[POLL] What is your *overall* rating for this Pre-Alpha Release 3?

Overall positive feelings. After breaking it down, comes to about 3.5 / 5.

Multiplayer (OPO) - 4/5 - Ran very smoothly for me (no lag). Some people were invisible, some were in the sky, and I started out in SPO at one point and wound up in OPO when I teleported to Kingsport. Oops. But honestly, I expected OPO to be so full of bugs that they'd be scrambling to patch and re-patch all weekend to get it to work, but it worked right off the bat. 4/5 for a first attempt at opening multiplayer.


Chat- 2/5 - I hope hearing everyone chatting in the instance does not remain- it should only show people in the immediate area. I would like to see private conversations with NPCs implemented so we can be free to say whatever we want to them without others viewing the conversation. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want to ask Guard Michael about his marital status with other people eavesdropping. So perhaps, double click on an NPC and a private chat box window pops up?

I didn't try to separate chat between the tabs, as it seemed like it would be even more cumbersome to swap tabs around to keep up.


Emotes - 3/5 - Maybe it's just because they are new and everyone's trying them, but seeing emotes spam chat gets a little old. Sometimes the emote did not perform when I selected it, and some of the emotes need animation work (e.g. I got a pretty good blowup doll face on one of them, the cheer perhaps? ) I like the emote window so we don't have to type them out.


Town 3 (Braemar) - 5/5 - Loved the style and the music.


Shopping - 4/5 - Something about the qty selection window bugs me every time it pops up in shop, crafting, inv etc.. but otherwise it seemed fine enough.


Configurable Controls - Did not try this


Crafting Improvements - 4/5 - this rating is for the improvements themselves and not crafting as a whole. I like the changes to the recipe book and the ease of crafting, though it is a little dull and seems a bit hard to discover recipes on your own.


Walking - 2/5 - I like the addition of walking but it is too slow.


Friends & Anti-Friends (Blocking) - 2.5/5 - Adding friends was easy. I didn't know how the friends window worked until I saw names highlighted later and figured that meant they were online? (maybe I should have read the docs more..lol) I didn't notice any difference in instance sorting but maybe I just didn't know where they were. I felt a little weirded out when I logged into SPO at one point to just muck around and take screenshots alone and someone started whispering to me. I guess I was on their friends list and they saw me come on. Perhaps we should not show as "online" when we are in SPO (or FPO, to non-friends) unless we choose to. There's something a little off-putting with the idea that anyone can see if we are online and anyone can send us private messages whenever they want.

I did not try blocking anyone.


Player Housing (SPO) - 4/5 - this is unchanged. I have some beefs with specific house styles but overall I am impressed with the decoration system and housing in general.


Player Made Music - 5/5 - all of the music was phenomenal!


Ladders - 2/5 - Was there supposed to be any transition animation? Instant teleportation = meh.

 

R3 was not as fun for me as R2.

The game runs ok in R3 with multiple people. But for completely understandable reasons it is noticeably worse than R2.

I'm still getting memory leaks on one of my computers that forces a reboot. So that's not fun, hopefully the devs will figure that out sometime in the future.

Overall, R3 should be considered successful because it was relatively stable for most people and wasn't a giant lag fest. I think the selective multiplayer design is proving to be worth the investment so far. That's a very promising sign of good things to come.

Right now I'm a little bitter about the floating names and the running speed. I realize there's very little to actually do in the game right now. But even if the game were at full release and questing and combat were completely finished - the social impact of running fast and having silly floating names over everyone's head is a real downer. In my opinion, this kills roleplaying and immersion.

I realize that to the average player these mechanics are standard for MMO's. However my point would be that they don't have to be standards here in SotA, and we can do much better. At a minimum, I'd like the ability to turn off my name for viewing by people that I don't know. I really dislike having my name broadcast to everyone in the game.

 

You can turn names to "off" by pressing "n" on your key board

- But if what you are getting at is for others not to be able to know your name - that's another problem

 

If you reread, you'll see that I mentioned both of the items you said. Yes, I know you can click N to turn off player floating names, but then they still see my name which seems a bit unfair. It's only accommodating one play style at the expense of another.

Ideally I'd like to see a system where people had to ask my name before they got it. Where I didn't have to turn my name off just to roleplay.

 

OK, got it - so it's the second one; I highly doubt that they would take that feature off but I agree with the sentiment

 

I know that jumping and swimming are planned to be limited by the weight you are carrying. I hope running is included in this - and I hope all three deplete a 'stamina bar' that decreases swiftly as you are doing these things, and only recovers over time and/or by eating some food or drinking a special potion.

Again, none of the NPCs are running everywhere, and I'd prefer the actions of NPCs and Players to be more consistent so it feels we are actually a part of this world. If players can sprint down the street, but then tire out and have to catch their breath, if we had /lazy, /brisk, /jog, /run, /sprint, I'd call the '/walk' in R3 /lazy, the '/run' in R3 /sprint, the 'slower run' back in R1/R2 /jog.. the faster the speed, the faster it depletes your stamina.. jumping and swimming would feed off the same stamina bar.. we'd see much more realistic actions occurring by players.. and they'd all be eating regularly and relaxing to build back up their stamina. All much more interesting and fun than what's going on right now.

I also agree about the floating names. It's strange to walk up to a new town of people, and already know who everyone is, both players and NPCs. if the game tracks whether they know my name, can't it track whether I know their name? Also, I look forward to every NPC looking distinct from each other, so I can tell them apart without needing to cheat and check their names. They said we didn't need portraits in this game because we can get up close and personal with the characters in this 3D environment.. but if they all look identical to each other, getting up close and personal doesn't help! Thanks.

 

I second this feedback. Well said.

