My morning in SOTA so far.

1. I Buffing up in our POT, jumped in shrine took buff, jumped out was running to second shrine. Unity Crash to desktop. First ever Unity CTD. I got a unity error box but wasn't quick enough to read or screen cap. Considered reporting, decided to see if it happened again and try to screen cap it. Moved on..

2. Opened my inventory to sort myself out before journeying out, couldn't find a darned thing due to locked clothing items filling entire page. Got slightly grumpy.

3. Went to a zone, tried to use a ladder, fell through the world. Had to use /stuck. Considered playing something else..

4. Went to Skrekk instead, decided to go dungeoneering and level some skills. Got into a fight, accidentally dragged half my icons off the combat and utility bars (as they don't lock!!) including my Focus pots and a key dps glyph. Ran out of focus, couldn't heal or hit...

5. Tried to use Inventory to recover my focus pots, encountered issue 2. above, died.

6. Wen't to shrine, lost more exp than I had gained in my entire short morning's work.

7. I'm off to play something else for a while. Now pretty grumpy.

 

UT for 30 ultra boring minutes, solves most problems nowadays.

 

I hear ya Steevo. I object strongly to punishment systems that can actually set the player -back- and have done since the beginning. The main thing they do is encourage you to play something else.
Sounds like you had 1 thing after another this morning and to have actually made negative progress is just a kick in the gut.
For me, I only launch up Sota and go out adventuring if I know I'm going to be able to give it 100% of my attention and am reasonably sure there will be no distractions, because I really don't want to have to spend any more ("extra-boring") time in UT than I have to. I'll do it for advancement, but I'm a lot less inclined to do it as "punishment" which is all the decay is making it atm. Without the xp hit, your morning woulda still sucked, but at least you'd have come out of it with a little xp to show for it.

 

The game is getting more mainstream every release. I doubt the system will be in place much longer.
So i guess i can forgo my classical getgud posting.

 

If I were inclined I'd ditch the combat bar all together, or add the option of this far superior alternative, invisible locking squares all around the screen, like in other games but have them lock into place like an icon on a windows desktop, and have a lock button where you can make sure they don't get accidentally dragged, keep the same rules as the combat bar but simply be invisible and have more options as to where you can put the glyphs

 

This happens to me at times as well. I feel your pain.

 

Yeah, lets hope not!

Its not about 'getgud' - I think I've only died maybe twice total since launch back in March and both times I was doing things where I accepted the potential setback as a risk. Like killing new aether things or poking at unicorns - The punishment for these things - "sigh, now I have to go grind for an hour" is excessive. So you just avoid risky content, and as a result, miss out on a lot of potential cool stuff. I absolutely think the game should be harder, progression should be slower, and we should stop catering to the people who cry about how long it takes them to level up. But I object to going "backwards" - that just serves no purpose except to deflate the player and send them elsewhere.

You say the game is going more and more mainstream, and I agree, but I don't think the game would survive for long with the old-school hard-core systems, the market has changed, the player demographics have changed.

However I don't believe that adding convenience and rewarding content ( as opposed to pointless timesinks, delays, setbacks, and "work) is going to ruin the game. I think we can still have a challenging, interesting, engaging game without it having to be a competition between who is willing to put up with the most frustration for the longest and those people come out on top. When you log on and your entire play session is either work, or a waste of time...why do you continue to log on?

 

@Steevodeevo

Prayers for you Steevodeevo

I've had my share of mornings like that.

Or entire days....

 

It's meditation. Like mining in EvE ^^

 

my morning:

Crafted 200 copper spears (hmmm... 600+ copper ingots? 500 pine wood?).

Ended up with 60ish MC's

Started enchanting them (100 alch, 100 enchant, 95 wep enchant, +5 alhy ring and the +5 buff) burned 600 gold ingots, ~2000 mandrake)

Got maybe 4-5 that were worth moving to try to Master work,

no... crafting isnt broke...

 

You enchant before Master Working them? Does that provide better results? I usually craft, Master Work, then move onto Enchant, even if I get failures, because a +4 or +6 item is still better than a standard item. I usually only craft things that I will use personally, but I also put "failures" up for sale at lowbie prices because there are still low money players out there and I do end up making some sales.

 

That sounds like a rough time.

