Thoughts so far

[Jameow]

I played in the last alpha (and a much earlier alpha) and have been getting as much time in the beta as I can. Here are my thoughts so far. I've played a lot of MMOs starting with UO.

Poison
Poison is very powerful, it does a lot of damage. That's fine, but the alerts that you are poisoned are barely noticeable. I've been downed several times because I didn't notice I'd been poisoned again. Secondly things that poison do it a LOT - as soon as you cure you get poisoned again while remedies still on cooldown.

So my suggestions for poison are that the UI/UX for poison needs more feedback. You should NEVER be unaware you're poisoned. I aware a lot of effects aren't in yet and this is likely not the final state, but it's the current playable state so that's all I can talk about. Secondly, remedies/other poison cures should give you a brief poison immunity. You should be able to stop just constantly being poisoned.

Starter character/creation
I started a street rat as a second character. Street rat starter is not very playable. It's not simply hard - most of the time the abilities don't work. You hit a key and nothing happens. Sometimes some abilities will work if you aren't standing next to something but if you aren't standing next to them the ability can't hit them, it's pointless to have melee abilities you have to be out of melee range to use. You do absolutely no damage to things like goblin enforcers. You can't make poisons because you can't get the ingredients and you can't get gold because the things that drop gold will kill you while you can't damage them. I can't really get a feel for how it's supposed to play because mostly it just... doesn't do anything. It's not a good starting experience.

There are a lot of stats and effects in game, but nowhere in game does it tell you what they do, and the wiki isn't up to date. On character creation you adjust your stats, but the stats aren't explained well. Then there's all the extra ones like encumbrance and other gear stats that are also not explained.

Ports
Ports should have town protections or defenses. It seems silly that something is part of a territory yet completely undefended, given most of the time you're at a port you're loading or looking at a map. There should still be unprotected road between the port and town, but the port itself should be protected as long as there is a town in that territory it should get the same protections as part of that territory.

I don't know if this is intentional, but mana/life drain works on things that are immune. Also life drain works while effects like death circle are active.

Continents
IMO Myr needs an update. Visually it's very samey all over with only a few areas with distinct feels. A lot of the terrain is also difficult, you'll just randomly get stuck on it despite the fact it's no different to terrain you were walking on just fine. Passable and impassable hills are indistinguishable in a lot of places and so much of the ground looks like small rocks. Even if the layout doesn't get updated, I think the continent needs a visual overhaul. Most of the time I have no idea where I am without looking at a map because it all looks the same.

Aehern is a much more interesting continent, though some paths around fire and ice elementals are impassable without teleport abilities. My only complaint is that there are paths that are indistinguishable from the terrain, you have no idea if you're on a road or not except for the buff.

Now onto the controversial part:
PvP
I know currently the pvp systems are not fully implemented and not working properly, so this is not a complaint about the current state of pvp, more my opinion on what it could be, should be and shouldn't be.

First of all open world, free for all killing (Reds) never works out well. It disproportionately creates a negative impact on the player base. In UO the perception of PKs was that they were something like 50% of the population when the number was much much lower. It drives players away disproportionately and doesn't add much to the experience. I was ganked the other day. I was just after kp so I didn't lose anything important and it didn't waste any of my time. But if I was time poor and only had a few hours to play per week and had been gathering something important to my progression and lost it, that would likely demotivate me to keep playing. I had friends who left UO for similar reasons. There was nothing exciting or interesting about the experience. It was tedious. If that happened regularly I would end up just quitting. The number of people having pks in game appeals to is small. The number of people it repels from a game is much larger. Plenty willing to try it will just quit in frustration. Many will refuse to play it at all. In such a brilliantly community based game, that seems like a bad move to me.

I don't think the demon world is going to work out well for the same reasons, but we'll see in testing.

RPGs are not the right environment for that sort of gameplay. FFA brawly pvp only works in games that are designed specifically around that like shooters. It doesn't work in games with time sinks. It has to be fast in, fast out, low penalty.
PvP in a sandbox mmorpg should be larger scale than that- guild vs guild/nation vs nation factional conflict over resource and territory control. Refine that, make it dynamic and interesting and you'll have good pvp conflict going on. Refine the uses of territory control and states (such as occupied/pillaged/controlled) for a more dynamic experience. Make diplomatic tools for different types of relationships with guilds/nations/territories. I could likely flesh out concepts (I'm a game designer) but it's not my game. You guys know what you're doing better than I do.

Quality of Life and "nice to haves"
Hotzone exploration names resetting to unexplored every time you log out is more than a little inconvenient. I don't know what any place is called.
More cooking recipes mixing various ingredients. Just for flavour (and maybe some for buffs?)
Being able to sit in chairs
Equipment reflecting the material it's made of (recolours/material swaps)
Chat bubbles above people's heads - please - being able to see what someone is saying to you because they're saying it to your face instead of having to look away to the chatbox is so much better.
More chat options at all, everything in one window can be a mess.

A creature's name never shows up on it. Ever. I have to look in my journal to see what something is called and If I play the game after a long time, or go somewhere I haven't been for a long time and go fight something I have 100% knowledge on I will have absolutely no way of knowing what it's called if I don't remember. With multiple similar things in an area I might still not ever know which is which. This system is not great for memorising what things are called because it never ties the name to the creature for the player. I can remember a lot of plants because their names come up, I can't remember all that many creatures. It should at least come up when you mouse over it (at least once you have some degree of knowledge on it. "???" on a creature you have zero knowledge on might be fine and interesting)

A "repeat action" loop for things like unloading carts and wagons into storage would be nice.
Being able to type how much gold I want to deposit/withdraw like with other things would be good, having to use the slider is not great.

