Done with SOTA for now

Pretty much r33 in a nutshell.

Tuning rent towards coto sales.
Punishing skill advancement
Hidden mechanics like increased skull gains on large pool xp
Unbalanced crafting requirements
Cloned city layouts where only the frills will be 'uncloned'

Forget the financial cost, the time cost the game demands are out of proportion to what they offer

 

Are we playing different games? what bills are you referring to?

 

The 3500gp burden placed on my $100 purchase

 

I don't see it as a burden but oh well if it was just that then i guess we just completely disagree on this matter.

 

Lol, no I don't, but I suppose that may be just too much to ask .

 

Out of curiosity I have to ask: do you have a 3500 gold per day tax on any of your properties you've been having to pay? I don't have any taxes on my properties, but as things currently stand, 3500gp/day would feel like a job that needed to be performed each day. I have the time to accomplish this, even though I work full time, but it would affect me negatively emotionally to HAVE to do this to keep my property placed.

 

How do you feel it benefits the game? I don't play sota exclusively so it's frustrating that the first two hours per week don't create any new opportunities. They just maintain equilibrium. This is particularly galling when it is a result of an addon purchase

If i was to return to the game in its current state i'd be obliged to do the worst, mindless content in the game for two hours every week before i even think of doing any exploring, crafting or such.

 

Paying taxes is a bit of a burden to me, too. I am only lvl 33ish and because I didn't sank my teeth deep into previous releases, I don't know the best grinding spots for gold (if there are any). At least I am not burned out yet, either!
Currently I make around 1000-1500 gold an hour. I'd like to spend that on recipes instead to improve my armor or make nice furniture, but it needs to go towards rent - and I have to repair my armor also. I don't know, that bugs me a bit, because some days I just can't spent so much time in game but the rent ticks away anyway, if I am logged in or not.

I know that open world (more or less) housing should cost money. But since people don't have alternatives like cheap instanced housing (maybe a room in the taverns) it definitely feels like a burden right now, yeah.

 

I suppose I will be in the minority on this, but I think the current pricing for rent on lot deeds is too high and should be the price weekly, not daily. This gives people time to go out and do things they'd rather do than grinding for rent constantly. I also think if you paid RL money in the add-on store for a deed it should come at 50% off rent prices. It's suppose to be a game not a second job.

Instead of daily make it---------------------- Weekly

• Row: 500 gold per day // Row: 500 gold per week
• Village: 1000 gold per day // Village: 1000 gold per week
• Town: 2000 gold per day // Town: 2000 gold per week
• City: 3500 gold per day // City: 3500 gold per week

 

I was flagged open pvp for almost two weeks in that time I saw maybe one or two "reds" and they didn't even attack. Pvp in sota is a dream unless you wNt to tournament

 

I think you meant "weekly" in the weekly column. But I'm not sure you're in the minority. I've dropped a chunk of change on this game and don't HAVE to suffer these taxes if I don't desire, but I know that if all of us with tax free lot just sit on our high horses and simply let the newer players suffer the consequences, we won't have many new players that stick around. We don't have enough players right now to fill the lots currently available... As the demand for lots increases and the availability decreases then sure, start inching up the taxes, but I simply don't see a logical reason for charging this much right now or anytime in the near future, especially considering that the game is nowhere near Episode 1 Complete.

 

Aye, I fixed it

 

I have been there. Its hard for me to keep playing right now since weapons don't even work correctly.

 

I would rather wait until the game is more complete. Part of what makes games like this great is having a character too weak to achieve a goal and building that character. I really liked Nighshade Pass and that troll at the bottom. I sorta wish that troll blocked my path up to the Hilt Fortress and I had to advance enough so I could take on the troll. In fact I wish death had more consequences and you could not just die and run to the other side and resurrect and you also did a lot more to avoid death due to the consequences (e.g. if death had more consequences then rescuing a NPC from a burning house where you might die would actually be something worth debating rather than just doing it to get XP)

But in this early release state of SOTA you mostly just grind and many are already building up to GM (Where to level grind now? (after deep ravenswood, and before the rise)).

I think the quests will be less interesting if you have a superman character by the time more of the quests are developed. But then again, I'm highly skeptical the quests and story will ever be that compelling anyway. Spending lots of time just to level up and get rare items in a uninteresting virtual world does not sound that much fun. I'll wait and see but I am even more skeptical now than I was during the Kickstarter campaign.

 

It was announced way way back that owning a house would cost and not for the faint of heart, I liked the sound of that and decided to pledge.
Secondly I have gone out to farm gold maybe once or twice for 30 minute sessions rest of my gold comes from exploring adventuring with my friends and selling some gear. Oh I'll admit a few COTO's by now and no I really didn't have to sell them to get gold..

