I was a lil bit shocked when Spectre told me, that the Foundation system is most likely going to end in near future during Alpha test phase. So it seams that Foundation program was meant to be part of kickstarter campaign and pre-alpha testing phase. End of the Foundation program would be a shame actually, because the base idea is really good. I believe, that the reward ladder system encourages people to spread the word, stick with the game and participate to conversations. It is kind of win-win situation.
So why not continue Foundation program through all the testing phases and stop just before release?
Imho it would be wise to continue, because I see Foundation program even more valueable after Alpha 1 release than time before that. Then Fractured has more concrete content to show, and the possibility to buy the game and start to play immediately. This would also lead people to participate more to conversations, leave suggestions and give feedbacks.
The Foundation program does not need to continue in current form and some parts could be changed to cater better upcoming development phases. Make new quests, ladders and rewards, or update the current ones if needed. No matter what kind of changes you will make if those just suits better for upcoming test phases.
There is one part where I would like to see some change, and it is the daily posting quest. Current quest encourages now just throw one quick post to Daily Message posting or Welcome to Fractured forum sections. This won't advance the game much though. I understand the argument, that this quest was there to keep current community members stick with the product. However, during upcoming test phases, it is important to get more from the community than just that. Reward more those who actually participates to improve Fractured as a game and not just those daily spammers.
I would be suprised if there is a single person who wants the Foundation program to end, because it does not hurt anyone. It is like symbiosis where both sides benefits and are the winners. So keep the program, make some changes if needed and I believe this will have a positive effect to development. Thanks DS.
If i saw a MMO with races called Beastpersons, and using various terminologies like person power (instead of manpower), parent nature (instead of mother natre), ... "insert many other crap sounding vocabulary terms here"...
True. It is not just about one word; Beastmen. If someone choose to take this neutral-gender- wording road, then it needs to be done properly and those new weird terms would annoy more of people rather get anyone interested.
Not saying women & non-binary folk won't play a game that's not taking them into account - we've been doing that for decades now
You make it sound like you are some kind of victims here..
but if the idea is to make the game as attractive as possible to the most buyers..
If every gender related words would been changed for more neutral ones, that won't attract everybody. It has positive impact to small portion of players, but negative impact for wider audiance. That is one of the problems purely from business point of view
..I'm having trouble understanding why suggesting non-gendered naming is so upsetting to y'all.
I stand 100% behind every kind of equality, but I would not like to see this kind of politics having influence in any game. Totally wrong place to promote specific ideology imho.
The biggest problem with your suggestion was that word man or men does not only mean a male. It is also synonyme for words like person, human and human being. So word man also includes females. Beastman (as a word) can be compared straight for human in Fractured, in both case it is not about males, it is about persons. Moreover, etymology for Beast + Man is "an intelligent man-sized beast".
Sooo, I am not here to segregate anyone, just speaking behalf some words and their true meaning, and how I see changes like in your suggestion more like negative for business.
Introduction
Professions are one of my favorite aspect of MMORPGs and I love to spend time also with activities related to gathering and crafting. Those are really good counterbalance to all combat activities what games can usually offer. That great interest related to professions and desire to be a mastercrafter has driven me to prepare this comprehensive suggestion.
Below is my matrix how professions could be implemented in Fractured. I divided professions to three main category without actually knowing how this is planned to implement.
Gathering
Refining / Processing
Crafting
If DS has planned to include refining/processing to gathering and/or crafting that is of course one way to do this.
Now please consider this as my vision, which bases on my experience how professions have been implemented successfully in other games and how I wish to see things to be done to cater all players interested of different life skills. I don't say this is how professions should be done, this is more like how things could be done. I just hope this post gives devs some ideas what they can consider to use in development.
I tried to gather information from forums and news, and I mixed those with my own ideas and experience. That lead to matrix like this:
I know there is a good amount of different profession, but some of them can easily be combined if wanted. I did not list all the things different professions can make, I just gave some meaningful examples.
Gathering
Gathering is usually and generally speaking very grindy activity, which can also lead people for boredom quite fast. I personally like to gather now and then, and especially in mind to collect more crafting materials. I am sure that most people are fine with decent amount of grind, because it goes well with spirit of gathering. Still I hope we will see progression implemented way like abilities are generally planned (using task system). And I guess this is developers intend as well.
Creating gathering more interesting is not only about making it less grindy. Adding more content to gathering itself is one good way to do this. Craftable gathering gear, tools and items are standard options, but on top of that gatherers deserves something more. Hiding rare drops and other rewards to resource nodes is something which keeps people going. Also unlocking special abilities to help with gathering would give people wider progression.
Crafting
Crafting will be really important part of Fractured, because we have player driven economy. That is why I hope we can see more focus on individual item crafting and less in mass production. So, I want to see more complex, but at the same time more rewarding system. At the sametime DS wants basic gear set crafting to be quite simple, so i am interested how they will balance this? Because, if crafting will be really easy (only few materials needed) and mass productive, this will lead items to overflood the markets. After that it is hard to make profit with anything. Also if crafting system allows mass production, this will lead guilds to centralize all resources to specific/shared alts. I hope this will be avoided with some mechanics like task system or recipes, so we will actually see crafting as meaningful career choice. This is where Albion Online went really wrong and I do not want to see Fractured making same mistake.
