Population Concerns

It would be very cool to have GM run events, and just to have them run in parties experiencing the wins/losses of the design choices.

Perhaps some RP-driven players with GM accounts.

Some in-game Q&As, votes, whatever to see what players really are excited about... and what desperately needs reworking.

This Dev period is a chance for rapid growth and polishing, before it gets marketed to the masses.

Forums are good/bad. A few squeaky wheels can call for a nerf on something that no one ingame sees as an issue.

Or learning to make one adjustment at a time, as per any scientific method.

My first suggestion is:

Add a flag to all avatar skills, and adjust the formula for damage and stuns/effects to balance PvP without breaking the PvE balance

 

@jammaplaya
You don't seem to understand 2 things:

1.) less than a year is NOT much time to implement a whole single player storyline of the size and QUALITY of old Ultimas. To do it right even 2 years are reasonable.
2.) we WANT them to surprise us and manage to do it, but the more time goes by without big improvements in this department the less likely it is. You seem to think we want them to fail, nothing could be further from the truth.

 

stand
------
eye

 

No there won't. SotA is a niche game to begin with, and when a niche game gets a bad rep in the niche community interested in games like that, it's VERY hard to come back from.

 

But here's the thing... they DO fit the demographic. You seem to be making the leap that, if someone doesn't like SotA, it's because they don't fit the demographic. And that's totally wrong in a lot of cases I see.

Use me as an example. MMO gaming since Ultima Online. I like a variety of styles. I didn't need this to be UO2. I quite enjoy Richard's outlook on things. I'm absolutely a target for this game. Yet I really, really dislike it.

And I'm not the Lone Ranger here. There are tons of people whom, like I said earlier, have dropped serious coin on the game and want to really love it... and they just can't. It's turned into something deeply underwhelming.

I feel sorriest for the people who have dropped hundreds... thousands... on land and houses and all sorts of stuff, and it's for a game where they'll be living in virtual ghost towns before long. That makes me really sad for them.

 

I try not to be a fanboy or one of the oh wait, it's still a pre-release guys... but there has to be context and there has to be acknowledgment of these limiters or the dialog just spirals and spirals into unsubstantiated tangents. Of course the game is underwhelming - we're only seeing like 5% of it. Of course the economy is broken and loot is meh and crafting is hhrrmmmmm and combat is wha?. It's not really a game yet - it's a frame. There is playable content and it's available for testing. I'm one of those people you can feel sorry if you want, but it's wasted empathy if you really want to get down to brass tacks. It'll be a game when it launches and the media is buzzing, and until then it's just a pre-release where some people can get down with it and others leave. Not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. The game will be legit - and anyone that can't see the hype, well, they should politely bow out and wait and come back when the game is done. I understand being passionate, but that doesn't mean we should also be unreasonable.

 

But here's the thing... it shouldn't be. We're years down the road... the game is persistent... it should be a lot better at this stage than it is. That's what's worrying a lot of people.

People understand that building takes time and, heck, the average MMO is always a work in progress as any of the ongoing titles out there are always having news systems, content, etc, added.

But what people, and I include myself here, can't stomach is that SotA seems to have been so poorly planned, that we're at this point with fundamentals like the economy, crafting, combat, etc, all meh.

Stuff like combat, crafting, economy, etc, should have been nailed as concepts right near the start; before we were even playing. At this stage, they should be really good and water-tight. But they aren't.

At this stage, the game should be under development -- YES -- but it should be more content, etc, not trying to get the basics worked out. That's the problem, and that's why people are really p'd off.

 

As someone who enjoys the game and hopes port and SOTA are successful, I really appreciate your candor and heartfelt cry for SOTA to improve. Can you be more specific what port can do to make combat, crafting, and questing less meh?

 

Broadly speaking, it's clunkiness. The interface "feels" clunky, in different ways of course, in all three of those areas.

In combat, there's no fluidity. You feel you're fighting the interface as much as your opponent.

In crafting, the desire to be all olde worlde and "here's how we did in in the 90s, kids", just isn't appealing. I was there in the 90s! We left this stuff behind as games and PCs became more advanced!

Similarly, interacting with characters for quests is very, very old fashioned. That doesn't mean I want lights over quest givers heads (!) but I do know it feels clunky and doesn't have broad appeal.

In many ways, the desire to be old school is hurting SotA with a modern audience because there are those of us who were even there at the time and knew that systems were clunky in the olden days because the games themselves couldn't do any better, not because they were great systems. As games (and the PCs that ran them), got better, we left that sort of clunky stuff behind. Meanwhile, SotA kind of revels in going back to those times and it just doesn't work with a modern audience.

Clunkiness as a retro design feature? No thanks. That's what's hurting the game's appeal -- at least in part.

 

Do you really think it's better if people who want the game to be better to be quiet and wait? Early on I agreed with that, but since we are quite close to release (one year is nothing in game development) it's the perfect time for fans to tell what they want to be better and, if possible, how.

I understand how die hard fans don't want to hear anthing remotely negative about the game they love. I am the same way. But it's for the better. I hate haters and trolls. But honest and constructive feedback by people who genuinely WANT this game to be as good as possible is the best thing a developer can hope for. You do the game no good by denying problems and telling people to hope for the best.

