R35 overall weaknesses and missed opportunities

If you read no other feedback about SOTA then the best summary I can give is

At no point in designing systems have the developers asked the question 'Is it fun?' Is it better to be loved, or be right? I would strongly encourage the team to evaluate how strongly they continue to invest in systems that have been left in the 90’s, often for very good reasons.

That is not to say that no onecanhave fun, but that the fun in SOTA is not a result of clever systems and rewards, but is a result of personal communities or unusual predilections towards repetitive activity.

Here's my R35 feedback.

Combat

Maximize focus, throw damaging abilities into the first 5 slots stacked as active with some situational cooldowns in the last few slots and trivialize combat.

The lack of skill caps creates ‘Gods’ who can solo the dragon and phoenix. This is a serious flaw as you will find it impossible to make balanced encounters. Your most dedicated fans will have nothing to challenge them if you make everything achievable by ‘regular players’ or you’ll lock off content to the majority if you make it difficult for the elite. Caps flatten this difficulty. I also fail to see how PvP can be a game of Skill > Grind when there is a character out there with 1k HP. I imagine there are huge amoutns of players with main stats much higher than mine as well.

Instead of decay being the control mechanism, limit the skills that can progress beyond 80 and ensure every player is unique in their skills otherwise we will have homogenous characters all at soft aps more or less.THIS IS THE BIGGEST RISK RIGHT NOW DO NOT BE TOO PROUD TO TRULY REEVELUATE.

Agro isn't working in a way the player can have true agency, or if it is the mechanics are obscure enough that my group hasn't identified them beyond send the tank in first the DPS and pray.

Downtime has been increased to 'encourage' food consumption. Food increase Health and Focus regen and some stat lines, however if you do content that is difficult enough to need food, you get stripped of the one hour buff if you die. I stopped using food since I'd rather healing touch then continue to waste resources.

Given the complexity of food items needing half a dozen items per meal, it's too costly to bother with.

With moderate skills training I actually gain negatively towards my pool in 4 skull areas and 5 skull areas. I believe the system as it works would reward me for going to easy areas with no risk where I can dispatch more enemies with less ‘on use’ actions and build exp faster. Difficulty should be more rewarded in this case.

Still no formal recognition in game that you are rewarded for having a huge XP pool by having skills gain more on per use when a pool reaches whatever the threshold is. Critical information that remains hidden.

Still searching for level which is critical in your PvE to hit calculation through ‘/stats’ %Appdata%. Just put our level on the character sheet. I don’t care about anything else on the stat dump but for the love of God let us take a measure of the character growth from session to session.

Gathering

Rare drops seem to be more balanced, which is good.

Still no itemization to actively seek the rare ingredients you need (E.g. Beetle Carapace or suet) so you are relying on RNG to get what you need, not player agency and preparedness as a crafter. Again, these systems need stat boosting armor or active skill buffs that allows you to pick between efficiency and rare find+ to actually make this part of the game more rewarding and reflect player choice.

Stop relying on dice rolls, dice rolls aren't fun when they are repetitive.

Owl's Nest, a long used mine is nerfed to the ground. I believe the risk versus reward ideology is misplaced. My mining friend risks nothing when he mines like Elysium. Low/no risk mid tier gathering spots are healthy for the game providing options for player to engage in different content at different rates. You require silver and gold to make proper equipment anyway so getting a bronze sword for 'free' isn't that good of a deal. I was grinding this area for quick gold as they had a vendor in there but they could of simply made the vendor not buy anything and it would have made it much less inviting for gold grinds.

Farming uses a pretty horrific set of button presses. Simplify it into a panel operating per garden bed. I don’t care if it is set to be ‘as time consuming’ as the current method of mirco clicking every element, but to the sake of remembering games are meant to be fun, let use mange per garden bed, not per seedling.

Taking out an option that was fun. There's a theme emerging here.

Crafting

Still a mess. I can still craft anything I want and have hundreds of thousands of XP to raise a skill as I need it. I'll be able to masterwork tailoring because that is easier than finding a player to do it with the FPO/SPO/MPO delineation. Easy to raise it all to 80 which unless I am mistaken gives you access to crafting every item .The only real difference is getting Masterworking high enough to open up more options to roll on.

