R48 Postmortem Missed Questions

Sorry this was bad copy/paste from convo with Bzus and I did not get all the text. Too many things going on this week!

Here's what it was supposed to say (and I edited the OP):

Majoria70: Can we get back more than a few scraps at a destroyed item especially at higher crafting skills? It is such a slap in the face.
Currently high skill in salvage has a chance to return components but failure when enchanting and masterworking does not. Failure only returns scraps and we intend to keep it this way for now. This keeps the value of salvage high and keeps the number of finished goods in the economy controlled.

 

lol thanks.. that makes SO much more sense

@majoria70 in case you missed the edit

 

This made my day! Thank you.

As someone who desperately wants to fill his library im now going to have to place these items by hand which limits both performance and deco limits.

 

How about an add-on store ornate longbow? There are no bows in the add-on store.

 

Do me a favour, don't bother asking for questions if your just not going to bother answering them, i get sick of asking questions that you cant be bothered answering.

 

Hi Dominor666,

Apologies, we do our best to answer as many of the questions that we can. As we've stated before, some questions cannot be answered for a variety of reasons:

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS!

We will be answering questions throughout the livestream, so submit them in the comments section below or on Discord chat during the event.

Please do NOT post questions containing:

• More than 3 questions in total
• Bugs or other problems best posted in the bug forums
• “When is this coming” or anything related to schedule (for those answers please refer to our quarterly updates or our post release plans)
• Questions with more than a couple of sentences. Please keep them brief! We will likely understand the context of your interest, so just ask the question and we’ll be able to respond.

For bug reports and extra idea suggestions, please use forums for this purpose.

A final thought: we see a LOT of repeat questions and requests. Please consider reading one of the other missed question posts, watching one of the previous post mortems, reading one of the post mortem transcripts, and/or reading our Post Episode 1 plan post before posting a question. Your question might have already been answered.​

If you have a concern about a question you asked, please feel free to ask us directly! We may simply have missed it.

Thanks,
Berek

 

I just looked back a little for you @Dominor666 since I pay attention to all the telethons and love the Questions and Answer threads that Darkstarr et al do for us.

This was answered:

This was delayed from Q3, R44 but is at least a planned feature:

You can at least try the #LFG sota subchannel in the SOTA discord: https://discord.gg/3ZBZzV6

Were there other missed questions from discord during the telethon?

 

Hey, well, I sure hope they plan to something to diversify the appearance of vendors later on and don't abandon those plans and say as a reason "immersion doesn't matter anymore anyway" ;> Meaning, I hope the devs still consider it a valid concern even though there are some game elements which shall we say challenge it as an issue.

The thing about bookshelves is that I think they have to either choose one method or another, or it'll be a UI concern, and bad for the user experience. People won't know whether the bookshelf they're looking at has individual objects or is a container. Honestly, having a static "collection of books" object is not the best thing, either. The first time I saw one, I tried to drag a book from it until I figured out what was going on. But to the extent that its passable I think its only because it's presented to the player as non-interactible. Otherwise, you present players with a choice between two methods of accessing books on bookshelves. So, anyway, I don't think "an option between both" is a good compromise, as it'll just add on top of all the other confusing UI inconsistencies that already exist in the game. And between the two choices, I prefer individual objects because I think WYSIWYG is good from a visitor's perspective and it also allows more freedom from the decorator's perspective.

What I would *love*, of course, is some type of a hybrid system which allowed you to manage a bookshelf or other furniture display set either by dragging individual objects or accessing it as a container... so, when you dragged things to the container view, it would automatically start filling up the shelf, and when you dragged things to the shelf, it would fill up the container view. You would then be allowed to move things around on the display set internally.

While it would require the devs to add a major piece of new tech to the game, it would be great and also open up the possibility of other things (like display tables of a vendor's wares).

I think if they ever did make a pure container bookshelf, though, they could solve some problems by giving it several visual states in a similar manner.

 

I revert you to my post

from time to time another person asks for the ability to see all venders, what there selling and there price. It's easy to see the lure, "I need gold ore" so I look up ok "Timmy" in that town over there has it for a good price, let me swing over there and get it. Or as a seller I can make my wears the cheapest in Novia and sell it quick. I get it but this is very bad for the game here is why...
1) emersion : you would be taking out of the game physical shopping. once an app or system like this is in place, no one would wonder around looking for a good price or a rare item. they will look it up and go to that one place.
a) that means no one would ever wonder into or around your town unless you had the thing they wanted and at that price.
b) so no impulse buys from your vender that they didn't know they wanted.
2) economy : in addition to making the price of things drop to places that would not be worth gathering anymore.
a) you would essentially kill the buy to re-sell aspect of the game
b) speaking of buy and re-sell.. there are a good number of very rich people in this game. it would not be hard for them to monitor and buy all of something and then be the only one selling it at an inflated price.
3) property value : it would lower the desirability to have a house on say owls main road (now that all venders will have the same exposure) thus lowering the value, making the people that worked hard to get a prime location, all for nothing​

 

@Sway,

It would also encourage people to put up junk vendors with bits of everything they want to get rid of, rather than creating interesting shops that draw players attention, advertising their shops.

