Spoilers: Path of Rage Quitting

Yes please! I have been wanting this for ages

Excellent. As a suggestion maybe think about how this information can be aquired through some investigation instead of making it too obvious (EG NPC XYZ knows of a shortcut. Seek them out at adventure zone blah)

 

All of that being said: thank you @Lum the Mad for your matter of fact answers to our questions.

 

Thank you @Lum the Mad for carrying the burning torch for the storyline! Obviously people care quite a bit about the story.

I think many more (silent) offline and single / friends online players are patiently salivating for the full story experience to be revealed at Launch; some I've encountered are ignoring the Spoilers as much as possible (most don't even read the forums... they are just waiting for Launch).

I hope there's a fishing part to the story (NPC Says: "go catch a fish, bring it to me, I will pay you and give you a key to the vault of Truth as long as you can also tell me a tale!!") What could be a better quest?! Wait, don't tell me ... don't spoil it.

 

hey, the whole west coast is with ya

 

Lum, TY for sharing your thoughts.

@Lord British it would indeed be interesting to hear your reasoning on this.

 

@Lum the Mad @Lord British

After playing some more I think I've figured this out a little better. I've now obtained 7 of the 8 pages, and I'm going to use @SorcerousSteve's fantastic scene Rhun Ruins as an additional example of what not to do, and what to do.

One of the largest problems I was having with all the page scenes is the sense of feeling lost, not knowing which way to go next. The scavenger hunt quests don't have enough clues (at least for me) to feel like I know where I'm supposed to be. For example, I know somewhere in Rhun Ruins there's supposed to be a vault entrance. I also know (through meta gaming) that all of these PVP scenes have an alternate route that goes underground. The most direct route is still the PVP scene however, and I think that's great design (but for the previously mentioned mobs that distract from the story and make pvp less meaningful).

So all the player knows is that there's a page in Rhun Ruins. And that's not very helpful because Rhun Ruins is a death trap wrapped inside a murder hole. It's got a lot of mobs (though not as bad as Libris Ruins which is flooded with them). But it also has the added complexity of having several other doors in the scene that look like they should be leading to the vault but do not. Instead they're opened and closed by manual levers. All of this is great, btw, if you're in a PVE zone. It works really well, because there's no added risk that someone will gank you the moment you start killing the mobs.

Back to finding the vault. My first instinct was to bug report that the Rhun Ruins doors to the vault would not open. My assumption is that most (if not all other players) took the alternative route through the non-pvp underground and therefore this was a bug that could've gone undetected over the last couple of months. Anecdotally, there was a player that provided me with the general location of the vaults within most of the other scenes but the one they were unable to find was the one in Rhun Ruins because "the mobs were too hard there". So I felt like the odds were high that this was a bug and the vault door was going to stay blocked until you guys fixed it, forcing me to go to the underground alternative.

But then I found another door, and as I said above there are doors that require manual levers to open which made me keep searching around. Hours went by, and luckily because Rhun Ruins is way out of the way of anything else, and because our population is currently low I didn't run into any players. This afforded me the kind of time I needed to explore and eventually I found the entrance to the vault. It was well hidden and well guarded and there were ABSOLUTELY no clues that would have even suggested this is where the vault entrance would be. And that's PROBLEM #1.

I think one solution you should consider is adding notes that tell players more about where to look inside Rhun Ruins. And I think I have figured out an interesting way to do that. Currently, each page is in a chest in one of the 8 locations (usually a vault). Inside the vaults are coffins that contain nothing. We don't know who's buried there, we don't know why, and we don't know (as players) why there's nothing cool to loot from there!

What I think you should do is develop a backstory for all these locations and hopefully link them together through lore. I know from watching the developer sneak peak videos that many of the "ruin" locations have been creatively imagined as "wizard owned" usually there was a magical experiment or accident (or the cataclysm) that destroyed these areas. Just like Rhun Ruins. So what if there were once 7 or 8 Obsidian Mages that were tasked with protecting these pages, and each time a player opened one of their coffins, there was a book of lore (or a note if you need to be lazy about it) containing their backstory (kind of documenting their life accomplishments, how they died, who they were and why they were considered important, maybe even background on the scene and structures themselves - which might help with future mini-quests too) and that mentions more PRECIOUSLY where the entrance to one of the other vaults is within the "ruin" scenes? For example: Mavlock would often travel to Libris to visit the alchemist known as Shade, and together they would work in underground laboratory underneath [Libris Location that appears on the compass when you get close].

This would give players the knowledge that they needed to 1. go to Libris next. But 2. Go to the structure related to the book of lore they found. This gets the player in the ballpark without requiring them to aimlessly run around a pvp zone while trying to avoid mobs and never really knowing if the vault entrance is there or not.