Summary
This suggestion was about different profession possibilities and what the structure could look like. I did not wanted to go too deep in gathering, crafting or specific professions. I guess I could get back to those topics a little bit later.
So it's time to end this post and hear others’ opinions. Did I miss something relevant? What kind of professions you would like to see in Fractured and most importantly why?
I am a former Albion Online player and I was planning to make an in-depth review of Albion at some point, but I guess I could share my thoughts here as well. Even I am going to share several points where Albion and SBI went wrong imo, I still do not think it is a complete failure. Albion has also done some things right and tried afterwards fix the mistakes made earlier. So I have to agree with @Vortech here and those small ranty reviews are not the whole truth.
I started to follow Albion Online when it was still in Alpha state. I watched a lot of videos, guides and comments from players. I was sold. Albion felt like a game, which offers so much things I love, and because of all that I decided to jump in to the beta test phase. Beta test was a long journey and I played it more or less almost 1,5 years. After launch I played about 9 months and I have revisited the game now and then to check out the new features, but always I have left pretty quickly because lack of interest. Here are some points what should been thought better in my opinion:
City of Caerleon as the central hub of the whole world
Caerleon is a city which was created just before launch at the end of true final beta (this was second final beta), so it was not tested properly before launch. It was superior when compared to other cities because it was a central hub for basically anything. You could fast travel from there everywhere, it had shortest way to best resources and it had the black market. So it was quite obvious that most of the player base would settle there and that slowly shriveled other cities. Most players in one place also caused a lot performance problems. Within time devs understood their mistake and now they have made corrective actions to the whole system. However, this came almost two years after release and lots of harm has been happened already.
Bad launch and first months
Official launch was horrible. Game was basically more or less unplayable for days and those problems was seen weeks and even few months after release. Characters were rubberbanding so you cannot move, server was rolled back several times and you lost your progression X time, login queue was easily 30 minutes to 2 hours, game was crashing etc. etc. So the preparations for the launch were not done properly and there was not enough time for that.
P2W or P2A or what?
Albion can be considered as P2W or at least P2Advantage. It is all about how people feels that, and there is many different opinions. I would say Albion sails somewhere in grey area with possibility to buy ingame currency with real money and with ingame currency you can buy almost everything. You can get so much help for progression with money, so it is kind of huge in game where progression is almost everything. However, you can not get everything with money and you still need to grind for that. There is also alts and islands involved the whole mess, when the game pushes people to use those and upkeep premium time on every alt separately. Albion Content creator Lewpac made a good video about Albion and P2W, it can be found from here:
Everybody matters?
Yeah well, nice thought, but not actually right. This relates partly to elitist like @FibS mentioned. Many guilds (at least top) works like "peon" players gathered almost all the resources for the guild and then the elite players centralizes resources for their crafting alts (or guild shared alts) to get all the fame progression free and the best gear. Of course this is partly okay when these elites in some cases are fighting over territories for their guild, but still the system is used very wrong. So Albion's best crafters are shared alts and very rarely people who do that actually as main activity. I really hope that in Fractured individual crafters matter and the progression can not be boosted by other players.
Test phases better than the final version?
Many people who played Alpha and/or Beta liked one of the test versions more than the final product, and I am actually one of those people. I really liked all betas and maybe combination of those would be the best version for me. When beta 3 started, SBI was so close a really good version, but they blow it just before finish line with Caerleon concept. There was few problems in beta 2, which I would like to point out. The world was too big and there was too rarely open world PvP encounters. Also creating few separated BlackZone continents/islands was a mistake. Now one guild or alliance could conquer the whole island and after that it was quite safe place to just gather all resources without fear to encounter any resistance. So DS should keep these in mind when creating Tartaros and Syndesia.
Gold sellers
Gold sellers were at start a huge issue and they partly controlled economies and even destroyed guilds, and that way made a lot of harm to the game. People quit playing because of gold sellers and that should not happen in any case. So DS, make sure you have enough tools to work with these guys.
These are things what came up with my mind, but like I mentioned before, there is punch of good things in Albion too why I do not think it is a complete failure. I always liked the SBI as a company and their workers, they were nice and interacted a lot with community. They have also done awesome videos and news. I love the destiny board concept, gear system with tiers and enchants, "you are what you were" model, OWPvP, resource bosses and The Black Market. On top of that I kinda miss my "support bruiser" character with Demonic staff, Mercenary leather jacket, Guardian plate boots and Mage/Cleric cloth cowl…
Spell(s): This dragon will breath steam instead of fire. Every steam breath attack will also increase the overall temperature of area, which will stack heat debuff on players. Players have a chance to cooldown the space with some kind of mechanics. Because the Dragon is partly metal, it will conduct well electricity and it will be vunerable for element of lightning.
Description: Steam Dragon is a result of experiment to replace some of the dragon's bodyparts with bionic versions. This dragon could be one of the bosses in dungeon called Research Center.
