2021+ Player Priorities Poll

When I think of better loot I think of drops I can get excited about. Atm there are virtually none. SOS bottles would qualify only if there were exciting loot drops in them. There are zero exciting loot drops in the game. Give me a ring or Jordan or a rare sword of vanquish or something. I remember them saying weapons would have and drop with goblin slaying or affinity . Where is this stuff?

 

There are people who have moved on and trying to win them over now would be a waste of time, that's true. But there are also tons of people who are starved for a classic MMO experience who would likely be here if the game was more motivating to them.

Personally I think the biggest problem Shroud of the Avatar has is that it causes a sense of futility in people who don't have practically unlimited time to devote to it. Since build diversity is lackluster and everyone can learn everything in this game it's impossible to stand out as an adventurer unless you have a gigantic amount of XP invested somewhere. Likewise since crafting is very random and also relies on skills it's difficult to make great items, let alone profitably sell them if you don't have a huge amount of time to grind materials and crafting XP. These are the most crucial issues, because a sense of futility arises in people who want to play, but conclude that they can't reach their goals, not in people who don't want to play in the first place.

 

This is part of the problem with trying to derive player's actual desires based on their feedback.

Of all requests that were presented into the original brainstorming, here are the ones that were relatively specific to loot:

• Better loot from mobs
  
• Crafted gear was always supposed to be the "best" - I only wish it were true, crafters don't make much anymore, they just add Masterworks and Enchants to artifacts - change that.
• Exceptional components & consumables being actually better than regular ones;
  
• More rare components (e.g. rare bowstave, weapon blades, hilts, magic cloth, dragon leather, blackrock, bloodrock, etc. with different bonuses)
  
• personally I’d like more tier 5+ options like Tenebris Harbour or Verdantis Mines. intersting terrain, lots of fights and sellable loot
  
• LOOT!
  
• Mob specific weapon enchantment scrolls to be applied by player to weapons. Scrolls dropping as loot or made by crafters.
  
• Loot loot loot
  
• Better loot in general according to monster level , more unique components like Torc Dawls handles.
  
• Some love to Blood bay, The fall , Ruins and shardfalls (PVP Scenes) with group boss, good loot and XP. Higher the risk better the reward
  
• Improved loot! Improved by a lot!! The way loot works in this game is quite frankly terrible. I'd like to see instanced loot, as an example; Me and a few friends work together to kill a boss, we each get our own loot tables to pull from. Sharing the gold is fine, but sharing the loot incentivizes playing solo. Give us more reasons to group up! Supply bundles just plain suck. It's such a good idea for loot, but it's squandered by the fact that you're more likely to pull a potion you can easily make and some bread than something you might actually be excited to get. Everything about the way loot is generated and distributed needs to be looked at and changed to make it more fun for the player.
  
• Just fix loot. I can deal with all of the other stupid quirks (and endless rounds of archery nerfs), but make it worth my while to go out and adventure. Make the loot relative to my risk.
  
• Better loot based on mob/character level and time commitment & loot that supports group time investment
  
• Make each play session rewarding - rework lottery loot mechanics to progressive/incremental system
  
• Daily fishing quest, pvp quest, and crafting quests so crafters can earn resources and special rewards not having to combat as much.
  
• a good treasure hunting system complete with difficulty of maps to do, interesting details and ways to get the maps.
  
• Scalable loot.

My takeaway from these requests was that crafters, in general, think they have less of a role due to the OP nature of artifacts. Something both crafters and adventurers want is more artifact components that can be used to craft even better gear. Some people think that the main problem with loot is the risk/reward or balancing of some scenes. Some feel the main problem is the lack of sufficient loot for group gameplay, which could be mitigated via balance passes and/or more higher tier scenes & bosses (which generally coincide with more higher tier loot in them). Treasure Hunting.


As to the desires for loot to get "excited" about, that is a very subjective thing, unique to each player - partially a function of the rarity of the drop/effort needed to obtain it and partially a function of the benefits the player expects from the drop.

I may be mistaken, or may have misinterpreted some of the ideas presented by the player base while trying to narrow the list down to 50, but I worked with what I was given.

 

I didnt mean like work on episode 2 quests i meant like have more visible lore in-game. For an RPG theres not alot of folks who dont know whats been goin on in the world even after the questline has been complete

 

Perhaps a gear overhaul system to address improved loot impacting crafting and adventuring? I don't see Loot as a specific in the list for the poll though.