Making a ring costs ten (10) ingots which is like, 60 ore. Get the recipes to a state where they make sense. If rings should be expensive then require that they are made of silver of gold to be enchanted/masterworked. I think a chair requires 6 trees as well? Balance or immersion. Pick one because at the moment we hear either of these as a reason for changes and they are at odds with each other.

Crafting is nothing but RNG roll after RNG roll. Roll to get exceptional, roll twice to get masterwork, roll twice to get Enchants and hope to get the right proc. At reasonable skill you’re at an average of 12 items to get them to this level of +9without accounting for the rolls being the ones you want. Sure, the one time you get it right it feels rewarding but the other 11 are way too disheartening.

Skilled blacksmiths are able to craft items that they expect. The SOTA system is a lucky dip every time you make a weapon.

Deep and rewarding crafting should not rely on chance.

Economy

Doesn’t exist. Spent 40 minutes looking around a town and found nothing to spend any money on because buyers still don’t know what people have and sellers don’t know what people want. Public vendors are empty in most scenes. Now the gold drive is in place hopefully there will be recognition that even when people have gold, it’s no good if you can’t connect supply and demand at large.

I still think the placement of gold handout instead of taking the opportunity to have NPCs pay for work that sends people into the world is lazy design and ‘not a fun implementation’. Whenever I go to the oracle I reiterate that I am a liar and get my 500. Only when I am passing by coincidence though as the amount is actually less then what you can make in 6 minutes in a particular scene.

General

Why are dyes being sold so aggressively? Even placing them on the COTO vendor. To my understanding only a very small portion of items in game are dyable right? It’s time to really scrutinize how you are driving monetisation in the game. Between that and designing bundles that specifically require a village lot or higher with included decorations is not particularly friendly to lower tiers. I think there is some perception issues that need to be addressed and managed better before you seek to promote the game on the ‘official’ release and now is the time to start working towards that because there is a large amount of ire that from the outside looks very justified to me.

Not entirely exhaustive list, but I doubt many will read the 1400ish words in the entirety anyway,

 

I understand the Owl's Nest nerf. I wish it did not have to happen though. I actually enjoy resource gathering, but the problem is and will always be the people who automate/bot such things and send the ingame economy into the toilet in the process.

In theory, the encumbrance changes SHOULD have made the difference, but even then, Owl's Nest needs a good bit of rework from the standpoint of the content inside altogether, not just the mining nodes found. As I stated in another thread, these three things are the biggest issues that popped out at me in regards to the content in Owl's Nest:

- You can "rescue" Norman with NO resistance from his "guards" (Note that he stays put and is still present after you rescue him, the guards completely ignore any conversation or quest flags being tripped, etc)
- Nestor seems a bit easy and anti-climatic to kill and noone seems to recognize if/when you kill him anyway. (Shouldn't that free the Red Sashes from a wanna-be Obsidian Necromancer?)
- There does not (yet) seem to be any method of allying with or being permanently against the Red Sashes although the potential is there between Enmar's decree against them and Kelly and Blackpond's quests. (Which side do you choose? Eliminate the RS group, free them from Nestor's control, bring Blackpond to justice and Kelly home? There are plenty of options that beg to be developed here)

I'll add one more: Does the vendor even need to be there? What purpose does he serve aside from allowing farmers to dump off excess items/weight while in scene?

Perhaps if the content were rebalanced and/or fleshed out accordingly, the mining nodes could be replaced.

 

He's there to sell you the red sashes for your quest, maybe? Haven't tried recently though....

 

Yeah I read it all. WOOT go me, You hit on many good points and I agree completely. There are many more things that need to be fixed, but their drive is to put out the content they have promised then go back and fix it with nerf bats.

I still very much enjoy the game for the most part, but having to waste 20 minutes to collect enough water "for free" to water 100 plants is such a waste of time and will not do that again.

 

Yeppers started and stil game is way to easy end game in two months is a joke and insult to a game that was supposed to be like UO shold have taken a long time to get as good as some players are.

