The devs need to be more flexible with community concerns, this being a prime example. +1 for hot-bar consumable slots.

Many quality of life improvements should be implemented, to facilitate a smoother, more enjoyable experience, and for those who quite literally have (or have yet to have) medical issues regarding the lack of QoL. Auto run for a long journey (even allow auto transit via roads by selecting a point on the map), as enemies and players will make that a hassle if you are not paying attention.

WASD, or gamepad control would be a welcome sight as well

I played minecraft with a bunch of friends way back when, and decided to name my sword "Anus Pounder". What a perfect enchanted sword, which help up to it's name.

@GamerSeuss

1- While having the majority of the game be horizontal in nature, an ideal is balance is found with vertical progression. It allows for significant player diffusion in terms of goals/ability that otherwise wouldn't occur due to the homogenous, pure horizontal progression.

Example: Players who make swords create better swords after a long time of "mastering" the craft. Players who make Staffs master their craft... Make the progression for each one very lengthy to incentivize player specialization, and the economy would become even more trade centered.

2- What are you responding to? I numbered my responses by OPs suggestions; you are confusing me. I was only mentioning carts being a silly system as is, and a potential change to resource gathering as a change.

3- You should be able to sell property, developed and undeveloped. Because the precious trade economy would enable it and flourish because of it. See real estate IRL for examples. Hell, maybe increase the amount of plots that can be owned to 2, to allow flipping of properties should players want to.

4- Just because something is planned doesn't mean it fits well with the game. Gameplay can be tweaked to make the game more enjoyable, for us, and new players too. Games only succeed if the player base is large enough, or wealthy enough.

@GamerSeuss It's proven to be a pretty general rule throughout human existence: If there is nothing to move forward to that benefits you directly, why bother? Having a certain amount of vertical progression (namely in crafting, as I believe combat should largely be horizontal + knowledge) would help give players an incentive to keep playing whilst providing newer players opportunities with their crafted goods.

Something too man people don't understand: Complete shakeups of previously proven systems are NOT always good, and often turn out horribly.

@GamerSeuss Success or failure, time will tell if the system works. I am of the opinion that players need personal progression goals as well as personal feats, and I firmly believe that is the case in RPGS/life in general.

Time will tell.

Out of sheer laziness, I will list the ideas in bullet/point format. These ideas and concepts may or may not offer improved gameplay, and quality of life, but also may or may not represent the future desires/views of the devs.

Attributes:
In the future, I would like to see removal of attribute hard caps for the races which have an affinity for that attribute, which would help provide a different playstyle for each race, on top of racial passives.

Increasing the use of attributes such as dexterity, which seems to be pretty weak at the moment. I understand that charisma is being worked with right now, so I cannot be critical of it's uselessness.

Strength: Change the strength bonus to something different from "+4% weapon damage per point". Ideally (from my perspective), it would add a separate bonus to weapon damage, not counting towards the current bonus weapon damage stat -> Damage Per Hit = Base Damage * (1 + Strength*.04)*(1 + Percent Weapon Damage Bonus), this way. This should allow more building paths overall.

Mining/Smelting
Add random mineral nodes to the open world, aside from the city nodes (which would be more resource dense than the open world nodes).

Slightly decrease the amount of time that it takes for these minerals to respawn, for city nodes only.

Decreased time to smelt ore, 4 hours -> 3 hours.

Crafting
Enjoyable system so far, but minor improvements may help quite a bit.

Increase the amount of fabrics available to cloth armors, I feel that mages are pretty limited by the current selection, as it only boils down to "muh primal weave". Possibly add wool, which may be with livestock farming, or alchemical weaves as well. A lot of possibility here, so please do not forgot mages.

Add a leather cost to all smithy recipes, and "advanced" bow recipes. Allow different leathers to be used for minor stat increases on these items, and the type of wood used for mage staffs to impart a bonus.

Add a weapon repair function at the smithy, whereby you have to pay a percentage of the weapons original resource cost to repair it to full, but this takes time. You would have to leave your weapon at the smithy for X hours whilst it is repaired. Also, weapon durability is awful, please increase it.

Events
Other than the legendary NPCs which will come sometime this year, resource events such as meteor impacts, whereby large amounts of minerals are scattered around an area, but cannot be mined for a period whilst they cool down. This should increase the amount of combat between players, as they work to defend resources other than their own cities.

