SotA is just not fun to play

The skill system sucks. At low level, it is taking way too long to raise skills.

The loot system sucks. No matter if I kill a grizzly bear or a crocodile, I only get one animal skin. Spider loot is horrible. The entire loot system needs to be overhauled and have meaningful loot drop. It is no fun to get a venom sack and a stupid spider silk.

The game feels more like a job than a game. Games should feel fun and rewarding. I understand there needs to be a balance but as it is now, there is no balance and the game isn't fun to play at all.

I could go on and on but I won't.

Feel free to reply with "work in progress, blah blah blah".

What I am going to do is finish my post and uninstall SotA. Maybe I will check back in a year or so to see if anything has changed. Sorry to sound so negative but I am just so disappointed. Thank God I only spent $45 and didn't believe the hype and buy into housing and all that expensive nonsense.

To those of you who are enjoying the game, good for you.

 

So long and thanks for all the fish.
See you in a year!

 

Sorry DarkEvilHatred

but the game is in Early Access and is not finished... Every time when you log in stay there, the game is not finished yet. where is the problem?

I do not understand the people. But fortunately this is not my problem.

Have a nice day.

 

well... to each his own I guess... ♥‿♥

 

How many hours you been playing, how many skills do you have to level 60 -80?
You know you can turn skills off and focus on the ones you want leveled fast?
Getting any skill except stat skills to 60 is quite easy. 60-80 then it gets tricky.
Basic tactics , sort your build, build skills to 60, work on stats to 60, pick a few most used skills to 80.

I've played a lot of mmo , I have no previous UO knowledge, I do not much care for game lore.
I played EQ, EQ2 DDO, SWTOR blah blah....

I was lucky , on my first day playing I was invited into a guild with teamspeak.
They explained the skill system for my build type and how to set up a dynamic glyph deck.
I obtained a set of +5 armor.
I laughed at the cost of housing and thought it was a total rip.........

400 hours later
My build rocks
I bought a Viking village bundle
My mates are now playing after seeing me play on stream
My guild is great
Crafting is fantastic
House and castle building I must have wasted 100 hours plus designing over 16 keeps, furniture etc.

My only gripe is the economy is a bit borked, like a recession ATM , just got to pucker up and hoard my gold. ETA on next big update, is it this week?

Sorry you got frustrated, I really like this game, I play every day.
So many unique skills, my build just gets better and better.
Maybe you just need an aprentic

 

It's a good thing for me that I'm never in a hurry, which gives me the possibility to reflect on how I wish to spend my time. I'm still testing, playing and helping to build SotA for several hours a day, and have been since Release 9. It is what is right for me.

I'm sorry your experience with the game was so different, @DarkEvilHatred, but I'm glad for you that you also were able to reflect and decide how you wish to spend your time. Perhaps we will see you again when you are a year older.

 

There is till a LOT of work to do - so much that I cannot see this game launching in a state that is "fun" - at least not until the end of next year.

From an explorer and adventurer type of gamer's view the game just offers not very much.

This starts at the end of the Solace Bridge introduction. We cannot take Charlotte to her mother although we protected her all the way acress the bridge and we are heading to Soltown where her mother is. Yet she decided to stay with a bard. In Soltown her mother thanks us for rescuing her daughter which she sent away instead of staying with her. I ran from Solace Bridge to Soltown yet Edvard and Charlotte obviously used lightspeed to get there. Her mother obviously just spent a few minutes with her daughter before sending her away - a very unsatisfying end to this quest. Why? Because she lives in a HOUSING ZONE which cannot change! So housing is more important than the story, I got it.
Wandering around I see mixed up houses and strange decorations which ruin the atmosphere. Then I get a new quest. Someone tried to burn down the refugee camp. This quest shows what is wrong with the whole quest system. I run through the whole town, search through every house and talk to every NPC in a dialogue system that makes me want to cry. Walls of text, NPCs don't react to keywords, they repeat the same sentences over and over and over and imply that they are just robots and not real inhabitants of a simulated fantasy world. Then I finally expose the bad guy and nothing happens to him. He tried to kill people but nothing happens to him. Why? Because he lives in a HOUSING ZONE which cannot change!
The I get the quest to free the farm house of a farmer. I wander to the East Perennial Trail, kill the undead, get the key and return. But the guy doesn't care. He will never return to the farm house. So why did I help him? All of this just because he lives in a HOUSING ZONE which cannot change!
Then I take the letter to Ardoris - a bleak and empty town. After searching for the Guard Captain for HOURS because it is a pain navigating this city in which everything looks the same. I finally find him but he doesn't want to help me. I have to talk to the leaders of the city which again leads to walking across a bleak city, reading walls of text, getting frustrated with the keyword system while talking to robots. I find my first companion in a very unspectacular way and can call her with a whiste - just like a pet... I want to sleep a bit but this is not possible as time cannot advance in offline mode.
I want to explore the surroundings of Ardoris a bit but there is nothing there! Nothing to explore, Nothing to find. Everything is empty. I have to deal with lists and excel sheets while trading or trying some crafting. I am sent from NPC A to NPC B, reading walls of text while praying to find the right keyword for the robot NPC. Finally I am sent to the Necopolis, a five-skull area right at the beginning of the game. So instead of trying to thwart the undead threat before they can kill more people, I grind and grind and grind, listening to the same sentences of my companion pet...

There is so much wrong with this game right now. There is so much that has to change until it is fun. Release in first quarter of 2017? I doubt that...

