My first five minutes in R31

sota-build-r31-feedback
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• white screen, client is "not responding" after launch, after patching.
• no appearance after creation. dead on arrival, literally. I'm a ghost on the isle of storms. Alrighty then, why? I can barely see my body, I thought it was broken and was waiting on the server to spawn me.
  
• GPU load on arrival in world is 100% (settings: Fastest)
• default controls are cumbersome and counter intuitive, as usual.
  
• watcher says "avatar: recording" ? why?
• watchers slow me down while I'm a ghost on the isle of storms. why?
• the back of the magic mirror is blinding white (broken texture?)
• no face choices in magic mirror? what about eyebrows? skin texture? age? Everyone has the same eyebrows and face? hm.
  
• why do we have the pvp "beaming in from the starship enterprise effect" still showing? If it's not a pvp zone, turn that off.
• If you press escape at the "Play" screen, you can bring up the other "Play Online" normal menu, but it covers over the normal screen. It's just very cluttered this way.
• Magic mirror is limited to one change of appearance? Why? Why not let the user change it as many times as they would like before they leave the isle for the first time? If I have to recreate my character to see different looks, the mirror is pointless.
• I'm constantly spammed with: "The lunar rift Arabella spoke of is at the top of the nearby hill" and "As a point of interest, the rift now appears on your compass as well" constantly. It never stops. It's just one after the other, always there.
• When talking with Charlotte Gray, she ignores my attempts to tell her my name:
  ... who are you?
  agra
  if you say so
  i am agra
  Hmm.
  my name is agra.
  Hmm.
  (yeah)
• tried to say 'no' to helping her, she ignores my response. Why is the conversation system different in R31? This worked in R30.
• I have to restart the conversation so many times... and the NPC ignores every previous response. They don't know who I am, they don't know what we talked about previously. Annoying.
• after I say no, she acts like we've never spoken, and now won't accept my name. argh!
• Uh... ok, then it started working? what the hell?
• ok, so.. i can change my response from no to yes, but I have to answer the questions in less than a second? What kind of race condition is this?
• oh, and solace bridge is trying to melt my GPU. performance is 100% on the GPU (6950 or gtx 970, same issue), with no let up, on 'Fastest'. Far worse than the isle of storms, which at least varied after you started moving around.
• if you take any fire damage, you die in three ticks from the burning DoT? That's .. well, it's a tad harsh for the first scene in the game. Also, the source of the damage isn't enumerated in the log, it just says "Player takes xx points of damage" not "Player takes xx points of fire damage from Burning", which it should.
• standing next to the ankh does not resurrect you. You have to touch it. Ok, but it makes it seem like it's not working, given the resurrection description text.
• After I died, the unsent letter, inkwell and quill and other placeable items have all respawned.
• After I died, and I go back to where charlotte is, it says she's following me and to keep her safe, when she's nowhere to be found.
• AFter I died, fire damage is only 10 per tick. before I died, it was up to 50 per tick? no... it.. varies by the fire? some fire is deadly, some isn't... ok??
• Eeesh, can we turn down the particle effects on Healing Touch? I'm not a 100th level cleric here. I'm just healing 9 points of health on myself. And what's with the huge icons when casting? Can we please have an option to turn off the 2 meter wide huge icons above our heads every time we use a glyph or spell?
  
• Again, why do I have the "beaming in from the starship enterprise effect" after I resurrect in a single-player non-pvp scene?
• the lovely green lush perfectly happy house plants seem a bit out of place in a village being burned to the ground
• You have to work at it, but you can die from burning damage inside the small closet in the landing just below Charlotte with the door closed so that while dead you can't reach the Ankh. This creates an exciting 5 minute wait while you do nothing.
• Trying to leave the first area in the solace bridge scene, it says "This gate needs a key to use the switch. Double click the guard's body to see if he has the key" I check the body, there's no key. There's only one body in the scene. Now I can't proceed?
• Instead I just went up the NW stairway, through the door, and bypassed the key and gate completely.
• Can't use the bow.. I have no arrows, but it doesn't tell me that. it just says "ready your weapon" and nothing happens. Can't find any arrows to use?
  
• targeting with 'g' shows targets on everything? Ok.. so with target reticles on everything, i can't tell what i'm attacking.. holy crap why is this so hard to get right?
• Ok, so I attack some undead with searing ray, and they just stand there? They don't fight back.
• the ground targeting reticle for fireball, when you move to the edge of range, puts the reticle up in the sky. If you cast when it's like this, it casts a fireball at the sky. (!?)
• without a hard target, but with a reticle showing, and casting searing ray, the more distant zombie is targeted, not the closest. smh.
• using the keyboard, you can't adjust the camera zoom distance back from the character. pg-up is completely zoomed forward, pg-down is completely zoomed back. With the scrollwheel, you can adjust it to whatever distance you want, but not with the keyboard. Argh.
  
• Also, zooming up is instant/jarring. zooming back is smooth and fluid (using either keyboard or scrollwheel)
• When initially casting, there's a few seconds of rendering frame-freeze, for some reason, now. This is new, didn't happen in R30.
• even with a hard target, there is no indication of out-of-range on spells or combat glyphs. It will happily cast even if it's out of range. furthermore, it will consume focus, too, and do absolutely nothing, and give no indication there's a problem.
• Ok, you need to let the player turn off HDR/Bloom or whatever other insane post-processing you forced-on in R31. Everything looks blurry, glowing, indistinct, and it's negatively affecting performance. (overland map) All those options are turned off in video options, yet in R31, they're all forced on, apparently, now? Why have the option to turn off Bloom if it's just going to be forced on?

Well, I think that's enough feedback for today. From the perspective of a new player, I would rate the new player experience as poor, currently. I could not find or get the key, had to bypass the gate, and in order to complete the scene and get into the game world, I had to exit and manually start on the overland map.

 

Much appreciated on the feedback, where we can find it . Can you help us out please and just post relevant feedback without the extra messages? It will ensure that we don't miss it... thanks!