What Are Your Top Most Wanted Improvements?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Wilfred, Apr 2, 2020.

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  1. Wilfred

    Wilfred Avatar

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    Who else has a most wanted list of improvements?
    What do you want fixed or added as soon as possible?

    Please post your top priority most wanted.

    If the devs could see some lists of what players want most,
    it would help them out when they are looking at what to work on next.
    Since they could easily determine what is most important to us.
     
  2. majoria70

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    1-Add a daily battleground complete with quests, make it a timed event, with 2 raid groups,include a capture situation of flags or areas or buildings or both, make the rewards things such as titles with buffs, cotos, or tokens to accumulate to purchase specialty items. Think Wintergrasp in WOW.

    2-Go thru all scenes and add purpose such as more daily quests that are randomized and tell a story of the scene and include lore and reason besides just grinding and combat to go back to these scenes. Surprise us randomize, wasn't that one reason RG said we had separate divided scenes was we could pull them out and change them out. A very long time ago.

    3-Go thru scenes and make sure in each scene there are surprising discoveries like on top of a mountain, behind a waterfall, perhaps you rescue someone who is lost, perhaps you find a note partially burned in the fire place, perhaps you find a ring with a name inside it and your journal reminds you during your journeys.

    4-Make discoveries tied to an achievement system that gets implemented. Make everything you do achievement notified. Like you have cooked one of each recipe, you have eaten one of each cooked item or food, you have discovered the tallest peak, you have visited each scene. you have reached level ??? or ???

    5-Scenes are not just about combat for many. Make them each tell a story as mentioned before. Why should we go there over and over? Give us many reasons not just combat related. Combat related is good too but it should be interesting. How about wandering mini bosses that spawn and walk the area to be avoided or engaged? Throw a reaper in or randomize it.

    6-Add popular systems like mounts with horse racing and jousting, treasure hunting, boating and sea monsters and creatures

    7-Stop balancing combat-let us craft and find specialty items that raise stats for pve or for better use in PvP. Balance with armor & accessories stop messing with our characters.

    8-Include quest, tasks, and dailies on almost every single merchant and Npc such as crafting merchant, fishing merchants,create a pvp npc to get pvp quests. Give us reasons to do everything. Reasons for those who don't just enjoy combat but want depth and story.

    9-Put the basic crafting recipes back in crafting. Progressing in crafting earns recipes, titles, and special perks. Perhaps it says see your crafting trainer for a quest.

    9-Reasons and choices for paths and outcomes have always been missing. Choose your path was not implemented since paths have little meaning inside the game. Very few things happen if you do x then y or z will happen. Such as you lose fame, reputation, or virtue. Virtue scores could mean something. Merchants sell for less, perhaps it opens up a merchant at a certain level or a certain quest opens up. We need depth please.

    10-Crafting improvements-GM means very little atm. Give us higher and different levels of crafting mastery and make them mean something like expert, master, grand master etc. Crafting titles can be made to mean something like title buffs. Recipe alert say "you have learned a new recipe congratulations", "you have earned a new title now you can go do the master quest".

    11-Add more trees to the game. To combat economy issues give more specialty resources from lumber jacking to sell to make up for an influx of trees. Wood is way to limited with recipes requiring extreme amounts of it.

    12-finish cooking with an enhancement skill. Give us more recipes to use alcohol (potions included) to make brewing viable.

    Ok and I'm sure I have more but if these things are addressed immediately we would then have a game. Right now as it stands you can 1)deco house, dungeon,basement, or pot and create themes, 2)try to be the best at combat, 3)gather and fight,fight,fight, and make up your own role play, visit a meaningless scene and gather and fight, fight, fight or grind for an item, do a small amount of quests. All scenes need quests. The game needs an achievement system and task system. Many just basics need implemented but what do we see done oh yeah lets skip over these and forget these. Enough is enough. Stop balancing combat as mentioned on #7. We need basics like a knowledge journal for new and existing players to see what there is to do in this game, please, please please.. Open it and knowledge is there. We need focus on getting basics in.

    Edited to add #12 since I forgot it

    Also I'm for global search of vendors with ability to buy only a few items a day by mail and other purchases require visiting the vendor.

