Posts made by Benseine

@jetah those who are terrified will come in large groups with cheap gear. Will be loads of fun

I played many mmorpgs that cost like €60 plus €15 sub a month. I saw heavy member drops in all of them. WoW is only exeption I know

I think +/- €30 to buy and VIP for €10 a month is better. Many players will drop VIP as soon as they have unlocked close to all +400 skills. It's good to have a cashshop for cosmetics.

I think giving ppl the option to just buy the game for +/- €30 and never have to spent another cent, while giving them access to all game content, ensures for a much more stable and bigger playerbase then €60+€15 a month to be able to play to game.

@jetah wouldn't the exploration system drive them to other planets? Unlock all the skills?

@vicious said in How similar to Albion Online?:

@fibs Yup thats when the game died, after t2a , the more you dumb down your game the more people you gonna get but also the less they stick around, becouse game become simpler less challenging and unless you have an incredible end game not many gonna remain.

Uo pop dropped by 50% when they did trammel-felucca (pvp world pve world) then another 20%-30% with age of shadows, and even more when they introduced insurance for equip

Star wars galaxy was going well , then they did NGE, simplify the game the grind the classes, les punishment , it lost 80% of players in 6 months.

I can go on and on with examples like that

Do you maybe... by any chance... happen to remember... if that was (partially) the result of.... PVE CAREBEARS crying on forums all the time?

Do idea, just a wild guess

@specter but did they say the difference in VIP and no VIP is the number of learning shots?

@kralith Well I think it did got mentioned before in the Q&A lifestream or gameplay video, that the difference is 10 learning spots with VIP and 3 learning spots without. If not I'm totally mixing Fractured news with EVE Online news.

@tulukaruk @Kralith it's in spotlight number 3. Read below. With VIP you can do like 10 or so at the same time, and withput VIP you can learn like 3 at the same time:

NEWS
FEATURE SPOTLIGHT #3 – THE KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM
October 4th, 2017 at 3:03 pm
The Fractured way of character progression has been revealed. Goodbye grinding and power disparities!

Hi, fellow gamer and MMO enthusiast! Just over a month since Universe & Travels, it’s time for us to drop a new Feature Spotlight – this time focused on one of the most unique features of Fractured: the Knowledge System!

While originally it was our plan to release an article on player-made villages, our community has been relentless in making us notice how much they wanted to know more about character progression on Fractured. So here it comes!

Before we begin, let’s clear something up. As you may know already from our homepage, progression on Fractured is neither level-based nor skill-based, and strongly rejects grinding in any form. Quite often, this has gotten our community members worried: how can there be a sense of progression and long-term achievements to look for? Well, it can! The core ideas of the Knowledge System are simple yet revolutionary:

The core strengths and weaknesses of your character are set when you create it by choosing its attributes, and don’t change during the course of gameplay: you’re effective and can join complex PvE and PvP scenarios from Day 1.
Your character rarely becomes stronger over time. Instead, it gets more knowledgeable. This happens is many ways, but one above all: the array of abilities at its disposal becomes larger and larger. This, coupled with the Resting system, allows you to design a ton of situational builds to engage in different scenarios more effectively.
Whenever there’s something that makes your character stronger, that’s just for fine-tuning purposes, so that there is never a huge power gap between newcomers and experienced players.
Now that we’ve made this important preamble, let’s turn this Knowledge System inside-out together!

KNOWLEDGE POINTS
In Fractured, Knowledge Points can be seen as your personal progression currency: you acquire them over time while playing the game, and you can spend them to obtain Talent Points and start learning new abilities.

Unlike the usual “experience points” you can find in most MMORPGs, on Fractured grinding (repeating the same action over and over) is not the way you earn Knowledge Points. On the opposite, their acquisition takes place naturally during the course of your gaming sessions – and the more varied are the things you do, the better!

Let’s have a look at the four main situations that lead to earning Knowledge Points.

Exploration. Unlike most MMOs you’ve likely played, a new character on Fractured is not only unaware of combat and magical arts, but also oblivious of the geography of the world it lives in. This ignorance is reflected in the world map, which presents itself as an empty canvas. If you want to become a knowledgeable explorer, you need to travel through every region of the world with some parchment and a pen at hand, taking a little time to write down what you’re seeing. Whenever you document a new location, it becomes permanently visible (in detail) on your world map, and you’re awarded with Knowledge Points according to the importance of what you’ve recorded.
Bestiary. The bestiary is a personal diary where you store all the information on the types of creatures you’ve interacted with and/or defeated. New entries in the bestiary only report the most basic information on a creature, such as its name and species. Multiple interactions / kills gradually reveal more detailed data on the creature, including its attributes and abilities. Every time you unlock a new piece of bestiary knowledge, you are rewarded with Knowledge Points, and your characters becomes more proficient when interacting with the creature.
Item Identification. Most equipment items on Fractured are crafted by players. Occasionally, however, you might be able to recover one from the corpse of a creature you’ve defeated or a hidden treasure. Each item obtained this way is Unidentified – it might be magically enchanted, but you won’t be able to grasp its powers (if any) unless you identify it first. When you do so, you not only may find yourself with a highly valuable prize in your hands, but you gain some Knowledge Points as well.
Relics. Relics are rare pieces of the lost knowledge of Elysium that have survived the Fracture and can be recovered from the most remote locations and dangerous circumstances. When consumed, they can trigger the discovery of a new spell or raise the strength of one you know above its maximum theoretical level – a power we’re sure the most competitive of you will crave to master. And oh, they give Knowledge Points too, of course.
OK, now you know how Knowledge Points are earned. Let’s get into the core of the Knowledge System and find out how they can be spent.

