I don't grind, rush, race, compete and still have fun!

@Aiyarree you are right, i was soaked into it, but made my way out and don't care anymore.
You have to know i would like to take PVP into my playstyle, because i like to have some thrill, but that's not possible, because i wont accept that thrill means i loose always.

I play my way and most time i'll do for myself or with likeminded people who are very rare.

have fun - Stun

 

What is Fun?
http://brianwill.net/blog/2012/02/06/what-is-fun/comment-page-1/

 

I always had Problems to find people who play like me "having fun"

Its not your or their fault, its neither mine fault, i just play at another pace and have other priorities than most gamers. I call it RPvE and i do it all the time i am ingame!
even when solo i immerse into my char and roleplay for myself.
I like to play with poeple who play the same way and interact with me while doing it. slow paced and immersing, playing their characters role more than developing their characters.
Character development is sure a thing that is important to me too, but i let it more happen by the way or at least and that was the point @Aiyarree is right i try it and i am disturbed by players around me who let me feel
weaker and such. Now dont understand me wrong, i am not comparing myself the whole time to others and i sure can always accept others to be better or further in development. Thats really not my point.
But when playing with others and developing further is the focus i just loose having fun and the comparison thing comes back into my mind. Its because going further is more important to the others than to immerse and roleplay.
I dont want to accuse or insult this . please play like you do. and its my fault if i fall back into comparisons and cannot stay focused on RP and immersion, if others do not.
Therefore i pull myself out of this. I'm going to found my own guild, maybe i'll barely find another member or just some small numbers 3-5 or lets say 8 for a full group of adventurers would be fine in the long term

I need to actively step out of this, yes its difficult to me, yes i lack self confidence maybe and cannot stand it very good if people strive too much, its because it destroys my imagination, my immersion, my roleplay.
I have no Problem if someone is more powerfull than me if he is allways roleplaying like me and RP is more important to him than character progression.

Please fo not feel accused - its me - i am just special about this.

@Marcus Antoninus , @Time Lord

 

You and me both ~

I sometimes watch my plants grow all day But this is an important point about the subject and one mentioned by our Richard the Lord British Astro~Nut Garriott... it's important for the player to feel that they are the character on the screen.

I want my character right now not to exceed what he's built for. I could lvl him up, but I'd rather dive into a bunch of green and yellow tagged horde of whatever and attempt to have them kill me from having the numbers more than the single boss, I'd rather have a more relaxed gaming life than one more intense.

My current Nystal TimeLord is set to become the worlds finest ingame pooper scooper collecting rare fertilizers from where he can get away with and then returning home where he spends most of his time tending as many (maybe someday special) crops as he can, yet not very swiftly ...

Our characters should fit us all like a glove, yet unique, intimate and personal to the player The character should fit like a glove!
Then we come here to the forums and blog about it so that everyone can have their own opinion of how terribly wrong we are

~TL~

 

Some really good points to read through on here.

Leveling systems (separate from your skills) in my opinion helps kill the vibe of the game fast. Like some have mentioned, since I created my character only in February, I have a lot of catching up to do to be on par where everyone else is. This means when I meet traveling adventurers we cannot always help each other in a Pve sense. Either I go and party with them and I'm getting 25,000xp every time they drop something while I chase them trying to keep up, or they can come with me and watch as I am more helpful fighting stuff, but they are losing XP by fighting stuff under their level.

In UO this was no problem, because it wouldn't matter if your character was 7 years older than mine, I can start, and get to that "okay you're done training skills as they are, live the life of this character" and become Steve the Blacksmith, mining, smithing, smelting and selling my wares all across Sosaria. And though I can't smith like Buck when I start, after about a week, I'm just as good as buck, all he has on me now is knowledge and expertise only learned through time.

A leveling system creates all types of plains where you have different groups of people trying to get to the plain that everybody is on. But the climb to that top plain where everyone else is not permanently, but currently sitting, is dependent on your situation.

When I started my guy in February I thought I had lots of time to catch up. I'd log about 16 hours a day at least. But now I have a baby girl, and I'm lucky to get on there for more than a few hours a day (if I go on at all).

This creates an opportunity for that highest plain I've been working toward to further itself from me again, and so any players facing a situation like this would have to come to the same conclusion @Stundorn .

If the game operated without a leveling system and just the skills system. The finish line would be every individual skill. Once you are a grandmaster you have done your job. (Or on UO you could get to 120 with use of a power scroll and become legendary, and that's the kind of climb I want.)

