What is exceptional?

So I've been collecting hats for the last year or so and I've crossed into the triple digits for hours logged in. What strikes me the most about my experience so far is that nothing has either struck me as exceptional or struck me as a precursor to the exceptional. Let's run down the list

• Combat: It's Morrowind with lag, with a few years effort it might be Oblivion with lag. As a predominantly single player gamer, it is a decade out of date and the core of the design harkens to the holy trinity of MMORPGs that is even older. I can see combat becoming serviceable with a few years of polishing, but I can't see a time where it will remotely compare to reasonably modern single player experiences.
• Crafting: Massive numbers of recipes that you will just research on a wiki and juggle spreadsheets of ingredients to craft whatever random item is the flavor of the week. I can see that some types of gamers will fall in love with this, but it is nothing that hasn't been done a hundred times before and isn't adding anything to the formula.
• Economy: The player driven economy is a highly publicized feature in this game, but as we can already see with the public vendors and 100s of clone vendors, this isn't a very clean system. Eve is the only game that has managed to pull off an economy on the scale SOTA is attempting and it wasn't hindered by having to shoehorn everything into a medieval combat scenario. I can kind of see flickers of greatness here, but it's a still a spin of the roulette wheel from where I am standing.
• Player owned towns: This is an interesting concept that makes me cringe that even if it is the best, greatest, most excellent gameplay, less than 1% of players will get to experience it. Also, given that the POT backers have a heavy investment in the game, I worry that lowly regular characters might get relegated to being pawns of these elites as the developers enhance the experience of the elites at the expense of the peons (as with F2P gamers being used like pheasant for paying players to hunt in many P2W games).

Is there something I'm missing? Social experiences like raiding and wars might be interesting, but they grow from the roots above and if those aren't strong enough to attract and keep players, they'll quickly fall apart. I'm not trying to hammer the devs, the game is competently designed across the board, but it feels like they took the original design document from Ultima Online, blew off the dust, filed off some obsolete bits and bolted on some modern conveniences and ran with it.

 

• Selective multiplayer
  That you can run in Single Player Online, craft a sword all by your lonesome, put it on a vendor and its available to everyone in Single/Friends/Multi.
  I think that even in the unlikely event that SotA becomes a dud that will become an industry standard for many MMOs going forward.

 

Open development/communication and adjustment to players? Never been all that involved in a pre-alpha before but the way they're building the game itself seem fairly exceptional?

Or is it really like this in all pre-alphas?

 

While this might be interesting, I suspect that it will get restricted. Flipping between the two is already an exploit used to quickly grind rarer materials, abuse of that would force nonexploiters to work with half the materials compared to the flippers.

 

Unless resources in single player mode respawn at a much slower rate and give of less than multiplayer, making flipping almost not worthwhile.

 

Which is what I mean by restricting. That said, doing that is the same as flipping off all the players that prefer the nuclear option for dealing with online jerkiery.

With the rise of Crowdfunding? This is the new normal.

 

The only point of selective multiplayer isn't switching between solo/multi mode. In fact, I'd say it isn't even the main point. Its matchmaking between instances. One advantage is you can be guaranteed areas don't have any more players than it makes sense for them to have. So you can have a desolate forest, where you only run into people occasionally, or a busy town, which is populated with life. Another is matchmaking PvP players as they're travelling overland.

Combat isn't up to snuff yet, but the combo/weaving system will be really cool I think once its elaborated and we can mix more elements, mix consumables, etc. There are also plans for it to be affected by weather, and I hope by environment (like sand, water, dry brush).

One of the nice things about the crafting system is you can substitute elements into a base recipe, like peaches instead of apples into a pie, to create a new result. The reason this is important I think is, when they add new materials, you instantly have new recipes.

One of the good things about the economy is that it'll be regional, and trade will require travelling and going through control points, which might be contested. Guilds might have control of these, which opens up a lot of possibilities, though none the devs have committed to yet.

