Free Trial Test: March 3 - 9

@DarkStarr

How come they cannot buy from public vendor or private vendors ... that seems odd.

 

It's a way to launder exploit gold, attracts farmers. Way to circumvent trade restrictions.

 

I say put a level cap and make it permanent.

 

maybe level 20... upgrade to remove the limit

 

What? I'm now a visitor? LOL

 

Aren't we all just visitors to our virtual worlds?

 

Could be used for botting non the less.
But if the character can't trade it would be worthless of course.

 

True worthless, except for people wanting to try the game and not sure if they want to comit. Kinda the point really right?

 

=/
Someone asked how the PVP was on SOTA, and if it was worth downloading the free trial at this point.
They got responded to and told * PVP wont be enjoyable for you during the free trial, as you will need to spend the time to grind up the skills and character before you can compete competitively, so don't try the free trial if its only for the PVP aspect. *
Question and reply are deleted.

Why even have a FB page... =/


RECOMMENDATION @Berek

While i think any cap on levels for a free trial doesnt really make sense ( honestly if i put in X amount of time in that week, and am MORE devoted, im more likely to buy the game) Capping it doesnt make sense to me, especially since 1 week isnt going to get you very far.

I highly recommend you guys are open and maybe even mention that the PVP is on a competitive level that unfortunately takes a lot of time and work to master ? ( Maybe this will avoid anyone thinking they can login and jump right into PVP, which is a HUGE reason a lot of people play games) So instead of letting people download, and learn this the hard way.. Maybe be up front about it so they can kinda look at it and figure what and how they would devlope a character for it. This might prevent leaving a bitter taste in peoples mouths about SOTA, and could lead to a slightly better positive outcome from this trial run.

 

Free trial/new account abuse was big in FFXI. The worst was using them for tell-spam to advertise gold sellers, naturally done via external software to download a list of characters and automatically send to everybody.

Another time, a loophole was found in gardening where something made money selling to NPC vendors, and there was almost a literal ant trail to the NPC vendor nearest to housing. (Not that I didn't make some nice gold selling the crystals they needed and were happily paying ten times the usual price for. It's legit!) They fixed that one by preventing multiple drops for new characters.

If someone goes in with a friend, they can at least know that they are at roughly the same level.

 

Can you please PM me with the concern from the first part of your post. I'm not sure what you are referring too here.

 

dunno... I spend too much time everyday in New Britannia... it feels like I'm a visitor in the Real World instead... LOL

 

I just loaded R39 and I think you guys should hold off a bit before inviting any users in for a free trial, test or not. :/

 

to @Portalarium just curious... what are you guys going to do to simmer down the current hate that seems to surround the game, SotA, in various gaming communities?

 

I hope the answer to this is * make a guild and guild alliance wars mechanic involving the capture and defense of keeps over weeks, so epic and on such a scale it makes everything else not matter *
Id be so happy.
Sorry, i am actually curious about your question aswell.
+1

 

The best they can do is ignoring the ****storm!

1. It's a great game.

2. Hate and rant are not constructive and can be argued , but why or how argue against haters? No chance!
Go on developing, uncloning, tweaking and balancing -> 1

3. Trial is a good way to introduce the game to new people.

 

Yes, I read through some pages that advertised the free trial... Most of the comments are very... discouraging...

Also I think it is interesting to see that people still want another single-player Ultima and expected SotA to be one (including me)...

 

The free trial idea is not bad in itself but I don't think SOTA was really ready for this. Developper's point of view may be very different from many player's one. People often report excessive developpment time and very incomplete game despite the 11 millions dollars budget because they probably have no idea how such a project is managed.

I don't know much about game development myself, but the comparison with what is developed elsewhere is rather telling : in the field of sand boxes multiplayer games with story telling, we could mention TESO (20 times more budget, 7 years of development time), Black desert online (6 times more people working on the game currently, six years of development), Guild wars 2 (five years of development at least, unknown budget but probably tens of millions) and so on... Many games that have something in common with SOTA (in terms of gameplay, I mean) have been created with incomparably larger ressources and more time.

In the end there are many frustrated people who believed that a team of 30 people could create a video game monument in a couple of years with two millions. It is possible that Portalarium bears some responsibility for this because of communication errors, I don't know. But we cannot seriously say they are greedy. They do what they can to optimize their income/spending rate.

The biggest mistake they make in my opinion is to show their game at some point rather than its evolution over time. The game has changed a lot since the kickstarter campaign and it will change even more until the release. Now the free trial has probably not been set up to advertise the game to the public, as @DarkStarr said, but for the trial system to be up and running in the future.

On the other hand, I read much more constructive criticism about this trial too. For example, the lot deed raffle and the tax rate are probably one of the worst barriers for young Novians who are interested in housing (and there are many while many cities looks empty). I hope house renting will adress this but I can't say for sure.
Add-ons store should also be totally closed for the "visitors" who should not be able to buy anything without owning a copy of the game (except for the bundles of course). It's a question of image : Portalarium should not give the impression of unnecessarily prioritizing its store, even if, of course, it's a good source of income.
Another area of concern is the death decay. Visitors will not have experienced its devastating effects for casual players. When one plays one or two hours every 24 hours, death feels very punitive, the way it is now.

 

@DarkStarr can you show us how this impacted player count numbers over the weekend?!

 

Well imo perhaps the starter area is not quite ready for prime time, but I could be wrong. How about letting the new players get a little taste of how to fish, how to recall, how to harvest, how to craft, how to deco by having quests that have them do those things. There could be a house in the starting area that needs fixed up for some reason and trial people can go and place items for an npc. I am not sure how it all would work but tutor things that prepare them for the world they will be entering. So just some thoughts and I only know from a few months ago a friend tried to come back to the game and was very frustrated, so things may have changed since then.