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    Last edited: Apr 16, 2020
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  3. SmokerKGB

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    #1 on my list is: A global search engine, but I fear this would just make it easier for "Hoarders" to purchase and Hoard resources such as Tin ore and Beetle Carapace and there for drive up/control the price as they choose for these resources... in the real World it's called Monopolizing and price fixing and there are Laws to combat this business activity...

    I have recently experienced this when I purchased a large quantity at an outrageous price, then a couple of days later, I seen an even larger quantity of the same resource(a rather scarce resource)... Of course this resource can be mined, but it seems the game is spawning less and less as I surmise because some wealthy player is trying to "corner" the market by buying everything they can and just sitting on it, until their price is met...

    #2 on my list is to try and combat this disgusting business practice and to limit Hoarding... I feel that Sota has a good start on resource gathering nodes, they even have taken steps to combat BOT programs, has anyone noticed? Example: A scene will have 10 nodes of ore for mining, but only 5 will spawn, when those are harvested, it selects a random node of the other nodes to spawn, this gives the illusion of different nodes spawning in different areas, if the same player keeps mining all the nodes because they have figured out the pattern, then each time this player mines, the respawn is longer and longer, until it's just not worth continuing to mine the same area over and over...

    I think there are several things to try, 1st would be to limit the # a shack can hold, then limit the # of stacks a player can have, after all, our inventory is the same no matter how many houses we have, so the game can monitor "How many" we have everywhere... My 2nd thought is to NOT have limited resource spawning, if the game is reaching a limit of a particular resource and slows the spawn because of it, then this should NOT happen... We have unlimited Gold, why not unlimited resources...

    If hoarding is occurring as I seem to think, then maybe that hoarded resource should spawn more often(creating a glut), we could have a skill that affects the rate, the higher your skill the more a node gives you... A 3rd thought I had was to have nodes spawn in random types, instead if mixing the ore for example with granite and iron and sometimes other types, the node should be pure Tin or Tungsten and that's all you get until it spawns again in a different type...

    My 4th thought is to have all resources spawn on game merchants (of the type) at a set game price, let the game compete with player pricing... A UO economy is not what we need, but it seems like it every day that goes by...

    #3 Mounts, I want a pack animal... And Boats to sail on the open sea...

    #4 Allow us to sell a "set" of something in a Bag off our player vendors(or public vendor), it could be anything from a set of armor to 100 of each type of ore... Allow the buyer to open the bag to look inside...

    #5 Allow purchased items to stack: I buy 10 ingot molds and it's stack on the vendor I purchase it from, but when I put it in my box, it's now 10 each/individually...

    #6 after I pick up my mail after selling a bunch of stuff, there should be a check box to either take the receipt or to destroy it and just take the gold...

    That's all I got, my main thing is to control inflation and not allowing big business to take over...

    I got 1 more: be able to move the house on a lot, not just center it on the lot, but push it to the back, left or right or even to the front, maybe just at set locations...
     
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  4. Chemeck

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    Here you can view a long time study about some mmo games, how updates affect the game, retention rate for some of popular mmo's (70% at top) and other informations :)
    https://www.thefengs.com/wuchang/work/cstrike/netgames07_long.pdf

    Here's more up to date article about 'what drives retention' in mmo games, worth reading if you're already into it :)
    https://www.raphkoster.com/2019/01/30/what-drives-retention/
     
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  5. evillego6

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    I appreciate the link. From the study:
    But also important, I was corrected before that Chris was speaking about retention rates for free to play games, not mmos.
     
  6. Chemeck

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    Multiplayer games takes a massive lion's share of the free to play games.
     
  7. Gorthyn

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    Hate to burst your bubble but people have been posting top ten lists for improvement for years - usually the same requests have come up over and over again and looking at this thread they still are.
    Which should tell you something about how much response to these has been forthcoming from the Dev team in whatever guise it has been.
    I used to post suggestions and requests but you can only bang your head against a brick wall for so long until it's time to stop.
     
  8. evillego6

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    We don't know what stats Chris is using for free to play. The stats he's using could just as easily include mobile games. Multiplayer games may make up the bulk of free to play games on the PC, but I doubt very much that MMOs make up the bulk of free to play games.
     
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  9. Vladamir Begemot

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    If they fixed the core problems that are keeping the population low then all these market problems would disappear because every town would have it's own little bustling economy. That used to be the case, and it was fun.

