Starting gear for future releases....?

Can we at least start with stabbing/bludgeoning implements of some variety? Even if it's just a butter knife or a tackhammer?

This sense of deja vu every release is getting tiring.

 

Basic starting gear would be reasonable

 

Yeah I agree.

 

I'd rather start with a weapon than armor to be honest. Basic starting gear could be your choice of some low end weapons like a dagger or a club or a hunting bow. Something people would carry when they are traveling.

 

I was just about to post along these lines and I saw your thread.

As is, these pre-release weekends are too short. I mean, I have a job. It chews up 66% of my waking hours. Family and things like, you know, clearing snow, cooking, eating, bathing chew into a good portion of the balance. I truly wish I had 72 hours to give to playtesting this weekend but I dont. I spent the two hours I had last night......getting nowhere. I wandered around looking for the old loot chests (which are gone) and then spent time competing for the single craft ingredient trunk in Owls Head (and hit pay dirt a grand total of one time). One day down and....I have no feedback to give because I wasn't able to do anything of consequence.

I cant test things like crafting if it takes all weekend just to get enough ore to make...one thing. I cant playtest combat if I spend all weekend....looking for a sword.

Please please please, for the love of all that is decent and good, give us a "tester's starter kit" or something!

 

Agreed! I too barely get a few hours during each playtest due to work and family. I hate wandering around trying to get basic stuff just to get started.

 

was real easy to go and craft basic plate armor and a sword with the crafting stuff they give us in owls head... took me maybe 2 minutes to craft stuff and head out... I dont see it being a bad problem.

 

In pre-alpha, you can always log in as single-player offline, do your crafting, and switch back to online. That works for now, until we have a split of those two characters.

As far as starting equipment, I'd take away the armor and give basic clothing instead, and provide a paring knife. Because it was illegal to carry arms, it was common for folk to carry a sharp knife with them, intended for cutting bread, meat and fruit, but useful for cutting rope and defense in a pinch. That would give everyone a simple weapon, without giving away "free stuff".

Now if you wanted to have a starter package, I'm all for that: Add a "Starter Bundle" to the Add-On Store that provides a suit of each armor type (think an unmarked version of the Founder starter armors), a simple weapon of each weapon type (sword, axe, spear and sling), a small amount of gold (~150), and a storage chest to put it all in. Set the price for $10, and start it off at 50% off.

 

As far as I have found, there is ONE chest with core ingredients which spawns every few minutes and always has about 5 people standing around spam-clicking it. How you got enough ore in "maybe 2 minutes" to put together a piece of plate and a sword is beyond me. In Pre-Alpha 3 I was not able to do that much over the course of the whole weekend.

 

About the only way to get equipped that fast would be to log into single player online. Go to the crafting area get your materials and craft your gear. That is also assuming your familiar with the crafting recipes or know about the SOTA wiki so you can look it up. Or there is apparently some guard barracks you can loot but that might just be weapons not armor. It is a pain though and they really should at least provide a starting weapon.

 

Super easy answer to that... log into Single Player Online mode and the chests are all yours... you can loot them without having anyone else take the items.... by memorizing recipes i can quickly make things and be on my way in almost no time at all.... The joys of selective multiplayer... i can use single player online to do stuff then hop back into open online multiplayer and party up with peeps...

 

Touché, but that still seems like a workaround for what I believe should be (and usually is) standard practice for any sort of test environment: giving everyone gear/money/whatever to make the most of the limited testing time.

 

My point was that well, we already tested the crafting. Some of us no longer care to test it or really deal with it, but we're basically forced to upon every release.

I hate crafting. It's boring and not fun. If I don't want to craft, I shouldn't have to. I should be able to walk outside with a butterknife and stab bandits and take their things to get started, if I want.


and as Sunsanvil has said too, this is a test environment. Everyone should start with a basic setup in their inventory. Like how UO's test shard gives you the works upon starting up, right in your bankbox.

 

Agreed, some kind of offline starter kit or something which can be tested out of the 2-3 testing days each release.

 

I found out about all the resource loot in single player by accident. There was so much lag in multiplayer, I decided to try single player instead of just quitting. I was never able to try crafting before, since the supplies were always gone.

I was able to craft a sword in a few minutes. The only inconvenient thing was having to buy the coal from the vendor.

The game is much better in single player mode.

 

In my opinion, the fact we don't get anything to start with fits in with the sandbox metaphor; you arrive with nothing but the clothes on your map. What's the first thing you do? Freeform, sandbox idea implementation. You want armour and weapons, you have multiple ways to get it. Buy it. Steal it. Craft it. Beg for it. Go and fight bare knuckled. From a gameplay perspective it seems to fit in. But I bet they'll give you some stuff just because its expected.

 

That's all well and fine for the actual game. But for a pre-alpha where we're supposed to be testing out the NEW things they've added it's just wasting time. Starting with some basic leather armor, sword and a torch would facilitate getting out into the world and testing the new stuff quicker.

 

You all realize that the weapons in the armorer's shop can be picked up right? They don't sell for anything but they work as intended. And to earn money without killing things so you can purchase armor most of the items on the vendor tables in the main plaza can be picked up and sold back to the vendor? It takes a little bit, but you can cycle through enough times to get a little bit of coin to buy basic armor. Then go out and kill some elves with the free weapon you picked up and armor you got from reselling to the vendors, make sure to loot their bodies (which ALOT of people forget to do for some reason- I think this leads to the alive elves that you can loot but not hit, but that's another topic), and then sell the weapons you get off the elves for more coins so you can purchase more armor and/or equipment to craft your own.
You also do start off with 100 gold, so purchase the gathering equipment- pickaxe, sickle, skinning knife. That combined with the crafting tools that are constantly refreshed in the chest (or can be bought of the vendor at the crafting stations) you can make things rather quickly. One area to note on the overhead map, is anywhere near hills/mountains/shoreline- right now they all bring up the same mountainous map and it has a BUNCH of iron deposits, cotton plants and wolves/stags on it. The respawn time on the map is pretty fast too.

 

In these alpha-tests, if we are not given very basic equipment directly into our backpacks upon first character login,
Portalarium should at least provide us with a failsafe instruction for how to achieve enough basic stuff to be able to go out and strike down a bandit or a deer.

Such an instruction should be viewable inside the game in a menu.
Every time I swapped out to Windows to perhaps to a bit of googling I was logged out of the game, wohoo...

Me and the wife ran round for about an hour and a half checking things out and not finding a single weapon.
We found in total 3 crafting tools, a cape each and some housing stuff.

Upon discovering bandits or skeletons we died quite rapidly.
That didn't inspire us to put anymore time into this event.

 

Nobody is suggesting that we get free stuff in the final game. We understand that we would arrive with nothing but the clothes on our back. This is NOT the final game. It's just a few systems thrown together for us to test and the more time we spend trying to find gear, the less time we are really testing anything and the more likely we are to get bored or frustrated and log off. We're asking for some starting gear for the pre-alpha tests, to better make use of the very limited time we have to test the game.