The Oracle could also provide additional flavor (included in the journal because it would be important) about the 7 or 8 Obsidian Mages that protected these pages. Perhaps each of their names and that at the time of the Cataclysm they were part of the Obsidian council serving under the Obsidian Eye.

I think it fits together really well and it would be consistent with not holding players hands, yet not letting them flounder and rage quit because they feel like there's no way to know what's a bug and what's not a bug.

I hope this helps. Please let know if you have any questions or it's not clear what I'm trying to say here. Not trying to be presumptuous about the solution, just wanted to pass on this idea as food for thought.

 

I desperately want to believe there is a reason/story for all of this and that there's so much that there is not an efficient way to convey it all to us.

 

Don't forget that Rhun is mentioned in BotA/The Sword of Midras. People can search the references on Amazon. Because of this, we should assume that there is lore for each of the original towns why they ended up in ruins.

Spoiler

Answer to many of them: Obsidians. A couple of them play a central part in the book.

I don't think it's a question of suggesting lore to the devs at this point, but implementing more of what has already been at least partially conceived and partially implemented (at least in world building). It's just a painfully slow process from a quest/story perspective right now. Not fast enough to be a rich part of the game before release most likely.

 

My lore suggestion was a placeholder example. It's not important what they use to fill the gaps, just that they fill the gaps. Currently, after playing through the entire main quest line now, I feel there are huge lore gaps and my suggestion above was an effort to show one of the big ones. Also, we can't assume people will or should read the book. We have to make this game assuming the opposite is true.

 

I've been giving this some thought. You know what would help fix some of the game play issues? The ability to program a series of emotes for dance parties. And add an emote skill tree. And more cowbell.

 

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying, but I think DarkStarr's point was more that with the way PvP currently works in the game, most players aren't going to want to go in a PvP scene unless they're looking for a player to target, or unless there is some PvE reason to go in the scene. PvE here can either mean resources and fighting, or it can mean quest content, or both. By the way, there actually is a pirate's treasure hidden in the Blood Bay scene, and besides that, the main entrance to K'rul, and the two towns. So it isn't all just resources and monsters. And as far as the Ruins scenes, we're also talking about the entrance to the vaults, but its also good that there are reasons for players to return to these scenes even after the quest content is done.

To some degree, this speaks to a deficit in meaningful PvP gameplay, because all PvP is currently about is being a sheep or being a wolf...

Still, I still have to disagree with the overall argument that having resources and monsters in a PvP scene on its own is a problem that needs to be solved. To me, it sounds more like a solution in search of a problem. If PvP and PvE content in the same scene are getting in the way of each other, that's maybe something to look at, but that seems like the same problem as mob spawns getting in the way of puzzles in story scenes. In that case, the real problem isn't that they exist in the same scene, its that they aren't placed or designed to work well together.

 

While I appreciate that much of this is played out in BotA/The Sword of Midras, they can't assume we know that. Sure, many (maybe even most of us today) might but will a fresh-off-steam-noob? There needs to be enough context in game for the books to not be required reading before starting. It's nowhere near realistic to expect a new player to look for and read the books before doing the main questline. This game needs to stand on it's own, it needs to give you enough context to understand what you are seeing. Doing that will make people want to read the whole story, not doing it will make people just give up on this as an incomplete game.

 

I completely agree with these points, and I wouldn't suggest that people should read the book(s) to understand the story.

All I said is that the book shows that there has been some thought given to the backstory of these places. Even if it was just way back when Richard and Tracy created the first 80+ page document about the lore. The problem isn't that they need ideas. The scene builders have had guidance in why the ruins look the way they do. They didn't just create them out of thin air. The problem is whether the team has the time and resources to flesh them out to be able to fully convey the story they have in mind.

If SotA is a "snadbox MMO" as the SeedInvest campaign called it, then it won't be important to flesh out these scenes anymore. They can remain as pretty backdrops for player adventures. In contrast, if SotA is going to live up to one of its "primary objectives" from Kickstarter (see #5 above) then as Baron said and as many have said before him, the scenes need to be fleshed out and the story needs to be told more clearly. Maybe the only guiding principle at this point is to get as much done as they can before they feel they have to release? The point is we don't know.

It's not from any failure of trying to ask. Here is the post I wrote about this back in 2014. And Baron was part of that discussion too!

 

I only ever tried to go through Rhun Ruins coming out from the vault and never found out how to open the first/last door from inside. But at least I did find a window to jump through, then a hole in the bottom of the keep to an exit, which was clearly one-way.

 

this whole thread makes me lol.

and then cry a little.

 

I agree. The game should have enough lore, context and story to make people want to read the book - not the other way around.