 

Agreed, lot of well thought out & well made point here.

As a pvp player in my eye people who PVP want to be the best. And given the current leveling system if you do say grind month straight. You will become powerful however the people at the higher levels when you begin leveling will continue to get stronger still with the current system. They will gain experience at a much faster rate even if they have to pay more to get stronger. It can and has left many PVP players with the mentality that the other players beat them because their opponent is better at the game. It leaves a Feeling that you lost because it had the game longer. Whether this is true or not doesn't matter in a case-to-case basis but Simply Having that possibilities will lead players to believe it true. Which can create a toxic environment. All of my real life friends have left the game because of this feeling of unfair PVP. So in my personal experience only one in six PVP styled players will even have half an interest in the game. Well this isn't a scientific ratio studying the entire PVP community it does have some insight.

If the game moving forward continue with the current system of what I would personally call unfair PVP. I would simply uninstall the game because I don't care about anything in my games as much as PVP. The only thing needs in this game for me to play it is to be fair. What do I mean by fair I mean you have access to everything anyone else has spells choice, equipment ect. Not everyone has time to grind all the time. I don't and I don't want to for that matter.

Short version = you should be a better player to win in pvp. Not just have an unusual amount of time into the game.

 

Excalibur was never meant to be fair or balance anything.


I see this as a, "war vs football" issue...
I'm sorry some have left the game for many of their own reasons in values, but when it comes to PvP; it's either a football game where all sides are equal and who has the fastest fingers, best fighting macros and best hardware rules... or a war where nothing is ever fair, equaled or ever balanced for everyone or anyone.

"War vs Football" will always plague all PvP issues where pride meets defeat. Some games will cater to the enjoyment of football styled games, while others will see the enjoyment of both victory as well as the other side of a humiliating defeat.

Some players are just more addicted to pride than others, which is the real difference between the sportsman and the soldier. It's a personal issue as to which is the more personal growth meaningful type of game.
That's the core issue I see that drives all PvP arguments involved with balance.
What's fair to one side of that issue is never seen as fair to the other.
That's the entire competitive argument.
~Time Lord~

 

You make a solid point and I do not disagree with the different mind sets between pvp players.

Consider the following- New players look into the game on a mass scale. How many care about pvp ? Let's say 40% of that 40% how many will enjoy the current system? All of that is unknown but for what I have seen from R35 till now most pvp don't like this system. Even long standing pvp players have started to quit. Any case let's just guess that 50% of that 40% quit based just off the current pvp format. That's 1/5 of total potential players.

I fully respect that you could turn that around and say the same number could leave based on if the DEVS change to a level/skill cap system. However I have no experience to see how the current player population would react/ leave/return.

To a more related example= Every successful MMO has had a level cap and don't great boosting millions of players for years. This is new ground that could be to slippery for the team the pull together.

The current could be placed in the single player mode with no issue seen by me other the getting it coded. Then you may NEED a group to do group content in multi-player mode. Rather people soloing bosses on farm mode for hours.

 

"Pre-Alpha?"
That term effects everything...
That's what SOTA is advertised as, which hiders what to say about any of our SOTA's play styles. This leaves the terms "Alpha or Beta" still untouched, thus we are still a concept game subject to everything being modified, refined, or further developed. This is why definate terms never can't be applied in any solid critique.

"Current system?" SOTA is still in caveman clubs. The first city of Owlshead is only 40 itterations old.

I see few which always seems like more when we have so few that post within our forums. Those become high profile and then they take a funeral march because something didn't go their way or to their liking, or personal things, or blah blah and blah. That sort of thing just always happens" but it's rare to see all accounts seeking to be sold by those plyers, though it happens. "But life is like that when your name is Alpha"... and our SOTA's name is "Pre-Alpha".

So people are not leaving, they are off playing finished games or previewing other Pre-Alpha.
TL

 

Very much agreed, and hopefully for changes. I don't wish to move the away from the op topic so I'll cut out here.

P.S. great to see you haven't lost your constructive and critical way of replaying to post @Time Lord Great to have you back.

 

Thanks @Belgtor ,
The way I see this grining issue is much the same. Until our game of SOTA says it's not a "Pre-Alpha", I think it's a test of our ability to remain waiting for all ends to meet up and become intergrated with each other. The SOTA staff has remained lean and affordable without loosing quality in what they have thus far produced. But it's all those things coming together which will take away much of what we are now seeing as "the bad side" of grinding.

