The Good and the Bad

So sorry Baron Droxis for your frustration. It has been a bit crazy. We were not having hand holding at all, which was an interesting experience. I was level 56 last release when it ended. So I also did quests healing the injured guy in Lord Enmars building pays 5000 expeirence and that will help you along, no gold though. You get 500 gold for picking up the key in the building in East Perenial trail and the skeletons are the easiest there, but watch the zombies. When we got to Wizards Rest it was not working and needed more patching that took a good 35 minutes with my cox cable modem. Then the town worked, but it is huge and of course not a snowy biome as planned, too big for me, but not really a village size anyway which is what it will be, just a copy of Paxlair. You get the same amount of markers that you would though, so you have a metropolis size and a village amount of markers. But oh well at least we got them in, so all is good on that part. Hopefully all goes better for you tomorrow Baron Droxis. I am level 22 now, If you ever need a run through or help I'd be happy to try to help. I did die a lot though and I'm poor with 9 gold and training is impossible to finish with 9 gold but its ok and the way it is planned Im sure. **cheers**

 

My experience largely mimicked that of Baron Drocis, scrambling off through wilderness to find a new town and mostly finding various unpleasant fates along the way . I recall wishing I had boots as spiders and such nipped me by my bare heels along my route more than once through my indignified trek. I did manage to stumble through a pass after gasping in shock at some insulting mage demanding 1500 gold to teleport me through to safety! I endured a few fireballs to the back through the pass, but won through in the end (still wishing for boots) and on to the town at the end of the rainbow of blood. Like Baron Drocis I suspect, my available time was quite limited, though I did get to toy with lot markers, failing to place one to support a water lot thus far, with far more experimenting doubtless ahead.

For Baron Drocis I send encouragement to weather through the frustrations we both have endured and reach the relative peace of a town in need of building. Although, once at said town (mine far from the beaten path, with no merchants or suppliers nearby as would be expected) be prepared for another daunting journey to buy/sell and acquire the bare necessities of survival once more. I am sure as we grow stronger the danger and barriers along our path will fall trivial, but I agree for now that were this a "new player experience" for launch it would be a bit much for our new players. I suspect there will be much more of reasonable "quests" and at least marginal direction for new players to get started with by then though, but hopefully still plenty of danger to start for those who seek it purposely.

Mainly I posted here in brotherhood with Baron Drocis' experience, I can relate to the frustration of not reaching a greatly anticipated new town with limited time to explore yet, and plenty of the pettiest of foes, man and spider alike keeping our bare-ankled adventurers from their dreams . Keep at it and enjoy your new town once you arrive! Hmm and a pair of boots, eventually...

 

Regarding encounters..... I got pulled into four just running the span from Greyacre to Soltown. It's not that far. The time it takes to zone in and then run to zone out is frustrating. This happened all night while I was on. I think I'm going to track how many encounters I get pulled into per hour of play while traveling. I think it's a little excessive.

 

In the beginning, Edvard gives you his notes and asks you to share them with Stanley the Guard in Soltown. Stanley will then ask you to show them to the Guard Commander Cugel in Ardoris. Just doing that brought me up at least a level, maybe two. (Didn't really check)

Up until the last release I had always done things the hard way by running out with no armour at level 5 and fighting the weakest monsters I could find over and over again. Doing this mini-quest was a pleasant surprise and made things much easier.

 

There's a lot of work to do to optimize the experience for the solo player... hopefully it will be at some point. I feel your frustration.

 

I'm not a big fan of global chats. But I do think that the learning curve is way too steep for truly new players.

Last night I was using pure melee, just the starting skills the game gave me and it was crazy hard. I finally stopped spinning my wheels and moved to magic melee. I got stomped using that too, but at least I was min/maxed correctly and had a chance.

That said, I'm still level 5! I haven't completed any quests (thanks for that idea btw, Woftam). I will eventually get through this, and now that I've had some sleep maybe I'll be in a better mood.

