The Hard Questions & Ideas

I don't know, I only played Eve for about a month. It just seems that I talk to a lot more former or continuing Eve players in Shroud than I see from any other game than UO.

I also think that housing scratches a The Sims itch, although only on the deco side since they haven't finished the emergent functionality of letting anyone use anything on lots (even Practice Dummy's last I checked).

 

I can't imagine that crafters would be that happy if any item could be dupped by dying in PVP, and if insurance provides a cash payout, that's one hell of a system to balance.

 

Same here. I rarely go to PVP area's and POT's. The risk isn't worth the reward at this time. Even in shardfalls. I send one of my alt's with hardly anything worth taking. They are getting better. Still, the risk of getting attacked by another player vs the resources there isn't worth it still. I thought shardfalls were supposed to be resource rich. They are ok in comparison to non PVP area's IMO.

Why do I send an alt at all then?

Because I'm hoping it's improved

 

I suspect that's due to MarkeeDragon streaming both (or used to). I'd be among those who he introduced to both.

 

I agree with a lot of posts here, SotA is an awesome game. But it lacks a lot of features and content.
The sandbox part of the game is already very good, the mmo PVE part of the game is very poor.
I would recommend:

• Add more PVE content, more group/raid dungeons or a lot more group scenes.
• Implement rare world bosses, they should be only kill-able with groups and very hard to kill. Let them spawn randomly on the world map and random scenes. Let us search and hunt these all over Novia.
  
• Fix and give the Quest system a full redesign. Do not wait to implement this to EP2 end of year 2019..
  
• We need more rare/epic lootable gear and weapons. Current loot is utterly crap. Heck give us at least Rare/Epic patterns and recipes.
  
• Yes crafted gear should also be the best gear in game, the problem is I DO NOT SEE IT anywhere. If crafted gear should be the best ingame gear, give us rare epic patterns that stand out.
  
• Skill tree's... You really need to cap on how many tree's we can level up. Leveling ALL skills is really braking the game. Stop this. It is not fun for anyone that you can be all classes at the same time. I have been seeing players that are just non stop farming UT with 200+ GM's. Make it hard for us to select which skills we can use to create a build. I am all open for class freedom, but having the option to use ALL options is ridiculous. This will make more specific builds more needed.
  
• More daily, weekly, monthly quests, more repeatable quests.
• The skill tree balance up in the list will make PvP also much more fun, now its not fun at all. Getting one shotted is not fun.

 

Is the MMO aspect the true focus?



its a hard question, and maybe the big idea.. Perhaps the MM quality is lacking because SOTA technically isn't a classical MMORPG.

 

I am on board with all your other ideas but this one that people mention frequently I don't get. your not actually breaking the system by allowing everyone to level everything with one character vs making a person create many many alts (like eve) and still in the end be able to do everything. The end result is the same. Now just because a person can train everything on one toon doesn't mean they can use it all at once. your limited based on your ten slot deck. the people are not using all 200 skills to solo upper tears. they are using just a handful. I personally solo upper tears and I only use 5 skills tops to do it and if you add in the passives, its still not a lot. My character has 77 gms but not all the gms contribute to the upper tears run. They are already are limiting specialization to just 2 which is wise of them and to specialize you take a hit to other trees so in the end it balances out. really this hole argument is not a valid one. but the other ones are great

 

not really. eve does it and eve also has crafters that they have to make happy as well as a player driven economy and they do it fine so ya. all this is doable if they are just willing to make it happen. same with the rng. I got far better loots from eve and they also have a player driven market to contend with and crafters and it all still works for them.

 

Yes you are right, maybe my point was not clearly explained. What I was trying to say, is that with the current system doing PvP is just not worth it. For some reason some players are almost like god mode with all their high skill lvl's.
We the lower players can not PvP is it PvP arena's or is it worldwide PvP flag enabled. Because there are players that can one shot us.

Also it should just not be possible to solo dragons, UT, The Rise and so on. This is a flaw, somewhere.

 

So after your valid comment, I re-read the main page description, and it is stated that Shroud is a multiplayer fantasy Role Playing Game, as far as I know that means a MMORPG. No where in the About SotA do I find Sandbox description anyhow.
Then again, we all know that SotA has some connection to UO. And also we all know UO is a pure sandbox game, and so we accept SotA to be a bit the same.

 

Well thanks for the debates but come back again to posting your features. None of us is right or wrong imo. It is really a personal thing to each of us. What I really would like to get to in this thread is not debates that have to be sifted through to get to the 'truth' which of course is speculative at best (even my personal feelings of 'truth)but to ideas we each see for this game that can be sifted through by the creators of this game even though we hold some of that responsibility. Not whether its an MMO or not please. So come back guys. What would you like to see to improve this game going forward? What should it have that it doesn't, what ideas do you have to improve upon it?

