Reconsideration

They very much never had that poll and never had that conversation with the fuller community. Now, sure the majority of the community prefers the current implementation, because everyone that didn't is long gone. I mean the current system is right out of the late 90s, it's not particularly intuitive, is reasonable for the lack of any meaningful economy and is the primary reason that abusing control points seems to be the primary method of play. If that and a worse system was all the devs had up their sleeves, I think we've found one reason the game wasn't a huge hit.

 

Completely disagree with this statement:
abuse
use (something) to bad effect or for a bad purpose; misuse.

The various attenuation areas (Vertas Pass or Air Ship) encourage (and require) Groups, thus encouraging grouping activity. And, in doing so, get a set amount of XP, until the Attenuation effect wears off. I do not see that as bad effect or for a bad purpose. Not seeing that.

 

Ah, I must have missed the "Chat at control points while your summons and pets grind XP for you" design bullet point.

 

Yeah but I was there and I remember a lot of people asking for a use based system. It's funny how perceptions are tainted by personal prejudices. Even though I was asking them not to change it (because that's what I was used to), the system we had at the beginning was simply crap.

[edit] BTW, what was absolute crap was the decay system they added with it. Fortunately, they removed it.

 

Everything we had at the beginning was crap, the change happened around r10 or so if I recall. Ardoris had just been released. I'm not saying the system as it was prior to the change was perfect, but 90 releases of improvements might have given us a system that didn't nuke any hope of a functional economy and all.

 

I think that if there were more players then there would be a functional economy.

 

I'm not a hater. I played SotA from the pre-Alpha phase until after the full release. Steam has recorded 3,850 hours of playtime (I never left the game running when I wasn't sitting at my computer playing), and I had several years of enjoyment. I disagree with the folks who claim that only the big backers were listened to. I remember several prominent big backers leaving because they either weren't listened to or promises were not kept.

I stopped actively playing a few years ago. The fact that I stayed around so long in a multiplayer game with combat prowess being the most important goal of the game just shows how much I liked it. I wasn't meant to play a multiplayer combat game because I can't keep up. The scenes got more and more difficult in order to accommodate groups and expert solo fighters. The game left me behind, so to speak.

If the promise of a spiritual successor of the single-player Ultima series had been kept, I would still be playing. But the single player version was never good enough to stand alone. It is an offline version of the multiplayer game and the only concession made to it are the three companions. That is what made me stick to the multiplayer version.

 

So your actual complaint is (as you put it) "Chat at control points while your summons and pets grind XP for you"?

 

I can't read his thoughts but it seems to me he's calling it abuse because there's basically zero gameplay involved, just release the pets and you can basically chat and even get afk for short periods.
This doesn't sound as a good "main gameplay" for any game.
I myself avoid entirely CPs because it feels like cheating and all the afk people make me feel I'm playing with bots.
I almost quit at the time ERG was the "end game" kind of thing.

And yes the CPs and tougher scenes with good XP will encourage more group play as intended, that's a fact.

 

New players only make it worse. Since players without GM'd crafting skills need to produce thousands to tens of thousands of items to grind up their skills, as long as you have people in that phase, raw materials will be priced so high and the market for anything but the most powerful items so low that only the few crafters at the very top have any hope of turning a profit in an open economy.

 

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with this again.

If we were to ramp up the playerbase by 10x, you'd see some economic movement for awhile... and then it'd die again. It depends on how much of that playerbase is recycled, with older players moving on, and newer players replacing them... creating a cycle of assets and money being permanently removed from the game.

The economy is fundamentally broken.

New players aren't just going to consume. They're going to mine, craft, grind loot and sell it to vendors, creating infinite gold, materials, and endless floods of failed RNG crafting. Several drastic changes need to happen:

1. End of NPC vendors buying stuff immediately. Or, keep they can only sell as much as they have money, which was gained from people buying stuff from them.
2. Also end non-humans dropping money. Why would a ghost or skeleton have money?
   
