What exactly are we doing here, Devs?

Ok, I confess.... I have not studied this thread beyond what I saw in post #5 that perked my attention:

@Alcedes I'd love to know what you've been eating for breakfast, because - say whaaa..... 50 skills at level 70 or higher...... I need some of that.

Could you please elaborate on that just a bit ?

I mean, I'm just very curious - barely a month in and you've got 50 skills at 70 or better.....

I'm doing something seriously wrong.

Either that - or you miscounted.

 

How are you going to kill a dragon single-handedly? I want a video!! (if im too believe...)

 

That is NOT good enough at this stage. We are talking about things that should have been thought about during the design phase, not after most of the game has some form of code like now.

 

1. Have you ever wondered WHY this is so? It isnt just because half the people you meet in MMO are creepy. It is to a high degree also because the game designs have sucked ass.

 

NPC companions.

 

As others have said, this is what happens when a game is released players RUSH to level without understanding the game they purchased and then complain about what the developers have told them from day one.

1. This game is a work in progress. Many zones are clones, many zones are unbalanced.

2. The economy is a work in progress. Tweaks need to be made. As they told us during the telethon, during testing, players were not playing as they would once persistence was achieved. They needed us to act "selfishly" to see issues with the economy and make adjustments. So far I am very impressed with their choices and direction.

3. IF you spent all your time leveling/grinding your Character in R32 at Control Points with your pet spider and are adventure level 70, 80, 90+ and have 50 70+ skills and now wonder why you adventure to zones and cant find an exp gain like your control points, You failed to properly understand the game you purchased. SOTA is a sandbox/experience/community game.

It is not WoW or EQ or DAOC etc...

You are supposed to be interested in more than just leveling your character in this game. Why do I say this? Your PHAT loot comes from player crafted goods. Your rewarding experiences come from player interaction with other players not NPC's. If you played early UO (day one) you get the sense of what they are trying to accomplish with SOTA. You develop a character skill get to a plateau in advancement and then what more skill advancement...NOPE that is NOT SOTA.

4. You want a challenge and have spent R32 grinding EXP play PVP tournaments and zones (with the other handful of grinders) until the rest of us have caught up to your Adventure level 90 in six months to a year. Organize into groups of high level players and do more Control Points if that is what you like to do.

5. SOTA is designed to be about the experience of SOTA, leveling your character or NOT leveling your character is a portion of the SOTA experience. Instead of Grinding 250,000 exp an hour, try not gaining exp for a week and experience the rest of the game and player interaction. Help new players in quest or adventuring, not all of the games enjoyment or achievement is character levels.

I hope all players find a rewarding experience in playing SOTA as I have. Sometimes in a new game we need to wait for other players who have less time or are less efficient in leveling to catch up. During this period of waiting for content and additional players at varying levels, play the rest of the game, would be my suggestion. Again SOTA is NOT about character leveling alone, it is a sandbox/experience game... say hello to other people in the game and get enjoyment out of helping others is my best suggestion.

 

Some of you have made great replies...Some of you are just completely off topic.

None of you have explained why we have level 90+ Raid content, that requires 12-20 players to complete when we dont have a RAID UI to support that type of play.
None of you have explained why we have such a large amount of level 90+ RAID content when we dont have single player, small group, or 1 full group content scene for level 70-90.

I get that the game is still in progress. What I dont get is why this 90+ RAID content is being developed NOW when there is clearly a huge gap in progression that would lead you to this level 90+ RAID content.

What I dont get is why the level 70-90, 1-8 player content is being CONVERTED to raid content little by little? A level 70-90 being able to progress in the game is NOT A BUG that needs to be fixed.

 

In a previous release me and a friend were level 60ish going through the rise. I was a moon magic fighter and he was a warrior in platemail. It was challenging but we could do it. "Probably could do it better if either of us invested into heals beyond healing touch).

At the time i dont think there was a harder zone, but i heard theres some stuff i aint seen yet

 

In my opinion the devs are in over their heads. In addition they are just listening to the dance party mmo crowd and not listening to the rest of the community. They do the desicions in other places that only have a few voices instead of going through these forums. So what we get is a one sided game and the devs are to busy catering to these small cliques instead of bridging the gap. This is how i see it at least.

 

Nope. Counted again. In fact, I have close to 70 skills that are 60 or higher.

https://images-1.discordapp.net/.eJ...tsp2Z-fwvZIvo.w8J6n2kH1USapBFgJA5rVg-V2Ls.png

 

I can tell you EXACTLY why we have 90+ Raid Content in the game.

When you design a game you place down the major story elements you plan to include. As a developer some elements are quite exciting to develop and build and you may put them in place before your technology or UI or systems have caught up/have the time to develop the features needed for their use. Other areas, another swamp (Swamp number 7) is less interesting and so you put down a place holder with a few changes with plans to revisit it "soon".

