My first several hours....

Greetings,

After a week of playing, I can say that I do like Shroud of the Avatar. I wanted to briefly run thru my playtime for the last week and say a little about how it felt to be new to the game.

Before I summarize, I want to give a nod to a few resources that I couldn't have lived without. At a minimum, the new player experience absolutely must include these in-game somehow, preferably in a guided tutorial:

• Beginners Guide to Draw Deck Building: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f.../begginers-guide-to-draw-deck-building.52341/
  • Including something like this in game is an absolute must. The deck building system is very neat, but really poorly documented.
• The SOTA Map : http://www.sotamap.com/
  • I may not have actually required this map, except that I had to run from Red River to Soltown during my first session. This map is definitely required for long distance travel.

OVERLAND MAP
Overall, I've enjoyed the overland map. I think it is an excellent way to design a game that you want to be able to easily expand in the future, and I can see why the devs built it the way they did. I've had a couple of random encounters. The first was with wolves, and they ate me alive three or four times before I ran away. The second was with bandits several hours of playtime later, and I managed to defeat them. I also ran around and checked out other instances and towns.

Some feedback:

• I enjoy the random encounters overall, though I think there is a problem with the number of enemies confronting a lower level player. There were a bit too many. Maybe half the number would have been better, ramping up as player level increases. Also, random encounters as a mage are fairly impossible without a custom draw deck.
• I would love to see more road signs on the overland map. Definitely signs at every major intersection, maybe even some on the long lonely road giving distances to certain major towns.
• There were many very pretty areas of the map, fields of flowers and such, that I found myself wanting to explore. It is a pity that all the instances near Soltown are so dark. I'd love to see some instances in those fields of flowers.

TOWNS
I found my time in towns to be a bit confusing. As a new Outlander, a bunch of player vendors is the first thing you see on entering the city area of Soltown. It took me a while to figure out how to find NPC vendors. It also took me a while to figure out using the map in my inventory, once I did that everything was a bit easier. I did find it somewhat annoying that the map was only labeled in runes. That might be fine once I've played hours and hours and had a chance to learn them, but as a brand new player having a map labeled in runes was distressing, especially when I don't have a key to the rune language anywhere.

COMBAT
Combat was overall very fun, especially once I figured out decks. I did find it kind of buggy sometimes, something I know the devs are working on.

Some quick notes:

• Auto-attack seems to turn off unexpectedly, and it isn't clear how to turn it back on.
• Focus costs make it really hard to be a pure mage.

MAGIC
I enjoyed being mostly a mage, and trained a little in every type of magic. I kept being confused by terminology, especially those instances where I noticed "attunement" penalties due to spells I cast. I still am not sure what that really is and what impact it had on me. I ended up mostly ignoring that mechanic. I'm sure I could have looked it up on the forums, but I was really trying to learn about things in game.

I was a little distressed that many schools were very similar to each other. There were several "fist of ____" and "____ arrow" spells. I really hope those get updated in the future. One of the nice things about magic is that there are a variety of attacks. Having such similar spells makes this aspect of the game feel unfinished.

ECONOMY
My only experience with the economy is in buying some items and selling looted items to vendors. While I seemed to be getting enough gold to advance myself, I looked at the costs of some reagents and saw that I definitely wasn't getting enough gold for my next level of spells.

I was also very confused by the pricing I was seeing in various player vendors. I kept wondering how those prices were set. In other words, do I trust the prices the player vendors are charging for an item? Do they set it? Or is it something set by the game? I tried some comparison shopping, but movement speed was so low in comparison to the distances between similar vendors that this took an annoyingly long time.

If players need to comparison shop, the ability to move quickly between vendors is very important. Maybe we should be able to sprint full time in a friendly city? Maybe base move should be a little higher on city roads?

I'd also like to be able to ask someone, maybe city guards or citizens, where I could find a merchant buying or selling whatever. They could then let me know how many there were and which way to head.

USER INTERFACE
The UI isn't bad. I like the compass up top, and it is generally unobtrusive. I just have a few notes:

• There seems to be a delay in the white text that shows in the middle of the screen, and it has a tendency to show up when I'm busy doing something else and can't read it. Since a lot of the current in-game help comes in this white text, I can see that as a problem for new players. Maybe a new UI element showing these tips, one that will save them so I can look at them when I have time, would be better.
• Looting was a bit difficult at times. Trying to select the corpse was sometimes quite a challenge. The take-all button is nice, but I'd sure love to have an auto-loot option as well.

CRAFTING and GATHERING (and SALVAGING)
Let me say up front, I am not a crafter. I don't enjoy crafting. I tend to be a gatherer and sell what I gathered to other players who are crafters.

To that end, I found gathering to be fascinating. I liked learning how to recognize what can be gathered and enjoy that learning process. I think some of the gathering takes a bit too long, especially the field dressing of some animals.

For my purposes, salvaging materials from looted items is just another type of gathering. I enjoyed learning how to do that.

Economically, gathering and salvaging felt like a waste of time. The income made selling gathered goods to NPCs was extremely low. Salvaged materials were worse, better to sell the looted item directly. If there were player merchants paying better for gathered and salvaged materials, I didn't find them.

I guess that brings me to my point. If I need to become a crafter in order to make money from gathered resources, I just won't gather. I hope selling gathered goods to other players can become worthwhile in the future.

OVERALL
Overall, I think I enjoyed my first sessions of playing because (1) I have long experience with online games (2) I like to figure out how to be successful and don't get easily frustrated and (3) I found some online resources that helped. If any of those was absent, this would have been a much harder experience.

I'm definitely going to keep playing. I'm trying to decide now if I will reset my character or keep on as I am. I think I made some mistakes that may have bugged my questing early on.

Thanks! Keep up the good work!

 

Actually, you can make quite a bit from gathering and selling your resources to other players. There are several ways to do this. If you have access to your own vendor you can sell them there. You can also sell them on Public Vendors (who charge a commission fee at the time of listing). Selling raw materials is much more lucrative than selling goods (at this time). Also, some player merchants will have buy orders (select the "Sell" tab when looking at the vendor).

That being said, if you are looking to sell some of your resources and can't find anyone to buy (I'm not sure if you are or not, since this is more of a feedback thread, but I thought I'd throw the offer out there), hit me up in-game and I am happy to help you out.

 

That's what I thought. I think I missed the right vendors.

Thanks!

 

You can also check the Player Marketplace here in the forums. An example of resources to sell to players, I often need pine and maple tree bark. So I put purchase orders on my vendor in my shop and "advertise" in the marketplace that the purchase order is there. That's a resource that unless you craft, you don't need it and it's terribly time consuming for folks like me to get as much as we need. So to utilize this feature, you would go to the Player Marketplace, see that I need maple tree bark,the location of where my vendor is. Then you go to my vendor and can "fill" the purchase order and pick up gold for your trouble. In my case, I pay 2500gp for 50 bark. Not bad for stuff you find laying around!

 

New to the game but 10 minutes in found my character stuck in the rocks by the water in Battle by Bridge something...but I can't get my character out. Is there any trick or transport fix I can use so I can continue playing. I'm trying to avoid starting over. Honestly, I was hoping we were beyond this simple design issue by now. It's terribly heartbreaking because I've now spent a couple days I wanted to play but couldn't without starting over. There must be a secret. OR how do we go about reporting the bugs? I have screen shots.

 

do this:


/stuck


or you can log back into the main screen and pick "log into world map".