Enchanting
Your enchanting system is awesome, and I can't stress this enough. I would like to see some changes in formulas, like critical strike chance, which is the same as many other different enchantments.

Further Character Development
I may be alone in this one, but having crafting experience separate from the rest of the knowledge system would provide a good amount of crafting depth. Having separate crafting levels: weapon smith, armor smith, leather working, tailoring, fletching, mage craft, alchemy, cooking, etc... which provide quality bonuses to the item crafted based on the level of the crafter. Albion did this right (from my perspective, it is one of the few things they did do right), and it only hurts to ignore the good things done by previous games

Quality of Life
Give us a "deposit all" option for depositing stone, coal, ore, logs... into their relative storage areas in a city, it is overly tedious to pick up each and every one of the pieces, and place it in the required spot; balance realism with "gaminess".

An auto-deposit option for placing material in chest, such as shift clicking.

An auto-run key, which toggles movement. This would prevent my hand from developing carpal tunnel when transporting goods across the world. Do this for our physical health, please.

This one is a big maybe: Allow us move to another city/point of interest via roadways by clicking on the map icon. I would love this to be implemented, and would fully expect to have to disable this to protect myself from wolves/bandits lurking along the highway.

Change the way hauling coal/charcoal/stone/metal/wood works. Allow us to place them in our inventory, but have them weigh a stupidly large amount. Then, allow the carts/wagons to store any type of item (also increasing their movement speed and resource cost), without a limit to weight cap; carts and wagons would only be limited to the inventory grid size. Such a nice quality of life change.

Rant done.
Good stuff so far.
Please don't ignore valid player concerns and advice.
Take as long as you need to develop a proper game, patience is key to producing quality.

You spend hours farming for materials to build crafting stations and a billion smelters then have to pay to use your own crafting stations. Nice.

PS. make smelters more efficient, because right now those relying on metal are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to producing equipment/mastering it.

@Roccandil That would also be a valid solution, but having multiple ways to solve that overflow would be ideal. Keep in mind that it isn't just crafted items, but materials which may need to get culled eventually, thus having both systems in play would be amazing!

Full disclaimer, I know that this game has it's core group who will defend the developers choices regardless, but as someone who wants the game to actually succeed, acceptance isn't a solution.

Now, I'm someone who has stuck with this game for a very long time, and I've noticed the same core issues recited by new (now former) players. The woes of these players cannot simply be chalked up as "But that's the developers view", or "I like it, therefore it's fine", because ignoring legitimate complaints will undoubtedly lead to a game with higher attrition than onboarding. Though most games can function with a minimal, dedicated player base, this game, with it's "player driven economy", cannot be feasible without a growing community and the changes driven by them.

The following are common complaints that I have read:

1. The time it takes to move past primitive gear, and the lack of a "how" has caused many players to leave. There is simply too much BS in the way of producing higher tiered gear than primitive when you don't know what the hell is going on, and the tedium to make work stations is a turn off.

Potential solution: allow access to all crafting stations in starter cities, but maintain the gold cost. Remove the gold cost when crafting in your own plot, or untaxed city. Remove the refining time for leather, wood, metal, etc.

1. The heavy material tedium. Is harvesting heavy materials supposed to be a full time job? There is very little incentive other than to make crafting stations, or level up your crafting (which does next to nothing), and the system itself just seems tedious and unenjoyable. This GAME should not feel like a full time job, with all it's monotony and BS.

Potential solution: remove heavy materials and replace them with normal materials which fit into your inventory space. This would make crafting, building, collecting in general, MUCH more enjoyable and less time consuming, making time for other more entertaining elements of the game.

1. PVE combat. With the latest update, PVE combat has become more prohibited to solo players. The solution of "just play with others" is not attractive to many players, who would rather play a different game entirely than be forced to work with others.

Potential solution: Decreases in either mob health, damage, or both, to produce a more entertaining game for solo players. Maintain the group requirement through difficulty for legendary creatures, pvp forts, sieges, and maybe future "raid" type instances.

1. PVP. The real issue with an abundance of red players is the lack of every other player to prevent this, thus bored players who have completed everything turn against players who have not.

Potential solution: listen to players grievances and try to make a game which will attract more than a niche audience. More blue/neutral players, or even reds from different groups, will help reduce the amount of suffering by PVE players.