Do you think you have some driver issues that are giving you Unity problems? What OS are you using? Linux? MacOS? It's possible there are some drivers that could minimize or eliminate the CTD from Unity and some of those other problems you experienced up to your 3rd issue at least.

I hear you about dragging icons off the bar... I have sometimes done that myself, NOT very often mind you, but it has happened. It's why I usually use the keyboard to kick off glyphs and judicious use of the SHIFT key and the numbers to kick off items in the utility bar. That's not exactly easy either, but it works.

I hope they can correct some of those issues with the glyphs not being locked.

 

Hi @Nelzie nope never had an Unity issue before, drivers all smack up to date using Win10. I should have realised at that point what kind of session it was going to be and moved on!

 

Depends on the skill Im trying to raise. For spears, I already have GM Master working and 95 alchemy weps, so I am enchanting them to raise my enchanting weps to GM (100). While I actually did end up Master working them (because spears are my priary wep), a lot of times they will sit in a chest for the future when I start taking that skill above 100.

There's no difference between ench or MC, its all just statistics and wont alter out come if you do one over the other. It may only matter if you want a specific outcome on stats (like say putting a gem on it first)

I have places failures up for years now, I have had thousands of items made that I put of for sale that are failures. I had +12 chain chests up for like 5K gold and they just sat. Even at a few thousand gold they never sold.

 

Well, I think all of us can explain storys like that one
And I can't understand, why there was / is no attention given. It's not about the game should be easier! It's about a kind of fairness for our invested game time.

I stopped to explore the lands because of such things. Well, it wouldn't be so hard, if the death decay wouldn't punish us EVERY DAY AGAIN from beginning!
The reason, I posted (I don't know how many times!) and asked @Chris, why death decay isn't built up in GAME TIME - not in real time - to prevent to loose XP for nothing ...
If someone just can play 1/2 or 1 hour a day it is very hard. And really a very good reason for not to play every day. Why?

EXAMPLE of 2 players, playing 3,5 hours a week!
PLAYER 1 is playing every day 1/2 hour = 3,5 hours a week,
PLAYER 2 is playing only 1 day a week for 3,5 hours.

PLAYER 1: dying every day once.
PLAYER 2: dying seven times in his whole playtime at one day a week:

The loss for the first death may be -50.000 XP.

At the end of week:
PLAYER 1, playing and dying once every day:
7x -50.000 = - 350.000

Earned XP 1/2 hour: 25.000 x7 = 175.000
Daily XP Bonus: + 10.000 x 7 = 70.000

SUMMERY PLAYER 1: 175.000 - 350.000 = - 175.000 + 70.000 = - 105.000 XP a week


Player 2, playing and dying (also 7 times!) ONE day a week:
-50.000 -25.000 -12.500 -6.000 -3.000 -1.500 -750 = - 98.750 XP,

Earned XP 1/2 hour: 25.000 x7 = 175.000
Daily XP Bonus: + 10.000 x 7 = 70.000

SUMMERY PLAYER 2: 175.000 - 75.000 = 100.000 + 70.000 = + 146.250 XP a week

Is this fair? The same time someone can spend, the same amount of deaths - with a gap of - 251.250 XP!

Well, are we crazy enough to play every day as a casual player ???
(and yes: playing just for fun, distracted by doorbell, telephone, crying chilld or something else, calculating one death every day!
And don't tell us: don't die - it's not so difficult! For sure not if we can play concentrated all the time - but if not?)

May be a "PAUSE" key would be fine to hide the Avatar (only possible if NOT in combat mode!)
Well, @Chris, show compassion for casual players
Or at least for the first death of the day!

It don't means we are against death decay - we are against an unfair counting of our invested game time ...

 

Just an FYI, but the decay has been effictively cut in half due to permanent double XP.

 

Unfortunately this won't change the system how decay works.
It starts every day with the highest death decay amount, equal how long you log(ged) in ...
Someone who plays every day and dies once every day is loosing more XP as another one who is playing the same game time in summery at one day a week (and dying as often as the other one!).
Does this make sense? If you have not so much time to spend it hurts to know that it works this way.
Unfortunately this system increases game experience like @Steevodeevo told above ...

 

CCP is being sold to Pearl Abyss.

 

Yepp. Saw that, raged in different places about it ^^