 

Here's an idea that has been suggested before, and I think it could help:

The devs could ask players to submit letters, books, NPC conversation trees, and other lore written from the perspective of NPCs in SotA or characters in "Blade of the Avatar". Players could receive in game rewards for any of their writings chosen to be included in the game. The devs could then tweak the writings if needed, and scatter the lore throughout the world of SotA.

Blade of the Avatar
https://sotawiki.net/sota/Blade_of_the_Avatar

 

The problem with loot isn't that there's nothing decent that drops. I'm not saying that loot tables couldn't be better, but there's certainly desirable-things-to-get-from-killing-monsters.

There's a lot of worthwhile stuff that drops, that is in demand and useful.
The problem is that none of it drops consistently or reliably, and there are far too many "global" drops that you could murder tens of thousands of creatures and never see.

I don't have statistics on what the average player's attention span is, but I know if I spend 3-4 hours farming content, even content that I know drops the item(s) I'm after (like say, destroyer creatures for taming artifacts), and I get absolutely nothing to show for my efforts, I'm less motivated to repeat the same activity the next day, and the next, and the next. Add that to the fact that you can combine the things, and need hundreds of something that you haven't gotten a single drop of all week, and we reach the "why bother" point, the futility mentioned by @Aetrion above. Its even worse for artifacts that don't have a dedicated mob source.

This wouldn't matter if crafted gear was actually better, or at least equivalent, to the best-in-slot artifacts or if you could actually have any control over crafting outputs instead of relying on the RNG. Artifacts would be a nice-to-have option for people who prefer adventuring rather than the only viable option due to just how significantly better they are.

There needs to be a clear path to your goals that you can progress at whatever pace. At the moment, that path quickly dead ends at the base of a very high cliff. I have no issue with needing to put in hours,days, weeks of grind, as long as I am making progress. The problem with Sota is you can put in hours, days, weeks, and make zero progress, which I know at least for myself and the folks I used to play with, is why we've stepped away.

The problem is we're still trying to hold on to this arbitrary need for "random" and "slot machine rarirty" in all things, which does not make a satisfying experience. Crafting could, and should, be an alternative gear path based on incremental effort - harvesting the resources, refining the resources, and customizing your build. It should take a lot of time and effort, and skill in it should have more impact than it does. And it should be plannable, and reliable - not a RNG-infested mess at every single stage. Fixing crafting would alleviate a lot of the adventuring loot pain, because then that stuff could be nice-to-have instead of 'absolute requirement' - meaning that if you get a shiny, yay, but if you dont' get one, its not a hopeless abyss of despair and pointlessness. It would also address the issue of waste, in that if you did get the 1-in-a-million mossy handle drop, you could have confidence that you could make something decent out of it.

If we are dead set on keeping the game as a "maybe you'll win the lotto today, nope, maybe tomorrow" then we at least need some mechanism to take all that stuff and turn it into something we actually want. Trying to buy/sell on player market in its current state is a non starter, and gets worse as population dwindles. Perhaps its time to look at npcs who will take arcane essence in exchange for specific artifacts, giving all artifacts a value. Some sort of system to accumulate progress toward your goal instead of 'I will buy another lotto ticket today."

 

Already cast my vote and seems i jumped quest system this need to be fix for sure!

 

I disagree with a few of the folks that say that they cannot make a specific build work. And for anyone complaining about the amount of XP needed to make "unusual build" work, just arent tapping into all the resources. You can gain 6-7 million xp per hour at ERG. If you want that unusual example...earth/moon mage build to work then 100 million xp that can be gained in 16 total hours at ERG should not be such a painful investment. I mean really folks, 16 hours and u can make a build with the right equipment work. I dare say getting the equipment will take you ALOT more time than getting the xp needed at that rate.

Now if you want to adventure and prefer to NOT ERG grind, then yes it is going to take you months to get there...but geez....do u want to reach maximum power in 3 months then wipe everything and complain about how there is nothing to do in game? I would say most gaming communities are made up of spoiled little brats that want instant gratification. The games I enjoyed the most over the years actually MADE me invest my time, effort and prowess.

 

Votes can be changed all the way until the poll is closed.

For example, hardly anyone voted for " Deeper competition across tamed and summoned pets, magic trees & builds ", despite the fact that people are constantly complaining about Fire Mages, Tamers, and Archers being OP.

I invite everyone to change their vote from a global vendor need solution, as Crafter's Town already exists.

 

It's not the XP you need to make a character functional that creates a sense of futility, it's the XP you need to make a character actually good at something relative to other characters. If you're sitting at 100s in any given skill you're simply not good at that skill. There are tons of players who can simply turn their character into your character by putting on some different clothes and loading a different deck. That immediately destroys any sense of accomplishment in building that character. Getting up there into the 120s lets you start defining yourself because that's when things start getting expensive enough that people have to make hard choices, but it's only a minor difference at that point.

