Quest of the Dev-atar

The devs should play the game. Maybe they should have a quest line, and when they complete it, they'll get the reward of giving us cotos. But what should that quest line be?

- No cheats allowed, obviously.
- No asking for help.
- Bonus points for not having been the creator of the parts.
- Must stay anonymous. No one must know you are dev.
- Must be in multiplayer.
- No obsidian potions

Here's a possible quest line:

1. Create a new character, and enter the game.

2. Enter the world, and leave the outskirts.
** There may be some things to do within the outskirts, but this is more about what happens after that.

3. Locate the zone "Middle Downs"
- Only using in-game map.
- Cannot disable the rune labels. Players don't often realize this can be switched off.

4. Solve the puzzle in "Middle Downs". Enjoy reward for the time spent.

5. Earn 10,000 gold.
- No selling COTOs for this.

6. Locate and purchase a [relatively obscure player crafted item type/configuration - TDB]
- No trade chat or help-asking.

7. Unlock sneak skill.

8. Do path of love quest.

9. Enable PVP and go to zone XYZ (TBD - that's popular).

10. Collect 500 wood and 400 iron ore.

11. Scrap 5,000 weapons and/or armor

12. Craft X iron shields (however can be made from the above)

13. Masterwork a shield with [TBD - a specific stat above 50-60 durability]
- No limits placed on how much material is bought or harvested to do this.

14. Sell all crafted items on a vendor, whether public or in an owned market town.

15. Fully furnish a city sized lot with all hand-crafted items, with materials they gathered (I.e., 1000+ items outside, 1000+ items inside).

16. Grand master 10 combat skills.

Edit: Added some suggestions

 

Sell a few hundred on a private vendor in a popular marketplace. Anybody can sell one thing, but the true pain of the vendor system doesn't come out until you've done it repeatedly.

 

+1 for this idea. I'm 100% convinced that if the devs actually played the game most of the annoyances would get addressed quicker.

 

Who is Atar?

 

I was shocked the other day in live stream when Atos didnt realize that alot of stuff that was used was actually craftable or even in the game. Yeah only one that i know for sure plays or has played alot is List. The others i am sure have dinked around in the game but not that much. Unless they are using unknown avatars . But would be nice to see them play with out the Uber button

 

Add: They must scrap 5,000 weapons and/or armor
Add: They must fully furnish a city sized lot with all hand-crafted items, with materials they gathered (I.e., 1000+ items outside, 1000+ items inside).

 

A good Community Manager would easily bridge this gigantic gap of player experience and what the developers think is in the game.........

 

yes, but a bad community manager is worse than none.

 

How about just a chest or other deco storage object. Was watching a stream the other day where a new guy had just gotten a deed and claimed a lot, then realized he had no storage. Fortunately I was able to spoiler him that NPC vendors don't sell those. He had, however, noticed the public cache chests for sale at 20000g and deduced that they would not be a good idea.

Not silver? Merciful. But then again, iron has the worst contrast of all the ores, so it's the hardest to see, especially above ground.

We still need that "buy a partial stack from a player vendor" tech one of these days.

 

Devs not playing a lot a game is normal, most games got a QA team for that as Devs spend most of their time actually developing. That said I do Agree that it benefits any Dev getting some normal(non-god) playing time as it helps them spot design issues - not just bugs.

And yes silver takes a while to gather too

 

They cover bugs, but in this case, they're both not playing, and not listening. That's a bad combination... and some of the fixes *only* come about when they finally, themselves, experience a thing. That's the pattern.

 

Actually QA teams should play, find bugs, design flaws and exploits - the fact they arent always effective is many big games with finances to hire an army, insist on hiring 2-3 only

Of course SotA doesnt have the finances for that, so they need to find a balance between developing and self-testing in player conditions. Humanly we should take into account they got RL responsibilities to attend to as well

 

The Current QA team is the players. Many of us are in game during QA and point out the problems. Then the devs go in and try to fix. replicate or change things that are buggy. We also have pointed out things that get broken in a new release build. They have us....and listen to most. So it works. But would still be nice to see them actually go to a scene and completely explore and see what is there. Outskirts would be awesome. Go through an outskirt region from beginning to end...even the little side quests there as well. Then they can understand the New player aspect. The do one of the Virtue quests...love , courage or truth. Beginning to end. Oracle Quest beginning to end. That would be the true test that they feel, see and hear what everyone goes through.

