How to make SotA great (please read carefully before posting)

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Corv, Jun 21, 2018.

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  1. digriz

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    Can start by not censoring as many posts, or locking as many threads. So people can feel free to truly have open discussions about improvement. It also uses less of your resources to not do this.

    Can also start to make this game story driven as originally sold to us, rather than a constant grind. Primary experience should come from completing story lines, not grinding.

    What story there is, isn't compelling or naturally flowing.

    I'd heed some of the bad reviews, and take them to heart, rather than be offended by them. A lot of the bad reviews come from people who wanted to improve things. Not people who are 'Out to get you.'

    Mr Garriott needs to be more involved as well. Right now it seems like hes more of a background figure, than leading the charge. But perhaps that's just *MY* perception of it. I could be mistaken.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2018
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  2. SmokerKGB

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    I find myself playing less, and less between releases, I've played every release since the 1 room chicken, and I've played many more hours than I've been playing before...
    I used to post a lot, but have since been quiet, not that I'm not reading, but because the subject matter has gone stale...

    I play SPO (single player online or Private, is what it's called now), I backed the game because of this ability, but more, and more the devs are making this a MMO, which is pretty much "why" I quit UO after 13 yrs... The online crowd is just too extreme, either they're totally Hardcore or So nice, wanting to Help you with every little thing...

    UO carried "rarity" to an all new level, and the economy was so fare out of whack, I couldn't believe a company would let it get that way... IMO, this just causes players to get/write a macro program to just "Farm" things, until they get what they're after... Some do this on their own, playing for hours, and hours, doing it over and over, until they get what they want... I think there needs to be a system of diminishing return to combat this... Let the spawn dwindle to nothing, let the loot dwindle to nothing... 2 ideas...

    I'm a casual player (if you haven't guessed), and chr development has come to a slow crawl for me (since so called "release"), I was at lvl 56, and I think I'm still there... So, it's changed since persistence, and release... it's the same as UO started with, slow... I guess that's understandable, it's the same devs... You gave us double exp, but what I need is double gains, x3, x4, x5... So come up with a scheme for casual players... For crying out loud, what's going to happen? New players might get competitive, sooner? Give me something tangable, if I haven't logged on since last release, how about x10 gains, let it dwindle down to normal after 2hrs, let be determined by how long I've been away, don't let me just log in/out... Adjust the numbers, I still need exp, so don't take the 10k away, that would kind of defeat the idea...

    Scenes need to "auto" adjust too, I'm only one guy, let it adjust to my level, let there be many in the spawn if I'm high lvl, let there be small if low, let the spawn be fast if high lvl or slow if low lvl... The one thing I liked about Graff mine was once the spawn was out of the way, I could mine, but now it's a place I don't go in to anymore... The lower lvl mines have very few resources... I guess you want me to buy from other players, well, I can't afford them, you've rigged the game to "rarity" again... I need recipes, I need skills, I need lots of resources, I can't afford it because I'm casual, what am I supposed to do? log and wait for next release, maybe you'll do something for me, but the MMO/Group thing has got you again...

    Shopping is a pain, walking to each and every vendor, I suggested a "search engine", you agreed, but I guess it's low on the list or gets bumped, the vendor sits down, yay, my sales have dropped. I'm casual... Great 1st step, so how about a search engine now... Or maybe they sit if no one opens them for so many days, NOT if I open them... Or maybe a advertisement board which "auto" fills with all the vendors in a region or town location, something that tells me where to go... I do like to travel, but not to the other side of the world... So fix the rifts already, you talked of a mechanism so I could dial in the destination, these things are important...

    I got an appointment, real life calls, be back...
     
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  3. padreadamo

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    I am an original kickstarter backer. I upgraded my account several times. I am one of those players who didn't give a crap about Ultima or RG. I wanted a good game to play with my friends.


    Bottom line...

    The combat is boring and overly complex than it has to be. I love the idea of card combat but what we got was a system that defies logic. The system we have forces us to look away from combat and focus on cards. A better system will focus on group dynamics, interaction, and a complete revamp of combat and its abilities.