 

I just realized another reason that the OP is such great feedback (pats myself on the back). Because in a few releases we're going to have specialized trainers. What's the mean? It means that all you people that are used to have whatever magic ranged build you want to begin the game with...that's over. You're going to be in a spot just like I was where you're melee only for a few levels.

It took me over 6 hours (without questing) to reach level 6!

So again, we really need to think about how new players enter this game, and what options they have in terms of getting to an area of the map where their friends are, and getting to a point where they can actually enjoy themselves (i.e. not being crushed by everything they encounter).

 

As an aside, if you run all the quests in Novia and hidden Vale you can reach between level 20 and 25. That's just by doing the quests with double bonus xp gains.

The encounters are tuned way to high for new, low level characters. When I see multiple bandits coming after me, I just run away.

What I found with the starter armor and melee skills was that I needed to switch to a dealt deck so that I could attack more often with skills.

As the zones aren't gated, each needs to be approached with caution. I like this idea, it's different than having to worry about gated content. It also means that I have to pick my fights, i can't just run in and start mashing buttons knowing that all things in front of me will die. And that is a new mechanic to get used to, just like no quest quest markers and having to talk to everyone to find out which ones actually have something to say.

 

Make no mistake, I LOVE the control points. I just don't like that my POT is behind all of them from the start and I'll have to get to level 25 or something before I can survive them on my own.

 

Completing several quests is definitely the way to go. I decided to try that and am now level 20. The problem is the few Soltown quests aren't worth much - the best were on the Hidden Vale. Of course this highlighted another issue which is gold rewards lagged far behind XP gains so I'm currently sitting on a bunch of skill points I can't use (well I could if I wanted to pump them all into cheap low level abilities I'd never use but that would be foolish).

I think that there needs to be a healthy selection of quests and areas around Soltown that a new player can tackle fairly easily. The random encounters also need some scaling around Soltown too. Once a new player has found their footing in the vicinity of where they start then they can begin to range out into other areas.

 

I am having a hard time because I found I needed some diff skills then what I started with to successfully survive a zombie attack, so i went back to trainer and reset skills, and realized after i picked a few i wanted, I HAD NO MORE GOLD...... duh, how stupid could I be, (don't answer please) now i am gimped and broke, and having an extremely hard time lvl'ing cause most things kill me .... have skills available but cant buy them BAH HUM BUG, no fault but mine.... SO whats a good way to make money, don't say crafting cause i don't have money for the stuff u need to craft, and the mobs drop, crap.... bah stupid me

 

We put in simple mail delivery quests so low level characters caught in your situation have a way to make a bit of money to get back out of the hole. Talk to a town crier in Soltown, Ardoris, or Solania.

 

Thank you so much

 

I just made a post in another thread that is pretty similar to this one... but this is feedback from someone who is about as new as you can get. I just pledged last week and only played R19 for a few days. In R19, in about 3-4 play sessions, I managed to learn the combat system, experiment with crafting, and reached Adv. lvl 21 and Prod. lvl 6. Of course, I think the game started me a few levels up with a good assortment of skills, 5k gold, and there were much more/better weapons laying about for me to pickup then there was in R20 so far... but it seemed pretty easy for a new player to jump right in.

With R20, I started from scratch with no gold to buy any armor pieces right away or to help with skill training. Combat seemed much harder on several levels - focus drained very quickly, auto attack seemed to miss a lot, my health drained quickly too. I guess the main setback was the inability to fight more than a few seconds when being attacked by multiple mobs. Zombie plague is brutal and even small spiders seemed to take me out in 2 shots.