It is fine just needs tueining to make viable but since your first comment nails the major problem down

Agro is nice that player cannot just send in a guy who has 1 million points to take all the damamge and a few stand back and heal him and take out target AWSOME one of the few things working makes people have to play the game not the same old send in tank keep him healed and rest take down target :-(

This part is so new and broken it is not even fun to try and test way more work than worth

Game started to easy and now players want the gain like was in previous releases bad start now it is all just a wash and try to make somtihgn even reotly viable wil not work because of your first comment already way to imbalanced. They even made it harder for a new player to get even close so those at the top just get further and further ahead.

SAD

Done trying to gao back and forth you nailed a lot of the game but sadly it is all about the same thing they made a game that was way to easy in some aspects and so convoluted in others that trying to balance it out and fix it will not work unless they clear the board and start over but they can let that happen because they said they wouldn't and it would hurt to many playes feelings.


Game needs a clean slate to fix the "injustices" already done and let player start out on a balnanced playing field that take game play not game the play. But to late probably

they don't really have the gunptions to do it and damn the torpedoes

 

While I see where you're coming from for me a whole lot of the stuff you are annoyed with falls under "this is still being worked on and not working as intended" (e.g. aggro). Some points I want to heartily disagree with though:

I am regularly buying tier 3 foods from other players for 100-200gold/dish. I think for a buff that lasts 3 hours that is not expensive.

I am curious - what do you think would be the best solution then? I kind of enjoy the RNG but then again I only craft for fun and have bought my equipment from other players with greater skill than me.

I can agree partly here. I see lots of vendors selling things I either do not need or priced way above what I'd consider the value of the items. Then again, I have bought items I considered fairly priced and will continue to do so, be it weapons or foods or materials. I have my own little vendor set up selling mostly "excess" raw materials from my gathering trips and I think this is actually my main source of income so there certainly is an economy.

I like that I can buy the dyes in game and don't have to exclusively rely on the add-on shop but can trade for COTO with in game gold and get the stuff... In regards to what is dye-able it falls under "still being worked on" from what I gathered.

Cheers!

 

@Vagabond Sam

Very good feedback with good arguments that I can follow (that is not always the case ).

Some of the suggestions would require complete system overhauls, and I would be surprised to see them happen at this late date (eg. skill caps instead of decay).

Other things are low-hanging fruit, and I fail to understand why they haven't been implemented already. One example is the "hidden" adv. level. I'm sure there are some folks who don't want to know their adv. level (for reasons of immersion?). But I've had countless conversations with players searching for this information. I would like to know how much accumulated time players have wasted asking where this information is hidden, then searching for the chat log on their computer system, not to mention the time people spend searching for and installing 3rd party apps to read out the chat log in an orderly fashion, just to get this one stat. It gives players a feeling of accomplishment when they see their adv level go up. (Yay, I reached level 62 the other day!) This is a fun factor that the devs have done their darndest to ruin.

I haven't been back to the Owl's Nest Mine since the nerf, but I believe low level players really need a place where they can mine simple ore and granite.

The most frustrating part of this game (my first online game) is that many of the fun-destroying things have to be added to prevent power-levellers from gaming the system. I hope that these things won't all be carried over to single player offline mode and ruin the experience there.

 

That's why I am providing feedback on these items before they become finished and move into the category of 'too entrenched to be changed'. I also have no illusions that any one source of feedback will change the way the game is being developed but hope to be part of a consensus fo play testers that lead to some change. We can't all have our way, but we can all put forward our thoughts.

That's fine in practice but I only found one person in Esguard selling and the time to gather everything to make myself would have been longer then the time saved. If I can find it and buy it, it's fine. At the moment that varies wildly based on availability and discovery of a seller.

Also, the effect drops on death and my friend and I were experimenting with pushing to scenes as hard as we could for levelling so would die occasionally, but still make good exp. Dying once or twice an hour, sometimes after I just ate wasn;t very worthwhile in the long term so I dropped food altogether.

