Are We Testing The Game Or What?

When that meteor strikes and resets things. #TheEndIsNigh!

 

May be I didn't understand all of the posts - I just would provide a few thoughts from my test experience over the last years:

1. I don't think it's good to destroy items, which people earned/created by investing their time or real money.

An example:
If a player would have 1000 items - equal how good/worthful or not - well, what should happen, if he has them in his house or bank?
May be he has a Vendor in front of his house and put all the stuff in. IF a player comes along THIS house, he can see how many different items can be found in game and he can decide to earn the money to buy them or find/craft the items by himself What's wrong about?

2. I also don't think deleting (or resetting) the XP pool of all players would be a good solution.

3. Karma: Our decisions should have noticeable consequences ... as the storyline is focused on Virtues ...

4. A full/half wipe is the right solution? Why?
I don't care about people having 40 or 50 GM or 1000 items or millions of gold. They earned it with their playtime (may be real money). Every new player can do this by his own.
I never asked for something, while I started WOW, for example - it's normal. And may be the challenge for following Avatars to earn this by one's own hand...

5. Resetting the Quest state is okay. It's a thing, a lot of players care about and want to have the feeling of a really good polished story. So do I.
And I thought, it would be clear, that the reset will be done automatically, if we don't do it after launch? There is really no reason not to do this.

Beside this: I am game testing every new quest online. And also made different starts with new characters offline.
I am at a point, I am tired from game testing, especially, if there are things told as "by design", equal how distracting they are for the game and the understanding of the story ...
For example, watch this thread about tutorials and the choosen path ...

Fixing the broken quest(flag)s is very important to give players a good event.
Reworking and reworking the tutorials (and I really appreciate them, please don't misunderstand!) isn't all this game needs.

Look at our dialogue with NPC's(!) This looked great in 2013(!) (watch this at 05:55)
I really hope, we get back something like this!

I am also still in hope, we will receive a Journal, where quests are sorted depending on their virtue ...
I think that would be very important, because the huge amount of quests is really confusing, if you do two or three paths parallel ...
as we are told to do by Arabella! (Look the new crafting tables included recipes! Looks so great )

6. Map and Exploring the Lands
Also the fun to explore the land is just taken away, because we can see everything on the map - equal if we have visited places before or not ...
A MAP RESET would be fine And may be XP points for exploring the lands/dungeons/cities ...

And to answer this Thread: Yes, I tested this game and I love(d) to watch the progress! For saying exactly this, I received a lot of bad reactions on steam
I am going on to test and provide feedback, still hoping, the two months will bring in some small, but essential changes ...
(Like the last few Releases did!)
In the last 20% until launch are 5%, I am still missing
I am still in hope! The last Releases addressed so many things!
And well, for me it's not I am expecting all things on official release date, but hoping for the next further releases ...

Often I am thinking - and may be, Jaanelle also thought about, before posting this thread:
HOW will a new player be impressed? What will give him the feeling of a "good to play"?
With a confusing amount of quests in the Journal, no way to find out, which path they are from?
(Well, consider, players will be completely new! And they could play casual - the first time )
Seeing the whole map immediatly after logging in. Not knowing, where (s)he started, where (s)he came from?
Not easy for first orientation. And beside this: without any effort to explore lands? Where is the fun?

For me that are important things, giving a feeling of entering a new world, seeing new lands rising behind the horizon ...

And may be I am wrong:
I think a new player will not care about, how many GM players have, how many items or gold they have in their bank, how many houses they own, or how many XP they have in their pool.
They know nothing about our sorrows
They just will have to find their way in a huge continent with a lot of story and quests ...
Having fun while following the storyline and exploring the lands is essential for people to enjoy their residence and playing Episode 1.

 

Wipes are only being asked for by casual players or people that didn't invest time and money into the game! The biggest problem in this game are the forums, plagued like UO with keyboard warriors!

 

You must know a lot about everyone to be able to make that kind of claim.

 

Overall good discussion so far, I think.

Please ignore the troll(s). I've obviously paid for this game, and have a Royal Founder Edelmann Home, a Golden Gothic Mansion, and a fat stack of COTOs to prove it.

As for players who spent all their money on gear... lulz to that. Come by the mansion anytime... drinks are on Jaan.

 

Actually, that's usable data for the devs. Mindless of the tests going on is the way. The devs have dials and knobs and test things all on their own. Reporting bugs/anomalies is our roll. Hunting those bugs can be interpreted as testing but that's not really what I consider testing.

The QA server is a different ball game.

 

That's fair. But is the economy stable for brand new people without given handouts, without RMT?

 

Really, I do support the policy on RMT. Not because I am trying to leverage money to get some sort of unfair advantage (player skill still rules in this game IMO) but because Port is a small studio and they don't have the resources (ironically, money) to fight the battle, which is a likely losing one anyway. The money that I do put into this game- I want to go to the dev team for *developing* and not policing RMT.

