Interest is almost extremely low

People who have bought the game can come back and play anytime they want. No one is required to continue playing if they don't enjoy the game. Just check in every month or so, stick around until taste enough changes is fine. That's what I did from 2014 since I pledged the game all the way until Dec 2015, which I considered the game to be at enjoyable state for me.

 

I am one of the Kickstarter supporters. The reasons I supported SotA are:

1. This is an Ultima, Richard Garriott's game. As simple as that. I played from U4, yet U6 was the one, which made me obsessed. I played UO since before the official release, and I didn't like it.
2. A single-player version was promised. More on that below.
3. They promised Linux (!) and Mac versions. This one is obvious.

The reason I wanted a single-player version (online and/or offline) is simple: unlike many people here I have life, family, and a job (no slight is intended). It makes me an unreliable group player: sometimes I play 4 hours straight, sometimes just 1 hour. I can be called back into Real Life (tm) on short notice. Sometimes I cannot play for several days in a row. Usually I cannot schedule a "play" time in my "free" time either, so no teams, and no guilds for me. Please understand: I am not against MMO, I just cannot be effective playing strictly in groups. Nobody will wait for me, and I cannot build my hectic play schedule around an availability of some other people. I tried, and it is like herding cats.

Given the above following things are not necessities for me (but nice to have): PvP, MMO, adventuring in parties, and other group activities. Obviously I am not trying to force people in my mode of thinking/existing, I am totally "for" those things, because many people like games like SotA specifically for their social aspect. I respect and appreciate that. In fact, I think we do not have enough social components in SotA.

But I expect the same respect and appreciation for my position as well. That's why I smile, when I read proclamations like that: "PvP everywhere! full loot!", "no single payer!", "we have to force people to team up! let's make everything hard, even impossible for soloing!", and so on. IMHO, zealots like that are wrong on many levels, even without taking into account my unique situation. But it is not my position to tell Lord British and Darkstarr how to run the show. I just hope they will ignore "radicals", and deliver on the promise.

Ironically, I play mostly MPO --- I like seeing other avatars, and sometimes I can even team up ad-hoc with somebody at the same scene temporarily to work mobs together. Recently the SotA bug forced me to SPO. In both modes I do soloing almost exclusively, so here we go.

 

And this is ultimately the problem with this 'hybrid' game. Attempting to integrate elements of both MMO and Single player RPG generally means compromises on both ends. It's like walking a tight rope, and trying to balance all of it, without falling off. Personally, I would have like to see two separate games come out of this: An MMO and a single player RPG. When the Kickstarter campaign began, I was excited about the idea of an integrated MMO/single player game. But as development progressed, I began to realize just how challenging it is to accomplish something like this. Port is in a position of having to please all parties. Still, I hope that Port can pull this off. I will just sit back and see how this will end.

 

In what ways is this obvious?

We've had Berek confirm before, the steamcharts population is certainly not a very very very small practically insignificant percentage of players. It was actually 60% of players logged in using Steam just after final wipe (July 29).

 

Flesh out a really engaging new player experience with fantastic looking NPC character models, interesting quests, compelling story.

Add a visually interesting UI that is more in line with other RPG games and not an MMO chat box.

More single player only scenes with unique treasures to be found, hidden passages to explore, interesting fights/scripted battled.

 

This pretty much sums it up.

 

The biggest problem with the new player experience is that there is not real tutorials for anyone starting out besides the "tips".

Portalarium under estimates the amount of hand holding and coddling new players need, and needs to make it more of a step by step tutorial with big bright arrows.

For the path of love for example the new player needs to have more guidance starting out and not just dump you into the world when you get off the boat. There needs to be more done to show the player how to mine/gather, swap skill starting in Solace Bridge. And these should not be optional so it can not be skipped. Example: Go here mine iron ore, take it do Soltown with you, give to so and so. You should ask this skill to your bar. Pick up item and sell it to the blacksmith. Ect.

Maybe there could be a short video clip in the "in game" of how to do these basic things so show people, so they don't have to go out and look for information that's hard to find.