[Kazzier]

More cooking recipes mixing various ingredients. Just for flavour (and maybe some for buffs?)

I was planning on writing a similar piece of feedback. If you look at some of the cooked foods, the images show the animal has been cooked with rosemary etc. So having additional resource requirements (with perhaps a minor buff) would go a long way in terms of usefulness + benefit the economy. It would also be more realistic.

Chat bubbles above people's heads

I made a similar post requesting this a few alphas ago. I do think it is something that will be added at some point, because chat bubbles are too important not to have. There's been about 3 instances now where I have been trying to help new players and they don't even realise I am trying to talk to them. Chat bubbles are very important for this reason.

[GamerSeuss]

@Kazzier

If by chatbubbles, you mean just a small indicator that your posting in chat, that might not be so bad, but actual bubbled text would be way too intrusive.

[Kazzier]

@GamerSeuss said in Thoughts so far:

If by chatbubbles, you mean just a small indicator that your posting in chat, that might not be so bad, but actual bubbled text would be way too intrusive.

I disagree. I found it helped me significantly while playing and learning UO (and other games). It certainly doesn't have to be intrusive, it can be done in a subtle but effective way.
It's also quite easy to incorporate an option to turn this off, if the user requires.

A comedic example:

[Ablabla]

@Jameow said in Thoughts so far:

I started a street rat as a second character. Street rat starter is not very playable. It's not simply hard - most of the time the abilities don't work. You hit a key and nothing happens. Sometimes some abilities will work if you aren't standing next to something but if you aren't standing next to them the ability can't hit them, it's pointless to have melee abilities you have to be out of melee range to use. You do absolutely no damage to things like goblin enforcers. You can't make poisons because you can't get the ingredients and you can't get gold because the things that drop gold will kill you while you can't damage them. I can't really get a feel for how it's supposed to play because mostly it just... doesn't do anything. It's not a good starting experience.

The issue you are probably experiencing is something I also experienced on gladiator which is your basic attack will override any ability you try to use. So if you are spamming your mouse click for basic attacks then you won't be able to actually use your abilities. So make sure you stop doing basic attacks, then click your regular attack, wait for the attack to finish, and then spam your basic attacks again.

The devs basically allowed us to interrupt our abilities, getting used to the freedom takes a bit.

[Jameow]

@Ablabla said in Thoughts so far:

@Jameow said in Thoughts so far:

I started a street rat as a second character. Street rat starter is not very playable. It's not simply hard - most of the time the abilities don't work. You hit a key and nothing happens. Sometimes some abilities will work if you aren't standing next to something but if you aren't standing next to them the ability can't hit them, it's pointless to have melee abilities you have to be out of melee range to use. You do absolutely no damage to things like goblin enforcers. You can't make poisons because you can't get the ingredients and you can't get gold because the things that drop gold will kill you while you can't damage them. I can't really get a feel for how it's supposed to play because mostly it just... doesn't do anything. It's not a good starting experience.

The issue you are probably experiencing is something I also experienced on gladiator which is your basic attack will override any ability you try to use. So if you are spamming your mouse click for basic attacks then you won't be able to actually use your abilities. So make sure you stop doing basic attacks, then click your regular attack, wait for the attack to finish, and then spam your basic attacks again.

The devs basically allowed us to interrupt our abilities, getting used to the freedom takes a bit.

I think you're likely right, but also it's a responsiveness issue.
One of the abilities is a dash. I wasn't attacking. or moving. It just... didn't do anything most of the time. I worked out I need to be still to use it (which in itself is clunky for a movement ability) but others even when I'm not basic attacking... nothing. Hugely unreliable whether they work or not. I'm going to assume it IS me cancelling my abilities, but lag means I have to wait much longer than I should, meaning I have to spend a fair bit of time just... standing there doing nothing to use an ability. Particularly since my attacks do practically no damage anyway.

I don't have this experience with other abilities to the same degree that I've used on my main, including other melee abilities.

[Jameow]

@Kazzier Exactly, like UO is what I had in mind, it doesn't literally have to be bubbles but bubbles do NOT have to be intrusive, they can be quite transparent, what they provide is a uniform background to make text legible. Mainly what I want is overhead chat text.

[Contucky]

@Jameow A alot of abilities dont respond when clicked twice. It hurts a lot as I have 2/3 abilities with stacks
e.g relocate - i have 3 stacks (3 dashes forward a long distance) i press twice because Im laggy (server) and i lose 3 stacks and not move! - insta death in pvp

as for the poison - yes it's strong. Right now I just always assume im poisoned

[THH]

We definitely need text bubbles like in UO, it helps so much in communicating.

[Prometheus]

Thanks for the feedback @Jameow, a few points:

• Poison: we have a plan to rework it as a whole.
• Street rat: clearly it's not meant to be like this. Could you open a bug report thread with more details?
• Character creation: we do have have a plan to add tooltips for stats there, it's a must indeed!
• Ports: yes, this is planned, and high priority.
• Continents: Myr is older, and indeed not on par with Aerhen visually. We would like to rework it by splitting it into 2 continents with more biomes, but it's a HUGE work. Unlikely we're going to be able to do it any time soon given we have Arboreus and Tartaros coming
• Creature names: coming soon!

[THH]

@Prometheus thanks for the answers. What are your thoughts about the chat bubbles like in UO?

[Jameow]

@Prometheus Thanks for the information.
I'll make a bug thread for the street rat.
I'm a small gamedev myself, I completely understand how much work redoing a continent would be