"Player housing major part of game" (from 6 month demo)

When the only reason a player cannot get a house is because of an arbitrary decision made by portalarium in the face of the fact that the solution to the issue is staring us all in the face and anyone willing to open their eyes can see it, if someone vents their frustration, the words "too bad" even if not paired with "I got mine", are belittling and inflammatory. Not to mention downright insensitive. I detest insensitivity towards legitimate grievances of others. So when I see it, I will act upon it. I've been in too many MMO communities and have seen too many of those communities degrade into flamewar zones, just because some overinflated buffoon couldn't be bothered to think before he spoke.

I will say this right here and right now... No matter how much money you have donated to this game, it does not really set you above anyone else or give you the right to look down on them. You made a choice to donate. You could and you did. Not everyone is so fortunate as to be able to afford that. Just remember that had this not been a crowdsource funded project, and had Portalarium not made it possible for you to donate and get your perks, you would be coming into this game fresh and new with nothing to show for anything, just like the rest of the people who will be coming here after the game launches. Remember that. As players in the game we are all equal. Any notion of superiority is an illusion, which I will be happy to dispel.

 

It may be realistic, but it is undesirable in the real world, so why should it be desirable in the gameworld.

Let me ask you this... How is someone supposed to know, before buying the game, creating a character, and logging into the game, whether or not there are any housing lots available? Will there be a regional spotlight for available plots on the web site, with a message on the box that says "check www.shroudoftheavatar.com for availability..." so at least players drawn to the game by its awesome housing system can maybe consider putting that box down until they have looked into it? One of the responses about this issue said that players should do their due diligence before buying into the game. I call BS on that. The day buying a game means having to research it before picking it up, taking it to the counter, handing over my money and simply going home to enjoy it, that will be the day I stop calling myself a gamer.

Trust me... If the box advertises housing without the negative suggestion that housing may not be available at any given time, and people who are interested in housing buy the game, get it home, and discover they cannot have a house, then the accusations of false advertisement will start flying... And they would be JUSTIFIED. Portalarium could face a class action lawsuit over the matter. Have we not forgotten how much of a sue-crazy world we live in? This arbitrary decision is a disaster waiting to happen.

 

I'm not after unlimited Housing, but I expect players to earn the right to buy one by participating in the game not a mouse click after they have entered their Card number.
If I don't get one in episode 1 I Know when EP2,3,4 or 5 release I wont be beaten to a plot buy a in-game shop vanity gamer.

With 5000 Plots why can you have as many plots as you want per account, that is Portalarium giving solace to cash farmers.

 

Did something change? I thought that there will be open lots at launch and then the ability to trade. No one will be automatically excluded from home ownership because I expect there will be people wanting to sell. Plus I expect new episodes to open new lots.

I think this is a little overstated. Many games do not offer housing, and SoTA will still be playable just as any other game without housing ever was. And this is only if miraculously people sit on their lots and never want to sell them, and new episodes don't offer new lots. Plus, single player will allow you to have a house anywhere you want!

So in the very narrow case of someone wanting to get a house for free in a multiplayer game, I think their expectations may not be entirely justified.

Thus, it is a sort of artificial scenario and not one I think anyone should ever quit gaming over. We've all let our expectations get away from us for games, and I imagine that even so, we still keep looking for fun.

 

GB, I can agree with you to a point. Having played various mmo's over the years I have been envious of items people had that they received from expansions, veteran awards etc. I wasn't there so I didn't qualify...I didn't play as long, I didn't qualify yet. Life goes on. Could I play without a house...sure. Would my game experience be horrible...no.

People take this all too seriously...its a game. Now personally, I think they should limit housing to 1 per account. This would really cutback on people buying up lots cheap and selling them for alot of gold or real world money when the supply of lots is gone. Possibly allowing a guild of say 10 people the right to purchase a guild house.