    Most of the games problems were pointed out two years ago with the launch reviews (following a year or two of us pointing out the same things). Most of those problems have been ignored, and are still being ignored.

    Piling global vendor search on, (I don't care anymore, do whatever, this is just conversation about stuff that won't happen at this point) is fixing the wrong problem. Same with @CICI trying to get peoples empty towns removed from the game.

    Want to fix all that at once? Fix the base of the game. Have a designer fix the base of the game, not a programmer. And polish the stuff that was left at 80%. Then, once you have a game that is worthy of its first release, a whole bunch of these low population problems will disappear.

    But we've skipped over ALL the polish phase of the release cycle and started dumping new systems on top of new systems, which just makes for a mediocre experience. Get back to basics, fix the base. Then reevaluate, fix the next level, etc.

    The only thing that has gotten any real attention is combat, everything else was left at either Prototype, or Prototype +1 functionality pass (usually because the prototype was barely usable).

    This game is dead in the water until its core gets the attention it deserves. That means looking at what was created during month 1, is it 100% complete and polished? If yes, move on to month 2. If not, STOP, do not do anything else until it is. Systems, User Interfaces, the QUEST SYSTEM! Holy crap, how can the quest system have been ignored for 2+ years post launch?

    (The one exception is that the developers ARE good at putting in new scenes/uncloning old ones and adding store content without breaking anything along the way, and because of the division of labor, that doesn't take away from coding or UI development time. Keep doing what you do well.)

    The other option is to just barely drag along, trying to fix every new issue that crops up due to low population, slowly bandaging, hacking away, etc, until what you have left is a game optimized for 10 people.

    Fix the base. Fix your stance. Back to basics.
     
  10. Wilfred

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    Ok, so if you were responsible for assigning tasks to the developers:

    What are the top five specific updates / improvements / fixes
    that you would ask the developers to work on next?
     
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  11. Anpu

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    It’s kind of pointless to list anything when Chris seems to just want to keep throwing unfinished systems on the Live Server and calling it good, and then off to the next unfinished system. So nothing will change.
     
  12. Vladamir Begemot

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    Start with month 1, the chicken room. Does every system in it work and is polished 100%? That includes the User Interface.

    If it's done or none of those systems remain, move to month 2. Are all of those systems working and polished to 100%?

    Continue until you've caught up with release 76.


    //
    The biggest sin of the way they used Agile was it gave them an excuse to move on from mediocre implementations. "Oh, it's shipable, that must mean it's done! No... it doesn't.
     
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  13. evillego6

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    This was vehemently defended by the community as the ideal way to develop the game, in some cases lauded as the way all future game development should and would ultimately be done. Lets not forget that a great many people supported this development model throughout the entire process, suggesting that the community as a whole should trust the experienced professionals.
     
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  14. Sulaene Moon

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    Correct and I remember when everyone asked to have Ep1 mechanics fixed and complete prior to moving onto Ep2 stuff. Listing what the OP asked is pointless these days.
     
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  15. evillego6

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    They began working on and implementing episode 2 content almost immediately with player dungeons, which people praised at the time.
     
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  16. Greyfox

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    1) Increased population in game.
    2) More people playing SOTA.
    3) Greater in game population.
     
    Last edited: Apr 17, 2020
  17. Greyfox

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    Don't blame Agile development. Under Agile you're suppose to continue with rapid iterations until the product meets requirements.
     
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  18. Vladamir Begemot

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    Including me. Except they never finished. It is great IF they keep working on the systems, instead of just ticking it off as done when it reaches bare bone functionality.

    We're still waiting... years later. Ticking a Kickstarter/Agile box because it is functional does not a great game make. Finished, quality systems do.

    That's why I said "the way they used Agile", not Agile in general.
     
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  19. Turk Key

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    Depends on your coach IMO.
     
  20. kaeshiva

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    For me - the priority is to fix the non-combat systems, like crafting & economy - refresh old legacy recipes that aren't worth making by reducing cost or improving outputs.
    Lets make crafting & industry a viable industry that can sustain itself without reliance on combat to supply it and to finance it. - and add global market tools to put (producers) sellers and buyers together.

    Finish. Existing. Systems. Please.
     
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