    We need a reason to want to group. We need better, more difficult group-based encounters, dungeon-roaming, et al. The world lacks of this and it desperately needs it.

    Combat was a big deal but a bigger deal breaker was the world. The Lore of the game is uninteresting. It is boring. The NPCs are boring and there is a complete lack of a larger story happening.

    I would rather we have a bad guy cliché storyline. The bad guy would the lines of the virtues which forces the players to choose sides.... that is more interesting than what we have and could be believable in the current world implementation. We need a reason to CARE. This gives us reason to play.

    The color pallette used in the game is very drab, akin to ESO. It needs to be more vibrant. Everything is just dark earth tones. Use brighter greens, lighter browns... it's just too dark and depressing. The NPCs make the situation worse.

    Progression, skills, quests are all uninteresting. Where is the need for more positional combat? Where are my interesting debuffs? Where are the dungeons to roam with my group? Where are the complex group quests? None of these things exist which makes playing in a group BAD and single player , ten times worse

    Loot needs to be generated. The entire game cant be all about crafting and crafting materials.

    In short....... different combat, different story, better color pallets, review skills abilities, loot, and progression.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2018
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  4. Jackrabbit

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    Let me preface this by saying that I sincerely want SotA to succeed and be the game I play til I die.

    It's not easy to accomplish what Portalarium has done, and it was risky and unproven to boot. I give credit for the successes they have had, and genuinely want them to succeed in creating a viable, unique, game that has real world meaning in our lives.

    As a backer of over $8k and very longtime RG and Ultima fan, it breaks my heart to see where we are at this point. Many of us are only still playing because of the $ we have spent, hoping and dreaming that at some point this game will become viable in the real world market and support a population that can in turn support it.

    It's hard to read all of these ideas and suggestions for making SotA great, when almost all of the issues have been pointed out to the Devs many, many times as being not fun, divisive, and alienating to a lot of players. It's not like many, many of us, AND the MANY who are no longer here, didn't warn the devs about the impact of the decisions that were made. While they may be professional developers, many of us have just as many years or more put in as serious gamers. We aren't idiots just because we are on this side of the screen, otherwise we wouldn't be successful enough in real life to have paid for the building of this game.

    As one of the people who was in many heated combat systems and pvp debates early on, the fact that we are where we are now, is not really all that surprising. How many divisive, fun killing, player driving away decisions have to be made in the name of being 'ground-breaking' before the game no longer has enough CUSTOMERS to monetarily support it's development? I think we can now do the math.

    Many of us PLEADED with Port (trying to leave out names, I have ban hammer marks all over me already for the past 5 years) to make a more traditional combat system with the idea of later expanding/morphing it into something more 'ground-breaking' with the idea of, 'hey, lets not alienate all these customers right off the bat, lets bring them in and get them involved and 'then' we can ease into these deeper ideas." Imagine our telethon success if we actually had 5k people playing this game (which is only 1/10 of what Starr said we needed). None of this would be an issue.

    On combat and so many other ideas like death exp, loot tables, crafting, etc.

    I really like/love the 'potential' SotA has. They rushed release in order to please the backers and as a result, hardly no-one in the real world noticed or cared. I think they are correct to hold off on a major advertising campaign until they can get the game into a more polished and playable state.

    I wanted to leave a short list of issues, but I feel everyone above has covered it much better than I would at this point, my biggest point would be that if the game was fun, people would be here. People don't mind a grind, if there's a reward or good loot. People can overlook many, many flaws, as long as they are having fun. I think there are several to many things about this game that are on purpose very clearly, not fun or appealing to the masses. As much as we may want to be 'special' or 'niche', without customers, we are just another title that failed.

    I think the sentiment behind many development decisions that best describes why we have so few customers can be summed up in the direct words of one of our developers. "suck it tamers", well, we could use a few more tamers at the telethon, and pvp'ers, and combat enthusiasts, and rmt'ers, and pretty much anyone and everyone who originally backed this game. How do we have over 60k people on our original 'customer' list, yet we cant keep our Dev's employed?