I do like the idea of wilderness housing and down the road when it becomes availible I might move out of the city to have a tiny home in the woods. Another thought is allowing guilds to create small towns of their own and guild members can buy plots and do housing like that. But the game isn't going live for almost a year...Im sure lots of changes will happen between now and then. Lets all take a deep breath and relax.

 

You're going too far with this housing projection.
I don't know what kind of housing economy the devs are expecting to develop, but personally I'm thrilled that the team decided to have limited housing in the online part of the game.

Currently in your projection you're arguing the following result:

All housing lots are filled by players -> Players desiring a house are shut-out of the housing market

I don't agree with that premise. I hope housing is expensive enough to not run out in the first 3-6 months, and beyond that I would hope the housing economy would be robust enough to continue to grow despite "supply" running out for a period.
The important thing here is not choice, "choice for the sake of player freedom" is worthless as a game design philosophy, because theoretically you can apply the argument to anything in the game. It's a childish argument to make.

- Why should housing be limited you might ask?


Well... as soon as the game begins housing will be a dynamic feature of the game, filling up in each area of the game slowly at first as players discover the instinctive value each major region may have.

-Right away when some towns and cities have reached capacity the housing market will change dramatically in those regions.
-When this situation occurs it'll likely spark a rapid acceleration of lot claims.

The conclusion to the original "Housing boom" will likely have a profound effect on how wealth is distributed among players at a much later point.

All housing lots are filled by players -> Pricing for houses and lots are determined by the owners of the lots, players must negotiate with other players to find a spot

Theoretically if everyone was self-centered and/or ruthlessly greedy you could be shut-out from a few regions or find people who only sell at outrageous prices, but I don't think scenarios like that are likely to happen if buying a house in-game is initially expensive enough. House decay and new plots in later episodes will also have a much more prominent effect in-game with limited lot spaces.

Your problem here doesn't seem to be with the availability of housing, but rather with allowing the difficulty of obtaining housing to fall into the hands of the player-base?
...do you really not trust the player-base to sell you a house if you really want one somewhere?

At the end of the day if housing is to be a permanent factor of the game, the devs will likely be tracking the metrics on housing and will influence the housing market as they see fit.
How will the game scale as it gains a larger player-base over time?

 

True. Just realize that in the MMO world, the ability to trade means the ability to sell something for whatever inflated price one decides to pull out of his butt. So what may cost 10k gold when buying it through the game will turn into 100k or even 1m when resold by players. And then there are the Ebay sellers who want REAL MONEY for virtual goods.

Anyone who does not want to pay real money or a ridiculously inflated in-game currency price will be excluded, because when the available lots are bought up, they are bought up.

Of course they will... But episodes will be about a year apart. For those to whom housing is what brings them to the game, and there are a lot of players who would come expressly for that feature, do you think it will be fun to sit back and wait? that long? If you do, then you are deluding yourself. Most will get bored after a few weeks to a couple of months, leave, and never come back, which means less potential revenue for Portalarium, as people cannot partake in the cash shop if they are not even bothering to play.

Portalarium is thinking up all these ways to draw people in, but they seem to not care whether or not they retain them once they get them. And arbitrary design decisions that will mechanically exclude players from what is being touted as a key feature in the game makes Portalarium no different from companies like EA who only want the buck they can get right away rather than the several bucks they can get down the line from loyal players.

Oh, make no mistake. You founders and backers and whatnot? Portalarium will cater to you from now until doom's day. If you guys were to be treated with indifference, you would pull out of the game, and any further contributions you guys might have made to continue supporting this game will not be there. The developer-investor relationship will not change. You guys have portions of these forums that can only be seen by those who have donated a certain amount of money. Just like investors are privy to the progress of projects they invest in, you guys are privy to it. The difference is that rather than one or two rich groups donating a ton of money individually, there are a whole bunch of average joes donating a much smaller amount individuallt, but collectively amounting to about the same thing. Portalarium is obligated to make you guys privy to stuff and give you a means to influence decisions.

