New article about SotA - objective and interesting, worth a read

With respect majoria, the game is not just a baby anymore. It is almost ready to be launched, the devs have said so themselves.

 

The article isn't fair with regards to the criticism being silenced. The people who were silenced were spouting insane amounts of vitriol.

The feedback forum is full of constructive criticism, and regularly people don't have positive things to talk about there, and it is full of people who have not been silenced.

Moderation is important, and it's one of SotA's high points, especially in a particularly harsh climate.

 

that may be true in some cases, but is absolutely not true in all cases.

 

Yes, always enjoyable when I get the little Alert number up there on the top right, and the pull down is far less. Something got deleted. And there is my point.

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Actually, it was. But, you can win this one. I'm not sifting through videos to find where RG specifically stated "oh, and you can play offline too but the optimal way to play is online."

 

Any kind of moderation is always going to be subjective. People who get banned or posts deleted rarely think "I deserved that".

 

Well no matter how much people want to say this is not early days for this game, it is early days for this game. Previous years was a bunch of development of core systems. This happens with most games. I'm not arguing with anyone on this and maybe this will not be a game everyone likes but this game is going to change, get much added to it over the next months and years no matter what anyone thinks. This is by no means all there will be. None of us have any full idea of what will be. and 'if you only look at what is, you might not see what will be'.

If the development team now jumps onto fixing the things the community has complained about for so long that they can even if the game changes a long with it because it has to, we can turn this around over and over and why would they not do that? In the case of Sota the game has had to evolve for many reasons and it can balance or change as we go along for years and years. This will be us over time. No game stops at release and we will not either, well I will be here of course for the future.

http://www.gamesradar.com/10-games-that-are-way-better-now-than-at-launch/

 

haha an unlaunched game with years of development still ahead is a baby imo, but whatever lol . Now World Of Warcraft is an old man ummm or is it woman and it is still evolving

 

The success of this game depends solely from the design decisions of Portalarium and Richard Garriott. Whether there is a market for this kind of game or not. Our feedbacks are nothing more than reactions of these design decisions. To make it clear, it is not the feedback that makes the success or failure of the game - it is the game itself! Or in other words - Portalarium can moderate and delete so much threads and postings as they want, it is totally pointless - because nothing of this will make the game better. The only thing which is caused by this behaviour is to decrease the interest in the game. And losing interest - and therefore losing players - is much more worse than critical reviews and responses!

 

I think by your logic there World of Warcraft is still a baby, due to years of development still ahead -_-

 

If a child after 4.5 still needs diapers there must be something wrong

 

I absolutely agree. The game has a design problem. You don't solve people not liking the story elements by adding more of them, just as you do not solve lack of meaningful PVP/PVE with more of it. Months ago I urged the devs to think big again... It's about time to really get into those issues before release. I hope you all filled out the polls.

 

Release 48:

27 new Add-On store items/bundels.
0 new recipes
3 new(?) Quest items/sets (Courage, Truth, Love Armor)

 

Too many microtransaction lead to this:
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/hours-before-launch-star-wars-battlefront-2-drops-/1100-6455042/

 

I'd appreciate the devs using the community stream for more than just teleshopping
Make quest events, Spawn mobs in a PVP zone with good loot... anything that promotes gameplay is better than this and might actually get new player exited rather than trying to get more money out of existing ones.

 

This is amazing. But like they would say "tons of new content"

 

I take Chris by the word that after the fixes on the performance we see a heavy increase in game mechanics pre release... Else I just have to lean back and let people on reviews tell them what I try to push here for years.

 

I suppose that depends on your definition of success.. however I can't think of too many versions where the type of success mechanics alone can warrant is ultimately very appealing this day and age.

Take for example Ultima Online freeshards. I tend to use this example A LOT when talking about success as far as multiplayer games go. There's been plenty of shards over the years that were beautifully designed with solid mechanics, but still ultimately failed and were shut down after a short time.

One thing that may limit the success of SotA to a dulled-down version of 'success'' is negativity. It's easy to see that some individuals are using the development phase of SotA to vent anger caused outside of the game. I don't support this type of behavior, and instead, would prefer to see people who may not be satisfied with one aspect of the game not doing so either just because it may help them strongarm the dev team. Ultimately, an environment with too much negativity and toxicity can be a hindrance both to developers and players motivation to do fun and creative things, such as running events or even stocking a vendor.

