Posts made by Rife

Let's first talk about mage abilities.

One thing to note about melee abilities is that their skills are affected by the weapon the character is using. Abilities are usually normal damage ( that is affected by weapon ) + Damage modifier multiplied by strength.

However, for mage abilities, the spell damages are usually just Damage modifier multiplied by int. This causes mages abilities to have less damage, and also have their abilities completely ignored by weapon upgrades. It's definitely weird when you have a fire staff doing same skill damage as primitive staff, which should not be the case.

The second thing we need to talk about is mage equipment. For light armor, it is insanely easy to create, there is zero processing time compared to medium armor that needs to have 16 hours for processing hides, and metal which needs 4 hours to process ingots. Light armor processing is instant. This also needs to be changed.

Tl;DR
i) Mage abilities need to take into account the weapon damage
ii) Mage equipment needs to have a longer processing time

I've already mentioned, this thread is about the lack of PvP content that is sorely needed, not about PvE.

If you've played the test so far, you'd realize that the current character progression makes it so that PvE can never be sustainable. After you hit the abilities and talent points you need, there is little to no reason to do PvE anymore. For them to make good PvE system, the character progression system needs to be looked at.

What they can easily add right now though is PvP content which is needed in Syndesia. Syndesia should have PvP content over resources and end game PvE hotspots, because that's how Syndesia should be, as it's political PvP, and fighting over resources is a huge aspect of political PvP.

Saying that we should only change things once we have more systems in place isn't the right idea imo.

Right now the population is kinda dead because there is hardly any end game pvp. ( Also because we hardly have any good PvE as well but Neutral's mainly PvP or PvPvE focused, so let's focus on the PvP side of things in this topic ).

We should first give more incentives for engaging PvP environment, to draw back the pvp crowd with pvp content, and then we can change things later where needed.

Saying we should change things later is kind of a miss at the moment since testers aren't coming to test since there is no engaging PvP content right now.

Also, we are talking about open world pvp content, which is different from asteroids and sieges.

Yeah, along with the proposed changes, we should definitely have a cooldown on alignment changes which is not just a day or something, so that changing alignment becomes a more meaningful and impactful decision as well with proper consequences.

I'm not a fan of the system, I'd rather we are just unable to repair, and get destroyed, and have durabilities get more hits when downed/death.

I think it's a good idea, instead of having recipes as an additional resource needed to be farmed for crafting, we can have it "unlocked" instead when a person reaches a certain mastery in crafting an equipment.

For example, only after getting Tier 4 mastery in swords, can you craft the higher tiered swords, or something similar. That way there really will be crafting specializations as it is a grind for each equipment piece.

In this case, we dont need recipes at all.

I'm in 100% agreement with everything you mentioned.

Would also be cool if specific monsters drop specific recipes as well.

@Tuoni You basically said it yourself. End game PvE content should be Neutral flagged in Syndesia, this is because Syndesia is supposed to be have political pvp.

Political pvp involves fighting for resources, and resources include end game PvE content like Legends, and also limited resources like metal nodes. Which is exactly why I suggested what I did. ( I would also add the suggestion that Neutrals should also get a higher drop loot chance when doing PvE )

We shouldn't just be looking at the game too far in the future when the current gameplay is missing crucial elements that's having us less testers than we could have. We should instead implement and trial engaging gameplay elements like the suggestions I did, and we can always balance them down the line if it gets too messy.

Having Neutrals get extra loot chance is not "taking away" anything from blue players. It's just incentivizing the neutral playstyle which is sorely needed right now.

Even New World which we all know seems to hate open world pvp has pvp flagged players getting a higher loot chance.

I think we all know that there has been controversies regarding the AMA that just happened.

I'm gonna skip voicing out my frustrations here and instead give some pointers on what needs to change :

AMA's are time limited segments which means that there will be limited number of questions being asked. This should already be declared upfront - how many questions we have time for - this sets expectations from the community.