    I'm trying to be civil, i'm trying to not call names, I don't lay all the blame at the feet of any one person. I'm just saying that too many decisions have been made in the name of 'ground-breaking' or 'actions have consequences' or 'we can't have a benefit without a penalty' that we/they have forgotten what we all came here for: to have fun. :(

    Nothing is perfect, but I feel that if we want to attract players, we need to find ways to make the existing systems more intuitive, more fun and appealing. Just changing mechanics alone won't do it. There's no reason we can't be more inclusive of traditional ideas and still be on a path towards uniqueness and nichedom. We don't have to get all the way there by episode 1 or 2, but if we don't have enough customers to pay the bills, there's nothing niche or ground-breaking about failure.

    I really hesitated to post this, i'll probably for sure be forum banned, (not for content but for other reasons I won't disclose). I risk that because I care about this game. As mad as I am at some of the people for the decisions that were made, I still want nothing more than for this game to thrive and be successful. I feel I have moderated myself appropriately in this post considering my history. If this is my last post, thanks to everyone for helping to support SotA and our common dream. Sorry for all the lines I've crossed, passion can be a terrible thing in the mind of a blunt talker.

    Just remember, if it ain't fun, it just won't sell.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2018
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  5. By Tor

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    You're so right. That's the tragic thing about all this. It's not like the backers didn't address nearly all of these current issues very, very early on in development. Combat, which has turned off so many old and new players alike, was immediately addressed when we early backers heard about it. They tweaked it but left it in place. The same goes for dozens of other decisions that the backers pushed back on - only to be met with a "suck it tamers" attitude by some dev(s). Our fears, complaints and concerns nearly always fell either on deaf ears or with condescending comments by the powers that be.

    This is not a negative post, by the way. I'm trying to be constructive. The game lost most of it's core audience and is failing now to attract new players. A friendly development team who listens to it's customers can go a long way to making a game successful... no matter what stage it may be in.

    It's like going to a restaurant and ordering a steak. The chefs give you a salad. You complain and say "I wanted a steak" and the staff tells you to "suck it". Do you think you'd go back to that place? But - if you hear the staff has changed and is now listening and being polite to it's customers - you may just come back and try it again.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2018
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  6. Barugon

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    I actually think that combat is one of the best things about SotA.
     
  7. Bubonic

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    its nice to hear someone with a large amount pledged to actually admit this for a change
     
  8. By Tor

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    I know everyone doesn't hate it. But I also know a lot of backers who quit because of it. Also, reading customer reviews, combat comes up quite a bit as a huge reason they don't like the game.
     
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  9. Jackrabbit

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    It makes me very very sad to admit it. I don't say it because I want to feel important by the $ I've spent, but honestly, if it wasn't for the money, i'd be long gone, just like the fun factor has been long gone because of death decay, combat system that limits me and forces me to watch the combat bar instead of the content, no real reason to grind except exp, completely stagnant economy where everyone sells the same stuff, and for a system where crafted loot is supposed to be the best, how come I can hardly ever find any good crafted stuff for sale in the major markets or anywhere else?

    How many others can admit it?
     
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  10. By Tor

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    I admit it. Not just my financial investment but my emotional investment. I have wanted this game to be great from the beginning which is why I never walked away from it. I hardly play anymore but I still want it to be the success I dreamed it would be since Kickstarter.
     
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  11. bloodydragon

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    Ooh, this is me:
    people who are NOT actively playing the game right now. People who pledged back in the original Kickstarter (I pledged after Kickstarter in April 2013.)

    I will just go ahead and say what would make me try and play again (other than popping in at releases to see if anything fundamentally has changed.)

    - The word click/typing system needs to go or be drastically re-done. At bare minimum, flavor text must be added if NPC animation is going to stay the same. I agree with whoever said it is detrimental to immersion.
    - Character creation needs a serious overhaul. I want to be short, fat and ugly. Just like IRL! Haha
    - Story. Who am I and what am I doing? I want to know more sooner, so I can feel like I have a purpose right away.
    -There needs to be a hard cap on skills. Or have mobs scale to everyone's level like in ESO. Classless system was a fun idea, but I see it driving people away.
    - Combat. Needs a major overhaul, but mostly needs an in-game tutorial to help young players figure it out. Yes, I want more hand holding.