 

It would be great if there was more music, and the music corresponded to what was happening.

 

I agree! More high quality music, higher quality sounds FX and ambiance. The last past months I have the music turned all the way down, and listen to a RPG music playlist online..
And to share: https://open.spotify.com/user/finneas/playlist/4WInDDbqwXrZKiUpj6nGsl?si=YdKdVn71SN6prH07f8UFhA

 

If the game is currently in the state it seems to be financially, where they are having to keep up the constant churn of items for housing and fishing etc for people to buy to keep the lights on and are making cut backs, it possible that some of us may be right and some wrong.

There have been a number of good suggestions in the thread already:

Loot System - Whether people like it or not it is a big part of why we play RPG's. Completely change the loot system to include weapons and armour drops that can be a meaningful upgrade to a player.
Priorities - Try to find a way to break out of the current trend of having to constantly create new items for people to buy to fund the game and prioritise game content (including quests and repeatable/daily events and quests) and mechanics. I would have thought that a game with RG behind wouldn't be short of some financial backers as opposed to the current funding model?
PvP - Needs to be meaningful to those taking part and to encourage new players to try it.

+ others.

 

Most importantly it's important to say that I do REALLY enjoy this game, and I do like all your ideas Majoria and I suspect Portalarium would want to add all of them to their game as and when they can.

The one thing I would add to your list concerns Grandmaster crafting.

I would like to see NPCs and NPC bosses approach a GM crafter and commission them to produce a "special item" for them that would then appear in the loot bundle when that NPC or NPC boss was killed as a "guaranteed" loot item, but it would only appear once not every time the NPC was killed. The initial "item contract" could be made available to GMs on the crafting NPCs ( like Blacksmiths/Carpenters etc ) who have used their blackmarket contacts to get these contracts. These crafting NPCs could also sell some of the recipes required to make these items and others could be quest rewards. Once the GM makes the required item it is sold back to the crafting NPC who pays the agreed price and then the item can appear in the next loot bundle. Once the NPC is respawned it can also respawn a new "contract" for GMs to fulfil. If the Grandmaster crafter decides to keep the item and not fulfil the contract then the NPC who generated the contract should "come after the GM" and try to take his item by force or subtefuge and not pay for it. As a side effect of this the NPC with the special item should now be able to use that item, for instance, instead of using a rusty sword the NPC was now using a MeteoricIron Longsword+5 and doing more damage.

 

On the flip side, the folks in charge of Eve know what they are doing, from a economics standpoint, and the game comes with a built in decay mechanism that is far more thematically appropriate.

 

Eve is a videogame...

 

A video game whose developers hired an actual real economist. I don't suppose there's any economists in the house who'd lend Port a hand?

 

At its height, and maybe still, folks were working the equivalent of full-time jobs for Eve companies beyond the typical MMO gold farming. Eve is part of the reason the "MMO as a profit center" folks hang around SotA. In the end, folks tend to be very loyal to Eve, so there isn't much room to expand SotA by siphoning off Eve players by implementing Eve functionality.

Six months ago, if Port had had a pirate themed content drop, they could have cleaned house after Sea of Thieves flopped. Reading the tea leaves today, I have to think the next big MMO craze will be something on the macro scale, feudal societies like I suggested or maybe some corporate or criminal analog. There have been too many attempts that fell short in the last few years, someone is going to make a fortune figuring out how to apply the Paradox grand strategy idea to the MMO space.

 

It would be cool if episode 2 kicks off with a bang.
Monthly updates are cool, but if episode 2 is just a trickling in, it won't have the impact I would like to experience - We all know how trickling works because of Overwatch.

My point though is that Eve is a videogame, whereas SOTA is more like an adventure, a game sure -- but a videogame? hardly. Ive got my fingers crossed that with each episode that niche gap between adventure and videogame becomes more realized.

Do you get what I mean? Yes, it is a video-game style interface with a game, an RPG (mmo or not ) But a /videogame/ is something specific and I meant a lot of people are trying to experience more of a videogame than sota has quite become yet.. Its easy for people who either don't game much, or have experience in pen/paper rpgs or MUD style gaming to figure things out... But there is a large chunk of potential players who are expecting a kind of thing which just isn't complete yet.

The interesting part is those who don't game much - I think its easier for them because they aren't bringing the "videogame" expectations with them, and so they are capable of a certain clarity which the MUD/Pen-paper crowd can also do but for entirely different reasons. Isn't it weird that the gap between them is also the gap which is under the heaviest scrutiny?