 

Who, me? I'm pretty open and quick on the keyboard when it comes to criticisms... so much so, that more often than not I'm rewriting my posts to tone them down. Constructive is subjective and a person with only bits and pieces of information regarding this project as a whole (read: all of us) is never going to have the right answer to a problem. Great ideas come across as honest and constructive rants all the time in these forums and sometimes people rage quit when they feel like they're not being heard. Oh well - they'll come back or they won't. I'm not going to get all stressed about the population size, because I don't think there's anything to be worried about. I want the population to bigger. I want 150 people living in my POT. I want a living breathing SotA world to play in filled with diversity and culture unique to this game. I know that none of that is going to happen until the game is ready. The game isn't ready for full on critique OR population; it's just not ready... but it will be.

I think a lot of people here are looking for problems where no problem exists.

 

1.- My pledge is under $60 and I`m still playing and having fun. And no, EU timezone is not a wasteland (playing from eu).
2.- Who cares about steam charts when we don't have the numbers of accounts sold from steam? this makes the steam topic useless.
3.- Generalize is often a big mistake

Don't take it badly, I can agree with some of you about all the gameplay issues, content, bugs, etc. That's perfectly fine but we should talk about the game itself and nothing related about charts or numbers. Because tbh, I don't see any population issues in a game that keeps under development.

 

The population does seem to be low in multiplayer but they also seem to be making money, so there must be someone out there still thinking this game is worth dropping coin on. Of course, that's assuming that the $$$counter on the front page is an accurate reflection of incoming cash.

(I haven't read the whole thread, so apologize in advance if someone has already brought up the money thing)

 

There are indeed still people out there who won't just drop coin, but will drop serious coin on the game, and that's definitely helping it putt along... for now. It's not going to last forever.

There will come a time when even the biggest moneybags currently in denial about how the game plays will realise they've invested 'x' to look impressive... but there's no one left to be impressed.

 

If we are seeing only 5% of the game after more than three years of development, then when will this game be ready? How many percent will we see of the game when it is released - which is planned for the first quarter of next year?

I was just watching this video from release 4, back from March 2014. On first glance, this version could be mistaken for the version we have now. Yes the graphics improved a bit and we got more scenes and optimizations, changes to the balancing but the basic game is the same. It looks and plays the same. So what big changes can we expect to the game until the first quarter of next year if for more than two years we are playing basically the same thing?

 

It's a thread about population concerns. That said, I think the majority, especially of higher end backers, mostly want improvements to the housing system, pvp, stability, and end game goals at this point, and devs have done a good job of catering to public outcry.

To me, housing is the biggest part of Episode 1. Even if Episode 1 was as heavily quest oriented as you want it to be, eventually everything gets 100% completed, and then what are you left with?

House decorating. Bank sitting. End game content. The biggest part of maintaining population will be associated with these things.

Then Episode 2 comes out with a bucket of new quest lines and features, like mounts.

So really, I'd say it's progress has been pretty justified. The focus on the MMO aspect isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, but in order to get to Episode 7 it's a good strategy. If Episode 7 comes out with anything less than what was originally planned when SotA was announced, then would be the time to complain.

 

I don't want to derail this thread but look, this is one point where we differ:

My opinion: When you start a food truck and announce Burritos and collect money up front for those Burritos you can't change the food to Tofu Burgers just because some others rather want to have Tofu Burgers and throw more money at you. And then you just deliver those Tofu Burgers to everyone pretending nothing has changed.

As for story content, it's like with every SP game, book or movie. I enjoy the adventure and the story. This is what I like most in games. When it's over I wait for the next chapter and maybe replay the old. Housing or crafting, PVP etc. does not interest me that much.

 

We share the same opinion about the food truck analogy, except in this case nothing was promised for Episode 1. Hence anything promised can be delivered by Episode 7.

I know you don't like it, but that's just how it is. There's no time limit on anything you're asking for besides Episode 7, nor does anything you're asking for speak much to population or maintaining it until that time.

 

I have not much interest in housing, PvP and end game content - anyway, I supported this game with $1600 so far. Maybe this isn't much in the eyes of a PoT-owner but believe me, it is a crazy amount of money for a single player rpg fan.

I'm a busy man, I need no second life in a computer game. When I've finished the story of episode 1 I am going to wait for episode 2. And play other games in the meantime

The Kickstarter promises were given for episode 1 only, not for a series of episodes! As well as the money for this Kickstarter campaign was only designated to support the development of episode 1. As far as I remember R. G. and Portalarium mentioned a series of 5 episodes, not 7. However - at the moment I have my doubts that we will ever see an episode 2 SotA game

Back to the topic. I still believe that this game has a huge amount of potential. After over three years of development and nearly three years of early access many people are tired to play an unfinished game. Perhaps this is the main reason for the population issue. I believe that the people who come from UO and have not much interests in story, quests and PvP are those who can be happy with the current state of the game. But there are many others ...

 

It all has to do with population. People who don't like the state of the game don't populate it.

I am a $ 500 backer - don't know if you consider this higher end, but I am one of many who care way more about the story aspect than the MMO one, so no I don't care about housing.

Believe it or not, but a huge part of the backers are people who didn't want SotA for the UO2 part but for the Ultima X one. They just simply stay away and check from time to time to see what's there. Not much has changed though.