Pros and cons of SOTA.....A constructive discussion.

I made the WoW comment, it was removed from thread. I admit that my comments were not constructive and I agree with removing them, But some of the things on the cons list are just way off base from this style of game and more suited for a game like WoW.

 

I like your out look on this thread and many others, we could use you in the havoc guild. The offer extends to all like minded people.



Now for the purpose of this threads main topic.

There are good points, the thing that scares me is all the empty lots (some pots need tumble weeds) and people who dont play on a regular basis now the game is live.

We have alot of people in our guild (100+), and usually at most I only see 15 or 20 on line in peak play times. This is a major concern since the clan started post final wipe.

Those things I consider leading indicators of the games overall health. What things are bad what things are good are important questions but unless it impacts those two things im sure it matters as much. How do they get people playing and make them want to contunie logging in daily, what makes people want to own a steak in land??

Well I think the store has negative impact on it, they are a store drivin company and it shows. Coto repairs kill the crafting for crafters, insane gathering times and drop for rare mats make crating a serious chore. it makes it where I only will craft what im going to use. It would take me a very long time to craft an exception full suit of plate armor to sell no way ill make my time back selling that. The time sink in gathering a crafting is way to long the time sink should be in skill required to craft instead and use breaking like master working and or require high and hard to achieve skill to make items. I like to be able to make many maplr rock bows and have more break or turn out crappy than take a realy long time to make one. Really I could go on and on with the negative stuff.

Things I like, the community and the contact with dev team are great. I like the rng in master working and cant wait to see more. I like the player owned and ran town ideas, players defenently make better towns than a dev team who just built it and left. And most importantly I like that this game wants to be the sucessor to uo and I want to be there when that happens.

 

Combat is too slow!

The issue is not the speed, it's just so basic. The player has so many different combat skills but there is so little interaction between them. The creatures also desperately need more variety in how they fight.

The things you fight dont have anything on them worth fighting for, they drop way too low amounts of gold.

Equipment is player created/driven, it's just how it is.

The game is not exciting (its quite boring if your not a crafter) very repetitive same things over and over (the only difference is they get harder to kill as they level up. (still dont drop anything worth the fight)

That is the nature of MMO's. The issue is going back to the combat. It's just not very interesting.

Weapons should do damage based on what your using better. (two handed warhammer should crush someone in cloth or leather unless they have some kind of magic armor active, as an example)

How weapons, armour and skills both player and mob use interact in combat all needs a lot of work.

It takes constant grinding to level (big boring turn off) some of us have jobs and life outside of the game so we cant put forth as much time as others.

Which MMO doesn't? Again, it all comes back to making the combat more interesting.

It seems to me that the devs tend to cater to the higher paying groups of people which would be fine if it was ONLY THEIR game and no one else s, but not all of us can afford to be in that bracket if your going to make a game for all you should listen to all needs and not just certain peoples. Those people in the higher bracket may be financing most of the game, but the lower bracket can destroy it by word of mouth to other would be people that also can help finance it! If you watch any of the post mortems, you will see that most of the people that get thier questions answered or in game adjustments are in the higher paying bracket. (this is an opinion ive had for quite sometime. My opinion)

I'm also not comfortable that the people with the deepest pockets during the kickstarter have the ear of the devs but thats crowdfunding I guess. More MMO's will go this way.

we are missing a bunch of creatures that could be added (Ettins, Gargoyles, fantasy type creatures) for gods sake open a Monster manual and see other things that could be added as to not make the game so boring! Wolves, Bears, Skeletons, Spiders, Kolbolds, and Bandits is all this game pretty much has on a regular bases and its boring!!

It is weird how there are so few mob types this far in. I've only fought the ones you have mentioned so far although I'd throw in scorpions as well.

I feel that combat, creature types etc have taken a back seat to housing and crafting budget wise and it's really showing.

 

Stability in game balance is among the biggest causes of people who aren't playing anymore imo. Plus the current lack of adventuring content besides endlessly grinding scenes.

Many players, as I'm sure you've seen from being on these forums, have been disappointed with big changes to their skills or the balancing of gold or the balancing of weapons. Balance is constantly changing right now, so many don't want to put the huge time investment into leveling a skill tree to high levels just to have it become next to worthless (like taming became for a while) or have it become not what they were hoping for in their particular character build due to changes. For example, I was an Air mage before R34. I was loving it, but then they changed the reagent use chance of Air spells in R33. The reagent cost just became too much for me to keep playing the way I wanted to be playing. So I ended up completely switching to Earth. I was very disappointed for a while and almost stopped playing the game for a while. It sucks to put a lot of work into something just to have it be suddenly taken away for balancing. So many players, imo, are waiting for balancing to be done for the most part so that their skills aren't suddenly going to become bad overnight.

As for content, right now there really isn't much to do in game besides grind grind grind unless you're an RPer. I did the few quests that are in the game, now what? I chose my lot, put down my house, and decorated it to where I want it, now what? I've killed trolls, I've killed dragons, I've killed the Phoenix, I can solo any 5 skull zone, so now what? All that's left is to grind enemy NPCs forever to level my skills. I don't mind grinding too much, but many players don't want to do that. They want a deep and long quest story line to work through. They want endgame adventures, dungeons, and raids to do. They want a reason to group up and play with their friends rather than braving the world alone the whole time. They want meaningful PvP that's actually populated with a good number of players. They want complex puzzle quests where you have to actually think hard to solve the puzzle. And unfortunately, the game is currently lacking a lot of this. All of this stuff is still in the works. It's early access of course. So I think that's also why many players aren't really putting a ton of time into the game right now. They're waiting for things to be more fleshed out so that they don't end up stuck with nothing but grinding left.

 

Most of thats true also.. like I said I could go on and on about stuff people already know and talk about. I wanted to hit it from a diffrent angle.

 

ive been around for years here, i simply posted what i thought was wrong with the game, and what i liked about it and all that was my opinion as far as i can see it from my perspective. Ive played WOW, ive played UO, ive played Sword and mount ive played archeage, ive played Conan, ive played many many mmos, rage quit is not my forte, trying to come up with fixes is, i may not have all the fixes since im not a game maker, but i do know what MMOs are about and i listen to what others say, not all those opinions are my own solely but what ive heard from others as well. I have to agree with Berek here......feel free to PM me all you want. but lets try to keep this post (me being the OP) on track and keep it simple, whats wrong with the game and what is not, at that point the Devs can pick and choose what they want to fix or not. Everyone has opinions and everyone is entitled to them. Some people love the game and others dont, so instead of fighting each other just put down what you like and dont like about the game.

 

also i expected someone would come up with a response like the one that was deleted (which i missed ) I understand what your saying, so with that, what type of game do you think this is? honestly you could be right. *thanks for deleting the post* ive done the same before, and i understand how people can get so involved in a game, and just blurt out stuff, i did that a lot in the pvp forums. No offense was or wouldve been taken.

 

Let's not make illusions about those who quit SOTA for whatewer reason. They have switched to something else and probably will stay there unless devs will do some magic and make SOTA groundbreaking expirience.