The specialization system would help with allowing you to define a character better, but the general balance in this game is such that a small number of builds are so much more powerful than others that deviating from them is a frustrating experience all on its own, and trying to make up the difference with more XP is asking for trouble.

So sure, you can raise 100 million XP in 20 hours or so pretty easily, but even that is a lot of time being absolutely bored that you really wanted to spend having some fun. When you start talking about a billion XP and more you're talking about a significant time investments that aren't actually fun, and for what? Having a cool character in a game with nothing to do?

I'm not one of those people who insist that nothing should ever be work in an MMO, but if the journey isn't the destination then the destination better be worth every miserable step along the way.

I think that's because they picked the first option which included balance as an ongoing problem in the game, and a lot of people picked that one.

 

Well...Im a pure air mage, so i have one of those unusual builds...but I slay dragons on a regular basis and i'm only level 121 unbuffed...so I'm not an archer/tamer and i'm not a fire mage. Now I struggle at Ruined Keep because I cannot stun trolls or their kin...but where I fail there...I excel at dragon killing as I have my AE's that can stun dragons in mid flight and grounded dragons are even easier....my build compared to archer/tamers and fire mages is dirt cheap. I'm sure there are other builds that have their pros and cons...I have a buddy of mine that solos down in despair at the 25k+ spiders...and he is a swords/death magic hybrid....

Perhaps it is the build that is frustrating...but I love playing my air mage...i was life/sun for a while and I just didnt like it that much...but stun locking dragons/kobolds/skeles and anything else non-troll gives me lots of satisfaction.

We really are not stuck in the 2 most common builds....I believe we just think we are...

 

Also....I dont compare myself to other players...I compare myself to the content that i can or cannot do...I could care less if Joe Blow over here can hit for 3000 with a fireball....as long as i'm successful at what I want to do....I don't care....they dont decide what loot i obtain...I do.

 

I just voted for "Balance/Debug/Polish/Completion passes on existing systems".

SotA has a lot of good pieces and a lot of things that could be really cool if they were actually finished and done right.

I haven't played at all the last few months other than to check if an epic artifact that I have can be masteworked, seeing that it still can't be, and logging back out.

 

There are several things I think need to be done:
1. What is hampering SOTA is probably the crashes due to memory leak / graphics resource loading.
2. There is a problem in SOTA where the game starts being a mindless grind for XP after about level 120 or 140. The huge quantity of xp needed to advance, and the lack of resources to help you advance past this point, make skill increase less about adventuring than about sheer quantity of time put into ERG or other grind zones. If you take a look at SOTA content, Novia and Hidden Vale are great and rich in content but designed for AL 40-100. Compare this to, say, Diablo 3 where you can choose your difficulty level and receive commensurate xp. I understand that new players have a need for "being part of the group" and to have their characters be useful. Unfortunately this doesn't happen in any real RPG I know of. You don't subscribe and after a couple dozen hours become as good as guys who have been around for 2 years. I think SOTA should abandon the "I want to be as good as X reasonably quickly" crowd because they're not here to enjoy the game itself and so SOTA has no chance of retaining them.
3. Speaking of which, skills tend to max out utility at around level 140 apart from Spec which is very hard to raise past 140. The sub-linear advancement in skill power means that your only real goal is getting everything to 140 and spec to say 120. My AL 120 fire mage could do Isshi trolls just about as well as he could, which is not how it should be. This, coupled with the OP Tamer class and Bard Savage Sonata make the game extremely unbalanced and the large party sizes make it possible to do huge quantities of damage. This damages the game in two ways: (1) players are not challenged as much and (2) everything other than target practice at mobs as they go to the platform is ludicrously difficult. Why? Everything other than offense has not kept up. Why the big boost to armor last year? Because it was no longer useful against any mobs past tier 8 or so. Magic resistance is still borked. I have a tank with 100+ magic resistance skill and he takes just about as much damage as if he had no magic resistance skill whatsoever. Ever wonder why ERG is so difficult some times and easy others? It's whether or not you have enough firepower to wipe out enemies before they start attacking, because if they start getting attacks in they are seriously fast and quite devastating. A Skelrin can take down most characters not using Air Shield in 2 critical hits. A skeleton or lich archer or mage can kill most characters in 3 critical hits. If you want play balance, have defensive skills raise at about the same rate as offensive skills: if you put time into your defense you should be able to negate the enemy's offense. Magic resistance fails in 2 respects: it makes spellcasting pointless AND it doesn't provide enough protection from attacks. In order to have that protection, my fighter needs to raise his now useless magic attunements to 0, which is not how it should be. Note: the offense/defense imbalance is also why PvP is so much of a stealth/sneak attack hunt.
4. While I understand the desire to toss in extremely low-probability rewards into supply bundles, if these account for a non-insignificant fraction of the bundles' average value then they become more of a lottery than a treasure. This damages the game because you don't get a reasonable reward plus maybe a bright new shiny, you get an unreasonable reward and maybe a bright new shiny. Oh, and the rusty tableware, scythes , flasks, and so on are, well, embarrassing.
5. Crafting XP needs to be commensurate with the cost/effort involved. Crafting items usually yields moderate xp but consumes large quantities of materials. Enchantment and masterworking are extremely expensive - why don't they generate huge amounts of xp? Mannequins both require lots of raw materials and have an unreasonably low success probability.
6. I see no need for a 95% success cap. This smacks of an obsession with the old plastic d20. Have a probability that goes up fast to a certain percentage, say, 80% or 90% or whatever, and allow for extra %, say 1% every 5 or 10 levels. You should be able to achieve 100% success rate on simple tasks at GM and at more advanced tasks if you raise the skill high enough past the fast progression level.
7. Skill descriptions need to be correct, accurate, and clear. Isn't Truth a virtue? There is a difference between "increases effective durability" and "reduces wear". 100% of the former means your gear is now twice as durable. 100% of the latter means your gear is now indestructible. Oh, btw, does anyone know base (unmodified) critical damage effect? x2? Ignore armor? Both?

