Trolly / needy / complainy players

Yes I agree we were not ready to Launch when we did. We are in so much better shape now to do it and could even have waited a bit longer if that were even possible

 

Yeah, there was a lot of feedback from players that it wasn't ready to launch for a variety of reasons... Reasons that still plague us today (like the questing interface, etc)

 

They were under non-stop, gattling gun style attack from reddit at the time. "When will it launch, when do we get our stuff, when when when?"

They had Darkmoon constantly writing terrible things about them not having launched yet.

There was a ton of pressure. Probably from the now long gone publishers too.

 

Heck yeah. Look at these monsters on the Unity store!



The Asset flip tack was just another troll attack angle. And the worst damage it did was in pushing the devs AWAY from using 3rd party assets.

As Chris once said, paraphrased: "You don't expect your plumber to make his own wrench."

And that's true. It's dumb to do things in house if you can buy them for a fraction of the cost and we can all be in there fighting them next month.

 

You have phenomenal recall. That quote certainly seems to back what you believe, though I don't think it necessarily invalidates what I suggested either. Which really doesn't matter. They decided when to launch and took ownership of the decision. The influences are irrelevant.

 

Arguing whether or not they were ready to release is pretty pointless now.

 

Agree. No one was arguing that point.

 

When Chris mentions "trolls", he is not referring to random players, he is referring to a few (maybe 10-20) individuals who have decided to do everything they can to cause SotA to fail, and have been doing so at least since persistence. All of them were early backers, many of whom have already cashed out, and they're in eternal tantrum mode. ("How do you kill that which has no life?")

What the game needs more of is not backers, but players. With enough players, the game will be more interesting to new players, and 10000 people spending $10 each per month is more sustainable than 1000 people spending $100 per month or 100 people spending $1000 each per month.

For me, the problem is that I've tried many times to report what I saw as specific problems with straightforward technical solutions, and been ignored. It's soul-draining to make the effort to try to describe problems and not get feedback as far as knowing it was even read, much less understood, and much much less JIRA-fied. This is why I've stopped bothering with QA, there are less depressing things for me to do with my time.

For instance, go to Highvale Outskirts when other people are there, and listen. The "floor breaking" sound for bridges and wooden floors has no audio locality, so you can hear it scene-wide. (I think it's with the objects, and not just in this scene.) This is a new players area, and one of the first things new players get to experience is a mysterious sound that makes no sense, thanks to a long-broken game asset. And it's probably fixable by just opening up a couple of prefabs and clicking on a check box. It's also one of those "devs don't play the game" problems.

At least LB does that, yes even offline, but I don't think he's really much in the loop about broken systems, I think he's more about the story design and making sure it works at all (smoke test). Also, the devs need more play time on a char that is NOT in god mode with 200 skill on everything. And change builds from time to time. If you can tank 10 trolls at once, it's not the normal player experience, try a cloth armor build. At least during his recent scene building, Chris had a char with no armor and got pwned a few times.

That's another reason I want to see more new players, there's too much of a rut all around. That's been my reason for reducing my forums time the past few months.

I think of it as my "home base" world, even when I'm playing a different game. I still think one of the most important features of the game, which gets way too little word-fame is the single world design. Breaking up the player base because the design can't handle that many players at once (sharding, a technique that actually started with UO!) is not only lame, it actually subverts having a player community. It was okay the first time (the scale of the player base was a complete surprise with UO), but now it's become a cliché crutch for MMO design.

 

Or a "don't play the game with sound on" problem. If Chris ever does early adventure (Bilbo), make sure he has his sounds on.

 

I love SotA's music mostly. Sounds effects are just OKish but never saw them as a prob so far. Buyable assets, like 3D models from unity, are good for every company that isnt huge enough to hire a small army of artists and generally Port should be choosing sustainable methods. Sandboxes, broadly speaking, cant really get easily more than 5k stable concurrencies(those not called EVE Online or Runescape at least) at all times so you are looking at a smaller pool. You can't get what the theme-park type games get in numbers because these games bank on being easy and attracting the people that do not necessarily like or dont like much at least mmos. I mean that expectations should be and should had been realistic from start and I think if we get a stabilized playerbase of 5-10k that would be perfect. Overall I really like that the game gets fixes in a much more better pace compared to when I started and I think it will go on improving at a reasonable pace. We should also consider its a less than 20 people team so we cant expect them super fast but what we want is understand and solving the problems while also slowly adding content. I think for a while improving should have more importance than expanding content though