I believe I have made a valid case for why the housing system as it has currently been presented is both unfair and unethical. It's up to you guys who really have the developers' attention to examine what has been presented. Remember, I don't really care about whether or not I get a house in the game. So I do not have a personal horse in this race. But I recognize that for a lot of people, when this whole thing goes down, A will not equal A. And that just isn't right. So examine what has been presented, ask yourself whether or not it is a fair and ethical system for those who by dent of simply coming to the game later, will not be able to participate in a part of the game that Portalarium has made into a very appealing draw-point. Be honest with yourselves, and with the devs. You've donated your money. You'll get the perks that go with that. You'll have yours. Think of the regular people who will be players just as much as you will be when the game goes live.

 

You know, maybe I am going a little to far with my concerns. This is not going to be an MMO in the same sense that every game released under that genre has been for the last decade or better. However, I do believe that my concerns are justified based on the behaviors I have observed on the part of MMO communities. Behaviors that I do not think will change in spite of how different the game itself will be from its predecessors.

Time will tell... And to quote a friend of mine:

"As a friend told my friend and my friend told me... It's Only Pixels..."

 

Can somebody please point me to a thread where this "I'm better than you are" elitism is happening? I'd like to see this in action, and I haven't run across a thread like that yet.

Thanks in advance.

 

The knights house threads kind of gave me a feeling of inferiority...maybe just me tho.

 

Thanks. I'll go check it out.
Still open for other examples if somebody would be so kind.

 

I have reading through your posts on this thread and all I seem to see is pure bitterness.

If you need a house you can do it 3 ways:
1. Just buy one from the add on store.
2. Back the game to the level that you are given a house.
3. Enter the game with the view that obtaining a house will be your primary goal....work hard and buy one.

All I see is you comment on fairness and people being equal, life does work that way and I can also guarantee that a game like this won't work that way. Some people will work harder in the game than others and that will create in your eyes a situation where people are not equal.

It is your decision on how you enter the game it is also your decision on how you play it.

 

You are right, EWHART. I have become bitter and jaded. What the corporate suits of the various MMOs of the past decade have done to the genre has driven me to that state. UO was my first MMO. Then EQ came out and was the first 3D MMO, which was a major selling point. Its gameplay was addictive, but not fulfilling. You really couldn't leave your mark on the gameworld like you could in UO...

Years passed. We got Asheron's Call, and a few others. Ultima Online 2 was in the works, and there was much joyful speculation as to how it would all pan out.

Then the suits at EA canceled it.

Raph Koster (AKA Designer Dragon) became lead designer of Star Wars Galaxies, and many of the things that were touted as being a part of UO2 manifested themselves in SWG. SWG was the first spiritual successor to UO to come to fruition in years... the Suits in SOE marketing screwed that up by releasing a misleading statement on the retail box suggesting that players could be all these different professions "including Jedi". What they did not mention was that Jedi was a locked alpha class that by design took serious dedication to the game to unlock. The entitlement crowd that had been growing in the MMO gamer community pitched a fit, claiming false advertising and the old "bait and switch" line. What did the suits at SOE do? Did they issue an apology for not being clear in their original decision? No... Rather than holding Marketing responsible as they SHOULD have, they made the developers FIX the game so that it would become easier to unlock Jedi. Players needed a much clearer path to follow. So the idea of Holocrons was implemented. If you battled force sensitive enemies, they would occasionally drop a little cube called a holocron, which when used would tell you one of the several professions that were randomly added to a hidden checklist for unlocking the force sensitive character slot. the problem was that some of those professions were the sorts of things players never would have done if left entirely to their own choice. But the whole "gotta be a jedi" mentality took over the majority of the player base. We had combat-oriented players being forced to play as crafters, dancers or musicians. The results were shoddy crafted goods sold at an inflated rate as these players just went through the motions to grind out that profession. And it became increasingly hard for those who were into dancing or musicianship to progress because entire full groups of combined dancers and musicians took front and center in all the most active cantinas, running macros while being AFK because their players thought the process was boring and stupid... An Arbitrary decision by a bunch of suits destroyed the symbiosis that existed among the players of SWG...

