Free Trial Users Feedback Copy / as they can´t post it

Yes, I can understand this. I in no way want to demean any feedback. I agree many people here on these forums are in denial and are blinded by emotion instead of fact. My post was addressing just this, the elephant in the room. If you look at all the replies on those sites, there are only a couple positive ones. I just wanted to explore why most are negative. Why so much hate from them and maybe gain perspectives for the devs to read. No Ill will toward anyone just a sense of understanding.

 

I don't see any real feedback that hasn't been given before. The only things that really need to happen are:

1. Provide a sub-forum for feedback in the New Player Welcome forum, which is open to the public. In Trial mode, open /bug or /feedback to this forum.
   
   
2. Provide anyone who signs up for the free trial during early access with a voucher to get a small ($5) discount if they purchase a bundle. Its not Steam pricing, but at least they get something.
   
   
3. Rework the Add-On Store. Honestly, if its available in-game for CotOs, it no longer has any business in the Add-On Store. Move CotOs (premium currency) and current specials to the first tab and add a "New" tab to show items that are available temporarily until they are available in-game. Once they are available for CotOs, remove them from the Add-On Store.

Those three things would remove a huge amount of the criticism I've seen leveraged through this process so far.

 

It's a trial run for trial play. They need to make sure it will work when they need it to work.

It seems like at least half of those comments that were re-posted were by people who apparently bailed because they saw just one thing that they didn't like:

EWWWW it's not 4K 60fps graphics!
EWWWW they sell armor in the online store! (never mind that the armor is just for looks and won't give much bonus, the only advantage is just that it won't decay)
EWWWW it crashed after I created a character (yeah, that one is valid, The Mirror is still listed as a known problem, and then there's the AMD A8 graphics problem)
EWWWW it didn't hand-hold me with more popups!
EWWWW no HUD map! (there is one, but it's based on having the right item for the current scene, and most scenes don't have one)
EWWWW it's so empty / there isn't enough content! (construction area, bro)

That touches on one of my pet peeves, the event loop which only processes one UI event per GPU frame, and doesn't keep track of mouse coordinates with the UI events. (click and drag quickly with low FPS, and it will try to start dragging from where your mouse is half a second later, and forget about double-clicking on anything at low FPS) This is stuff that was figured out by 1984 during development of the original Macintosh at Apple. It is also something that honestly shouldn't be fixed while they've still got Episode 1 content to work on.

I'm not gonna blame anyone for not liking the deck system though. I really don't like it myself (I enjoyed not only having 20 spell/action macros but also being able to CLI any spell I wanted in FFXI. By the time a spell finished, I would even have the next one typed in), but it is possible to play with a bar full of locked glyphs. And even more so now than in the past because they finally dialed down the extreme warmup delay for locked glyphs. But I still haven't figured out stacking yet.

But what I really miss is playing with a joypad and only using the keyboard for chat and CLI. It's just too easy to hit the wrong key when the whole keyboard is a game controller.

That warmup delay on locked glyphs was a big "encouragement" for people to use the deck system, making people go out of their way to figure the deck system out. I managed to go six months without it, but that was when focus recovery in combat mode was still very high. The new lower focus recovery likewise "encourages" you to sheathe your weapon to recover faster, so it's good that locked glyphs aren't so harsh now.


Anyhow, I think some of these negative reviews come from the mainstream Steam attitude, play a game quickly and move on to another one. (It's also that people would rather take their time to gripe than to praise.) But hardcore games that make you take time to learn how to play mean you can't quickly move on to the next game. As an example, a friend of mine has an old SotA account and doesn't play (yet), but he's always got a list of upcoming games he wants to play when they get released.

At least slash vee slash (you either know my reference or you don't) still hasn't discovered SotA yet.

 

If they liked it, they would be playing instead of griping. Ever notice how quiet the dinner table is when the food is good?

A8 graphics is their integrated graphics, right? Like Intel's HD3000/HD4000? Even if it worked, they would probably not get a decent frame rate anyhow.