Playing an Alpha game for a very long time does tend to leave us wanting to play other games which are finished or new to the market. If SOTA were only opened for the public in R40, without any of us ever having seen anything of the game before, then I think there would be a general hightened excitment about it. But we public players have been here for years now and may not share that same excitement because we've seen so much of it, for so long a time as we have.

We're all "test players" sill. Star Citizen with allot more money for production has only seen a playable product just recently, yet started around the same tim as SOTA with it's Kickstarter.

I just think those are things we need to keep in mind as we all move forward together here. Star Citizen (I'm just using as example), SOTA beat to having a player testable game by "years". It's just something to think about that sort of blows my mind

TL (from my GF's laptop while on the go here in Thailand)

 

Just FYI they have been saying for quite some time now that we are no longer "pre-alpha" and are instead "early access", though they continually refuse to remove that term from the opening window of the game.

I know that they want to avoid traditional terms like 'alpha' and 'beta' in favor of just 'early access' but they make it confusing by still having those terms in various places like the steam store page which says beta is coming this summer and release a few weeks after that.

Regardless of their own confusion of terms to use or not use, we are most certainly not in any sort of 'pre-alpha' or 'alpha'. With release stated in many places to be aimed for late summer or fall of this year, we are more accurately in the 'closed beta' equivilent of traditional terms, but again officialy just 'early access'.

 

I totally agree!
I think Portalarium would like to have more added game features yet keeps the "strange pre-alpha, beta, early access, not yet sold in stors (?)" thing going for far too long. It is there, and for that I am forgiving of them when it comes to advertizing it as it is (seems unfinished to me).

• The simple placeholders will be filled in.

We've seen astrology's filled in yet there's (I believe) another feature(s) coming which will expand that. Fishing may see it's placeholder replaced as well as agriculture, but these game features are under restriction of player comment for addition to, or so we have experienced through our enquire. I beieve this is because they are "pet projects" with single or closed group contrive. Both of these features seem to get max interest given them through major fan interviews, yet will remain an afterthought of game focus, which such focus will always be in hunting, combat, or combat balance. I think they spin their wheels and burn up much production $ with balance. There seems a larger push lately for balance now, which would indicate to me that they are nearing some sort of release posture.

I mention all of the above because these placeholders are what take away the bad downside of grinding. For me, the fishing and agriculture in their current state do not match the great attention that cooking has recieved. Those two are simple while cooking is elaberte seems a balancing issue that needs addressing, "but they remain a closed group or single person pet project not for public review or matter in their invention".

Astrology, agriculture and fishing are possibly "enviorment linked", and we've only lately been linking things to our sky, so I exspect these issues are the hold up on them.

The other thing fishing and agriculture share in common are that they are what would enhance a less grinding game, being that they are distractions from the main focus which is combat. Currently we have some of our top players complaining about grind, yet that is the result of having a combat focus "only" game. When this is taken into account, whatever we will see these (agriculture/fishing) placeholders modified past whatever they will be replaced with, will be effecting those players who came for a fully released game in Ep#1. To do anything more in modifying them beyound relacement woud be premature and not effect the player retention as much if they were all fleshed out. If the game wants to seem intovative and player input welcomed, then there's not much to fall back on if these are fleshed out as much as combat has been.

I mean in all this that, if it's not for ego of the one great imput to have made these without player influence, then there must be another reason these (agriculture/fishing) have been egnored or sheltered from public interaction within their creation. It's either one or the other that's effecting these having been sidelined/sheltered/witheld... It's either an ego at work or a contive within purpose.

Such player passtimes in Ultima Online made up a great percentage of player base, yet we have not seen or have yet to see these game features given much attention (and if they have had), they have not had the fan fair or their banner waved as a game feature... possibly because they will be lacking perhaps?

We can only assume and ponder motive of Portalarium on these issues, but they are wold enviorment linked which is my best hope for them not having had much fan fair or feature time made for them.

But the public seems to scream them in questions at events like DragonCon, which truly baffles me when I see such things lagging behind the attention given to combat. Combat and PvP will always be issue in every game that sucks away production time and attention at a constant rate with no end, which leads to "the bad side of grind".

Pre-Alpha = fishing and agriculture which are the "anti-grind" (or grind distracting) issues.
Time Lord