 

sadly, i slept on getting mine in on time, but as a n00b of several months i think i agree to a point; the people least likely to have even known this survey existed are the newest players, while those most likely to both know about and respond to it are your veterans "who find it tolerable as is."

the problem for me is that so many of what i consider "egregious" issues are either fundamental or buried within other issues needing changes, e.g. i'm guessing that drag n' drop reordering of the combat deck system might get looked at if devs focused on one of the choices listed above, but which?

it would be interesting to repeat this survey as a practice and refine the list into an outline or tiered structure. it would also be great if you could force colored admin-style chat notifications when the survey is open...need more participants and more adherence to the requested 1-sentence responses...

regardless, THANK YOU for doing this Sorgin!

 

I did finally get to voting. I definitely think we need a vote as a heads up to say here is what's missing in this game that needs attention.

We can scurry all around the core issues in this game to fix this and fix that but if the core issues are not addressed it is like putting frosting on top of sh**t. The thrill of the new more/ better shinies will eventually fade to needing more, more, more new ones.

So I did vote for an achievement system of course but actually imo we currently don't have one in game. I do not count steam since I don't play on steam and have never played this game on it. @Chris mentioned getting steam achievements for all in the game not reliant on if you play on steam or not. This would be a great time to add to the system to reward all players for their multitude of progressions.

We need to feel we've achieved. How to make that happen imo is not all about more/better even though that is nice and instantaneous and one fraction of making the game.

Imo it's how you feel afterwards. Was it interesting?. Was there a reward?, Is there an ongoing reason to progress? Like 'congrats you've achieved', or rewards like titles with bonuses you can pick and choose from, or 'you've completed 50 tasks here is your reward', or completion of an achievement gives tokens to buy something or map pieces, or clues to the map locations.

So much possibility to include and really a core missing in this game. It just should be there underneath all that goes on. Like you have Eaten one of every food, crafted all foods, killed a dragon, completed all dailies or a questline at least, and we need pvp achievements as well and so on and on.

I also voted for scene updates. We need to see NPC quest givers and discoverable lore in each scene.

Other reasons to visit and re-visit all scenes should include multiple rotating tasks and progressive tasks with rewards for completing more times. With merchant npc's requesting items like they got their watch stolen so please hunt down the item or thief.

Those who don't care for game imposed tasks simply don't do them if they aren't interested of course but all in a days play time they should be a core inclusion Not a one day some day idea.