I am more concerned about handouts and "twinking" and have seen multiple players eclipse Jaan in both XP and gear in the last 3 releases alone.

I want this game to attract high caliber players. Really and truly, I'm a "B" player at best and don't mind others kicking Jaan's butt and occasionally stealing her gear.

 

I would support a wipe AND being unable to level my character for one full month after release if it made the new players feel more at home and having a chance to jumpstart

Unlikely to happen as long as money and virtual value rules our policies...

even with a wipe, we experienced players have a MAJOR advantage, hence my proposition for a handicap...

 

Janelle you bring up some good points that I've also mused on a bit myself.

Firstly, the quest reset. There are a couple of key reasons why I have not availed myself of the quest reset.
1) The mechanisms around this are very unclear. Would quest rewards/items that I have received also be cleared until I ran the quest to completion? For example, what about gathering up lenses/pages before resetting oracle quest would they poof? There's simply too much unknown about what would happen that I'm not willing to set myself back into a position that will result in me needing to go repeat all the quest content - right now - to get my stuff back to where it was.
2) The quest experience/reward system may have been adequate at lowlevels, but would be largely a waste of my time right now. Lets face it, when I did the quests, they were pretty painful with the state of the dialogue system, etc. And now new additions such as absolutely requiring group content (hilt) to reforge the lens and such are things I'm certainly not looking forward to doing.

For these reasons I'm against your 'pre launch wearables not being repairable' simply because we are persistent, and have been, and persistence means that if I've cleared that quest and earned that item, its done. I don't want to have to do it again, fighting with the dialogue system every step of the way, spending dozens of hours for almost no reward whatsoever, to get something I've already gotten. Its not about lording over my achievements, its more about not wanting to spend 20+ hours repeating something that was painful and unrewarding the first time and with the addition of additional steps/group requirements promises to be even moreso.

Secondly, the virtue reset.
The entire virtue system gives the player little/no feedback about the impact their choices are having and there is no way to check this except the oracle, who gives you vague information once a day. I answered 'yes' to love virtue every time I was asked for weeks, and then one day, for no reason whatsoever that I could work out, my virtue was now negative. Asking the oracle, she said something about I chose not to intervene in an argument between two strangers. Did I? Where? To this day I have no idea what/where the oracle is talking about. Was this something I walked by and didn't even notice, perhaps? The baffling lowering of truth virtue for "theft" - especially prior to the 'red indicator' back when we could check our virtue with /stats - we were taking virtue hits for looting things in adventure scenes that belonged to no one. The addition of recipes requiring items that they had no other way to obtain other than by stealing (ie carrots when cooking first came out) and still hundreds of props that be obtained in NO OTHER WAY for decorators pretty much means if you're a decorator, your truth virtue is irredeemable. This makes no sense. I'm an extremely straightforward, honest person who holds truth in high esteem - yet the game does not accurately account for this. Stealing should never have been anti-truth, if anything, it should have been anti-love, for the callous disregard of other people's property. So, they add a reset but guess what? Even with residual karma, I'd likely still be irredeemable. But guess what, there's no way to check, and no feedback from the game, and precious little you could even do to raise truth virtue in any way it seems. So until the system is FIXED to give the player feedback about these decisions, well, I just don't see the point in resetting as you'll likely just end up in the same situation unless I decided to give up decorating entirely.

I don't think that existing quest completions or existing virtue levels are going to have that significant of an impact on 'new players'

With regard to "testing out pvp and pickpocket mechanics" - well, the current implementation of both of these systems has zero appeal to me and that's why I don't participate. You aren't going to get players to test out things that are going to cost them their time or earned items just out of a sense of altruism. Maybe before persistence, certainly not now. What we have now is a game heavily into RMT where time, essentially, is money. That's the reality, and I am happy to test all sorts of things on the QA server but its a bit late to go jumping off of buildings to see if death decay is working correctly when doing so is going to set me back 6 hours of playtime.

 

Not a bad idea... Or at least archive it.

And also change the policies such that moderation can't be invoked to simply silence opinions one doesn't like, or because they "made" somebody have a sad face.

 

Not here to test, here to play. It doesn't matter that we got in during early access. If you play on QA, you're there to test. That's not what the live releases are (primarily) for.

I don't really understand why people think the quest reset should be mandatory with an forced expiry date? Where is that coming from?

 

@kaeshiva I think you have a ton of good and interesting points here. While I'm not going to respond to them all, there are two quick things I wanted to mention.

1. Totally agree on the borked virtue system, and in particular, the Oracle's apparently shallow understanding of "theft" as regards recipe ingredients and deco that "belong" to NPCs. (Or even the next of kin of dead NPCs as she would currently have it.). Because I can't bring myself to believe that Richard Garriott (the person, as opposed to Lord British, the character) could possibly agree with her dogmatic zealotry, I have chosen to take this as a strong hint to be very skeptical of all things Oracle, and to decide to have Jaan follow the path of Chaos. If you haven't already considered, I would ask you to join us!

