Posts made by FibS

PixARK is on free weekend. It's like ARK: Survival Evolved, but less awful.

It's also 60% off so I went ahead and picked it up (which means I can play the sky islands DLC too.)

Have you completely finished the house? It won't work if you only have the floor in, you have to finish the entire thing..

@Tuoni said in How in depth is the crafting going to be as far as supplying players with things can it be a proper business?:

Perhaps they should do something with the combat then...

... You mean like finish the game, because it's in alpha?

@PeachMcD There is nothing about the concept of a sandbox, or any other kind of game, that forbids "limitations". "Limitations" are what make a game a game.

If Mario was able to teleport to the end of every level, he would have less limitations, but also no game.

If you had no story quests in Grand Theft Auto, and could just instantly summon any car or weapon instead of having to go find one, you'd have less limitations, but also less game.

The entire definition of a game is a set of rules (limitations) with a coherent goal. If you want to just control an entire world and never have to follow any rules... then you're not a gamer, you're an artist.

@Tuoni Yes, even when adjusting for currency conversion, price is sometimes grossly inequal in different currencies.

South American countries are frequently shafted. Sometimes Australia is too.

Same problem here. Character is Odessa.

@Nightmarestang I don't think this will be possible in Fractured. The game design seems to be leaning towards being 95% combat, with everything else as a side project.

As I understand it, the rules go something like this.

• Arboreus: It is not possible to loot anyone except a party member or guild mate who has permitted it.
• Syndesia: It is an ingame crime to loot anyone other than a party member or guild mate who has permitted it.
• Tartaros: There are no restrictions at all in looting other players' corpses.

There's no such thing as an "epic crafter" in this game. Every character can make any gear if they have the materials for it.

While the game intends to do away with formal equipment tier, the fact remains that certain stat spreads will be better in the meta than others at any given time, and so particular materials (which determine said stat spreads) will be more in demand than others at any given time.

Because of this, I suspect that the game economy will revolve around top guilds contesting high-demand resource spots.

I believe that Arboreus, which lacks substantial PVP, will be the chief hot spot for "smuggler runs" - small guilds or individuals sneaking trace amounts of high-demand materials out from under guilds' noses to arm themselves and others to be viable on Syndesia and Tartaros (which will likely have higher-demand, PVP-focused materials.)

@Jetah I've played Path of Exile. Yes, you can 90%-optimize your gameplay for a one-time payment of less than $15.00 (which I've done.) I have many, many criticisms of Path of Exile, but the cash shop is not one of them.

It doesn't change that the norm in F2P games is to be a predatory, fake-PVP-focused, P2W scam however.

My main character will also be Beastman. Good travels!

@kingpwood

Albion is linear - characters must progress from "T1" zones to "T6" zones. These zones become progressively more griefer-focused until the black zones, which are utterly lawless.

Fractured is not linear. There are no "tiered zones". There are three separate planets entirely: a PvE one, a lawful PVP one, and a lawless PVP one. All three are equal with their own start, middle, and endgame.

Fractured is effectively a MOBA with three game modes, and you can scoot your character between the three with some limitations.

@Clinion said in What I "DO NOT" want to see in this game:

Recently, I have been watching alpha tests and introduction trailers of Albion Online. They have so much in common with Fractured in those early stages. However, Albion changed drastically over time and I did not quite like those changes. Here are a couple of things I do not want to see in Fractured(or change in Fractured)

This game is very unfortunate to have been constantly plagued with Albion comparisons since the Kickstarter.

Unless they completely change the entire fundamental concept of the game, the two will not be comparable. The Three Planets system is incompatible with Albion's progress line.

• Albion has no players cities, only cities with rich people buying all the spots. I do not want to see that happen in Fractured.

I don't know what financial gate will hold players from spots in the final game, but the vast majority of player city gating is chores - wandering around the local area transferring lumber and quarried stone to your building site. As long as you can make an axe, a hammer, and a cart, you can build a house.

• Gathering is very unpopular in Albion as far as I see. Game forces you to hardcore PvP and rewards those who does. Consequently people do not prefer gathering. Instead, they do newly introduced dungeons and hellgates to obtain money and gear.

For the uninitiated: Albion Online explicitly separates all of its crafting materials, equipment, etc. into Tiers. Higher-Tier resources are found in higher-Tier zones. From low to high Tier, Zones run down a spectrum from "no PVP" to "completely lawless PVP", requiring a competent guild to realistically gather high-end materials.

The Three Planets system mentioned earlier in this post renders this irrelevant. None of the planets is more "endgame" than any other:

• You can get "endgame" gear on Arboreus, which has no PVP.
• You can get "endgame" gear on Syndesia, which has lawful PVP.
• You can get "endgame" gear on Tartaros, which has lawless PVP.

You're free to play any one, any two, or all three planets as you like. None of them is required to excel at any other.

• Related to previous matter, in a sandbox game, I would love to see gathering&crafting be the backbone of everything and they should be the primary focus.

This is the primary determinant of math muscles in Fractured.