OK I could of course go on and on but I'm sure if you've read this far you get the gist. Also if you have been around a while you know my thoughts well. 'cheers'

 

*One week left to vote bump*

 

One thing I would like to point out is that while I really like the Lord British philosophy of "others make games, we create worlds", there are things that need doing before you should expand the "realness" of stuff like weather and sky. One thing that needs attention is the utter lack of pleasant Town and City homes. Basically at the Row and Village level you get everything and then some. Now, as players with several years' experience start upgrading their properties and looking for something to put on them, they find basically nothing in the Town or City range in comparison. I bought a Town home that was Wood and Plaster Shingle Roof 2 story with Balcony and it was the exact same as my Village home, but in a Town lot. That is not what I wanted - I wanted a bigger home for a Town lot. I now have downgraded my Town lot to a Tax-Free Village lot because I see nothing I can put on a Town lot that I like that is actually available (and no, I'm not going to search through hundreds of vendors trying to find something I like and then find it priced at a few million igg because it's been discontinued). If you go to the COTO store you have your choice of boats or drydocked boats, which is rather stupid. Instead of all those ships, someone should have come up with the "average" Town home, e.g. Shingle and Plaster 3-Story or whatever. Buy a nicer one with COTOs. Hometown has Viking, Shogun, and Elven style homes at the Town level and Viking and Shogun at the City level but those never appear in the COTO store. *WHY*?! I'm not asking for rare Knight/Lord Benefactor architecture here, just some good all-round large happy middle-class-character living areas for those that have the occasional COTOs to spend.

I agree with the poster on the previous page that says "Time to stop the bleeding, THEN attract new players". While I can understand the desire to add new features, ask yourself: why would adding these features make people STAY with the game? Without staying power, all you get is a lot of people that just come, zip around for awhile, and leave. We, the "regulars", need to be more supportive of the new players, but we also need new players that can enjoy the type of game this is: deep, rich in content and potential. It isn't Diablo 3, where many people just spend their time leveling up and that's it because the content is minimal and ENTIRELY focused on levelling up your character.

Wrt classes and XP, I don't really see Fire Mages as being overpowered. Fire Mages do allow for much better handling of melee-only mobs like undead and trolls, but splatter easily against a significant number of high-level opponents. I have heard that the complaint is that Fire Mages can solo everything but I cannot see how any Fire Mage could effectively solo Ancient dragons or the Tartarus Maze without an impractical amount of skill investment. That being said, Fire Mages have some spots they can easily solo, unlike some other classes such as Bard which appear to be primarily focused on party support rather than individual adventuring.

The first that REALLY needs to be looked at is offense/defense play balance. The main reason the armor adjustment was needed was not just because of the ludicrous ratio of protection between plate and cloth but the fact that offense has increased SIGNIFICANTLY over the past 2 years. Consider: (1) Party size went from 6 to 12. Suddenly you are able to field 2x the characters you did before AND a more diverse set of characters as well. (2) Bandit and Tamer gear really added a damage multiplier and Bard only made it worse. A good archer before was someone who could do, what, 50 dps? Now we get 500. Okay, you ramp up enemies to compensate. Problem: tanks and mages didn't receive any benefits and so are left behind. Potions and poisons did not get upgraded and so become more and more useless as their effect values become embarrassingly small in comparison. Crafted gear is now less useful than class-specific gear so crafters lose out to simple resellers. What you get is an optimal party of 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 bards, and 8 archers. Compare this to Diablo 3 which is simple, but does have a great play balance in that as your character advances, damage increases in an S-like curve and defense increases to compensate at nearly the exact same rate, resulting in a net zero gain. That is, you do not really notice much difference between level 1 and paragon 1000. The absolute values are much higher but the ratios are roughly the same. Which reminds me of Zawaraks Zaw and his complaint that his tank character was nearly impossible to play because of the huge shield damage he was taking (basically 30% total shield durability per hour or something like that). Did someone consider that increasing mob offense also increases gear wear if you're the one "holding down the fort"?

The second thing that needs to be looked at is the progression path for "mature" characters: AL 130 and up. Now that I've raised my skills to a "reasonable" level what do I do? How do I generate the billions of XP I need to raise my skills another 10 levels? Will raising them really add anything to my character? Hint: the answer is "usually not" since progression is at *BEST* linear and at that point the extra 5-10% you'll get won't help much AND the XP cap works to *discourage* game play.

 

Just an observation having been a part of and supporter of this project for what is rapidly closing in on a decade. This poll unintentionally very clearly demonstrates the issue haunting SOTA from day 1.

A lack of direction.

Why do we have, I quit counting after 30, options for player priorities? Less than ten, preferably five should be the limit. This is not a dig at the OP, not their fault. The poll is simply a reflection of the rudderless game.

This project never had strong leadership with an overarching design philosophy. SOTA has always been without a direction. Listening to the passengers all shouting out louder and louder where they want to go and the driver trying to go in all directions at once to keep them happy. The result is a ship that just turns around in circles.

I sincerely try not to be negative. When negative, I do try to give solutions. So once again, I'll waste a few sentences on a solution. Pick a direction and stick to it. Stop trying to be everything to everyone and failing at everything and everyone.