Hi- checking back in

I hear you on this!

 

This thread is the perfect example of what happened with the community relation with this game since day one. Everyone wants their own sota experience. Some came here for all the MMOs features, some just expecting to find an UO2, some still waiting for a vibrant and intesting story (quests), others to play alone online.. and the list goes on endless.

When you design your game to fulfil all possible desires you can expect something like this. Apart from that, many people saying for years the game will die soon, but the game has still the lights on.

Welcome back @Bioxide.

 

Agree wholeheartedly with this.

The lights at the party are on, but the guests never arrived and the only people in attendance are those that rented the hall.

 

Yeah, lights are on like in my $500 PoT of One. Lights on is like saying my building has a door. MMO? Sandbox? Naked Dance Party Simulator? All I know I came to play an "online" game with people and there are NO people here. I giggle every time I head into something like Eve Online and I see somewhere between 20k - 30k players online... all the time. Now even if you tell me it is people with multiple accounts and assumed that everyone had (4) clients open at the same time... that is still 5k - 7.5k people playing.

Regardless of what you expected SotA to be.. it has missed the mark on all expectations. You name a system in this game and I will show you another game that does it better. You say Crafting, I say Eve. You say Housing, I say UO. And so on. I'm not trying to prove other games are better. What I'm hitting on is that the mechanics of these systems have been done before. There are working examples how to create these systems. You can start with them as the base and build on that.

Take vendor sales. We argue like children about how to make selling easier. "Gives us a global method". "Don't do global, make people visit towns". And so on. Look how Eve Online solved this. There is a global market place that you list and buy from. But you have to visit that particular station to get your items. You end up in a situation where you can find things for cheap but they may be far away and risky to get to. This is NOT new, this is something that has been there for quite awhile. So what does SotA, something on its own and inferior. Don't get me started that you can't even sell a "bag" of stuff together.

So Rada, I have a lot of respect for you and your opinion... And yes, the lights are on but very few are home. And if I look at what has been accomplished in 2020 I can say there have been improvements and add-ons but they, let's be honest, Chris, has missed the mark. Loot sucks. < = = = Loot still sucks, after all this time.

And if Elgarion or anyone there thinks I'm being unfair, then please, tell me why. I'm not simply whining, I keep offering criticism and examples of it being done better. I keep beating on the Loot system because Chris himself said that was a major focus for 2020 and what happened... again... And I keep giving this criticism in a non-aggressive, non-threatening manner.

 

... of UO and the Ultima series. The original vision was "selective multiplayer." Play entirely alone offline, solo online, party mode, or go full MMO.

 

I think with enough players and enough devs, it could have worked. Sadly, that's not where we ended up.

Honestly, I would say the game is dead. Regardless of how many people are still playing, there's only a scant handful of devs working on it. New content trickles out at a snail's pace. Maybe I will be wrong, and they are working on a large chunk of ep2 behind the scenes which will all drop at once, but I don't think that's the case. I play (well, played) only a few hours a week, and they still aren't able to put out enough to do to keep me interested. I suppose I could go farm stuff and kill the same bosses over and over every weekend, but it's just dull as sh!# doing that. And even when new stuff comes out, I'm mostly not doing the ep2 stuff, because I'd like to play through it all in one go, not in tiny bits and pieces. At this point, I'm just hoping that when (if) ep2 is completed and given at least some polish, my character won't be so nerfed into oblivion that I can actually play through it.

And while a lot of people seem to take joy in seeing the game die, I don't. I really wish it was super successful and all the devs were happy and making great money and they were hiring more of them. As it is, I'm glad they all have jobs, especially during the pandemic. But without new stuff to do, there's not a lot to keep people here, even if we get new players. And I don't really see a scenario in which Catnip suddenly gets enough regular income to hire more devs and increase output.

I hope I'm wrong; I'd really like to see where the story goes. (Yeah, yeah... cue jokes about "what story?" If this is a five part story, then all we've really gotten was the setup for what's to come. I certainly do wish the implementation of it was better, and featured more world building (I've been pretty critical of both, especially the world building) but I also didn't give up on LotR just because the first four chapters were all about a birthday party.)

 

I didn't know the concept was intended to be "cross-style" so widely.

Expecting a game to do all of that and excel... well... Jack of all trades, master of none...

In the end we have all the experiences except for full MMO because the population is so small and scattered.

 

I believe they said it's intended to be a "spiritual successor to the Ultima series".

 

Or Single Player Online, since we're now forced to see people on the overworld and in towns.

 

https://shroudoftheavatar.net/how-many-people-play-shroud-of-the-avatar

As close as one will get to"real" numbers. Other than that, threads like this are pointless. Everyone plays for different reasons. Load the game up and find out for yourself if you like what you see.

 

Just checked my Steam achievements and it took me 3 full months to join my first party in the game. And I wasn't avoiding it at all. And before you say there's LFG, it's mostly high level stuff and I never saw anything newbie friendly at the time.

Secondly, I highly doubt we have 500+ humans playing SotA every day. I believe roughly half of that is made of alts and people that log in just to check their vendors.

There is, on the other hand, the undeniable number of PVPers. Less than 10 people fighting everyday. This number is concerning to say the least.

 

The people here expected it to be like UO because Richard Garriot sold it as such saying 'you could essentially call it UO2".
He said that in 2012.


#MAKEGUARDSGREATAGAIN

 

You could try starting groups too. Perhaps some newer players would like easier content grouping. Also announce in universal chat since some may not know to check on looking for group. I meant you could create a newbie group yourself.

 

LOL... "Universal Chat"... Sounds so big.

 

The new player downloads the game, start playing the Outskirts without spotting another player until they find Ardoris. There they'll lucklily spot 1 or 2 other players. The game will feel just dead. They'll most likely abandon the game rather than work around its lack of population by crawling into chat and systems just to find someone to play with. I mean, a new player should run across other players in a natural way.

 

Outskirts are multiplayer only areas. Besides that, there isn't anything that we players can do about the low population. If people want to play then they'll play, if they don't then they won't.

 

Yeah and we know the vast majority of the players just won't.
The outskirts being empty is understandable because it's pretty much a tutorial area. The rest of the game being empty is just sad.

 

What about guilds? Why struggle alone if you don't want to. Find out if there's an active guild. Really the game is so spread out it is difficult to know who is where and when. Also use looking for group and universe chat to ask for a group. We do have a couple of tools nowadays which we didn't have in the beginning.

 

Welcome back to SOTA!