Conversely if the content was easy enough to remove the chance of dying, the benefit of food isn;t particularly high either since I can heal to full between pulls in those areas which kind of defeats the purpose. If food is stripped every death on difficult content (Where most online games like WoW and FFFXIV use food the most to hit stat caps) then it becomes a chore and my group will just heal through skills.

Have gear, or crafting active buffs that affects the crafting output. Smelter's smock increases ingot output, Weapon-smith's hammer increases exception chance of equippables, Blacksmith's Focus to increase the chance of masterwork linked to a reagent cost. Make item parts like blades gain benefits from being exceptional themselves. Keep the RNG but add more options to affect the RNG to output what the player wants. Enchanting right now has a little of this where you affect the output by affixing a gem to get rolls based on that school of magic.

Technically you do have to rely on the store though. You're just separated from the person that must buy the COTO originally. I know one player who bought a dye pack only to realize they wasted their money because they couldn't dye leather. Right now, I believe the add-on store would recieve lots of negative criticism from a wider audience and they should consider their image now, well before release as measures to present a finished game need to be put in place before 'go live' time.

In R33's post mortem one of the questions was around how they spend so much time on the add-on store and they responded by trying to correct the misconception based on man hours invested then make sure the game's presentation didn't create the misconception in the first place.

Thanks for your comments though and I can understand where you disagree with some of my thoughts.

 

Totally valid! For me I just consider it hard to put in any constructive feedback if I don't know how the finished system is intended to be. Like for example farming is still so incomplete I find little merit at the moment in pointing that out.

My secret food dealer is in Etceter, there's a player vendor nearly always stocked with tier 2 foods and I'll stock mine with tier 3 foods occasionally. Also some players like @Bow Vale have posted in the marketplace about their vendors selling foods, I usually look there if I can not find something in game that I am looking for.

Ah, I am more of a casual player that likes to avoid risks so I seldom die. I do not like to do mass pulls either, so I usually kill at largest groups of 3 and often just run from mob to mob so I seldom encounter the occasion I have to wait for mobs to respawn that I could use for regeneration breaks. I like the idea of not stripping the food buff on death though.

These are all possible things that could be implemented but wouldn't it just lead to everyone having the super-buff-items and being jacks-of-all-trades? I feel like the crafting system is currently not fleshed out enough for me to have a funded opinion on this and I have no clue in which direction development on it is headed... I agree that it needs work though

Yeah right, I nearly made he same mistake but got informed on here that you currently couldn't dye leather. Afair it is planned though so he has not "wasted" his money at least

 

My thoughts.
While I agree with many of the suggestions, however...
For those less familiar with game development, that bulk of the quality goes in during the last 20% of the development cycle.
ALL the rest is foundation. Our foundation is strong.
We are now on that last 20% where a collection of oft mismatched systems get molded (and reworked) into a cohesive whole.
I myself am now the #1 play-tester of many of the systems and especially the story.
But I am going through with a fine toothed comb, so to speak.
I believe people will find the fun factor of the general play experience, the UI, the story, the difficulty, the balance will all get MUCH better through this process.
Yet... it will still not be "finished", yet, for months.

I hope you enjoy playing during this time of rapid change which will often include back & forth on various systems, but I also know it can be challenging to wait and wait for the issue you find most annoying to get solved. I feel that myself a LOT (AHEM - Seasons, plant growth, animal cycles, harvesting and crafting food through health)

Thanks for bearing with us, and helping us get this game done and done right!
- Richard

 

and cannibalism

 

Cannibalism... is good.

 

On the point about recipes seeming arbitrary in terms of resource requirements, I'll play Devil's Advocate and say they'll be arbitrary no matter what.

I do agree there should be some logic to it so that the player can pull from knowledge they bring to the game, obviously you wouldn't require players to create chain mail from cotton, but if uniformly re-describing materials as 1/20th their current size is what we need to create immersion, it really won't change much by way of time commitment and economy. In my opinion.

 

Thanks - that's very reassuring to hear a response to this feedback in particular.

I've been meaning to make a similar post about whether the "is this fun?" question is being asked while setting up the game. I'm always thinking the game isn't done yet and that's why it isn't there, but I haven't felt sure that this was something that the dev team was going to come back to later in a significant way, and I haven't known how to properly articulate my thoughts on the subject in a way that can be well understood.