    -Public relations needs some help. @LordBritish needs to be more involved to save his own name. I watched the R54 livestream and his introduction rang so untrue for me. He named a bunch of great things about Ultima games, most of which SOTA does not live up to yet. Dial back the "spiritual successor" talk. I hear that and I admit, my ears just shut. The story needs to be strengthened before you can call it anything Ultima.

    I have many more thoughts about this, but I am trying to be succinct. I leave with this. I bought ESO April 2014. It was kind of fun, I beat the main quest. There were TONS of bugs. I got stuck under a main boss for a couple days twice.

    I now have been playing ESO 3 hours a day. They have made major changes. It can be done. People can and do come back. If many of the voices in this thread are heard, there are people who will try this game again.
     
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  12. Ariella Shadowdancer

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    I agree with almost everything you said here, except two of your PVP parts. First PVP part: I do not find that they catered to the PVP, in fact I find it to be the opposite. I never thought PVP was close to anyone's heart but Chris'. Second PVP part: I do not see anywhere in the game where they forced anyone to PVP. Yes you can go through some PVP areas to do some quest, gathering, etc but you do not have to. Third PVP part: Absolutely agree. The PVP crowd did not like what they got and MOST left the game.

    Everything else you hit the hammer on the nail.

    I would add: stop with the housing deco for awhile and dance party crap and start making treasure hunting, fishing on moving boats with some kind of monster to fight while doing it and SOS and good loot to boot, mounts that have a purpose, pets that you can train in their own skills.

    Edited to add: put in some kind of fast travel. Atm most use their friends list to teleport as fast travel. I do not see any difference in putting in runes we can use to mark places Or something similar to runes.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2018
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  13. Merlota

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    A reason to log on other than grinding. Be it grinding exp, crafting mats, actual crafting skill the game is grind grind grind and it isn't fun. Putting a hard cap on levels and limiting crafting to a couple trees would go a long way here.

    I am not asking for daily quests unless there are so many of various different styles that they don't seem to repeat. I'm asking for 20 different dungeons to fight though with a goal at the end instead of a room where you setup camp. I'm asking for raids where you need 15 people in coordinated execution to succeed. Both of those should have rewards, you know, loot!.

    I'm asking for zones filled with quests and overarching storylines that unfold as your travel through the zone and very importantly I want to be able to say "I don't want to help these people" and continue on. Even better let me work against them. Love, I wanted to slap the leader that were whining about their lost love instead of doing something about the undead invasion. Why would I want to help them in their selfishness?
     
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  14. Jackrabbit

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    Trying to be constructive here:

    Desperate times call for desperate measures.

    We're not going to recover all the ground we have lost in one or two releases, most of the issues we have talked about are structural. How about we list 5-10 ideas that could be high impact but easy/quick implementation that will generate a lot of buzz and excitement among some of our lost brothers and sisters?

    1) Remove death decay - if we can have double xp on a whim, we can remove death decay on a whim
    2) Give us AT LEAST 25% of our combat speed back
    3) IMPROVE LOOT DROPS - dbl the gold and rng chances and bring item destruction on enchant/masterwork failure back BUT any item that fails automatically goes into the loot table
    4) Announce (the easy part) combat system and quest system overhaul as part of Episode 2 (I imagine a combat system overhaul STRETCH GOAL would be one of the first to sell out)

    That would be my top 4, what's yours?

    Seriously, what do we have to lose?
     