 

No clue about reddit honestly, but I do remember very well Garriot sayin they had to keep the window launch cause money was utterly finished

 

Occam's razor time - the game is in the state it's in because -

1) The game as designed offers a grindy sandbox game, with a large number of unfinished/un-polished systems - a style that most of today's gamers don't want. (yes, some like this design, which is fine. but most people clearly don't)
2) The game took far too long to move away from the appearance that it took hundreds or thousands of dollars to participate in key areas of the game
3) The game had and continues to have, almost zero advertising
4) The game had run through most of its capital by early 2018 and had not much choice about the launch window

or

1) a sub-reddit with maybe 20 people in it somehow had the entire gaming world to not only read that sub-reddit, but successfully convinced the world not to play SotA.

If anyone really believes the latter, yikes. That is one good way to not take a hard look in the mirror to address the problems with the game.

 

Take a hard look, but notice the trolls standing behind you as well. Notice as the follow you around town, pushing people off the sidewalk, telling new players with questions their best bet is to unistall, drumming up fake controversy, brigading every single media post with half truth and lies, filling same posts with abuse when anyone that likes the game shows up thus ensuring that every article looks like the world hates the game, taking over the main sub and filling it with bigotry.

They exist and did serious damage.

But that wasn't the topic, the topic is the devs being pushed into making decisions because of such people.

 

I highly doubt that Starr, Chris and LB launched the game when they did because of reddit trolls, nor that any major decision has been made because of them. I cannot understand the logic behind thinking this would be the case - again, the trolls are there, but asserting they had some sort of massive operation to take the game down and therefore the devs had to makes decisions based on that is puzzling. It is giving a lot of credit to a barely read reddit and barely read news article comment boards.

This game is free to play - either people do not know about that (because it is not advertised) or you know, actually tried to play and didn't like it. Just my opinion - Reddit trolls have nothing to do with the topics of what decisions the devs have made or why people do or do not play SotA.

 

I guess you dont visit mmo gaming sites much. You can easily go search SotA topics and you will see same 10 or so people. The funny thing is it is mainly people who dont post on other topics at all. They just have the major mmo sites on social media feed and whenever its something for SotA they visit and make every topic a troll-zone. Only other game I seen such a thing happen was when Official UO was planning to launch on Steam and people driven from the private shards were trolling the greenlight topic to oblivion

To the other notices, sandboxes by default appeal to a lesser audience which is a portion of the Actual mmo fans only. The newer games(assuming you mean the few AAAs left) depended on attracting the normally not so MMOish players by being easier and more polished and offering something closer to single player gaming experience too. Grind is everywhere - the type of grind differs. On ESO you reach max and you grind extra points, on FFXIV and WoW you grinded dungeon points. The difference of a sandbox is pretty much you choose what you do(your grind since you set this way) rather than being railed on a specific one. Notice also these major games had a single player based gaming IP behind them. Sure R.G. was saying (wrongly to my opinion) that SotA is a spiritual successor to UO but does it have the name Ultima Online to back it? Also UO was a game that affected far less people than FF games, TES games or Warcraft games had - so the advantage isnt comparable. We just also live in an era where most mid sized mmos are considered by the press and the majority of newer gamers as "failed". They forget their favorite mmo years were on servers of caps that ranged from 500 to 2k people.

Bottom line the old "guard" mmo playerbase still likes games like SotA. The newer to gaming or the genre gamers looks for easy things and mostly semi-solo friendly experiences that happen to be also easy and polished. WoW's success too banked in that it managed to bring players that werent playing mmos to try their game

 

Yep, they are in endless tantrum mode. Fortunately they are now pretty much the peanut gallery, but back then they were putting a lot of pressure on the devs by constantly creating drama for a launch.

They still try with the drama, but it's pretty much a yawn fest when they get it going now.

 

Yes they just drag along some normally neutral readers though cause trolling/joking is "fun" and that creates a bit of chaos

 

Some may say there is a peanut gallery of ten or so people here, doing the opposite - not so snide remarks about any criticism made ("some people will complain about anything!"), questioning why people who haven't gotten books or boxes dare to seek an update, etc. I get that is a natural defense of a game a person may care a great deal about, but it just trolling on the other side of the spectrum nonetheless. There is a group of reddit folks claiming the sky is falling, and a group here claiming all is well and don't you dare say otherwise. The way of the world, I suppose.