MMORPG SotA Column: Concerns Worthy of Note

obviously you're missing the point / and again / if you knew me in real life you would know that "those" are not my intentions

plus - I don't think the dev's need any one to protect them / their ideas / or their goals ... they are a big boys and girls and they can speak for themselves

good night adamhimself - hope to see you in game sometime

 

I said I wasn't really doing that. It was a funny joke because of that.

 

Doing the right thing shouldn't depend on satisfying the whims of the majority. Polls are also a highly flawed gauge of opinion.

 

I'm curious why you are here on the forums? I know you're not trolling because that's against the forum rules. You must have some other goal in mind, what could it be?

 

So that doesn't make you happy? It's pretty much all I can do. I'm trying to help here and you still seem mad.

 

What destroyed the sense I was in the real world, was I got tired of never being able to get a larger house in UO without buying one on Ebay even though I had in-game gold. And now they've bypassed Ebay and created inequality in the game before the game is even released. Now you have to pay them for a house (or wait on the promise that you will be able to buy one in-game with gold). The very thing that made me quit UO is what they've used as a strategy for SotA to get development revenue.

I got tired of seeing neon blue or pink hair, or aquariums or big screen TVs made out of bolts of cloth, in a medieval world. And now we have a Tesla tower that breaks immersion for me from the style of the rest of the city.

Now we have no ability to build our own house design, when it gave me some of the most happy and memorable times in UO. I had neighbors with god-awful ugly homes. But it didn't ruin my game. Now I see boxy homes with too much linear lines that look like American tract homes, with no ability to change in SotA.

I got tired of them making rare or hard to obtain items in PvP dungeons only, or mining resources where you got double the amount just to get people into PvP areas. And now they'vre designing the same thing for SotA.

You can say, oh, you can bypass all that by buying from others or earning it in the game. I have no problem earning things in a game, taking the time to do it, reading text and dialogs, and all the rest. I'm not, and never have been a power gamer. You can't have a 10 year subscription to a game and say you're a power gamer. Power gamers have no patience. They want it all now, in a couple months time, then they get bored and move on.

The game concepts are not balanced to me, and that's what has discouraged me from investing more in the game.

 

I'm not sure how you can tell I'm mad. I'm not. Emotion is not conveyed well through text.

I've said my piece. I highly doubt the dev+ section will ever be closed since SotA's resident aristocrats will huff and puff over it. Sad.

 

For getting my input on how to do things better one can pay my consulting rate of 250$ an hour.
For free I generally only rant or talk about physics. Well unless I have a good day =)

 

I'm glad you're not mad about it then. You're sad about it. Well I've done all I can to help. Have a good day.

 

I'm going to wait for your Kickstarter!

 

You really shouldn't be trying to tone police. My "sad" comment was not referring to my mood, and neither does my mood have any bearing on the discussion.

 

I too have been trying to say this for a long time. Everyone is important. Everyone's opinion matters.

 

That's exactly what Drocis and I are talking about, though.

I agree with you on housing in UO -- all I can say is that I hope the devs keep their promise that there will always be housing available for those who want to buy it with in-game currency. At least in SoTA, there's the potential to do that. Because of the dual-scale map, they always have the potential to expand housing around cities; they just expand the city scene. In UO, they couldn't do that.. they would have had to form another shard to allow more housing.

I don't want to restrict people's freedom to do whatever they want in the sandbox, I just want the sandbox environment to be built on rules that make sense for role-playing. Ie. if you want neon-tiles, good luck searching to the ends of the earth for neon-colored dye.

And what Drocis is saying is: no, the game shouldn't be designed for power gamers who have no patience. :>

 

Maybe I just misunderstood this role playing thing and am role playing a forum troll

Naw, that's not it, I am always very critical as picking apart stuff is my job.
I buy about 20 indie games a year and usually only play 2-3. I do it to support independent developers but I only play the best of them. I got my moneys worth out of the behind the scenes look and could care less about if I will like the game. I will be be positively surprised if I do =). I pledged to witness the development, not necessarily to play.

 

You forget about an important point though. You are most certainly correct that, if used just like the boring NPC conversation in other games you mentioned, there is no difference and the system is only a bad GUI design.
If (and I most certainly hope this is going to be the case here!) you use the benefits such a system offers, you can gain very nice additional functionality!
In a multiple choice environment, I am never going to have to think up own ideas. Everything is handed to me. But what if not all the keywords are stated by the NPC?
Let's say your NPC has a problem and requests your help. The NPC offers you a 'tivial solution', such as retrieving an item from somewhere, so the NPC can then use the item to solve it's problem. What if you had a different idea and suggested to solve the problem for the NPC in a way the conversation did not hint at, but that seems logic to you? It's somewhat like with an 'adventure point&click game'. If you are handed a multiple choice option for every possible interaction any time you enter a specific scenario, you effectively 'dumb down' the game to an interactive movie. There's no longer any puzzle you'd have to solve with your own brain.

 

I think you're giving the AI and game mechanics way too much credit to be remotely realistic here. Why is Portalarium going to waste development time coming up with a series of ways to finish quests and then not make them immediately obvious? Huge waste of time and money for the benefit of only a handful of people.

 

I was going to continue the conversation, but it appears that there really isn't one going on, just people presenting logical rebuttals and counter-points to a few others who are doing their damnedest not to hear.

So on that note, I'm off to read other threads that might actually turn out to have some value in the long run... enjoy!

 

"the only real gripe I personally have with the new project is the decision to use skill-trees over a skill-based system."

I agree with this entirely. I loved the use to gain skill based system of UO and that was a staple for me. Not having it in the game makes me sad.

 

As far as the implementation goes agree with that. However, my favorite pen and paper game knows no classes, no "professions", no levels and still allows people to customize their characters in a tree-based system.
It works by awarding points for what people do and then allowing them to spent them in related areas. As an example if you use a skill that requires a lot of strength you can use it for any other skill that is strength related. The beauty of the system is that while every character starts out the same (up to appearance) by the time people have played a few hours they are quite different.

 

Because this is a roleplaying game? Seriously...do you want everything presented to you with no thought involved? I know this is a stable of MMO's in general, but come on.