The game is not meant to be character progression grind heavy.
It is resource/equipment grind while players interact with the politics between player built cities.
To get to 60 talent points you still need to have killed every mob to 100% research and fought numerous world bosses.
There is plenty of progression options, they are just not -necessary- to have a good game play experience and have a workable set of abilities and equipment.
Sadly Dragon soul was not actually useable in the spring alpha. Hopefully it will be in the next tho.
Alpha ended. so servers down.
on discord they announced that the alpha was ending tomorrow. you probably got that. (since the devs work in Italy and it's tomorrow there XD)
buying/abandoning a plot -could- be done in the starting town... and give that plot an upkeep of 1m gold coins due every 5 min? to keep players from 'accidentally' holding it beyond the quest prompts.
There could still be trolls who just re-buy it every 5 min tho... ugh...
In playing this last alpha I and many others were happy to help numerious new players with their questions in general chat.
Of the many questions there were two that really could use some more help from the tutorial section; What a fleshing beam looks like and how to change the resource in the crafting station.
Here are my 'give me a sec' versions.
A tutorial for catching a horse would also be good as that was another very high frequency question. Really just giving the players a link to the video in which Prometheus shows us would go a long way to helping the new players.
I think that if we had a pve alpha that it would be to establish mob balancing, trade, and democratic takeovers of cities.
Note that there was some heavy handed mob changes this alpha and could use some more work. example: black widows went from the terror of melee with their magic missiles and mage armor and went to boot goo when magic missiles got nerfed. Same with the shadow stalker goblins, they were terrors that would come out of no where, jump, and one or two shot your squishy archer/mage, then they became a joke.
It has never been said that you cannot craft higher tier weapons and armor from a dwelling than you could from the city you are attached to.
If the city can craft it then you can also craft it as a resident living outside of the city.
I repeat: the only thing you cannot do is craft Exceptional quality items which only have a 5% stat boost over Good quality items which you can make.
For this 5% boost the city has to build a separate crafting specialty building the size of your entire plot eating lots of resources, time, and valuable space.
AND if you get citizenship then you have access to them too.
If the city can craft tower shields with oriclaicum (Tier 4 alloy) metal, then so can you.
Due to the value of cities as: safe locations, resource stores, and tech suppliers any city that goes dormant will be easily conquered by any rag tag temporary group of 20 people at which point they retain all the shiny things in the city but kick out any people who were living inside the city walls (the afk citizens). This means that there will be little to no effect on the residents. Read the siege rules posted in news.
Cost reward benefit in addition to the prestige of being able to say 'look at my giant ego'.
People will spend inordinate amount of time, money, and energy on building ego monuments. How else could you explain games surviving only on cosmetic sales?
The players who want to be part of a big team with big things which they have control over but have to (get to) defend against other big teams are plentiful enough to supply the city options for the more laid back or introverted players to get the free ride.
There is no versus. They both need and benefit from each other.
The cities need to attract smaller groups and individual players to increase their size (through residents) and tech to allow them to better defend the city from other cities or large groups. They do have the freedom to choose a city location, but with the population we saw in the game at the peak this can be competitive.
The residents need the city to provide the tech but also have the freedom to choose from any of the many cities established by the big groups and also move between them with little cost.
Both win.
I repeat:
You are seeing the messages of 'you need XXXX tech to craft' only because the game is at a low player activity and population phase.
Jump into the next alpha 3 days after the start and you will have your pick of which city you want to join which offers all the crafting tech you want because the hundreds of players who like to be part of something larger will have put in 20 hour days to grind the shit out of the trees, stones, mobs (for gold coins), animals (for meat), just so they can say they have the first/biggest/fastest/shinyest ego symbol and soon be bribing, wooing, or hunting other individual or small group players to join them with offers of free money, gear, etc...
In my opinion the 'rares' will be the special enchanting materials dropped by big bosses and used for tier 3 enchantments.
They will allow you to build that vorpal sword of fire.
-by the way, currently a team of 5 can totally take on these big bosses and thus are not beyond a small team-
Not at all.
If your definition of success is to be able to make all the equipment and farm all the mobs then a small guild is better able to succeed than a large one.