 

It wouldn't hurt to watch a totally new player do it too.

There are some really wonky things (handing in quests for instance) that faceplant a large number of new players. But the devs (and most of us) don't even think about it because we already learned how to cope.

 

@oplek I generally agree with your posts (even tho I don't always click the "Like" button... I like your posts overall) & in Theory, I agree that in the "Unicorns & Rainbows" World, the Devs, would have the time to complete your suggested challenge & adapt the game due to their own findings, as to the problems encountered, that We, as players actually face whilst playing.

I personally "feel" that currently the Team we have is so small, that a "Quest of the Dev-a-tar" cannot happen, as the current active Team are super busy, working on improvements/tweaks to the current game on the fly AND moving forward in its' development in a generally positive direction.

Even though I try to catch @Chris /Atos streams live when I can (where he is extremely candid & honest & often quite vulnerable, when LIVE answering any questions asked by viewers) I often have to watch/listen to them in the background whilst doing something else after the fact, due to RL timing.

Atos & many of the Team, are fervently working behind the scenes to make as many changes as they can, to improve Our game-play.

I will say, that as much as I appreciate Chris' acknowledgment (adding Jiras for Action) to certain questions, is indeed encouraging , I feel there is only so much this hard-working Team can accomplish in a work-day.

I truly wish, they could either implement a system (as others have suggested that occurs in other games, which shows webpage with a record of the bugs & time-line for fixing them)
OR re-instate the "current Daily Stand Up Notes" so ALL players have an understanding as to what each member of the Team is working on.

These days, it "feels like" Chris is entirely shouldering the Future of Shroud. RG & Starr seem ominously silent in the past 6 months or more....

I have NO idea these days, what the 2 "old" Main Leads" of Shroud, DarkStarr OR @Lord British actually contribute to the ongoing development of Shroud these days...
I do know that RG had to deal with sorting out his Fathers affairs after his Father/Owens passing... (which was understandable)
but have since heard, that RG is travelling & the Maps he had signed have been unavailable for Chris to package & ship to those who have been waiting Eons on their rewards. Kinda unacceptable IMHO...
Poor Chris, is shouldering the brunt of the dismay of those who have been waiting.... waiting........ waiting.... (when it is not His fault)

As for @DarkStarr ?
It is Truly sad for Me to say, but I was "firmly" in the Team Darkstarr Club, until recent months... I have since sadly recently resigned my membership....
In recent months, on any of the Live-streams Weekly &/Release, Darkstarr has seemed quite disinterested as compared to 1 year ago...
& I do wonder, what, if anything he is bringing to the project, or whether he is concentrating his time on other endeavors...
It sincerely is sad, to "feel" Darkstarr is disinterested these days in this Project.

 

I feel that it's in the interests of Agile to kill off QA as a cost saving exercise:
https://jp-lambert.me/why-so-few-agile-testers-c653d922d113

I worked at a company where the focus was to create automated test scripts. They decimated the majority of the testers, hundreds of redundancies. And, you know, maybe that's an OK strategy for web apps and business software in a corporate environment. But game dev is different, no?

Now you might say "hold on there cowboy!" and point to Valve. Well, sure, they might have been the poster child for Agile... but when's the last time they released a game?

It's not all bad, we get our monthly releases thanks to it.

 

Yes the cost of workhours is always the problem

What surprises me is also some AAA budget games used very tiny QA teams which gave to QA as type of effective way to improving games a bad name they didnt deserve too since gamers do not usually watch the amount of people used for it in such big projects. Its not like SotA where we know in about every single dev because the team is small

 

Needs a "Sympathize" option instead of "Like"