THE TALENT TREE
Unless you’re entirely new to the world of RPGs, you’ve likely had to deal with Talents already in one way or the other. This is what your Talent Tree page looks like in Fractured:

At a superficial look, this is not much different from a canonical MMORPG talent system. Whereas in classic MMORPGs you gain a new Talent Point once in a while when leveling up, in Fractured you’re free to choose when to obtain one by spending a fixed amount of your Knowledge Points. The Talent Points you have – up to 50 – can then be assigned to the nodes of your Talent Tree. The latter is divided in six branches, each focused on one of the main character attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Perception, Charisma.

In classic MMORPGs, moreover, I’m sure you’re used to thinking very carefully before allocating a Talent Point, knowing there is no way back – at least not without having to open your (real-life) purse. That’s not the Fractured way. Here, you can re-assign your Talent Points as many times as you want during a Resting phase. Yes, that’s it: just sit down in front of a fire change all your Talents to match the stats and abilities of your Hero, just like you do before a match of your favorite MOBA! You can also handily save pre-defined configurations.

One last remark before closing this paragraph: if you’re afraid Talents create a power wide gap between new and experienced players, you can stop worrying already! Talents are certainly an important complement to a character build, and we’re sure different setups will be widely debated in the competitive crowd. However, they’re just that: complements. The main strengths and weaknesses of your character are established when you create it!

ABILITY LEARNING
On Fractured, magical and combat abilities are discovered and learned through a unique process involving exploration, combat, gathering, crafting, and a little bit of waiting time (including offline time).

Our aim when we designed this piece of the Knowledge System was once again to avoid grinding and to make you feel like any ability you learn is a small adventure in itself – always familiar yet never repetitive, always worth following but never creating power gaps.

Have we managed to do so? Read on and let us know!

STEP #1: DISCOVER & QUEST AROUND
When you open your Character Abilities window for the first time, almost all the spells listed in each School are in an Unknown state.

When an ability is Unknown, you character doesn’t know anything about it (surprising, eh), including its effect and what are the tasks required to unlock it – you’re only able to catch a glimpse of its icon. How to discover an ability? Just play the game! Travel, fight, gather, craft – whatever you fancy. As soon as you accidentally perform one of the tasks required to unlock an ability, it will switch to Discovered state.

Once an ability is Discovered, you get to know everything about it: what it does, what’s the cost to use it, and – mostly importantly – what are the tasks that have to be performed to be able to start studying it. Some examples of such tasks are:

Find, interact with, or kill specific creatures.
Kill some specific creatures in a unique way.
Find, collect or refine some amount of a specific resource.
Consume X units of a specific item.
Be hit X times by a specific spell.
Perform a specific combat action X times.
Explore one or more world locations.
Rest in a specific location.
Craft X units of a specific item.
Die in a specific way.
Ability learning tasks never require you to repeat the same action for hours. Instead, they’re designed encourage you to explore and travel – rewarding cleverness and bravery, not time spent grinding.

All abilities have a total of 6 tasks associated to them, but it’s enough you complete 2 to turn the ability to Ready To Study – and that’s when the second part of the learning process begins (EVE Online has similar learning rules, so I picked it up easily I guess).

STEP #2: STUDY THE ABILITY
So you finally have your ability Ready To Study. To start the learning process, all you need are:

A sufficient amount of Knowledge Points.
A blank tome of the appropriate School of Magic or Fighting.
Tomes are regular items that can be crafted by players. Tomes of different schools feature different procedures to be created, as some are made of parchment, others of paper, and several require unique resources on top of their basic material. They can be freely traded between players.

When you have your tome and enough Knowledge Points, you can start the learning process: the points are consumed and the book is inscribed, removed from your inventory and added to one of the Learning Slots of your character – if you have at least one not in use. Once launched, a learning process cannot be interrupted and continues even when your character is offline. The inscribed tome disappears when the learning has been completed.

That’s it! Now you just have to wait for the learning process to end to be able to use the ability. The total time required depends on several factors (such as the type of ability and your character attributes), and can be made shorter by actively playing the game (e.g. by consuming special kinds of edible resources).

Below you can see how a spell already learnt to level 1 looks like – the fearsome Axii’s Sun Strike, from the School of Invocation!

VIP works fine in EVE Online and look how popular it is. And playing EVE without VIP it is not possible if you want to PvP (although I have seen news that CCP was gonna making f2p a more viable option, dunno if that happened since I left).

In this game it seems less irrelevant if you play with VIP or not since it was stated that a new player could beat a veteran player by design of the game!

