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An Apology And A Rant

Discussion in 'Release 21 Feedback' started by No Longer In Use, Aug 27, 2015.

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  1. No Longer In Use

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    I'd like to start this post with an apology to Portalarium. I was lousy at providing feedback on R20. I didn't thank you for starting to implement player-owned towns in a usable way. I didn't praise you for improving the deck system for locked-glyphers like myself, to the point where I could actually make my peace with combat. I didn't laud you for adding animal taming, even if it was resource intensive. There was so much fun to be had that I got lost in it all, and neglected to report any of it. Mea culpa.

    And I also should have reported the most significant part of my R20 experience: that my husband and I were having loads of fun. We hadn't played an online RPG together since our World of Warcraft days in the misty past. He's a crafter. I'm an adventurer. We both had a blast.

    But now, sadly, I have to come down from my R20 afterglow and talk about R21, which is neither fun nor stable. The bugs hit hard and fast from the word "go." I would sheath my weapons with the "Z" key, only to have them mysteriously flicker in and out of my hands after the fact. I would hear phantom enemies attacking me long after I exited combat. Players jumped and teleported across my screen like Nightcrawler. Dragging locked glyphs in the deck editor resulted in duplications rather than moves. My mouse periodically seized up.

    It was a mess before I even reached combat. Things only got worse from there.

    My summoned bear sucked mana out of my bar like a child slurping a milkshake. His cooldown time reached comical proportions. Unsummoning him meant giving him up for around an hour. Keeping him meant that I couldn't use any other skills. Catch-22. So I ran around firing my bow at elves, doing next to no damage, as my bear handily clobbered large mobs without breaking a sweat. I could have set him to "aggressive" and just sat back for a couple of hours, looting at will. Combat was unbalanced in every regard.

    Then there was the implementation of "use and gain" skills, something I personally never liked in Ultima Online. The implementation of this system proved both jarring and unwelcome. Seemingly trivial acts resulted in the same "level up" effect formerly reserved for, well, gaining a level. My speakers went hoarse trying to keep up with the "dings." I considered turning off special effects altogether.

    Advancing my skills proved similarly bizarre. I only seemed to gain Swiftness in combat, and then only if I had mana. Running in town did nothing to advance it. It felt confusing and arbitrary. My dual melee/ranged deck arrangement proved a total flop when I reconstructed it, because the Ranged tree lacked enough usable skills. So instead of drawing glyphs, I just resigned myself to drawing slugs in the many, many unused slots of my action bar.

    Engaging in melee combat often proved fatal. Because I had to track dozens of little skills instead of one, overarching metric, I really had a hard time understanding how durable (or not) my character would be in a fight. It was all trial and error, and more often than not, I guessed wrong. And so I relied on my overpowered, all-killing bear instead as I stood back and ineffectually fired arrows, drawing slug after slug. By this point, I decided that combat was irrefutably broken to its core.

    Eventually, I gave up and logged out. I needed to take a breather. R20 really raised my expectations, and it was crushing to have R21 fall so short of its predecessors' playability. This might be a "skip it" release for me after I grab my hat.

    Anyone can complain, I suppose, but useful suggestions are always better. In that spirit, here are a bunch of my ideas:
    • Make "use and gain" skills a crafting thing, and revert combat to an experience point system.
    • Make summoned pets much less powerful, but greatly decrease their cooldown time in exchange.
    • Remove the pet-based mana drain altogether. Taming, summoning and managing pets is tough enough as is.
    • Stop popping the "level up" effect for trivial things. It devalues the sense of satisfaction players derive from hearing it, and also, IT'S SUPER ANNOYING.
    As an aside, here's my combined feedback on situations that exist in both R20 and R21:
    • Archers need too many different kinds of ammo. Simplify ammunition down to just one kind of arrow. [EDIT: I discovered that this already happened, but the special ammo counters remain unchanged on the skill glyphs. It's extremely confusing.]
    • Training is quite expensive, and often depletes funds needed for armor kits, arrows, crafting supplies and other necessities.
    • Three- and four-story trees are next to impossible to place on lots with houses. I've yet to find a configuration that works with the Knight Marshall or Lord Marshall homes.
    In conclusion, I want to thank the team at Portalarium for your hard work. I know it's difficult to see the product of your sweat, blood and tears constantly criticized by others. Portalarium's staff should feel especially proud of R20. After playing it for hours on end, I became quite attached to it.

    But R21 is such a cantankerous beast that I felt the need to speak up. I'm sorry I waited until I had something negative to say before brining up all the stuff you're doing right. And I remain hopeful that R22 will return to the great experience my husband and I so enjoyed. I hope at least some of this feedback proves useful toward reaching that goal.
     
    Last edited: Aug 29, 2015
  2. Kara Brae

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    Regarding R21, you seem to have run into a lot of weird bugs that I haven't experienced, thank goodness.