 

Very much agreed on the chat system. I wouldn't mind a Guild world-type chat (have a communication crystal or something like Gemstone), but the constant spam of messages got annoying at one point. It's difficult to scroll through NPC or personal conversations when you're also receiving a lot of comments from people nowhere near you physically.

Personally, I always really liked the old UO system. You can have someone yell to hear for a short distance, but if I'm out tromping in the woods by myself, I should not be listening to the gossip of the cities.

 

There comes a time in a development cycle like this where there has to be a transition. The first group of developers have a vision. All the neat stuff they want to put into a game... the crafting, the pvp, the monsters, the traveling and etc. One day this will be pretty much complete. As we approach that point, the mundane task of fine tuning each system has to take over. I only have to hope that our group can make that transition. It is boring, but necessary to the business. The fine tuners have to be as knowledgeable as the original developers, the drive to create something wonderful that does not now exist has to become a drive to satisfy the consumer of that wonderful thing.

 

I gave it a try on both the Linux and Windows clients. To clarify how I ranked it, I'd have to begin with 1 Bad, meaning they did not meet the expectations, 5 Good, being they exceeded expectations. That leaves 3 as meeting expectations. As fractions aren't possible, I gave a 2/5 - Not quite meeting expectations.

Now some parts were quite well done, like the new village (however when placing towers up in SPO mode, it was disturbing to see trees go through walls). Walking is very very slow. Being told directions was good - not actually knowing which way I was going so I could not follow them was bad.

Performance - I have a pretty powerful system, Quad Core i7-3632QM @ 2.2GHz CPU, 8GB ram, 2GB Radeon HD 7730M GPU. The Linux x86 client was unplayable at default settings. the Linux x86_86 client was playable at default settings but moderate lag. The Windows client was playable with occasional lag. On Linux 2 CPU cores sat idle while in game, and 1 of the 2 in use only had about 30% load.

It was pretty close to being a 3/5 for me, but the vastly different experiences between the Linux and Windows clients knocked it down for me. Still looking forward to the next release.

 

For me R4 was an overall very positive experience. Sure, a few glitches here and there (the main one, that the friends list did not open any more after adding two or three people).
Performance was overall good to very good besides immediately after the doorunlocking patch.
Definitively much more than I expected for a Pre Alpha build.
And it was great to see so many people ingame!
*Salute*
Olahorand

 

I said it before, but I must restate that the music in general, and the tavern music in particular, were really good. I even left myself logged in to have it playing while I did work. It was really neat to walk into the tavern/inn and have different songs playing, some of which sounded very much like I would expect to hear 'ye olde tavern'

 

I logged in again yesterday. I went to Braemar in SPO, then moved back to OPO, and found that performance was dramatically improved, and got to actually see other people running around. I can now totally understand why people would have been impressed if they didn't experience the performance issues - it was pretty cool running around and actually seeing others run fluidly through the environment! So that was positive. Kingsport wasn't too bad either, though I did freeze a couple of times and it took about 3 minutes to open a chest.

I went to Owl's Head again, and it was still pretty unplayable. I couldn't craft or interact with vendors (I still have yet to see the shopkeeper interface - needing to go into SPO to do it was too disheartening), and opening chests took forever. But I didn't get stuck in chat this time, so props to the team for fixing that bug.

So, my rating: overall probably more like a 2 or 2.5
Multiplayer (OPO): 2/5. Works alright in smaller places or with fewer people, but the performance issues are worrying. This release has increased, rather than decreased, my worries about this game.
Chat: 2/5. After the stuck-in-chat bug was fixed, it was functional, though you really shouldn't be able to see what people say all over the scene you're in, and I don't particularly like the interface.
Emotes: 2.5/5. A lot fewer than they planned to get in game. I guess they were okay, some might need some touching up. I was surprised that they were so long and you couldn't cancel them partway through. Overall pretty mediocre, low score is mainly because they missed their own benchmark on this one.
Town 3 (Braemar): 3/5. Kind of an interesting idea (receding wilds), but I worry this mechanic is kind of a waste - I assume all lots will fill up pretty quick in episode 1, and then will rarely be empty. And with it being empty, it seemed just like woods.
Friends & Anti-Friends (Blocking): buggy
Ladders: Not much to say here - they obviously added this in as a quick freebie without putting too much effort in. No animation, just a sudden teleportation. I assume an animation will come later, as it is, it's not really something to talk about.

 

Since I got to play for exactly 10 seconds before the game locked up I have to give it a 1.

That's ok. I'm only really interested in the final release and just logged in to see what it looked like, and not how it plays.

 

It was fun. I found only minor bugs and only 3 I think so I believe that is pretty good for the Devs. I found out how to get to the new town which was pretty neat. Can't wait for monsters to fight.

Good jobs guys!

 

no optimization affected the quality of the feedback! in R4, they are bound to improve optimization to get good feedback on bugs and attract new masses of people.

 

Very well written! I'd like to comment on the comments for Braemar. The receding wilds idea involves having say, 50 plots available, but limited to 20 max plot population. Therefore, every 'receding wilds' player town will be unique, depending where people decide to settle down on the map. One might be populated by a giant guild who groups all their houses together on one end of the map, or in the center, another might be filled with individuals who decide to spread out, so when the 20 max pop is reached, there will be 20 plots spaced a fair distance apart! (that's where I hope to live). So they will not all simply fill up and look alike.

 

Ah, interesting, I didn't know that (I was basing that comment on the brief description DS gave in the R3 notes - is there more info somewhere that I'm missing?). It will definitely seem pretty rural out there. I guess that's the point!

 

I don't think anyone was expecting perfection from a pre-alpha. I would have like to see the game crash lest on zoning, but otherwise it was great to be a part of that experience.

 

Gave a 4! Glad to see some forward momentum after a limp 2nd release. Open online and merchants were a big step, well done team, looking for more next time.