The second point is about deciding the questions being asked. We normally post our questions on the discord channel, instead of CM's choosing, let the community decide instead - let the top voted questions by the community be asked. This helps with transparency and nobody would have any issues with the questions being asked if there was ironclad proof that it was what the community wanted to hear answered about the most.

TL;DR
i) Let us know number of questions upfront
ii) Let community vote on which questions to be asked.

Bonus - It would be nice if we can have an actual active player have discussions with the developers during the AMA, someone like Spoletta for example. This is a win win situation - CM's who dont want to be there dont have to be there, and people who actually want to hear more meaningful discussions with the devs can hear them.

I've got to be honest, I was pretty disappointed with the AMA as well.

Disregarding the rather lack of professionalism from some of the CMs, it felt a little tone deaf considering that the hotly debated topic on discord and forum for weeks now have been about pvp and alignment in Syndesia. For some reason, there was completely no questions asked about this topic, but a meme-question about blue's one shotting reds was asked instead.

Honestly, I am still in a bit of shock that CM's would choose to ask that question instead of the multitude of other serious questions about pvp and alignment.

We should not be punishing good alignment, because all newcomers will primarily be in this alignment for a pretty good time.

Instead we should be incentivizing neutral alignments and also have more engaging open world pvp hotspots in Syndesia.

For example, we could have Neutrals double their percentages of loot drop on mobs.

Right now, Neutrals are basically meaningless in Syndesia. The only thing they can do is legends, and even then the legends are only notified on death, so there's barely any difference with doing it good aligned.

Not to mention the fact that Syndesia is about a political war, and everyone knows that the most important thing in political wars are wars about resources. Right now, there is simply no war for resources which needs to change -> something like if you were to gather resources outside of your residential territory, you need to be flagged neutral, and can have your cart stolen by other neutrals.

One more thing to add is that neutrals should be able to steal other neutrals carts, else it would not make much sense if whatever you managed to gather is unlootable in your cart when you gather outside your territory.

There are two major issues with the current gear progression and economy. I'll go through them individually.

Firstly, recipes.

Recipes do nothing for the game but gives an additional time sink that in time will be useless anyway.

This means recipe is basically useful for the first couple of months before it gets completely deprecated. All it does it to lengthen the time you can first craft a stronger armor/weapon, and later on it becomes a completely redundant item.

Some suggested changes to the system is to :
i) Dramatically increase recipe drop rates, and make specific monsters drop specific recipes. Recipes can then be limited use, and there will be a market for them.
ii) Remove recipes completely and replace them with a different system, or completely negate the use of any pre-requisite besides town tech to craft equipment

The second issue is the drop rate of specific reagents and items.
The drop rate for some of these rarer reagents and materials are way too low. Some examples are like soul shard, force stones, hardened skin, etc etc.
To have a thriving economy, we need to change from taking a really long time to get an equipment that can last a really long time, to taking a moderate amount of time to get an equipment that does not last as long. We will probably need a few balance passes to make this perfect, but right now it's skewed way too much to the opposite way of being so rare to get equipment that it doesnt make sense to lose them at all.

When we make equipment relatively easier to get, it will also make more sense when we have durability punishments in PvP. ( Which imo, we should ).

Now I'd like to discuss about some gear progression that was great but was removed. Primarily, the socketing system and the upgrading system. These two systems promoted the use of materials and gold, and were pretty liked by most players. I think these two systems should have been kept, it would be great if we can have both quality AND upgraded gear, like +1, +2, +3, and depending on how much you upgraded your equipment, you can enchant it with additional properties.

The upgrading can also come with failures which might hurt the durability of the equipment you're upgrading, or make it be destroyed entirely, which could add more gear sinks that the game desperately needs.

TL;DR :
i) Recipes need to be changed
ii) Rare reagents/materials need to drop more often
iii) Bring back socketing and upgrading gear, to +1, +2, +3, etc.