 

@Ice Queen you are definitely NOT in the minority and are absolutely right, those numbers should be weekly prices and not daily. I bought an extra row and village lot deed ages ago. I can't place that village lot yet because i cant afford it. The only saving grace is having that darn royal scepter which i selfishly use to cut my own row lot taxes in half with.

I would be furious if i had bought a city lot deed right now (not that i'm not already salty as hell) . That deed was/is around $1,000 in the add-on store and now it costs 3.5k in gold, EVERY DAY, to maintain. That is just plain terrible...and what makes it worse (IMHO) is that one coto is EXACTLY 3.5k in tax credits. Isn't that a remarkable coincidence? So I either fork out a coto a day to pay my taxes or play all day to make it up in gold. It's just ludicrous!

Lets walk through this one step further...Lets say i have a village deed that i bought in the add-on store awhile back. I start playing the game in R33 as a mage. Here are the options available to me if I want to use that deed:

1) Buy cotos in the add-on store to support a product i already paid for.
2) Try to grind for loot, only to realize that the little bit of gold you made has to pay for reagants and repairs.
3) Trade mats for cotos. This is probably your best bet under this scenario, but now I am no longer an adventuring wizard. I am a miner/lumberjack/trapper, which would be fine if I actually wanted to do this with my game time.
4) Sell mats for gold. Almost pointless in this economy since I can get a better return trading the mats for cotos.

Is this a joke? What about any of that is fun, or even easy to figure out, especially as a new player. Man, I am sorry to be venting team but I feel like im taking crazy pills!!!!

 

Can you refer me to the 'not for feint of heart'?

I purchased in a release where the rent was obtainable of one run through a scene that had humanoids. It was achievable 'on the way' to doing other content, not something that was an active content blockade. There was also no warning on the purchase that they intended to create a 2 hour grind to maintain it.

Also, I am still more interested in what benefits the excessive rent brings to the game. Many people are expressing dissatisfaction ands the replys are always in the veins of 'you should have to earn a house'.

That's all well and good, but when balancing against negative play experiences, concrete examples of how this improves the game would go a long way to convincing us this decision was fair.

Ice Queen captures well what the expectation for rent was for sub citizen pledges.

 

Well if we dumb the game down to the lowest casual, a lot of other guys will leave as well. Taxes need to be set at some level.

Having persistence and so on, you will only see minor changes to this. I suggest to wait until the game is more balanced and play sth else more suited to your liking.
I am sure SotA will get there at some point, as from my perspective all the housing etc is more or less a way to make money with cosmetics, less a part of the gameplay.

So within a normal subscription fee you should easily be able to maintain a house in a reasonable size already.

 

Thankfully, I don't have any deeds that aren't rent free, but I sympathize with those that do and will have them.

I'm still trying to understand why these prices aren't weekly. Price per coto to gold it only makes sense that this is for increasing purchases of coto's from the add-on store for convenience as you say. I know they gotta make money, but I feel the coto's should be more for potions/skins and things of that nature, people will still buy them for convenience.

If I hadn't seen Chris post in another thread that the prices are intended, I would have thought it had to be a mistake somehow.

"At 3k/hour, we're just over our target of 1 hour for 1 week for a row lot. I believe that the fix is not to lower tax rates but to fix earn vs spend so that an moderately skilled player can make enough to pay for the current tax rate. As always, working on it. We've been hammering out many of the high points without lifting of the low points in terms of earn but we'll get back to balancing out the middle and bottom end of the gold earn methods.."
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...n-regards-to-housing.60124/page-5#post-638481

In other games I've played I know of people that only get to play a couple of hours a week, and expect that would be no different for this game. If housing wasn't such a huge part of this game it wouldn't be as big of an issue I guess. I'd still think rent is too high though. Before someone says you don't have to have a house, that's true, but housing is the #1 most fleshed out feature in the game and is a big selling point and is one of the biggest reasons people pledged so high for pledges for rent free deeds, so the pricing on the non-rent free deeds need to cost something but really shouldn't cost someone a dollar a day in the worse case scenario for city lot...that's $365 dollars a year if paid with real money....that's a lot of money to most people. I think things like this puts the game at a disadvantage and moves it more towards being a niche game that only people with money can afford to play, and even that won't be sustainable long term. I'd really like to see a bigger push for thinking of the more casual people as well as the rest of us and filling up this world they're building for us all, and see it do well for years to come.
Hopefully, adjustments will be made more in the right direction for you guys with rent deeds and get more reasonable.

 

@Ice Queen shall i give you my taxable village deed so you can feel the joy of "gaming for taxes" lol?

P.S. We miss you in Brittany Estates