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  15. By Tor

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    Ok, these aren't the most pressing things that need fixed but seems like these could be put in relatively easily and would get people interested:

    1. Scale roaming encounters that is appropriate for whatever level you are (not sure if this can be quickly implemented but it seems like it wouldn't be difficult)
    2. Improve Fishing (throwing in a few different fish and things like "notes in bottles" and other loot - supply bags, maybe). Again, this doesn't seem like it would be too hard to put in.
    3. Surprise attacks/events. Any time the devs have parties they usually, towards the end, incorporate high level monsters in the POT hosting the event. Also, I'm assuming the dragon attacks weren't too difficult to do since they did 4 of them. This leads me to believe that they could do this at random places and at random times. How cool would it be to be crafting in a POT and suddenly see a few Mountain Trolls causing havoc... or shopping in Central Brittany and an invading group of Kobold Gunners invade the city and need to be repelled by the players.
    4. Roll back <insert your hated nerf here>. It seems these combat nerfs (plate armor, for example) were put in place because very elite level players were getting too powerful. That is not a good fix. So what if they're too powerful? These nerfs hurt everyone and makes combat less fun for everyone - especially for the 99 percent of us who aren't elite level.
     
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  16. TheGrinch

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    There are so many things that I agree with in this thread. I won't bother to list them all, but having the dev team lose the "suck it" mentality is high on the list. How about for once they actually listen to the people who pay their bills. If they had listened to us way back during Dev+ forum days there would be a lot less problems and a lot more players today.

    I also want to bring up that I see a lot of people calling for skill caps / limits, etc. Keep in mind if Port implements a skill cap / limits on # of skills you can have, etc then they need to also implement something like soulstones were in UO. If all of a sudden you are going to limit me to 2-3 skill trees then they need to give me a magic box or something that I can store all of the skills that I worked up in. I will need to be able to use this magic box at anytime outside of combat to swap out my skills. I and many others have spent countless millions of xp on skills, I don't look forward to losing that, or to dropping it all back in an xp pool and having to re-work the skills that I want to use next. Also, if you cap any skill levels you need to refund completely the amount of xp that it took to get from whatever that cap is to the level that I currently am at.

    Oh, and I agree... death decay is one of the most stupid game functions I have ever heard of.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2018
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  17. sake888

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    My only suggestion at this point in the games life cycle is new blood. The people who called the shots have missed the mark woefully, as is indicated by the lack of players and positive reviews. Millions of game players out there, hundreds in Sota.
     
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  18. Rada Torment

    Rada Torment Community Ambassador (ES)

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    I see lot of old faces here, those who left one day and they came back to see how the game goes, and thats good!

    I like to read all your feedback, hope they would read this thread too :)
     
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  19. redfish

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    For me, its not that complicated.

    Through the whole development process, I think there have been two directions that have been tugging at the game design.

    The first has been to create a rich and deep RPG in the tradition of the single-player Ultima games, which would extend into a multi-player experience in the same way that UO intended to. This is the "Multima", or Multi-player Ultima, that Lord British talked about during Kickstarter. It puts a premium on role-playing in the "classic" sense of the term, that we were used to back in the old days of Ultima and AD&D. A rich, living virtual world, in which players were faced with meaningful choices that shaped all of their participation in the world. Some of these choices might be driven by stories and narratives created by the developers, some by immersive game mechanics impacting your experience as a player, some by player-to-player interaction like PvP and commerce. It wouldn't be designed to be "hardcore", as none of the Ultima games were really "hardcore", but it would still impose real choices and be limited in the way it did direct hand-holding.

    On the other hand, there has been a little devil sitting on people's shoulders whispering all sorts of naughty things. Like -- "this won't make money" -- "it won't be mass market" -- "its too old school, games have improved since then" -- "the Ultima games are not as fun as we believed they were, its just your nostalgia talking" -- "its not what young gamers want" -- "casuals won't like it, too hardcore" -- "it would be too hard to make that game with the schedule and budget". This tendency has, in my opinion, pushed the game in a different direction. RMT and the focus on the social experience, with marketing focused on things like dance parties. Gameplay focus on easy repetitive grinding, and whittling down player limits because of the fear that players don't like making choices.