So firstly to address some concerns :

Residence housing doesnt need to change - in most cases you only want to gather stuff once you already have a house, so there is no need to make residence cheaper. This also incentivizes people to become residents, instead of just co-owning a house.

Regarding legends being beacons to PvP if they were announced earlier - this should definitely BE the case though. Look at what's going on right now - there is little to no pvp hotspots, open world pvp is practically dead in Syndesia. Legends should be one of the PvP contents that players can fight over.

Right now the neutral alignment feels almost like an additional 2 button chore to go through when you're doing legends.

As legends are only announced when they're dead, there is almost zero conflict surrounding them, as any party who isn't lazy will just rotate them.

Neutrals should be the "primary" and "end game" alignment in Syndesia. Due to the fact that we now only have inventory drops, open world pvp between Neutrals should be much more encouraged, and areas of interest should be more telling.

The problem right now is that the map is really large, ( which is a good thing ), but to drive conflict and engaging content, there needs to be pvp hotspots or dynamic contested events.

One such current content that is there right now is the legends. The problem is that because legends are only announced when dead, this prevents there from being engaging PvPvE content surrounding them. This needs to change.
Legends should always be announced when they are summoned. The 10 minutes or so where it takes for them to appear gives time for other groups to marshal and fight around a summoned legend. This ensures that people know where to go to find content and fights. ( Right now it always feels like we're just roaming an empty world.)

Another point I'd like to bring up is resources. There is 100% going to be a problem in all worlds where resource nodes are going to be camped. In Syndesia where things are political, we should be able to fight over these resources. Thus, when you try to gather resources out of your territory, you should be flagged neutral.
"Your" territory is defined as the territory you have residency in. This encourages people to actually become residents in Fractured, which to be honest should be one of the first things people try to do.

Residency is incredibly important because it starts to make players get invested in the land and territory that they reside in. It also makes choosing a territory much more meaningful as well.

My final point would be about Guild Wars. There definitely needs to be a system where guilds can declare war against another, as this goes hand in hand with the political system and political war that Syndesia supposedly should have. Guild wars should enable players from opposing guilds to fight each other in the open world regardless of what flag they have.

Of course, to prevent the guild war system from being abused, we need to have clear start/end to the wars. We can use a similar system to the current one, where the guild which has the highest ratings, in the war would be declared the winner after an X amount of days. Guilds can also only have one war at a time, and after they have finished a war, they cannot declare or be declared against for X amount of days as well.

TL;DR :
i) Legends should be announced when summoned, not when dead
ii) You should need to flag neutral when gathering resources outside of the territory you own a residence in
iii) There needs to be a system where we can declare wars against guilds and fight in the open world

Also agree with most things that Spol said.

I would like to add on that right now Neutral is almost a useless alignment. I think we need to change two things about Neutral.

The first thing is that when world bosses spawn, there should already be an announcement throughout the continent, so that people can actually contest, considering how travel times in this game are really long. Not when they are dead.

The second thing is that when you are getting resources from other territories other than your residency, you need to flag neutral. This makes it so that where you choose to live becomes more meaningful, cities with more resource hotspots might get more contested because they get higher tax due to higher population.

The other thing is that resources are finite, and even with the limited number of players in the test, we could see the first days certain resource spots were really farmed. On release, it would be much worse, so we need to be able to prevent players from "stealing" the resources in your territory. In this regard, we should also let neutral players steal other neutral player carts, because it would be no meaning if you could kill a neutral player that is trying to take resources from your territory, but not be able to do anything to his cart.

Previous tests we had a resident requirement in each city for ranking up, this however has been removed.

Resident requirement would help greatly for casuals and solo players as it incentivized cities and big guilds to get people to come and live in their cities.

Will this requirement be back in live version of the game?

Blood iron and several other alloys require Shadium ingots. But there is no Shadium mines anywhere, none in Myr nor in Aerhen.