 

That really does not address the question, but yes when the food is good no one talks. In this case there is a lot of bad food I guess.

 

Wow, Great feedback in here!
We have not been ignoring y'all, we always do listen, even if we may feel we can fix things along the way as we tackle other problems.
Y'all make some great points about combat, bars, convos, quests and maps.
This is the time (when we finally have most major systems at least present, that we circle back and see how it all hangs together.
Its never surprising to me when there are some rough spots and some wholesale misses.
That's the nature of Product Development.
Again thanks for the frank thoughts. We will noodle on ideas to address these.
- Richard

 

Don't do that. I'm a new player and I like the deck combat system. My only complaint is the finger gymnastics I have to do sometimes to combine glyphs. If you can find a way to make combining glyphs into combos not require longer fingers, I'd be happy

 

The glyph based combat system, as I love, is not really implemented ergonomically. The straight 'bar' representation is little bit distracting and the stacking implementation unfortunately as well. As for the stacking, it might be actually simplified. I'd love to have an option to use a simplified stacking: instead of being forced to identify a source and a target it would suit me a command stack_on_position N, which would take automatically an available glyph from another position and stack it to the same type glyph to a position N.

 

If posting a review on Steam counts as a Ideal opinion of the game then we are all in for a long wait for people to be happy with Sota. I think sometime around hell freezing over should do fine check back then. I posted a positive review and was told in no uncertain terms I have no idea what I'm talking about. That's the kinder version without a doubt. Opinions are like well you know everyone has one. I just don't get the endless rage and trolling of the game if you don't like it don't play and go away. Why do so many people even here spend time returning to the forums to rage even though I DON'T PLAY ANYMORE is listed in their complaints. You don't play, you feel cheated or mislead. Great we understand somewhere in the veiled recesses of our minds we care and wish you well. With that being said, if you have made your peace once and expressed your disdain for the game why do you keep returning? They seem to have a battered player syndrome and need someone who plays to care. Well we play cause we care if you don't why should be care? I like SOTA a lot and maybe as a new player I'm playing at a bias since I wasn't here for the bad times. The game I am playing has its faults but is really getting there and is enjoyable.

 

I have very few complaints about the deck system. For the most part, I love it. With how its set up, you can easily make each type of glyph sort into the slots you want, manage them efficiently, and lock what you need to have available. And, I love the concept of Spellweaving/combos. However, I have one major issue with it.

I hate stacking glyphs.

Strange, because I like combos, but I think stacking is basically the opposite of that. Combos are a way to weave abilities together into something new, while stacking just makes the basic stuff cheaper/more powerful. Thats what skill advancement should do, not combos. Plus, it just ends up with players 5-stacking some insane ability to one-shot something. Boring. Instead, make all abilities about 20% stronger to compensate, remove stacking and replace it with combining two of the same ability into a new combo.

Beyond that, I wish there were more abilities in each magic school, or combos of non-combat spells, that would allow you to have a range of out-of-combat application. Right now, its movement or vision. Where are the Electrical Field, Unlock Magic, or even Telekinesis (the closest is Gust!)? those kinds of things would draw users who want to experiment, play in the sandbox, but who don't care about killing everything. Hopefully they come, but I dont see it in the short term.

 

agreed with the combos... combos should work like combos and not like stacking... executing a skill then followed by another skill will then make the Avatar do a special move of somekind... that's how I see combos should work... @Chris @DarkStarr

 

I play with the chat box center bottom and the combat bar on top of that, zoomed out a bit to not obstruct the character with the interface. Playing this way, the rotating glyphs are always near eye level with the character action and I have no issues feeling like looking at the glyphs takes away from the game since I did that. Just a tip. I'm sure not everyone will like it.