    I think there have been players who've believed that going on the second path was the path to success, and any problems with the game could just be fixed with minor tweaking, tinkering of mechanics, better and improved graphics, better and improved animations, removing more of the "old school" elements, giving more hand-holding, making the game more like "so-and-so" generic MMO, creating more tutorials and help text, creating better marketing.

    I've never believed any of that.

    Putting aside my personal preference for classic RPGs, the market is already over-saturated with grindy MMOs, all of which are at a better staring point than Shroud is. I also think the only thing the mass market is really interested in is a good, quality game. The Ultimas were good games in their own time; its not our imaginations; its not our nostalgia speaking. Technology and the time that comes with an open-ended development of course creates the possibility of creating an even better game. But most of the "new" solutions existed back in the old days, too. Some things have to be done differently just because things are different today, but IMO that doesn't justify a radical change in the philosophy that drove the Ultima games. The path to success is, and always has been, quality.

    What can be done to make this game more appealing to my friends? I have a lot of friends who refuse to play MMOs, not because they don't like the idea of multiplayer, but because again the typical MMO centers around grinding and RMT. Myself, I've tried a lot of MMOs, but tend to just play through the story and then quit soon afterwards, because I don't find the gameplay that interesting. I don't like grinding, and I don't mind grouping and social activities, but most of my time in game will be solo, doing things by myself. If you don't give me a fun experience playing by myself, I'm not going to stick around long enough to enter groups or social activities.

    But the real bottom line is if you look at any random F2P MMO, if you really look at the numbers, I think you'd find that most players are exactly like me. I know my friends are. So, again, I don't know why Portalarium would want to try to clone every generic MMO out on the market, because I think there's a bigger, untapped audience which currently has no game directed towards them.

    To me, there's a lot in Shroud that falls short from what I hoped for. The reason I'm still playing is that there are enough elements in the game from the first path that make me still hopeful about the future of the game's development. The devs are still faced with the same two directions, and there are a lot of reasons for me to believe they want to go in the first one.

    Plus, there are still tools that let us create things on our own, even it requires a lot of time and effort and planning to kickstart. There are things I've been planning from before pre-release, but its taken me a lot of time to try to get this out of the gate. I'm not rich and don't have a lot of money to spend on the game, so I've been doing a lot of grinding for gold so I can earn things, figuring out a path to get things done, working with others in the community. But yea a lot of grinding. So I'm grinding a lot even though I don't like it, because I want to finish what I started. Hopefully its something I can make work, and the effort will have been worth it.
     
  20. Winfield

    Winfield Legend of the Hearth

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    San Antonio, Texas
    I'll focus on "Initial Contact" with my friends:
    1. First, my friends need to learn about and find the game - Figure out how to get the word out more about SotA - Push things in local game meetups, Ultima fan groups, etc. Many of my friends remembered Ultima and UO, but did not hear about SotA. Many of my friends get their information from other friends. So ... the social network is essential and needs to be cultivated. Get existing SotA Veterans to become creative in reaching their social groups, and expand their social groups.
    2. The new player experience is always tough ... but some of my friends want to just jump in, click, shoot, WASD, perhaps have a starter deck already installed, skip tutorials (boring), and get through something fast to see what the game is like ... and get "hooked". Then they could say "oh, wow, great ... now how do I really play this game?" I know there could be a lot of tech needed for something new/different like an intro scene (free to play): Dump the player into a scene fully equipped, easy to slay the dragon and zombies, easy to get the Keymap, deck sufficiently installed, and have the person kill different things and loot stuff -- round around -- see cool things. It would be a repeatable solo player instance to "try the game" without any storage of information, other than their avatar character profile information. if they like it, the can show their friends anytime in the repeatable "intro" scene. If they like the game, the will then create their character in earnest, go through some tutorials, etc. Hook em fast ... then say "if you want to keep playing, now create your character for real!" Something like that maybe. But they can ALWAYS go back to the repeatable "intro" scene to show their friends what is possible in this game. -- Just an idea.
    These are the only two things I can think on for the moment:
    1. Find the Fish (or they find you).
    2. Hook em and real them in.
    Good questions! Thanks!
     
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