From testing point of view it is better keep the rules like at the moment. There will eventually be more PvP in Syndesia when flagging and criminal systems will be implemented. Because at the moment we have just one planet to test by everyone it is only reasonable to keep the testing environment proper for all kind of players. Now it is important to get gathering, crafting, building, PvE and city management to work, and later focus more on PvP aspects when the playground is working.
Alts will have a huge impact for economy in Fractured. Why travel to another planets gathering resources under heavy debuffs when you can do that with alt who already live on that planet? This will also lead that guilds will have sub-guilds on another planets making the access to all resources as easy as possible.
In Albion alt scouts are a real pain in the ass and developers there wants to limit that kind of behavior. People are scouting all kind of content especially gates, hotspots, dungeons and such. When people arrives, a little bit later they will be ganked.
If all this is possible in Fractured, of course I am going to benefit the loop holes as much as possible, however, I would rather like to live without this kind of alt behaviors.
@Buckykat Okay, if you are a tester that is ofc a different thing, but most people are not. Opinions of NW seams to be really mixed in general, why it is a good thing to wait more information, especially those who have not tested the game themself.
I do not personally care of the community drama or the PvP rule changes, but I am more concerned how finished the game will actually be at the time of launch. No game is perfect nowadays when they release but hopefully NW will not have fundamental game breaking issues. Some testers are still very hyped and interested of the game, however, some of them have been worried about the development schedule though and that the release date will come too soon.
@Gothix If gear is human readable or we can inspect other players, then you cannot keep anything as a secret. Furthermore, the streaming and video culture what we have in games nowadays also takes care of that everything can be analyzed afterwards. So someone needs to fight once against the team #1 and all the builds are revealed.
I do not personally expect much changes anymore because they have focus on cutting features instead of implementing them. It is a missed opportunity unfortunately.
There should be progression system for all professions tbh because otherwise the game lacks goals and depth in that field. Additionally, it does not feel like a sandbox MMORPG without a possibility to progress and specialize. I am actually surprised and disapointed that there is nothing reasonable available. Crafting has some minor progression now but it is really underwhelming system. In one of the latest AMA they answered that gathering will not get any progression, therefore, most likely nothing will be seen in the profession field in general.
I think it would been great to implement at least a 3 tier system which takes into consideration abilities, gear, enchants, professions, basically everything. Creating entirety where all pieces supports each other, for example, tier 3 gear needs or benefits from tier 3 gathering, refining and crafting.
At some point 3 character slots / account was the thing and package extras on top of that. I am not sure what is the situation at the moment but I presume it has not changed. Three characters would also make sense so that people have at least a possibility to create one character / planet.
The situation of the whole economy is a bit messy why it is hard to see that bandaids would help for that. Yeah some random gold sinks can be thrown here and there but those easily come with cost of player experience. Players play games for fun and if they feel that things are getting too grindy or some fees does not make any sense to them, they simply play something else. Players do not care how much a game needs sinks for example, they want to play a fun game with enjoyable systems. If players (like some people in this thread) do not see why they should even use crafting stations on their own plot or why to pay for crafting just to realize that items will not sell.. Is that players fault or a flaw in the design?
It is reasonable to add gold sinks, with small fees, a little bit everywhere. However, the locations should be where extra fees makes sense and can be easily agreedable by the players. Player houses could be left out of extra gold sinks but in trade you can make better quality items in city stations, for example. If gold sink fees are getting too high in general, just to get enough gold out of the game, then there is a fundamental problem with the economy and it cannot be fixed only by adding new fees and raising the current ones.
Taking a cut of profit, from an item which is sold in the market place, does not feel as bad as a cut during crafting process. Selling extra bank tabs, rerolls for talents, KPs, attributes are good places for utilizing gold sinks. Bank tabs could cost a good amount but rerolls can be much smaller because those are something what players can do over and over again. Every crafting station could cost a little in towns but the fees needs to be small enough so that players still feels their actions are benefical. Even a small fee can feel bad if the crafted items are useless or hard to sell, for example. Therefore, one important thing is to make most of the items relevant which are also easy to sell for profit. This part is not working properly atm either why in the first place even the smallest extra fees can feel bad.
I am curious to see if any improvements will happen to the whole economy in general and the next real test awaits when summer content patch is released. Until then, popcorns.
@stkmro Interesting thought, but in general, you never want to give command line access to players in a game. It can then be used to develop bots and hacks and generally launch other kinds of cyberattacks on a program...
This is why even limited command-line access will more than likely be reserved for moderators at most, but probably GMs or higher...of course, that's coming from another player/game designer/instructor, not one of the Devs.
Players having a possibility to use different kinds of /commands is common in games, and /unstuck is used as well. These are executed through the ingame chat and are not causing any security risks. I do not know what kind of access you thought but this is what @stkmro meant.
The economy has not worked at any point and I fear that it will not work in the future either. The problems are fundamental and cannot be fixed with bandaids. It is really hard to get people interested of trading when there is very little interesting gear, items and consumables available. Some resources will sell and that's it.
That takes value from the package extras tbh, if stays.