An important feature the Game lacks / A suggestion..

Currently I can't embrace my gaming passion all that much due to other commitments, but I often do have an hour to spare to get a quick gaming fix. When I sit down at my desk and decide what to log into under these circumstances I NEVER log into SOTA.

SOTA lacks any aspects that tempt a player with an hour to spare to log in and have fun. Yet this could be fairly easily remedied and in my view could have a HUGE impact on retention and maybe even recruitment as it would give a player fun stuff to do for an hour, available on a daily basis and this would often be all that was needed to get someone to log in most days and keep them hooked into the game. Often times a player may log in for an hour and get drawn in for a longer session.

As most of us are experienced gaming vets, I won't waste your time patronising you about the fundamentals of daily tasks and quests but here are some specifics I think are pertinent to SOTA -

Daily bonus experience: Many games offer this simple mechanic. If you 'rest' in a town or zone when you log out, the next day you have a period of time/amount of experience that you can gain faster or is cheaper to earn, often reflected as a different colour on the experience gain bar. This runs out after an hour or so of playing.

Timed crafting tasks: Set something running that takes 24 hours to deliver. In SOTA terms this could be a rarer crafted item with a unique stat or a large batch run of Materials. You can run one of these tasks per day.

Daily PvP or PvE events: These would also give the bonus Exp gain and maybe a bonus reward in Gold each day. To achieve this a player would enter a town siege and if it is cleared they get a substantial reward. For PvP, a player enters a PvP zone, such as a Shardfall and has at least one PvP contest. Win or lose they get an appropriate bonus. Again, one of these instances per day has the bonus exp or rewards.

There will be other features that most of us can think off but some require significantly more Programming work than others..

I have a sense that these fairly straight forward mechanics, none of which require the crafting of additional quests or locations, or major programming tasks could make a huge difference.

 

Nice ideas.
More Guild stuff would be nice as well. Projects you can donate to. Stuff you can do for an hour to support yur guild and so on.

 

Well I would guess as their implementation could be seen the daily oracle quests and in the beginning the 10k exp was a good start for a day but I guess for most avatars this is today nothing they even care about. I think there were a lot of suggestions regarding a daily bonus and I would love to see this as a resting bonus too. Even if I would prefer if this would be bound to conditions. E.g. just in NPC taverns, a rented room or on your own lot you get this bonus...at best you get an additional bonus if you are using a bed to rest to give your decorations some usage.
I personally would suggest that this bonus is raising a fixed number of exp * hours of resting and is not a buff active for a certain time. This way you would not have to run as fast as possible into the next battle.

Maybe we could define tasks we are doing while offline and these task depend our current position on novia and on login in you get a short report of your avatars doings while you where offline.
everywhere - standard - You do nothing and just stare into space.
overworld map - gathering information - while you are offline your avatar is asking passing travelers if they heard some rumors about hidden treasures. Possibility to gain treasure maps. (Maybe also the possibility to get robed and lose said treasure maps.)
overworld map - mercenary - while offline you are offering passing travelers your service as mercenary. Possibility to gain a larger payment (gold) and start at a random settlement location on the world map. (Maybe also the possibility to get robed and lose the earned gold.)
settlement - delivery boy - while you are offline you may help the citizens with small deliveries. Probably a small payment (gold) and you might start at a random location within the settlement.
settlement - beg - your avatar is asking passing novians to share a coin. Random payment but maybe a loss of virtue if you have more than x gold.
your lot - cleaning - After x hours the lot or specific items on the lot are getting some sparkle effects.
your lot - hunting insects - Depending on the number of planting beds you get each hour a chance to catch an insect.
Could be something you can change in the options of the game.

Hmm...maybe each day one town and one PvP area could be declared as today's daily goal...maybe visible in your journal. The siege of this settlement might be always active for this day and maybe even a little bit more dangerous or an automatic grouping to let avatars play together who would normally not. An all day siege may sound unfavorable but this would still add a lot of traffic to the settlement especially if you would have to visit the local town crier after you ended the siege to get the special reward. More or less the same for the PvP area as it would not help if you would search a victim and cannot find someone because all are roaming different pvp scenes....all avatars have to aim for the same scene.

 

I've always thought that random repeatable Daily Quests, both adventure and crafting, would be a good idea.

Visit the Carpenter in your town and see if he/she needs any items made (of course they do). You make the item(s), hand them in, get gold/xp.
Visit the Guards in your town and see if they need you to do anything. Kill the critters/fetch the item/find the outlaw, come back for your reward.

Short quests that don't take more than 30-60 minutes to do.

 

We currently have daily quests that do provide Adventure and Crafting XP;

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/the-list-of-daily-quests.160888/

Though we don’t have one that specifically involves crafting, which would actually be nice. And specifically tied to an already existing system we have: Player made items that have a makers mark, go into the loot tables. And of course, make that an ACTUAL good use of our time and resources.......

 

Problem with that is...I spend time and money making an item that could cost hours to gather/thousands to buy resources for, try to sell it to an NPC vendor for 5gp...there's absolutely no value in that. Would be nice for an NPC to have a daily quest asking for particular item(s), give gold and xp for items turned in by players, and the items then get added to the loot table. Wins all around.

 

Would be nice for an NPC to have a Non-repeatable daily quest asking for a particular item(s), give MORE gold and xp for items turned in by players, and the items then get added to the loot table. Win-Win all around.

 

After 6 months of crafting I finally looted one of the items I made. After hearing about what makes it into the loot table I started selling my crafted gear to the NPC town vendors. Back when I started I remember using looted gear if it was better than what I had. Getting a very rare +3 or +4 item seemed like a gift from the gods. So selling it doesn't exactly get me the best return. But some lower level characters get get a lot of use from it.
vj

 

They don't exist unless their reward is worthwhile. 800 xp in Brookash I believe? Not worth the time to run there. 8k for the letters? I spent an hour trying to get the last one, had 16 of all the others. RNG negaeted its existence.

Still waiting for a real daily.

 

Oh, I never once stated they were worth your time.... you can decide that for yourself.

But those are the ones that are currently in the game.

Could they be more actually rewarding? Oh certainly.