One thing to note is that one of the best running shards in freeshard history is one that wouldn't tolerate half the toxicity as has been tolerated here, one that makes promises and doesn't fulfill them regularly, and one that has had some of it's best years during a time when the mechanics were fairly broken and uninteresting. It became popular because it had stocked vendors, player ran events and a good vibe. The majority of players who have played long term are from that era, even though the mechanics were pretty bad, whereas I've noticed that players who started more recently, now that the mechanics are much better with more endgame content and balanced PvP, usually don't last all that long. This is likely because there are bigger budget games out there, and trying too hard to look like one of them simply makes them look more attractive, which is true also for SotA.

PvP may be a different story. It's true that in order for PvP to flourish, someone has to make a scene. Hotspots are often not generated by the game itself, but rather by players, and in order for this to work, the game mechanics do need to be supportive. A moongate, a crossroads, a bridge, a house filled with murderers; incentive doesn't always have to be gain driven provided that the mechanics are there to support the active playerbase, wherever they may be. Nobody likes to die every time they fight, so there needs to be activity for everyones skill level. On one freeshard, Delucia was where all the more qualified PvPers played, and moonglow was more the hotspot for newer players.

Nay, the days when it may have been true that success of a game depended solely on it's design are long gone, replaced by the prospect of an endgame based on player interaction happening in a positive and fun environment.

 

Please forgive me for talking about the age of the game and progress in it's development some more, but I too think, that the core design may only be open to see minor changes from now on. Pre-production has long finished for this chapter of the game as well. Maybe some major changes can be made retroactively. Maybe the ones I mentioned in my previous post, could be. At least the portraits would be fairly easy to implement, as none of the existing assets would need to be drastically changed. Narrative text would require that just about all of the story content will need a huge rewrite.

And to be fair, many have been asking for these changes/features, before they meant change. It could have been like that from the get-go, or soon after. This is why I have a hard time trusting in the process of reviewing what we say in these forums. I do not feel like someone out there - a person that can make these game-changing decisions - is reading me. Hearing me. Understanding my concerns, because I put great effort into detailing these without going overboard, or without becoming a nuisance to anybody. And yet, many would say I have been just that, merely because I try to find a middle ground - a compromise -- but one that works better for all, than what we currently see in the game. I may not like the MMO part much at all, but I have always been unbiased wherever possible. Sometimes I may rant a little, but I do want to stay constructive at all times.

The game is not finished, but considering it is the first of several chapters, you could claim it'll only be finished when the last chapter is out, and the last update patch was delivered, and all servers are shut down. You really could do that, and technically you would not be wrong. But I have to be a bit blunt - that's not what I mean, when I say finished. With finished I mean, that it would take a lot much more effort to strike the balance and make the changes we Ultima singleplayer fans are hoping for, compared to N years ago. By now, much of it would require rewrites. It would require so much more work now, because it wasn't taken serious enough at the beginning. However, the most important time, the critical point to be making changes, is when you're at the drawing board, or when you're beginning production.

And we've always been here. From the get-go. Since the kickstarter. We saw parts of the pre-production phase, and the production phase, and there never was a better moment than right there. We argued, we tried our best. Some would say, we were a pest. Much of what Jammaplaya would shrug off as negativity contributed to that, I reckon. Though I doubt that most of it ever was, and that's an interesting subject for another thread. We pleaded, reasoned, and we were constantly overlooked, our ideas mostly disregarded or dismissed. Richard was my captain, not Starr. But Richard is hardly ever seen on deck. OR on the bridge, I wager. Neither of them ever spoke to me, a simple shipmate. Busy people, I know. Yarr.

Sigh.

 

Microtransactions in and of themselves aren't a bad thing, even less so for having plenty of them.

My personal opinion is that, provided that they don't destroy the economy or exclude players from having a fun time, these days it's necessary for a game to have them to show players that the developers are serious about the game being successful.

Considering that there's an extra 160 hours of storyline (and everything else in the 2 year post launch plan) in it for us if the micro's are a-plenty (and maybe even if not for all anyone knows), I can't see anyone here truly not wanting that given how nobody is being excluded from any of the content. Especially since the game is, and always was, funded by players.