 

it's alpha, so it is more of a job. you're supposed to be testing out systems and giving constructive feedback, not powerleveling, hording gamebreaking amounts of loot and making disparaging threads daily about how basic the game is at this stage of development.

In essence, you came into SotA alpha with the wrong expectations. By launch you can definitely expect less basic systems and loot tables.

 

Folks, first of all, the OP got a point. The game is not fun to him and not what he might have expected and/or liked, so he consequently stopped playing it. That's perfectly ok to me.
Then you have to consider what kind of guy that dude is... naming himself "DarkEvilHatred" ... I don't want to judge prematurely, but the choice of name probably indicates a certain way of thinking, that might mean he will never like this game. Sometimes a game isn't simply to one for you, but you don't realize before you tried it out a bit.

Fact is: you cannot make it right for everyone. But regardless of the strange and a but disturbing choice fo name, the OP gave SotA a try and still seems to give it a chance. So no need to bash on him.
Another fact is: The game does feel like work sometimes... the need to grind for money just to keep me playing doesn't feels right to me, too. It doesn't have to be like WoW where you get plenty of money from questing and selling all the stuff that you find and is obsolete within a couple of hours and don't have a need to spend any of the money. But it doesn't feel right when you first have to go out, camp some scene for a couple of hours, just to get the money to pay your rent and pay for the "fuels" so you can craft some more stuff, that noone seems to be buying. Then you need to run out and kills some more and other stuff, so your xp-pool doesn't scream in dispair, because hunting that first kind of stuff nearly depleted it... And then you need to hunt some even more stuff, to get either the cash to buy or to gather and hunt the materials you need for your craft. Is THAT what you think what this game should be about? Truely? Yes, the game is still in early devellopment and way from being finished. But we still need to give feedback so the devs know when something is not working. But please don't forget to give positive feedback, too... so the devs see when they did it right! Also positive feedback makes everyone feel so much better and enjoy the game... even when working on it.

 

Personally I couldn't care less how long it takes until the game is released. I mean, that's the point of having final wipe early isn't it?

Nobody's forcing you to play 24 hours a day grinding basic systems. If you want to improve your overall experience and help get to launch as soon and as smoothly as possible, I guess I would suggest that you try summarizing your thoughts in the form of short and to the point suggestions and lower your expectations to something a tad more realistic for a game that's still in alpha.

Keep in mind that you're not a developer, so you really have no idea what breakthroughs are in store for future releases.

 

Breakthroughs like slower regen? Slower travel? Decay? Losing faith in "innovation", personally.

 

"The skill system sucks. At low level, it is taking way too long to raise skills."
--> This is your view. I think low level skills raise quite fast as long as you keep the experience flow ongoing.

"The loot system sucks. No matter if I kill a grizzly bear or a crocodile, I only get one animal skin. Spider loot is horrible. The entire loot system needs to be overhauled and have meaningful loot drop. It is no fun to get a venom sack and a stupid spider silk."

--> There could be a nice suggestion from your side. Lets say: Bears should have a higher chance to produce more skin than wolves. Venom sack could actually be used for poison crafting.
However, it sounds to me that you are expecting something more like.... I don't know. I hope you don't expect gold? Tell me.

"The game feels more like a job than a game. Games should feel fun and rewarding. I understand there needs to be a balance but as it is now, there is no balance and the game isn't fun to play at all."
--> Have you explored Kiln Sewers lately? Nice area to explore and puzzles to solve. However, also here it seems to me that rewards means that you rather want to have high level loot and gold instead of exploration and adventure?

 

Slower regen is to make food part of the economy, slower travel off road is to increase the "distance" between locations and land masses, thus making homes n community more of a factor, while decay is to make sure we do not turn into a 1 man army I guess.

Every decision however painful it is for my experience, but if it turns out to be right for the sandbox player run world in the long run, will show its true worth in the end.

 

You can make food useful by adding decent and different buffs to each kind of food...or maybe that's just not "innovative" enough for them (aka would take too much time to do - writing all those pesky recipes whereas nerfing regen just takes one coder to go in and shift the decimal point to the left...maybe add a couple zeroes in for giggles).

 

Lets see what is in for us in R34.

 

As much fun as you are not seemingly having I an having a great time. Find a group and adventure with them it will make all the difference in the world. But if that is not your thing, Thanks for trying the game and Good Luck. Buh Bye!

 

'buffs only' isn't how balancing a game that's in alpha works at all.

Again it comes down to two factors, people having too high of expectations of how much power they can actually have in an MMO while maintaining balance, and people not suggesting things and relying entirely on a small team of developers to think of everything.

like hello guys and gals, did anyone think to suggest different mechanics regarding food? Do we really need to make people able to fly at light speed on the world map to prevent people from losing faith here??

 

I'm not going to sit there and passively wait, we already know what they're threatening to do for R34 (massively reduce regen rates so we have to wait five minutes between each fight, and add skill decay so that like 30 of our skills (including crafting skills) will drop a point or so each time we die.

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten to mention the world map speed nerf due to the horror of the above two nerfs.

 

Yeap, off the top of my head, the basic regen now could be too high for them to put buffs on top of it perhaps? As in why buff or bother to eat when it ain't broke now?

But I do agree that other game design has to be worked on asap e.g. Disparity between pure melee vs. Reagent user, weapon types, missing combos, agriculture, balance of resources and its usage etc.

One step at a time, piece by piece. Til Launch.