 

I've used the deck system for a long time now and I like it a lot. I only have two complaints with it right now: the cooldown for unlocked glyphs is too long and I want to be able to use the extra buttons on my mouse for movement (it's very difficult to move and use the number keys at the same time) but the game does not treat those buttons the same as keys. If I map one to say move right then when I press it I only do a little nudge to the right.

 

The problem is that not everyone has a screen large enough to make that work. On a 1280x800 screen (13 inch laptop, barely playable on integrated GPU), the combat bar is XBOX HUEG.

 

This i would like to see also ...

 

Got my son to give it a try, so he jumped out of his WoW raid team Discord to humor me.

He was a little bemused with getting into the game from the oracle and navigating through blood river. I helped him a little, but its been so long.

Got him into east perennial trail and later west perennial trail and after a short period of struggle, he seemed to enjoy the combat asking a few questions along the way.

His general feedback was: graphics are mediocre, the deck takes some getting use to and he continuously harped on "Where are all the other people?" That seemed to bother him the most. He found the overland map concept a little strange, but not a killer. He found the zones small (i personally agree that the zones, at least some of them, need to be much bigger).

In summary, he's enjoying WoW and likes ESO. He probably wont join this game and thats ok. At the same time, he didnt use all the immature, biased language that infects so many posts in Steam. He's not the sort to not to speak his mind and he stated clearly that he can tell the game's not complete and needs a lot of work. He appreciated that this is something different and he would follow just because he's curious to see how it develops

 

Specific details about game mechanics are not particularly important, provided a few simple requirements are satisfied. In order to really enjoy a game, the player should ideally:
- See some indication at regular intervals that he or she is making significant progress. [1]
- Be entertained, whether that is through quests, unexpected discoveries, great scene design or some other means.
- Have their base instincts catered to, whether that is greed (e.g. loot) [2], ego (e.g. the opportunity to demonstrate one's superiority over others) [3], or some other characteristic.
- Have agency. [4]
- Have an outlet for their own creativity. [5]

SotA achieves some but not all of that. A lot can be learned from approaches taken by other games. For example I love the level design in The Forest, the suspense leading up to each Blood Moon in 7 Days to Die, the amount and variety of loot in Grim Dawn and the ability to be both architect and builder in The Forest and 7 Days to Die.

[1] For those beyond beginner adventurer levels, there is little in SotA to indicate progression. Suggestion: perhaps if each scene had some kind of special non-transferable loot item that, when combined with all the other such special loot items in a region created some kind of honorific or award. That should give people the incentive to tackle every scene, and give them a feeling of progress as they gained each item. I fondly recall the hat quests, so something along those lines (but with the difficulty ramped up, and not about hats) might work.

[2] Compared to other games like Grim Dawn, loot drops in SotA are extremely meagre and lack variety.

[3] PVP, without hard caps, is a permanently uneven playing field, and new players may feel that they can never catch up.

[4] What is player agency?

1. The player has control over their own character's decisions.
2. Those decisions have consequences within the game world.
3. The player has enough information to anticipate what those consequences might be before making them.

[5] Examples: Players can create their own buildings and defences in popular new games like The Forest and 7 Days to Die. SotA does not have that, but on the other hand it allows players to write books and distribute them in game, put on plays, etc.

 

I've been thinking about it, and I realized that part of my enjoyment of the game comes from discovering things about the game itself. Not just "how does this work", but second-order things like how to make various character builds, which are not explicitly in the rules, but derive as a result from the rules. You get to experiment with stuff that people are still learning what can be done with it. So it's not just about discovering the world as built, it's discovering what you can do with the world. I guess that's the sandbox thing.

And also things that are unintentional challenges, like finding garlic plants. There's nothing saying you have to know where any of them are, but they can be very hard to find, and have a few specific locations where they will appear. You can even record their locations for geotagging and share with others. (that ability will probably remain, since Richard likes geocaching)

 

+1
Using just a keyboard and mouse and not using macros puts me at a significant speed disadvantage while in combat - any options to make glyph stacking more flexible and ergonomic would be fantastic.