Combat stands out for me as just not feeling fun. The card system never really grew on me, I can't use as many abilities as I want, the cooldowns feel way too long, I have a very tough time surviving and I don't know what I'm doing wrong, I die a lot and lose XP faster than I gain it, I'm XP locked because I've been levelling skills to try and be better at combat but can't get that XP from going into combat.

I haven't delved enough into the crafting skills, but from what I have seen, gathering the materials to make the final item is an absolute chore. Making weapons and armor are some textbook examples, though I feel like taming rates a big mention here, which feels almost inaccessible to me. I don't care enough to go to the trouble of making multiples of the gear that's required just so I can get started in charming animals.

I keep making comparisons to UO across the board, and UO nailed the fun factor on all of these levels - combat, crafting, and taming. There's probably other areas I could talk about, but this is just off the top of my head of what I think about when I think about what to do next in SotA.

 

Place any item as a decoration (not even drop anywhere, just being able to put swords in a sword rack or on a table!)

 

I'm not a huge MMO player, SotA wasn't an MMO when I bought in, but my biggest concern is that SotA fails the "is it fun" test but will continue to get made due to the obligation of preorder sales. Introversion Games got through the bulk of Subversion before scrapping it because the design simply wasn't fun to play, and honestly at this point the "is it fun?" question for SotA should be answered "Yes, but we need more" not "Not yet, just wait a few months". For example, can anyone name a quest that they regret spoiling?

In most early access games I've played, the developer cuts out a small section and polishes it properly and that becomes the part that players can point to when someone complains that the game isn't fun yet, does SotA have such a spot?

 

Every game that has crafting, especially full armour sets, plus housing, I immediately want to place an armour stand in my house. Sadly nobody does this.

 

Ive been harping on this exact topic for month now. People who are treating this game like its complete (after persistence) and even refute people when they remind them that the game is still under development.

Sorry LB, but I have been real harsh on this new crowd sourced dev model. I just think its a failure. The main issue is that it has brought in a *lot* of people to play a game in alpha whom do not understand the game is in alpha and do not understand things like the 20% you mention. That 20% is something I really harp on myself, especially story line related (being that it is one of the last things put in place in a game). I try to focus their anger about these things into a constructive way, let them understand that one of their true purposes is to help fix things. But they just dont get it, they rage quit or just flame the forums with complaints about obviously unfinished things.

 

I have over 1000 hp sometimes with my normal builds. I can get over 1200 hp actually. I PvP regularly and I think that while there are some circumstances where Grind > Skill in PvP (e.g. when you're 15 adventurer levels higher than someone), skill has a lot to do with winning in PvP.

Earlier today I was dueling with some friends in Owl's Head, you might still be able to see the corpses near the Public Vendor. One person I was dueling is 5 adventurer levels lower than me, and has around 600 health buffed up. I lost to him a few times, I won a few times too. The XP difference between us is around 30 million XP (94 vs 89). Even with the best XP rates, you would have to grind non-stop for a day. That's a very significant gap between our XP. To put that XP in perspective, it is about 5% of the XP required to GM every adventurer skill and innate.

I think Skill > Grind when it comes to PvP (within a certain adventurer level difference), and would be happy to put that to the test with anyone who is much higher level than me @Lord British perhaps?

 

Do you believe feedback is not relevant? Should i assume things not in the game nor discussed in roadmaps are on the way just because the game is in Early Access.

If you have issues with feedback being provided then i invite you to make a new thread instead of posting here where i have given feedback that has been recognized as helpful by the team in portalarium.

By posting this complaint on my thread you're insinuating that i an either flaming or don't understand early access development.

If something need attention you correct it before you finish it if you want to minimize pain.

I've played hundreds of hours since persistence but an level 48 due to how i play. 320hp 40ish str and dex and 20 int. While I'd be interested to see how we compare i am also wanting in pvp skill so it wouldn't be very indicative of fairness because im not good at pvp in general.

One of my irl friends is very pvp focused and level 56 and I'd be interested in seeing the outcome of that if you'd like. Test my assumptions.