Right now people will close the tool tips and never look back then get to Soltown and start asking questions. This will help many people that want to play the game but get frustrated and leave.

 

I'd prefer the player numbers be higher, certainly - because people may be missing out on a really good gaming experience they might enjoy a lot, if they don't at least try out SotA.

The Steam charts, though, need to be approached (as with almost any statistic on the internet) with great caution, they usually do not mean what you might think they mean. For example, in the last couple of minutes, I checked the Steam player number in the last 30 days for three vaguely similar online games - as in they have a world you interact with, characters you develop and so on. The results of those were :

Lotro 723
EVE Online 872
Guild Wars 20

So at 215, you could easily imply SotA is a quarter the size of EVE, a third as popular as Lotro, and ten times more sucessful than Guild Wars - none of which conclusions is even in the same universe as the truth

 

Seems that a lot of SOTA players hates UO (why?) probably young players .. but crowdfunding of SOTA was made by ANCIENT/Veteran players of UO.
the words: ULTIMA SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR vs ULTIMA ONLINE SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR have made a lot of cunfusion ...

PORTALARIUM NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT YOUNG PLAYERS ARE PROBABLY SWITCHING GAME ON NEXT MONTHS...
and UO veterrans.. will DIE (for AGE) on SOTA ... if DEVS starts to modify game to make an UO2.

UO2 CAN BE AN UNIQUE THING... an ONLINE MMORPG IS JUST ANOTHER MOORPG

 

Hey not all of us are UO players, many of us are here from the single player Ultima games. I like the direction SotA is taking, but i am here due to Ultima 7 ^.^

 

As far as I remember something is off with the steam charts.
Can't remember what it was though.

 

I agree.

I have played on UO and Ultima. That are different game.

I have funded because that is Ultima.
If that was also UO direction, I will also funded, but I hop that Shroud of avatar don't go in direction of UO because the target was Ultima and I think the game schema is not executed to have UO (I think in this case theswitch will fails I think).

 

The game is neither the virtual world ultima online was, nor has the deep storyline u7 had... that's why you got hardly a following, decreasing player base and mediocre to bad reviews.

Still lot of work to do to work in both directions. Problem is I see more and more that the high pledges (incl. myself here) are the problem... because what is good for the game could mean our "valuables" would have to be made worthless. I guess we could avoid that by making good sandbox content... but development of that hasn't begun yet and I didn't hear of any concept about it officially.

 

I would like to know which ideas would be good for the game and devalue our 'investment'?

 

Speak hypothetically, let's say that having a water lot is the ultimate life goal of all new players that will make them play the game every single day. So one day Portalarium may figure that they should allow any lot deeds to be water lots to bring many new players into the game. Those who pledges as founders may find that their founder lots become less valuable because now anyone can use any lot deed with appropriate lot size to claim water lots.

In reality, water lot is unlikely gonna be the salvation or the desires of all new players, but you get the gist.

 

For instance all houses and lot should be obtainable by everyone through game mechanics no RMT involved. Next would be that POTs can be obtained and built by guilds rather by people buying them and then they are empty and useless. Not going to happen, but would have been AAA pve content. Not going to happen though so kinda pointless to follow along that road.

 

IMO at least POT lot deeds should be obtainable by everyone. They could make it a challenge to obtain in such way that it could be tough to get in solo, but cooperatively doable via multiple people helping one another.

As far as the POTs, there was a plan to make it obtainable in game, but the current tech is still prohibitive even when people pay real money for it. Once they get to the point where a person can just look at the POT form and click button to create/update/delete a POT within 10 mins (right now it's 1-2 months), then it will be more feasible to consider making POT obtainable in-game. At least the next release we'll get more tools to adjust town crier location, then some blessing later release. So baby steps, I guess.

 

I see.
Well let's not start a discussion about how this game will get founded in the future.

But:

All for it.
Actually advocated for it when the idea for this deeds came up.

 

In fact, in one of the games you had to earn a citizenship via series of quests to prove your worth. It would be nice to see something along these lines implemented in SOTA.

 

this