    I think it makes no sense for new players who have no skills to be able to do advanced things like summon bears. Once your focus level has been raised considerably through gameplay, the focus drain won't be an issue any more. I believe a lot of your (and others') frustration with R21 arises from the fact that you have a pool of experience accumulated in R20 that you can spend all at once on acquiring skills in R21. At the next wipe this won't be possible, so players will have to do easy stuff and earn gold gradually to level up the next skill. I am really looking forward to that.
     
  3. jschoice

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    I would agree with Kara that I have not experienced the technical bugs you have which from the sounds of it are horrible. As far as the new combat system, I am going into this release as if I am starting over. The rapid leveling us not part of the system on release as we will not be starting with all this stored XP. I spent a lot to work up my focus so I would not have a huge issue with running out. I am primarily a Mage with one pole arm skill. i have been able to fight 3 mobs no problem unless there are spiders involved because I don't have cure.
     
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  4. Waxillium

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    Seems like great feedback. Polite but disappointed with your experience.

    This "use based" release is going to be awkward for many. Lots of things are halfway between two systems. They are listening to feedback and I don't think it will stay awkward and disconcerting in releases to come.
     
  5. Halvard

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    Imo spells have been tested every release I would have liked a full xp wipe for this release so we could evaluate used based better
     
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  6. Gurney2

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    Like many , you dont seem to take in consideration your adventurer level.....Skills are not everything!
     
  7. docdoom77

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    I think you make some excellent points and have done so in a very polite manner. Let's hope it get's some attention.
     
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  8. No Longer In Use

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    After the latest patch, my bear is now way less powerful... and he has an hour-long cooldown. I'm not sure taming is incredibly useful in this state. It's better to save the materials and just work on some other skill.
     
  9. No Longer In Use

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    As an aside, I think my technical issues may be related to Windows 10. After re-reading the patch notes, I noticed that it's explicitly unsupported. It seemed to work fine with R20, though, so I'm not sure if that's really the case.
     
  10. Kara Brae

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    Many people (including myself) are lucky to have no trouble playing SotA with Windows 10. Aside from the option of rolling back to your previous OS, you might check to see if there are updated Windows 10 drivers available for your specific hardware.

    Even if you download an updated driver, that, too, may still be buggy, so it is worth while checking for new drivers very frequently after a new OS launches. Good luck!
     
  11. Pleione

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    Regarding pets, I totally agree. In order to level your skills, you must summon - but you can only do that once an hour. If having a pet is going to be just an elite thing, fine. I'll go build a macro to summon once an hour and let it run for weeks, but as it currently stands, it appears broke.
     
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  12. No Longer In Use

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    I hate to say this, but it feels like Portalarium keeps moving the goal posts every time we start having fun. "They're enjoying themselves? Must not be hard enough! Break leveling into a million little fragments, and make their pets steal ten years of life at each summoning!"

    Right now, I'm feeling extremely frustrated. I just spent another couple of hours trying to play with my husband, and we keep getting slaughtered anywhere other than North Valeway. Many other players are in the same boat, so North Valeway has become a competitive exercise in camping resources. Inevitably, I just quit and return to my house, where I wander around until I get bored. I can't even really decorate the place. It's too hard to obtain wood and ore from uncrowded areas.

    As for bugs, they keep stacking up ad infinitum. My UI frequently glitches on the overworld map, which prevents me from entering towns or wilderness areas -- the "enter" buttons and English region names never appear. To fix it, I have to quit to the main menu, then reenter the game. I did that four times in the space of an hour. Sounds continue to glitch. I still have a "special ammunition" counter for archery skills, even though that ammunition is apparently no longer needed. (I discovered that through the forums, rather than through the buggy UI.) My "offhand weapon" skill increases when I cast Light or fire a bow, but my archery advances at a snail's pace as I burn through arrows. It's madness.

    My general policy has been to walk away from the game when it gets frustrating. I really thought the deck system had reached a state where I could live with it, given that locking glyphs no longer cost skill points, and I could mostly ignore the random, deal-a-power system. But now I feel like I'm back to square one with utterly hating combat, and so it's time to take another break.

    It's a very disheartening thing.
     
  13. No Longer In Use

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    My drivers appear to be current, including the nVidia one (the big enchilada that normally causes trouble). I'm at something of a loss. Maybe I need to wait for newer drivers? But if that's the case, why did R20 run smoothly, but not R21?
     
  14. Kara Brae

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    Ah, those are the mysteries that are hardest to solve :(

    I'm currently still using the GeForce Driver 353.30. There is a newer Windows 10 Driver available, but I haven't downloaded it because I haven't seen the need (never change a running system :D)
     
  15. No Longer In Use

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    I'm running 353.62, so I'm guessing that's the newer one?
     
  16. marthos

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    Might be worth a try to downgrade the drivers to 353.30. A clean install of Shroud could be an option too.
     
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