I do think its good to be able to look up the shops in a town by name say on a town crier, and I also think we need better tools in the game that will allow us to advertise, and a lot of other things that will make the buying experience better (like also being able to tell when a vendor is empty), but yeah, I agree with you, I think it would be a mistake to allow people to remotely view and search vendor inventories.

But honestly, its not unexpected, and what can I say except that I think it'll make the game a lot more boring and I'm not sure why anyone thinks searching vendor lists remotely is fun gameplay.

 

Alright let's try this again then.

For context:
In this thread here @DarkStarr opened up a bit about the financials. He stated that the game has a budget and said it's around 17-18 million with the various fundraising that has been done so far.

My questions:
1) Will there be continued telethons? All indications so far seem to say yes, so what is that money going towards?


2) With Darkstarr talking about how that budget is set, does that mean episode 1 is finally funded? Does that funding include physical rewards?

Edit: Basically the same sort of questions that I asked in that linked thread, which Darkstarr didn't answer before he locked the thread.

 

They've answered both these questions in the past. All money collected during development for EP1 goes towards the development for EP1.

I'm not trying to answer the questions for them, but this is what I expect to hear.

1. They already answered this, which is why you didn't get an answer.
2. What I just said. Which means yes, all money goes to EP1 and yes more telethons. And yes they have physical rewards paid for in that equation but no they're not going to send them until launch because they want to use that as part of the hype.

I hope that helps.

 

Thanks @Lord Andernut but my question was still valid

When will we see some form of a “looking for group” ability in the game.

Answer

• Looking for Group Delayed: Work on Localizing the Launcher (see below) forced us to delay work on Looking for Group.

I suppose under the Berek's terms of reference and quite frankly the feeling i get from his message, i'm just an annoying person who asks the same questions but i didn't ask IF i asked When

With the low population currently on the server at AeST time the LFG ability becomes more and more important.

Currently unless i just want to run around mindlessly killing low level mobs, adding nothing to the development to this game. There is very little i can do, as such me playing Sota in its current configuration me wasting RL time for no reason.

I suppose i could spend my money cloaking my house in all sorts of useless junk, at least that gets upgraded / Added to looked every month.

 

The quarterly release will be coming up soon that will also list things coming up for the next 3 months, but I'm sure @DarkStarr has an idea of when we can expect to see any type of looking for group make it in. Anyway Darkstarr posts the quarterly upcoming stuff every 3 months or so.t. But for now if you are looking for a group whisper sometime and I can also let you know when we are doing group things like boss kills and stuff.

 

Check out Berek's post a few posts up. You will see explicitly that there aren't answering 'when will some particular thing be coming out or schedule type questions such as yours. I would expect theses kinds of questions to longer solicit an answer from them.

 

Why does it matter if they have monthly post-mortems/telethons with sales? The shop will always sell items. It will probably always have sales too, maybe monthly, maybe not.

Even if Episode 1 is "fully funded" they've said numerous times they will always be working on the game - enhancing/balancing/new content/new skills/etc.

They have a long list of post-episode 1 launch goals that they want, that all takes funding. So Episode 1 will cost X dollars of development, and then they will need more money for further development.

I had some missed questions too, I'll just ask them next time.

 

Sorry your questions got missed in the shuffle.

1. Yes we will continue to do livestreams with fundraising. We are a live service that costs money to run (servers, bandwidth, customer service, QA, monthly releases, staff, rent, insurance, etc.). We do not currently have a subscription so store purchases, telethons, etc. are all things we currently need to raise funds. Perhaps if our revenue sharply increases we might consider discontinuing this but many of our players enjoy them so we do not have a compelling reason to stop them.

2. I am sorry if you felt like I indicated the budget was "set". I provided an estimate of what our total spend would be at our launch date and yes that includes physical rewards. You seem to want an answer about Ep 1 being "finally funded". Unfortunately because of the above (live service) it's not a simple answer. I would be simpler if we were a simple single player game with no online component and we were not planning on doing monthly updates. However that is not the case so funding will always be continuous.

 

I am one of them and happy to hear that.

 

Me too.

My only complaint about telethons is that the rewards are often "Virtue" based and we get something like a cool Ice Staff but it has that damn virtue symbol on it.

If only we (from time to time) could have cool Obsidian stuff (that I could use for my character).

 

@Vladamir Begemot This just happened to me with my 'consumables' chest..spent about 10 minutes re-stacking regs, scrolls, potions, anything stack-able and consumable!!! All I wanted to do was log in, collect my 500 gold pieces, 10500 xp and restock my character for mining tomorrow morning. >: | I do this about 1-2 times a week.

Here is my example! *Edit: chest would be container