Cool game, but way too punishing for newbs.

The responses to the posts on here are great examples of people not listening and just generalizing their preconceptions to justify what they want to believe, arguing things people don't disagree with.

 

Great ideas.

3) I personally don't think the game needs more tutorials on the super basic stuff, I think a tutorial FEATURING cool stuff you can do with the deck building is a need of the game to help get players hooked on a unique feature.
4) Arabelle directing you to other starting zones is a good start, but I think new players should have even more encouragement to go directly to the next start zone after they get to the first big city (Aerie, Resolute, Maybe even Solace before Ardoris) my exp pool began drastically dropping after I completed most quests in Blood River Crossing/Outskirts and Aerie, Highvale, and then in the middle of Highvale Outskirts.
5) I've personally just never been into the crafting cause it seemed likely that it was a money sink that wouldn't yield worthwhile results until much higher level. If I'm wrong and it provides worthwhile gear on a parallel pace to adventuring, it should be advertise so in the game. It sounds like this was sort of a priority/idea that didn't get executed in a newbie friendly way. If you want to make crafting the way you get your gear, thats fine, as long as you make it friendly to people who want to adventure and not craft, meaning minimal investment from adventures for basic gear that they have been told is what they're supposed to be using. If you want to reward more investment that is fine, but telling someone who is interested in adventuring they have to grind crafting is rejecting a huge player base.
6) I lost confidence in the questing system right away. Ultima 4 was a difficult questing system, but I was confident it wasn't bugged, so the challenge was enjoyable. SotA is easier questing than Ultima4, but harder than most MMO's. It being harder only works if people are confident that it isn't bugged. Creating hard finite finished indicators to a questline would help. And obviously the blue markers going away when they're supposed to. Also, the tutorial makes it seem like the answer to NPC's is always given as a clickable option, this is not always the case and players should be told that in game I think.

One idea to help encourage players to explore low tier areas would be Blessings from your personal virtue banners. Could add two spots to the other blessings, or just could include it with the other blessings. Maybe make them weaker than City Blessings, but also longer?

5) Back to crafting, I don't know the entire history of the game's updates and if this was already thought of, but it'd be cool to have player crafting guilds that have 1 physical headquarter for each crafting field that newbies would have access to. Veteran player crafters could keep wares stocked, the headquarter could show new players all the available gear that is being crafted. New players could be given the option to simply purchase from the guild, or start an apprenticeship.

 

Hello @jacksweather and welcome to the world of Shroud of the Avatar!

... And welcome to the forums. Somewhat lesa glorious, but a generally nice place once you've acclimates to the eccentricities of our community.

First off, let me congratulate you for reaching level 85 in a month! I've been playing (hard) for more than 4 months and have only reached level 84.... Are you sure your character level is 85 and not aome of your skills...?

If your adventure level is truly 85, then you'll have to excuse our fellow forum members for their astonishment. That might explain some of their reactions. For a new player to clear AL 85 in a month with no expert or inside knowledge would mean that something has seriously gone wrong!

And don't go to upper tears, friend.... No matter how well meaning those players were, you experienced the result: they should have taught you how to manage your skill gain/consumption. I mean, they gave you the biggest fish in the world (not exagerating) but didn't teach you how to fish. Now your skills are like hungry teenagers who ate the whale, grew several centimeters, and now demand bigger fish, more often, and you're the poor schmuck left holding the fishing rod and feeling screwed.

As you experienced, more exp didn't solve your exp shortage. It might seem counter intuitive, but those hospitalers hamstrung you. I'm sorry about that. As the idiom goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions... Substitute Hell with upper tears and you have an exact facsimile.

Now that your skills are higher, you now need even more experience than before. It's like injecting a struggling economy with free capital - shapow! - heinous inflation that makes day to day life even harder than before. You may now be suffering the ill effects of experience inflation.

I will try my best to make a quick guide to help you with your ordeal. I'll try to make it entertaining as well as I can, despite being a terribly dull person. This will require two parts: 1) Exp gain vs Skill gain, which I will try to illustrate with the metaphore of belligerant university
students; and 2) why the veteran community members were not well receptive of your suggeetions, which I will try to explain with the metaphor of the local diner/pub.

Firstly, the beligerant uni students. Even if you didn't go to university or your country's tertiary culture is quite different, every cinema goer is well aware of the drunken frat boy stereotype. They begin their education as wide-eyed innocents who just want to expand their social spheres as quickly as possible - so you ply them with a pint of the foamy stuff and send them merrily on their way. Next weekend, it's two pints. And the next, a few pints and some shots of whiskey. Our boy has developed an alcohol tolerance, and he will drink you out of house and home until someone puts a stop to it!

But my friend, you don't have one beligerant fraternity brother getting knackered every night on your dime. You have several or dozens. You have many main skills that you use in every adventure, many essential innate skills that are continuously needed and therefore continuously used in the background. You might also have one or even two dozen skills that you use situationally.

Each of those skills is like a frat boy, and each time you use a skill they take a drink, and each time the skill levels up a stronger drink is needed for the same effect - skill gain (and the innate skills drink more and more often).

Now you have a house full of beligerant drunks who can quickly out pace your ability to work and earn money for more alcohol (your exp pool). But how do you reign in this runaway binge?

You could....

1) Take on a second and third and fourth job to pay for the ever increasing alcoholism in your fraternity (in other words, play more and more often just to keep your rats on the experience wheel);

2) Beg the government for booze subsidies so that the same amount of work results in more alcohol (in other words, asking for exp boost from mobs which I'll explain shortly won't solve your problems long term);

3) Get a handle on the situation by forcing the worst alcoholics in your fraternity to sober up until your booze consumption lowers to meet your income. As time goes on and you get promotion after promotion at work, you can again indulge those hard drinking skallywags as your improved salary permits. (in other words, set the highest consuming skills to "maintain" or "not training" until your exp pool starts growing again).