(math muscles = you have better numbers and are more likely to win)

While experience-we-don't-call-that is present, the power of your gear is not dependent on your innate attributes except in terms of your ability to get the crafting materials, and is probably considerably more influential to your math muscle.

However, Fractured is implementing fishing, animal husbandry, etc. only as stretch goals. They are unlikely to become major parts of the crafting system. As such, the chief flaw of the game, as currently planned and known to me, is that its most important aspect (crafting) is also its least detailed.

Fortunately, math muscle itself is not that important compared to on-field skill, or at least won't be once the combat system is stabilized and the skills and talents are field-tested and finetuned.

• Being a sandbox game should not indicate complete freedom. Currently in Albion, they are trying to reduce the power of huge alliances and guilds by applying certain debuffs and so on. Instead, there should be limits for number of players in a guild/alliance for proper control.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say.

Many MMOs suffer from slippery slope tyranny - one or two guilds come out on top and stay that way because the poor game balance makes it trivial for them to choke upstarts before they become rivals, thanks chiefly to geographically bottlenecked resources.

I don't know how Fractured will address this, but the fact that there are three separate planets each with their own "endgame resources" should help, especially if "veins" can run out and new ones end up spawning in totally different places on the planet.

@Farlander While money used to be backed by gold and silver, and there was a huge political fight for several decades over which to use, modern money currently uses neither and is fiat currency. It's minted from cheap materials and legally mandated as worth a considerably higher value than that of the material and production cost.

Money, as in dollar bills and coins, is effectively a physical representation of abstract value or debt. The virtual balances kept by banks and other such institutions are also representations of value or debt.

The relative value of different currencies to one another depends on a myriad factors, such as how influential the respective nation is in the world economy. How much physical currency exists is only one factor, and a relatively minor one at that.

The primary cause of inflation is a shock to the economy, such as a rise of production costs or a change in supply or demand causing a rapid price hike.

That said, the fact that virtual currency in an MMO can be minted infinitely and rapidly, and that NPC shops are endlessly stocked, infinitely rich, and buy anything and everything for a static price, is probably a much larger factor in inflation than it is in the real world, where minting is very limited and retailers have stock and funds to worry about.

@humerus In the upcoming open alpha, they're implementing an early faction/militia which works as Psymantis described. It's a placeholder for Syndesia's eventual justice system.

You went straight for Eternal? I hope you end up liking the game! o.o

You could have waited for the open alpha in a few days to confirm if you like the progress so far. Of course, it's incredibly early and probably 90% of the systems are not implemented. Even player cities won't be in the open alpha, let alone the other planets and their respective races.

The design of this game allows me to play an overall babby PVE character but still experiment with PVP whenever I feel like it.

@Tuoni You should read the quoted passage again. It has two conditions.

• You are only allowed to stay anywhere on Arboreus for a half hour. This implies you will be ejected from the planet after that half hour.
• If you enter a Good-only area you will be instantly killed. This implies you will be ejected from the planet on respawn, because respawning on Arboreus afterward would make absolutely no sense.

Also, to whoever mentioned the idea that playing on one planet meant "missing out on part of the game", the entire point is that you get to pick how you play the game... If you want Arboreus's content, then make an Arboreus-compatible character. If you don't, then don't. It's that simple.

The developers have stated again and again and again, clear as day, that nobody is gimped in any way if they stay entirely on one of the three planets. They all have equivalent start, mid, and endgame content, from enemies to gear.

There is no such thing as a successful free-to-play MMO. This is a euphemism for free-to-try scams.

Excellent examples are Albion Online (formerly P2P) and Black Desert Online (still $10.00 for base entry). More or less every system in these games is a mob shakedown; your character is arbitrarily crippled, and your resources throttled, unless you pay more to regain full capacity. You are not playing the game for free and therefore it is not free to play.

These games do this because they rely on whales - rich people who don't have any concern for decent gameplay, or talent therein, and prefer to buy e-peen trinkets to pretend they're better than everyone else in the game. A mere 10% of the player base sustains a whale game. So, these games have no particular need to have decent gameplay for 90% of the community.

They also do this in order to profit off of goldwebs. Goldwebs are organized mass-botting operations done to collect ingame value and sell it to players through RMT. They're difficult to track because they always trade the value back and forth between tons of accounts (like a web) and never let large amounts of value stay on one account for longer than it takes to give it to a customer. Goldwebs make so much money from RMT that they think nothing of paying through any and all remotely reasonable financial game access barriers. The more paid accounts a goldweb registers, and the more passes to high-value DLC areas, the more profit the game turns. Thus, not only is there no incentive to actually stop botting in an MMO (which is incredibly difficult for any traditional MMO design), but it is in fact desirable to encourage them!

Right now, Fractured has not lost its passion to actually be worth playing, and would not benefit in its current form from a free-to-try model, because it isn't designed as a scam. Maybe someday it will fall apart and die like Ultima Online before it, but not today.

@Farlander As I understand it, the majority of Arboreus hard-bans characters of Evil alignment - they effectively die instantly upon entering these sacred zones. Evil characters are limited to a half hour or so in addition to only being permitted to enter a select few areas.