There were bugs in the game, of course. But the biggest complaints about its combat system did not start coming in until people who would have preferred playing noncombat character suddenly found themselves playing combat characters in order to chase the Jedi unlock. An arbitrary decision from some suits resulted in this game that was intentionally designed to be classless and level-less suddenly got levels. And it wasn't the bugs in combat that got fixed, but rather the points where weapon types were unlocked got redistributed. It didn't have an effect on those who had already mastered their chosen professions. But those from the low-to-mid range in advancement felt the massive sting as weapons they had earned access to were suddenly moved higher up the progression trees, essentially forcing them to REGRESS. This was called rebalancing. What it resulted in was a massive exodus of players from the game. Arbitrary decisions by corporate suits did that. Then six months later, just when people had started to cool down and many were coming back after the fiasco that was the Combat Upgrade (CU), the game changed overnight. The NGE was born which eliminated several professions and folded the remainder into nine iconic classes, and SWG was turned into a World of Warcraft clone. The second mass exodus occurred, leaving roughly 25% of the games peak population.

Every stupid decision that has been made in the development process of MMOs for the past ten years has been arbitrarily made by some corporate suit.

Some say, if you want a sandbox game, go playe EVE. Sorry. I want a sandbox game like in UO, where if your stuff gets looted you get set back by maybe a couple of hours or a day at most. In EVE if you die, you get set back potentially months or years. That takes things a bit too extreme. In UO, death had a sting to it. It wasn't something you wanted to happen and you tried to avoid it. But in the pitiful excuses for MMOs (compared to UO, in my opinion, at least) that have come out since, players use death as a quick travel method to get back to town. the MMO genra has become so dumbed down by suits who insist that we players are not smart enough to learn the game and so learn to play. And more to the point, until recently there has been little effort in developing a new sandbox MMO. Yes, there are some on the horizon now, This one, Embers of Caerus, EverQuest Next, and Arch Age to name a few. Embers of Caerus, last I read about it, was being envisioned as a cut-throat EvE clone set in a medieval-age world. Arch Age looks solid. EverQuest Next does as well... I have concerns about this one for reasons I've already stated.

We shall see how it pans out...

But yeah. I have become jaded and bitter because of the way the MMO genre has been treated by the corporate Game Development industry, and how that industry is content to patronize its potential customers. It's going to take a solid game that is serious about raking the road not traveled and reviving the spirit of MMOs ash I knew it when I first started playing. I don't think I am asking for much.

 

They said they will not be having wilderness housing, for a verity of reasons first being the mistake of UO will endless housing, and abandoned houses. Second they are pretty keen on promoting social interaction with different players. Third is seiges on the village, towns, and cities. This is not to say they may not revise their stance on the issue later on, but where they currently stand on the issue


As for housing that some people are so concerned over, they have said a variety of ways the houses will be distributed after launch. The First being having to pay an large sum of gold to acquire said plot, in addition to this all plots are not available for sale at the begging and will slowly be released into the market. The next way distribution will go around as well as being a gold sink is a lotto on buying tickets for a chance to win the lot. The third method that cost the most to the player is when they do a land rush on new properties, these plot prices will be the most extortionate of the ones listed as it is first come first serve.

After all this plots will still come to the market when people neglect their lot through not paying upkeep takes or they have not played the game in so many days, making this plots available once again. As for the contents inside and the house itself will all be placed in the bank (for backers only those that have been guaranteed a plot of land by supporting the game will get some benefits). One being inactive accounts will have a longer time before being tore down and placed in bank, this includes the plot deed that you may apply to other unoccupied lots for no cost, the time is said to vary among pledge tiers.

Hope this helps the forum calm down a bit, before the moderator have to step in.

If I made a mistake or they have revised previous decision feel free to correct me or add more to it.