3. Redo the entire crafting system from scratch. Fully eliminate RNG as a fundamental component.
   
4. I've heard people complain that real mines don't have monsters. Well you know what? Real mines are depleteable. End infinite mining. Trees can grow, but they'd take much more time. Increase the yield from salvaging.
   1. "Prospecting" can be a profession to find new mines.

A lot of this is drastic, and would have other consequences, but if the goal is have a functional healthy economy, the game needs to actually be built for that to be possible.

 

Frankly, with the demand-side of the equation so badly skewed due to need for crafters to consume the majority of the world's raw material for the mere sake of consuming, it'd be like trying to open a burger joint in a country where cattle are shot and burnt on sight.

 

+1
Have RNG affect small portions of bonuses is nice.
Have RNG as the heart of crafting isn't nice.

 

New players do not make anything worse. Some people want to be crafters and ultimately they'll get there.

[edit] Perhaps I'll use my surplus to make and sell some select gear.

 

There is an art form to making an argument for what you want. Asking Catnip to admit fault or that there is an issue, is getting off on the wrong foot. I think it is safe to assume to that Catnip wants SOTA to be a huge game that draws in hundreds of millions of dollar so that the devs can retire to their own island one day. If Catnip doesn't seem to be in agreement on something then there is probably a reason. I agree that Catnip is not good at communicating that reason to their fans, which is a terrible shame. I think when everything you do and say is mocked all over the internet, it is hard for Catnip to be honest and forthcoming. Computer nerds can be a great bunch of people, but they can also be immature at times. If the answer to not implementing a feature is that the devs simply don't know how, that will not be well received. It should be, because being honest and open should be the path forward. Maybe someone in the fan base can help overcome hurdles, but it is more likely Catnip gets trashed again. I will say that the current player base seems MUCH more supportive of the game. It should be more about how we all work together to overcome certain issues, instead of giving the SOTA haters another article's worth of material.

 

No one will convince me that RG is not a genius. SOTA has so many terrific underlying systems that I can't find anywhere else. The crafting alone is MILES apart from any other game. The world just has a certain "feel" to it. I do feel that it is two different games shoved into one. I think RG's vision was greater than his budget. But I have not found a game that seems as living-breathing as SOTA. It is such a shame RG and his crew left. I think SOTA could have been the cornerstone of his legacy.

 

You know for how long I stepped with the "right" foot before switching to the "wrong"?

When people just delete opinions they don't like, someone has to be "that guy" and say inconvenient things. It's their right to believe it or not. It's their game after all.
Creating a "positive spin" echo chamber of a community won't be of any help IMO.

 

I can't really judge because I don't know what the original system was like. I hear that Portalarium only listened to high-level backers and then other people say they didn't, which is why those players left. My guess would be that between a nebulous system and one that was more straight-forward, Portalarium went with the more traditional system that players could wrap their minds around. SOTA seems to be a game that started out catering to the few million Ultima/UO fans but then decided it wanted to go after the 100 million MMORPG market. To do so, it needed to become more main-streamed.

 

The original system was the more mainstream, it was the standard kill monster to get XP, level up at specific XP amounts and get skill points that you spend to buy and upgrade skills. For the most part, it was the same system as pretty much every modern MMORPG on the market with a couple of tweaks to make it unique. What they swapped to, which is what we have now is descended from, is a hybrid of that concept and a copy-and-paste of Ultima Online's system, which was the standard for MMORPGs in the late 90s and early 2000s.

 

There was something similar to this skill system proposed on UO's House of Commons forums back in the day.. seemed to be inspired by various Simutronics MUD's such as DragonRealms. When I saw it implemented that's what I immediately thought of.. tried looking for the posts from back then but couldn't find it. I was hoping it would be level gated.. like adventure level 100 for episode 1, 120 for episode 2, etc. Then focus on other interactive types of game mechanics that players could get involved in that doesn't put such an emphasis on constantly grinding mobs for endless amounts of XP.