2. I'm pretty much with you excepting your assertion about "forcing" players to do XYZ. While I think I can understand your POV, I also believe is is hyperbolic to use that kind of language, and ultimately disrespectful and insensitive to people who have suffered real forced trauma and abuse in their actual physical lives to act as if occurrences in a digital world are in any way equivalent to happenings in the physical world. I'll ask you to reconsider your perspective on that particular issue, but also will abide if it is something you're not ready and/or willing to agree to because I otherwise value your opinions and insight.

 

Wow! So many people popping up in this thread whom I've never interacted with before. Hmmmm... well anyways, please consider the following. It is displayed when logging in to the main server, and not just the QA server.

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Then please read the OP, where all your questions will be answered, and also the above splash screen which you click past every time you log in. Otherwise, please stop trolling this thread. G'bye.

 

Hi Jaanelle, I'm not sure how you got to RL forced trauma out of my post (being forced to re-do quests?) - certainly not my intent to be insensitive here - but I'm struggling to find another word that fits. Basically its creating a situation in which players must repeat already completed content on a mandatory basis. I used the word 'forced ' here because if you use/rely on any of these items, such as the quest reward gear pieces, etc. then your character is diminished until you go out and do the quests again, which gives it a certain sort of urgent necessity within the context of the game - a necessity that didn't exist the first time 'round. I think most can understand that I don't mean literal force, as in chaining me to my computer chair and denying me food until I've completed the quests again, but other words such as "suggesting players do quests again, or encouraging players do them again..." don't convey the 'mandatory' aspect of the activities in order to get back where you were. Of course, you are absolutely right, that getting your digital 'stuff' back doesn't equate to RL problems/scenarios, nor should it, but I don't think I was suggesting that it did, certainly not intentionally. If that is how it came off to you, please consider it retracted...perhaps a better way to put it would be "creating a scenario in which players must repeat already achieved content in order to reach a previously obtained level of progress within the game". I've edited my original post to hopefully address any misinterpretation of my intent.

 

That image does not say "you are here to test".

It explains that the whole game is not fully functional yet and you should not expect a fully fledged game.

And wow, I resent that you're calling me a troll. I did read your original post and the reason you've qualified for a mandatory quest reset doesn't make sense. You've got your optional quest reset, and if you consider yourself tester-only, feel free to use it without imposing it on everyone else.

 

Ahh got it! Sorry, my bad, I was carrying something over from previous recent interactions regarding the idea of "forcing" players into PvP dynamics. I do apologise for the misunderstanding.

Well yes I do understand your point about not wanting to repeat the quests. On the one hand, they were pretty tortuous the first time around. On the other, they HAVE been considerably improved.

Recently, I spent hours running Jaan just around Aerie chatting up philosophy with the NPCs and have to say, I found it very engaging.

While I think it would be a shame to have players miss out on the revised quest dialogues, the larger concern is really the missed opportunity for feedback. Like... Hey I went ahead and replayed the quests and ended up ripping even more hair out of my head due to XYZ.

Still not entirely sure why a player would feel "dependent" on quest gear, but anyway it's moot since my suggestion was to add an expiry to the quest reset, and not to require that every player take it.

 

Go back and read the OP again. The suggestion wasn't for a mandatory quest reset, rather it was for an expiry on the option to do so.

Assuming you are willing to acknowledge your misapprehension of the OP, I will happily retract my troll comment, with all due apologies.

 

I use the quest gear to grind/mine in 'cause it doesn't break but actually adds some stats. Not having it wouldn't be a catastrophe, but it would be annoying, considering the amount of time I put in to get the stuff, having to do it again. At my current level of progress the experience rewards from the quest are significantly lower than I'd get spending the same amount of time doing anything else. That being said, the option to "someday" revisit it after its all nice and functional is nice to have. I just don't think it will be at that state in a month. I can understand your initial concern about people 'saving the reset' to double-dip the xp, but beyond a certain level, it simply isn't worth it for this purpose.

I'm actually a unique case here in that I do have an alt account that I play/build completely differently, both in combat purposes and for role play purposes.. So I have gotten to experience all the quests twice, the first time shortly after persistence / implementation when doing them was tortuous, and the second time a couple of months ago when things were far more polished. I can see the value in players experiencing the quests after they were much improved, but I still don't feel that the quests/dialogue system/rewards are where they need to be. Pretty much the only ones that I have done are the ones that reward some sort of bauble or deco for my collection of shiny things - the experience/gold bonuses are nearly worthless after adventure level 60 or so (in my opinion) compared to what a player can earn just killing stuff in the same amount of time.