs....

 

Some new high level content would be cool, but to be fair, there will always be a significant amount of people that will spend all of their time grinding at the place they consider to be the best spot while complaining that the best spot is getting boring and that the world needs to be full of best spots.

 

Or other reasons to visit them too. Maybe a certain fish can be caught there and a repeatable fishing quest is there that gives some special random bait types as a reward along with a bit of gold and perhaps it could give some fishing items such as different weights of line for our fishing poles. Now of course this could be possible only with a fishing updates. @DarkStarr please, please schedule fishing update.

edited phone typos

 

Nice idea, but they don't have the tech to do this.

One of the big issues I see is how to balance the mobs when you have different level players in the zone. It's trivial if you are playing in apology private instance. Now add a group of different levels ranging from new player to veteran . What level are the mobs? Not so trivial a case to balance. Or you can create instances based on level, but now you restrict how groups flan be formed. Once you get passed the one person, one instance case, things aren't as easy as they seem at first glance.

 

If your perspective is only about the end game, the lower tiers are a waste of time. But these tiers serve an important purpose, they provide a valuable user experience for the players who come into the game. This is where new players form their first impressions of the game, and as such they need to be there and polished enough that they create a positive impression. Time needed to be spent on creating and polishing those scenes to a reasonably high standard at the expense of higher tiered scenes. So for the new players coming those are valuable scenes.

 

Techniques to enhance and keep lower tier zones active and populated has been a headache for all MMOs for years. Some of the inducements I have seen in games to get people to revisit, which I am sure can be reverse engineered into SOTA (and given the experience of the Dev team probably are outline planned subject to funding):

- Repeatable quests, zone unique mobs and resources, higher level mob instances or map pockets, such as camps and dungeons, timed Boss Spawns (SOTA has a unique celestial calendar so this could be interesting), timed resource spawns (calendar again, weather, day night..), Fishing trophy collection quests and other collections, Sightseeing and other exploration rewards (i.e FFXIV), Trading, maybe. I'm sure there's loads more, but these are often additions in expansions in maturing releases.

The games architecture - using instanced zones dropped into from the overworld map - actually seems better placed than most MMOs for introducing additional content rapidly without massive overhauls of the game engine or expansions of the land masses.

 

This has been used as a point a few times now. Of course we need some lower level zones for new people... but again, why so many if the average player spends 5 hours in a tier 2 before moving into a tier 3? Why not more tier 5's where people generally spends thousands of hours?

 

Priorities, only so many people can create scenes on the team and each scene takes around a month to go through the workflow. So while I agree that I'd like more higher level scenes to grind in, er explore, I believe that their energy,and priorities, had to be the lower end tiers so that when they started marketing the game the players coming in would have a positive experience. Lately they started uncloning the tier 4 scenes, which is a positive step. Hopefully we'll see some tier 5 scenes being worked on and then some higher level scenes.

Also remember they did an XP balancing pass through the higher level scenes so that it wasn't all about one scene being better xp than the others. While I haven't reached the Top level, low 90s right now unbuffed, I can state that many of the scenes with mobs underneath that top tier seem to be balanced for the amount of xp you can earn per hour, if you are of an appropriate level for the mobs. This based on the 3 scenes I tested of the 5 or 6 scenes at that level, I should get back to Ulfhiem and Grannus to see what those are like.I cycled between three different scenes and th level of xp was similar (not tried the rise

 

Yes I agree that this could have been the reasoning behind doing the lower tier scenes but to better enhance all scenes to be multi purpose and give incentives to re-visit for all levels imo only makes sense. The mobs may be lower tier but the scene could still offer lots of incentives to re-visit for all players but I see this over and over happening that they either make a high level tier or well lately they make low tier areas and what about the details of this game.

It cannot be an either or for these scenes. Scenes need to have reason to visit and imo fishing is one of them. Also it could be that this is where you get a certain bait type since the soil is indeed the right consistency. So please @Devs don't make this a tier level reason only for visiting these scenes. That is a big mistake. Resources is perfect for making scenes appealing to revisit. Updating fishing, adding fish more and some better fish recipes, fishing quests, bait types, and on and on and also adding achievements are perfect reasons. And fishing is not on the schedule and it was on the schedule for episode one. @DarkStarr

 

I would love to se a progressively harder dungeon the farther down you went even if it meant additional load screens. But I can’t agree more with this post I’m so sick of grinding sieges and the rise but there is nothing more I can do that’s challenging and worth while. Except for lost vale which I can do 2x a week if I’m lucky. Or maybe we can even see some hard modes activated for existing scenes but I’m just spitballing here. I found myself logging in less and staying on less because of this issue.

 

Well some of that is because you are just doing combat related stuff. What are we just voting for combat related stuff. Where is the outrage that this game focuses only on that. Where is our horse racing, our sea battles, our treasure hunts? Well not in this episode for sure but we have to be loud about what details they add to these things. Preparations could be in the works. The waterways of the world could be getting upgraded for one thing to prepare for the many types of sea life and maybe they are although I have not heard that they are. Also if you have not sync'd music perhaps you would be a big fan if you tried it. Instead of joining a combat related group perhaps join a jam session and sync some music. Well just some thoughts and perhaps you have tried many things in this game already.

 

I remember when EQ added an achievement system after it was already a very old game. There were achievements for exploration, learning languages, killing a bunch of a particular type of mob, etc. It got me to go back through a bunch old content that had been trivial to me for years, and it was pretty fun to toil away at when I was bored. There's probably a lot of ways to make trivial content relevant to high level players other than just adding high level mobs, not that I have anything against high level mobs.

 

Thanks, everyone for responding just wanted to put my thoughts out there!

 

With double XP, I routinely encounter players who started after launch with more XP than me after 1.5 years.

Personally, I was up to T5 zones in my first week playing, before we had real equipment.

This is actually an often-cited feature of sota game design, that players can start up and be relevant in higher level parties after a fairly quick bootstrap.

So in this context, i don't think "but new players!!" Is a good enough reason to delay end-game development...

But I don't think port is delaying. If I understand correctly, this is their primary focus at the moment.

 

T5 PLEASE =O