You can be a 5 man guild who each buy one house near the good pve or resource farming areas, get access to each of the 5 cities techs at the meager cost of 1 hour of gold coin farming a month without any need to bother with politics or worry about the safety of your holdings in your plots while cities can be raided or captured.
Unlike players tied to one city -citizens- your 5 man group has more safe havens, more tech options, more space to craft and smelt, more access to resources and mobs.
A large guild has to make trade deals for ore and food to get by, while a small guild can use their numerous locations to get access to all the ores they want them selves and never have to worry about paying 4000 meat for weekly upkeep.
The only thing you cant do is craft excellent quality equipment (a 5% boost in gear stats), or farm crops (even then you can hunt for meat and sell it to the town so they can pay their upkeep).
You also do not have to spend 5 hours to gather the wood and stone to build each of the city buildings that unlock tech for the entire region, not just the citizens.
In many ways a small guild is more able to be successful through diversification and distribution than a large guild which is tied to one city.
In the last test the minimum number of people to claim a city was 5. you know what happened? ghost towns and almost no player interaction.
Having a max level city (15) requires 100 residents ! and we had 7 of them! -I think-
There is no shortage of people to create cities and thus no shortage of places for smaller guilds to pick from to call home and get access to all the tech with none of the work.
Small groups have more access to resources, crafting materials, mobs, and tech than large groups tied to cities.
Wow !
I am amazed that this was not reported earlier but am sure it was still a thing then.
As a resource farmer I feel this needs to be checked out and fixed else the efforts of farmers and miners will be redundant.
Good Catch.
Any solo or small group can seek out a city with the tech they want and join it to get access to that tech by simply buying a residential plot outside of the city.
Valhalla, Duath, sproketon, were all large successfull cities made up of solo or small groups.
Right now there is no activity or player presence which is what you are runing into.
Valhalla was specifically created by a number of small groups who decided to join together into a larger group just for the purpouse of claiming a city for small groups like them.
They got one of the first 4? city spots on the map and by many scales, the best one for conducting pve activity in the shadow vale while also being very close to one of the starting locations.
There actually is fast travel: from port to port. Even uninhabited cities on the coast have working ports. The cost to transport a cart full of material is not even very high.
This ease is actually something that reduces player interaction, which is not the goal.
Otherwise, yes,
Travel is a main aspect of the game.
Bottle necks and passes through mountains are there on purpose.
This gives highway men a place to set up ambushes or bridge tolls should they want to.
This gives players reasons to work together to make trade caravans.
This gives combat players a purpose to defend, or attack, the caravans.
As there is no fast way to get to any ambush or fight players have to think ahead, use scouts, know about choke points, and be organized.
All this gives value to long distance trading which can make trade, escorting, and banditry profitable and possible.
Want that cool special armor? well you need alloy X from the north, alloy Y from the south and Coal from the mountains outside of town. All needs to be shipped in, slowly, over exposed, bottlenecked land. As a combat player it gives you reason to support the trade people and the trade people feel they have value because of the complexity and difficulty in gathering and transporting all those goods.
The cliffs could defiantly be more clearly marked on the maps, no argument there, but if you zoom in the way through is identifiable.
That sounds both hilarious and horrifying Farlander.
In any case I do not think that it will be much of an issue in Fractured as you are limited to one house per account per world (arborus, tartorious, synedra), tho I do see people who build cities buying up surrounding land -as they can- and then sell them to players wiling to contribute and defend the city instead of just having leeches. (sadly currently there is no real downside for residents should their attached city be sieged/taken over)
Thanks for the testing info everyone. I am sorry that there are not more on and available to join in.
Incentive to go to the huge effort and work of making and maintaining a city.
Incentive for players to work together for something greater that benefits all who join in.
Intended
You can stock the house upkeep with 4k gold coins, which is 4 weeks rent and about an hour of farming mobs.
So once every 4 weeks you need to farm gold coins for about an hour to keep the house.
Not doing that is a choice.
I agree that a notice like " your house rent stash is at 3k" when you enter the game may be a nice reminder, but with such ease for upkeep...
I feel that people 'loosing' their houses is more of a artefact of the slowness of the game right now. When you are active the coins and upkeep checking would be easy and hardly noticed.