 

Seems to me that the "instant gratification crowd" you're talking about would be those paying $200 or more to own virtual land instead of working for it in the game using game mechanics. That's pretty much the definition of "instant gratification".

What I'm talking about is everybody having a chance at a house, even if it's a long term goal you have to work for in game. I never said you should be handed a deed as soon as you log in the game the first time.

I foresee people quitting over it, yes. And it will happen, mark my words.

 

Ok. You are an original UO player who is expecting sota to be the 3d version of the original UO. Got it.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

I foresee people not being missed.

People who really want a house will work hard to get one in game. They'll be a part of the land rush.
It's a very limited number being sold for cash, in spite of what alarmists would have you believe.

More plots will be introduced later, even if it's a year out. People that don't want to wait may leave, but if people stick around, I'll bet they'll be able to get a place eventually.

There are people that are going to enjoy the story quest, and then put the game away until Episode 2. They'll either never get plots because they don't need or want them, or they'll be backers that have plots, but let their plots revert because they'll figure they can just pick up a new one in the new area introduced in Episode 2.

Beating this dead horse accomplishes nothing.

 

Sadly people get bent out of shape over things...and sadly life is not fair. Never was and never will be.

We try to make the best of it...its all we can really do

I made my decision to buy a plot of land and I stand by it. There is the option of making payments for a higher tier pledge for a house and more in game stuff...so there is an option for people as well. Yes everyone's financial situation is different, just like everyone's in game time is different. Make your decision about what you can do and accept it.

I hear a lot of complaining that sounds more like envy then anything else..."I can't afford that so you shouldn't have it either" ... I would love to be a "Lord of the Manor" and trust me if I farted out gold and rainbows I would do it in a second. But I can't so its not something to even breathe hard about. I have missed out on things that other games offered because I wasn't playing it at the time or was a pre-reg deal that I wasn't aware of...Some people will be unhappy that they can't log in day one and drop a castle down and call it home...some people will quit...some people won't like the combat system, or the magik system... they can't please everyone. All the pledges and items they are selling is to raise money to fund the game so they don't need an outside company to back them that will put pressure on RG and team to make them more money.

Its ok to want something and work towards it and earn it in game...but remember a lot of us here are pushing 40-50-60 years old and might not have all the time in the world to mine ore to make ingots to sell to slowly save the in game coin to buy a plot of land and build on it. The Pledges and store items are an option. Being "Lord of the Manor" doesn't give you a Sword of PvP slaying and armour of unable to be ganked... It's not going to throw the game out of balance. Yes some people will try to sell the virtual items for cash on ebay... I can see it coming just like every other game out there. Personally I would limit housing to 1 per account, with the acception of 2 if a one was becoming a guild house and they could do something like placing a guild stone in a personal house converts it to a guild house and it can't be colapsed/sold/transfered for 90 days just so gold farmers are not exploiting it and flipping plots of land on ebay every week.

 

Nope. Just want a house and the opportunity is there...Not about instant gratification, it's about an alternative way to get a house than in game...Is it wrong? I don't think so. I played many games that had no housing...dealt with them sometimes, but rather have a house. If I have to wait, it's okay, if I can get one with work. SOTA is allowing me the option to get one right away...Yay...I am a crafter by nature and it's part of my gameplay anyway.

I'm not into instant gratification, but I do strive to get what I want and need in efficient ways. I'm sorry for the people who can't afford things right away...I'm lucky because they had the make payments method for me...that worked into my budget...I'm just here to have fun and enjoy the game. I wish everyone could be happy and get everything they want too...

Hopefully, they make it so everyone can have at least a place to stay if not their own house...That's to be seen...But I'm willing to hurt my pocket to support this game that I know I will love for many years. Not looking for instant gratification...just having fun here. Got a whole year to wait...in a way it's a good thing...could never afford to lay out for a house in 1 setting hehe.

 

*locates Kuno Brauer's land on the map and strolls off in that direction*
Monk = vineyards = reasonably priced wine!