It is both human nature to act this way and developer nature to execute in this fashion with a "EARLY RELEASE" pre-Alpha product such as SOTA. In addition there are probably areas of this game you have spent very little time on that the developers spent a lot of time on, such as each individual crafting ability, decorations for your homes, environment lighting, etc... All of these elements also took development time. And while not as important to you at this moment in time, are more important than the developers revisiting high level content for 90% of their users.

I have seen you stream and it was fun to watch thank you! However to be honest as you streamed (a few others were doing the same thing spiders at control points) I wondered if you would burn out quickly. I am not implying that you have, however, unless your focus shifts to other elements of the game soon, you will remain disappointed for a long time. As they say in real life... stop and smell the roses or in our case, have a mug of imaginary ale with a new player and tell him of your tales of adventure!

 

What is the concern about adventurer level anyway? Gaining XP is still possible and ultimately it comes down to leveling our skills and maintaining a good xp pool.

The ballance and level scaling is something they will continue to fine tune. It appears level is becoming more transparent over time anyway.


What's wrong with leveling fast anyway? Many players who have played the prewipe releases want toblevel up because they had to do it over and over and over again. I personally want to get to a place I'm comfortable with because I never want to have to grind again for levels. Also if there are changes to deepravenswood or other level grinding areas it is sort of a dirty trick to do that too soon before long term vets get the level they want. They might not get to 66 GMs but to something at least powerful enough and satisfyied with.

Ill do more quests when all the story comes online. Meanwhile while they are still building and making this game look pretty before opening it to a larger market why not give the long term players the ability to get the levels back they have so many times attained and had wiped away.

When they do decide to alter these level grinding areas I hope they give the community plenty of warning so that all the players who want to take advantage of that to have an opportunity before removing it.

 

Im not saying that you are wrong in your assessment, but... if you are right, then you are also implying that we would be able to see where the gaps in the game would be filled out. Where do you see that?

 

It was possible (although would require a hell of a lot of effort) to get a character to max level in WoW in a month or two. I know because I did it once (although I had the recruit a friend and got double XP gain for that time ***keep in mind that game was not in prealpha, and it wasn't a problem for other players***). Also I was able to get a 4x GM character in UO in about a month or 2 on my first character without knowing anything. So what's so bad about allowing people to level grind? It didn't destroy WoW? And there seems like there will be plenty other things to do after I get to the skill levels that I will feel comfortable with. (I may still raise some skills after that but I have a baseline I want to go for). Seems reasonable.

If a player level grinds it has absolutely no negative effect upon other players.

 

Game's not done. People are working on the game in many areas at once. It's hard to build a game A-B-C-D-E-F-G in that order as people have different skill sets. In addition, players have different things that they enjoy so it helps to have a variety of things to do.

You say you get that the game is in progress. I really don't think you understand it. The game isn't done. The balance isn't there. Portalarium isn't going to ship the game in this state.

Perhaps you need to take a few releases off and go find something else to do. When you come back you'll be recharged and excited to check out all that has changed.

 

work in progress pretty much says it all they work on what they want and feel is important.

that being said i dont like raid dungeons and dragons world bosses ect. the only reason i would like a raid grouping system is faction/guild war and hope this comes soon.

sure the occasional world boss and dungeon is fun but grinding them is the mostly lonely and empty thing i have ever done in a group and feel more happy and content solo grinding scenes while chatting with people.

need to find a new guild tho

 

it makes no sense to have more level 90+ RAID content than leevel 70-90 scenes for 1-8 people, when we do not yet have a RAID UI or any motivation to work in a RAID

 

Given the NPC archers have been this way for over six months, the only conclusion I can draw is: Working. As. Intended.
And you will never get a dev response that even comes close to answering your questions because they don't know themselves.
They're in pure reactionary/knee-jerk mode, because 1% of the players are doing exactly what they shouldn't. They're playing the game more than 2 hours per day and blowing the hell out of all the progression models. Those death traps were created when people were all AL100+ after exploiting quests and other bugs to get basically infinite XP pools during R10-R31.
There is no content for AL60+ solo progression, hell the entire premise of these incredibly punitive progression curves is fundamentally flawed. No one (far far far less than even 5% of the target demographic) is going to grind this game for a billion XP. Yet Chris shows us screenshots of him in god-mode with the most overpowered Pet in the game and expects us to think everything is "Ok" ?
The whole Skinner-Box-carrot reason people play MMO's as a single player is for tangible personal daily progress. Once that's gone, a large portion of the demographic stops playing until there is more opportunity for progression.
All of this was discussed at length 3+ years ago, and Portalarium ignored it all then, and will ignore it all now. /shrug I guess they figured virtual real estate would carry them and leaving core mechanics like combat, crafting, targeting, UI and progression didn't matter.

On the bright side, Pantheon is polishing as they go, which is a refreshing take on development.

 

Which is funny, because of the sheer number of reactionary/knee-jerk comments in the forums.

 

Its funny because even if its knee jerk its still talking about the game. Some people are talking about other people instead of the game.