My first big mistake was to reset all my skills. When I played R19, I found some of the magic spells greatly improved my survival and power, so I wanted to trade off some of the melee attacks and use the skill points for magic. Oops, slight problem when you don't have the gold to buy more than a few skills back, LOL. At that point, I felt hopeless and much worse off with only 2 attacks and a heal spell, so I decided to delete the character and start over. As I was deleting though, I was warned that if I didn't put things in the bank first they would be deleted. So... I put all the stuff I thought I could use later in the bank (potions, crafting supplies, various loot that I could sell, etc.) After creating a new char, all that stuff was in the bank! So, this might be considered an exploit, but you could in theory run through Solace tutorial, deposit everything in bank in Soltown, delete, repeat.... and even though most starter stuff is no value, you can certainly stock up on potions and stuff and perhaps buy things of value to put in the bank to transfer over some of the gold earned (can't put actual gold in bank, but can buy things to resell at lesser value on vendor). Anyway, I only did this once and the few extras helped me out a bit the 2nd time around.

I did turn in a few starter quests and that got me some gold and levels and once I was able to start adding some magic spells and added some points in the strategy tree (I now have 26 each in focus and tactics) that seemed to help a great deal. I also turned off auto attack and that seemed to help too. These few improvements got me on a path of slowly becoming stronger and being able to take on more mobs at once. I managed to get to Adv. lvl 15 and Prod. lvl 5 as a "new player learning the game".

So, while I see the OP's frustration with trying to make it to his POT alive at early levels or as a "new player", I don't think that the game is too hard for all new players in general. I think the key is to do a few early quests to get gold/exp and add a few helpful spells/skills to give you a better chance. Then, once you can kill mobs easier, you can start working on crafting better armor and that will advance you even further. At least that's my approach and it's working fine so far.

 

I think the new player experience will be on a starting area, dealing with Arabella and making a virtue choice that then sends you to one of three starting areas. Solace Bridge is likely to only be one of these.

The tutorial now sends you to Soltown with some starter quests. The New Player Experience is getting better.

In normal game development, no one would be playing until you were feature complete and possibly content complete as well, so New Player Experience comes later in development.

I also think the expectation is to remain close to Soltown until you level up a bit, and not sprint to the POT. This is a bit off-topic, but the land rush at actual launch shouldn't be held in game for this very reason. You're going to have upset players that they missed out on the location they wanted because their starting level character was killed repeatedly trying to get to the location to claim their lot at launch.

Or people will complain they missed their lot due to different patching speeds.

I really hope they handle the initial lot requests with maps on the website.

 

I didn't change from the auto-deck they gave us until level 10 and I rarely had any issues hitting things at all. A single skeleton/wolf/ruffian/small bear was pretty easy to kill, where a zombie, large bear or 2 or more easier enemies was a really rough time possibly having to use consumables. I especially found focus draining really quickly to be the most dangerous thing in larger fights.

But could your issue really be because you always seem to like to go full magic and just aren't used to how to position in melee? Perhaps they should give you an option to start with a melee/archery/magic starter deck at the beginning?

 

Totally agree with you, enderandrew. But since this isn't new development...

For example, I have a friend that hasn't played this game in over a year. We had so much cool content (my POT, Obsidian Towers, changes to combat, etc...) that I invited him back to play in R20. So now this guy is going to show up and I'm going to have to tell him..."Well in order to really see all that, you're going to have to grind for days". And that's WITH my help.

Sure, I might be able to zone him into my town (someday when I find it myself), but the barrier to "fun" is a little too high in the early stages of testing, imo. If this were launch, it would be much better because then what I'm doing matters. But right now none of this matters. I'm just grinding and doing stuff I don't want to do knowing all the while that 1) I'm losing playing time and 2) I'm going to have to do this all over again at the next wipe.

Don't get me wrong, I want to help test, but how many Brown Bears do I have to kill before I can move on to test the cool stuff? 1 million?

 

It could be....

But I would argue that we should have an intuitive system where if I think I can hit something, then I do. I mean, what's my intent otherwise, to swing at air while a Brown Bear destroys me? It needs fixed.

 

If you watch your action bars they'll highlight in gold when you're actually close enough to hit. The issue I have is skeletons with equal length weapons and zombies and wolves using claws being somehow able to attack me when I'm "out of range" to hit back with a longsword...

 

There really needs to be a way to edit or change skills around as much as you like until you get things setup the way you want and then hitting a confirm button that will tell you that you need to pay and do you accept.