I get your point on POTs, but one good thing about it is the owners will mostly be devoted role-players, so they'll help add interesting content to the game.

I think all of these things can be improved on and made better than they currently are, but I think the game as a whole has a lot of potential and you're underplaying its good aspects.

 

I understand where you are coming from at the moment Brzmali. Many of us have had a lot of those moments. Since we are dealing with first iterations of everything and then some things get vetoed out and restarted as in the map redo. Then yes there is combat which is a good example. I would not give up on it yet or the game. Nothing is completed. While I feel your pain very often myself speaking up is really important even if it is the downside to what you individually are experiencing yourself.

For me I had the greatest glimmering of hope when I saw the notes come in for R20. Then watching the hangout yesterday and hearing Darkstarr say that next release and even more in R22 and on we will start to see a huge increase in the amount of features implemented with the new hires helping one of the new team is specifically revamping and working on crafting. 3 new hires now and one more next month. So my advice is to hang in there. I think we will be able to finally have many who are naysayers eat their words regarding Shroud of the Avatar. Thanks for hanging in there also. ** big cheers**

edited

 

It is not like this in other pre alphas, to some extent sure but not quite, I might be wrong though since I don't put nearly the same amount of time in the other alphas I'm in.

 

Not sure where you get that. I look at it as more players, more resources, less players less resources. Works out even in the end.

 

20 Releases in (and I've logged at least an hour on almost 2/3rds) and I feel safe in making a few projections. For combat, simply stated, even if the Devs are able to implement all the combat features they want, based on what I've been able to glean, the combat system will roughly be on par with Elder Scrolls Online, which is struggling only a year after launch. As I said, the combat in is perfectly functionally, and I can't name an MMORPG that really has an exceptional combat system, but it was one area SOTA could have been made to shine. Think about it like this, first thing that strikes me on each:

World of Warcraft: Massive player base
Elder Scrolls Online: Dynamic territory conquering
EVE: Insane economic simulation
Ultima Online: Massive sandbox

Each of these moved the bar in these respective areas (or set them in the first place in WOW's case) enough that people in business suits were willing to dump millions to build and support each. What bar is SOTA moving, and, more importantly, why isn't there any clear sign of it in the game yet?

 

Well really you know the answer to that, you don't need me to tell you. I have no idea how this will all play out. it is too soon to label the game. I'm not debating it. We are just giving our point of view. You make good points, but it is all speculation at this point, but still important points to be mentioned. I don't feel the need to go down the path of doom and gloom, not saying you are, but also I do feel that it is important for everyone playing to bring up things that they are seeing so far in the progression of the game as it evolves to a completed game. So continue on.

 

I don't like the idea of reducing resources in Single Player Online because it would punish those players who only play in that mode. People do currently exploit that mode to get more resources by switching back and forth between Multiplayer and single Player online mode, but maybe there is another solution that wouldn't punish the SPO-only players.

 

Hi Burzmali,
The primary thing that has struck me as exceptional, being old and slow, is the community of players and the positive energy and zeal they bring to the world. Just yesterday, I was exploring some scene and met a couple of fellow adventurers. We had a pleasant semi-RP conversation whilst fending off a group of mischievous kobolds. It was nice. Something I have rarely if ever experienced in many years of Wow, Rift, DDO, etc. And within a few hours of joining the game a couple of months ago I met a group of grown ups that were forming a guild. Despite wide-ranging time zones we communicate, laugh, and plan our path ahead. In most other games I've been a part of (excepting perhaps early UO and DDO days), the motivation for joining a guild was simply to gain some cheesy perks--communication was secondary.

The depth of involvement of the community is quickly apparent by browsing these forums for a few minutes. Somehow, like in the early days of UO, Richard Garriot and company have a magnetic ability to attract folks that are interested in interacting with one another ( be it in player-run social gatherings or hacking each other to pieces ). For me this is exceptional and is what I've been looking for.

Cheers