So for someone like me with a bussy life VIP is the way to go to compensate for my lack of time to explore the game, compared to someone who has no money but lots of free time.

I know there are ppl stuck in the middle, no time & no money, but be realistic, they can't addept a game to cater the ppl stuck in the middle, if they also want to run a business...

I have the same problem, one newsletter is missing from my quest log. All the first newsletters went to my spam folder. I think it got deleted there automaticly. Haven't had the problem again since I made them go to my regular inbox. But no way I guess to get the quest completed, right???

@jetah said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

there should never be any progression outside of the game.

So if offline characters didn't lvl up, and there was no gathering, you would be okay having an offline character wondering around the guild settlement? My main reason is still to make guild settlements look more alive.

@fibs said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

Online players who are not gathering (the vast majority of online players at any one time) gather significantly less than a so-called "offline player". Specifically, they gather zero. The guild therefore has a conflict of interest in keeping its players offline.
Here's another exploit I didn't mention before: making alt characters solely to keep them idle in guilds. If you're not gonna play a character we shouldn't encourage you to make one.

If you have extended crafting ingame I can't imagine an offline character will collect resoures for settlement upgrades, maybe a handfull of basic materials.

Alts won't work. If you log one character on, you have no offline activity on any character. Have one alt stationed inside the guild, while your main if exploring the far corners of the world... who cares. Added this to the OP too btw.

Why have them to begin with? To make a guild settlement look very cool! To have a log of enemy activity around your settlement while main part of guild is logged off. (Who cares if hardcore guild runs in shifts or something, good for them). To make being part of a guild extra interesteing vs playing completely solo in an mmorpg. And I don't expect guards to be very effective guards vs a group of enemie players. It's just fun. I remember how dead playercities in Darkfall Unholy Wars looked like, or Battlekeeps in Age of Conan. Was really a shame. I just want guild settlements to look alive and attract ppl.

@fibs You say never done before, but then you mention it was like that in Ragnarok Online, another mentioned it was in Age of Wushu and appearantly Chronicles of Elria wil have it as core machanic...

The players or guild aren't punished for being online because online you can gather so much more then an offline character. This can also be easily balanced.

And about the Ragnarok Online exploit:

In this case, signing on and back off allows you to:

• instantly summon your guard back to the town hall (the 1 building that is probably most under attack) So put a 10 minute timer on the spawning of your offline character
• refresh your guard to max HP with all skill cooldowns removed Irrevelvant with a 10 minute timer
• break skill targeting (whether automatic or manual) Irrelevant with 10 minute timer
• not actually participate or risk anything while griefing your siegers I don't think an offline character will be a viable substitute for a online member in a siege

On top of that we could just add NPC for hire to guild settlements. I currently play gw2 wich has NPC guards and NPC patrols everywhere add they add very little to the game in my humple opinion...

@fibs

yes, hire guards/NPC's is easier, but less unique.

Why does it punishes players to be online? The guildsettlements are protected anyway, the guards simply log enemy activity while you are offline. The offline gatherers are in no way as effective as gathering online yourself, especially for crafting resources. It just offer guilds an extra income of basic survival items such as firewood, nuts and berries.

Why is it exploitable? If the rule is you log off inside the settlement and you offline character always spawns at the town hall and goes to their assigned activity from there, then I don't see any exploitable options. I added this to the OP btw.

@muker said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

@benseine said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

@muker no loss of knowlegde, your offline character is just a copy NPC. And you will see who killed you. That was my whole reason to introduce them. So you can see which enemies where near your settlement while you where offline. I highlighted it for you in the OP.

1. I find it abnormal even if administered because death involves death. If the BOT NPCs died, you have to buy a new one, with a different or similar range of skills

no the copy NPC/BOT will respawn after some time. so same NPC with same abilities. If it costs you anything depends if you choose to have it with your own gear (your items are lost) , guard duty gear (some currency from guildbank is lost) or just clothes (free). Maybe you can choose to set your offline character not to respawn after dead.

@muker no loss of knowlegde, your offline character is just a copy NPC. And you will see who killed you. That was my whole reason to introduce them. So you can see which enemies where near your settlement while you where offline. I highlighted it for you in the OP.

@muker I know it's unlikely they will listen to anything I say, but I want to suggest my idea's anyway

@finland said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

@benseine every race. botting is the best way to avoid annoying things like gathering. demons are the master race able to kill only bots?

If I have to do PvE I prefer to kill NPC's owned by rival guilds then just wolfs or boars or something.

@finland said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

@benseine

I like the "BOT" I dea but I doubt that you will find many players up for that.

Thx, beats normall botting by a long shot, right?

@finland said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

@benseine I would prefer something like a guild can hire npc bots rather than transforming our character in to bots like CoE.

So everything I mentioned in the OP, but with hired guards instead of copy of guildmembers characters? Why?

@finland said in Suggestion: Offline character activities:

@benseine They are developing the game in way that allow offline progress. it's the core of that game

I like the "BOT" I dea but I doubt that you will find many players up for that.

Yeah but what kind of offline progress? EVE Online has offline progress, but that doesn't compare to anything that I suggested here.