Number 3 is the clear choice. Managing your exp pool is an essential skill after AL 40. AL 40 means most of your skills are about forty while your most used skills might be in the 60s and your primary skill might be even higher. Some of those heavy drinkers will need to rest their livers.

The design reasons for this are myriad and complex and evolving and extremely controversial, so suffice to say that micromanagement of experience gain/skill gain is the price of a true classless system. Rather than having oppressive legal constraints on drinking, the game developers incentivize players to choose their own path, of their own devise, and keep them on their paths by making progress extremely slow for those who spread themselves too thin. That's not to say that you can't be über at everything - if you don't mind skull-numbing grinding until all of the interesting content becomes too easy and your only source of joy is whipping out your digital bits and comparing exp pool sizes.... But I (terribly) digress.

In summary, skills consume more experience aa their level gets higher, so you will need to manage your skill gain to match your experience gain according to your playstyle. The point of the game is to have fun, face challenges, and consistently improve the challengea you face by consistently growing as a character and a player. You'll need to lock down some of your skills as you progress to keep your exp pool healthy. The benefit is a truly flexible classless system. I'm building a classic AD&D fighter-mage multiclass. I started as a staff fighting necromancer, changed to a hoplite, swapped my spear for a rapier, and fell in love with the estoc. At around level 82, I swapped out my plate armor for maile and started slinging spells! In true AD&D fashion, the result is a passable swordsman with wimpy spell power. Its a work in progress! The purpose of my example is to show the flexibility of the system and the importance of personal experimentation.

Jeez this is long... I'm typing this on my phone, so I'll skip to part 2: Why did the veterans dismiss the advice of our new friend? As I said before, the local diner/pub.

Imagine a typical diner in small town North America, the European cafe frequented by locals, or the neigjborhood pub. The food, the menu, the decòr, the music - each of these elements are the products of two essential factors: local context and history.

SotA was officially been released for about four, pushing 5 months. As we've just received the 59th monthly update, we can understand that the game has been played for 5 years, resulting in a lot of history and context.

For example, did you know that two months ago, all experience gain was doubled! No, the game waa not an unplayable nightmare. Indeed, skill management didn't become easier. It juat became faster. More experience gained meant faster skills gained, which resulted in much more experience needed. There was a great orgy of experience!.... for, like, a week, until everyone's expeience needs once again oustripped their acquisition due to higher level skills requiring more experience to advance. Once again, players had to focus on raising only a few skills at a time and nothing really changed. Experience gain might be double, but the process remains the same.

So, when you, dear new friend, walk into the diner/pub and say, "Verily, my good sirs, there's not enough exp!" it's not terribly surprising that you were met with less than enthusiasm. It's not your fault, of course, and it's nothing personal or even against new players in general, but it's simply a matter of "we've been down that road before" mixes with a little salty "Why, back in my day, we had to kill FIFTY dragons to gain one rank in blades specialization!" This local history is still fresh enough in the memories of the players to prejudice them against these kinds of comments.

So, @jacksweather , I hope this absurdly long post might have soothed the sting of the rebuff you have felt. Rest assured that this is a welcoming community that is receptive of new player feedback. And don't worry - you'll be a salty local patron in no time, complaining about the new generation and how good they have it compared to "the good old days."

"Have you heard, Jason Moryn? Young people these days don't even need to buy the game to play AND own a house! Why, back in our day...."

 

Sparse commentary injected into the quote.

 

WOW Jason_M, well written.... I very much enjoyed what you wrote.... Very informative …

 

Jason_M. I think, possibly without realizing it, you first post was more a response to others' posts than mine. The only part of my play experience I have listed as unenjoyable is my exp pool nearing 0. The focus of the OP, is that the game is losing people faster than it is gaining.

On the first page I was quick to remark that the increase of exp was unimportant. One thing I think discourages newbs is the pool getting closer and closer to 0. Exp increase is a solution to that, but there are an infinite amount of others as well. Like I stated on the first page, one would be, making it so no matter how many spells are training, they don't get more total exp attributed to them than 1 spell would if it were the only one training. I was well aware I could turn off abilities to increase the pool. But I think that is a bad game mechanic. It's not a difficult one. It is grindy and it goes against the advertised goal of having a classless system where the abilities you use are the abilities that level. Say you don't keep on one ability. You turn them all off. You will gain exp, eventually you could decide to turn on all your abilities again and level proportionally to the ones you use the most and your exp would drain empty again. So all the people who say they're patient decide the best system is to turn on one ability and get the instant gratification of that ability leveling. Which to me is still the same grind, just changing the intended leveling system so that some people get a little bit of dopamine/gratification along the way. I liked the system that the abilities I use are the ones that level though. That's why I keep my exp pool full with UT, as most of the 2nd page of the thread disregarded . I did level some abilities to make me more effective in UT though. What I really wanted to level was healing abilities, but there is very little demand for healers, and even less demand in low tier places. UT gives about 1 mil exp in 30 mins. 85 adventure level is around 20-30 mil exp. That equals about 15 hours of UT. Unlike previous posts suggest, it doesn't mean that newbies can get to 85 in a month without being power leveled.

The thread reminds me less of a tavern scene and more of a social media political debate full of pretentious people defending obviously undesirable behavior because they think other people could upset their status quo. I don't envy the devs.

 

If it's unclear, I'm saying I think it's perceived grindy to have to farm exp and level your abilities separately. Even if it takes the same amount of time to get to the same adventurer level, I think it is perceived less grindy to just not have your exp pool drain closer and closer to 0.