1. Introduce AI merchants to sell to and buy from, ensuring a base cost of goods and a means of generating income from other sources, or sinking gold into, let's say, an "extract vendor", who sells extracts at a relatively high cost. I know this one is a potential solution to an unlisted problem, but most successful RPGs have similar elements, and I want this game to be successful.

Potential solution: read above.

1. Potions. Potions seem to be a bit off... they are relatively expensive and tedious to produce, and don't last that long.

Potential solution: make the potion effects permanent until the player enters a downed state. Increase the cost or reduce the amount of potions created to compensate. This may also dissuade red players, as they stand to lose more without extra gain.

I hope the devs give these an actual read through, as I thoroughly believe these changes would make the game more palatable for newer players, and would not effect the current player base much at all.

TL;DR

More players = better economy and game atmosphere. Some ideas for the game which are too niche should be done away with in favor or increasing the player count.

Cheers,

Beckfast

The devs need to be more flexible with community concerns, this being a prime example. +1 for hot-bar consumable slots.

@Roccandil That would also be a valid solution, but having multiple ways to solve that overflow would be ideal. Keep in mind that it isn't just crafted items, but materials which may need to get culled eventually, thus having both systems in play would be amazing!

Crafting hundreds of the previous tier item to prevent "exp waste" creates unnecessary grind.

Grinding to improve your craftsmanship on items is fine; no tradesman has ever created a masterpiece on their first attempt. Solve the issue of "item overflow" with NPCs (god forbid we add those) who buy your stuff for a base price and sell various goods, therefore setting market minimums/maximums. The current system only works with a very large and active player base, or with horribly slow progression and crafting times; take away exp from crafting and I can assure you that many players will lose purpose.

Why not introduce "legendary weapons" whose recipes only drop from legends, or certain dungeon type events? Instead of recipes for everything else, force players to max out the knowledge of certain mobs to learn the recipe. Dedicated crafter now has incentive to move from their crafting hole to explore the rest of the game.

Also introduce more crafting stations in starter towns, until players are comfortable migrating elsewhere/have a better understanding of how things work. Down side to this is that smelting, tanning, other processing times, etc. would have to be nearly instant to accommodate this, like Rune Scape, making the ore regeneration time the gating process.

No matter what they do, issues will arise... Also, nothing is truly set in stone, so why not find the best possible solution for as many people as possible and make this game successful.

Or change the smelting mechanics/tanning mechanics to "instant", to reduce tedium and promote gameplay that isn't make a billion smelters and wait simulator. Changing smelters & tanning tubs to "crafting stations" as opposed to what they are now would also solve the problem of citizen trust-worthiness and make crafting more tolerable (at least for me). Like, I really don't understand the need to be unique in this sense, when tried-and-true methods already exist whilst being incredibly less painful by lacking "heavy" materials which need to be picked up and loaded onto a bloody cart.

If gear ends up proliferating, reduce the durability of lower quality stuff and/or add major durability loss upon being downed by ANYTHING. Excellent gear (enchanted stuff) would be limited by reagents as is.

Activity logs are obviously needed for city managers, so I hope they implement this ASAP.

Another possibly crazy idea: Remove farming/food requirements for cities all together, replace growth with gold which is now supplied by taxes. Along the line of food, I'd be happy if they removed food & rest requirements altogether, as this game doesn't feel like survival mechanics suit it very well, and appear very cumbersome at best.

You spend hours farming for materials to build crafting stations and a billion smelters then have to pay to use your own crafting stations. Nice.

PS. make smelters more efficient, because right now those relying on metal are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to producing equipment/mastering it.

Exactly this ^

@TheBodo The fact that you have taken so much effort really shows your devotion to this game, and a desire to see it better... I'm surprised that people would even go ahead and outright shut your ideas down as if they know what the game ought to be, as that level of thinking shows a cult-like "my views are right and cannot be wrong" type of approach.

You have a lot of good points in your post, and I hope the devs keep track of both the blessings and criticisms of their game.

@spoletta I completely agree. I am not proposing such a stupid level of power change from start and finish, but a modest amount that leads to player continuation. I don't understand why people always bring strawman arguments into these sorts of things... Hell, too much water would kill you too.

@GamerSeuss Success or failure, time will tell if the system works. I am of the opinion that players need personal progression goals as well as personal feats, and I firmly believe that is the case in RPGS/life in general.

Time will tell.