Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
General Feedback
Valkyre
Member, Alpha Two
This is mostly going to be a scattered listing of feedback, but I will try to revise and categorize.
Animations need to be looked a little closer, some either break future animations or simply get stuck in a never ending loop. I.E. Horses freeze in animations, chest looting repeats animation repeatedly.
Questing needs to be overhauled. The quest portion of your inventory does not work. Several quests just bug out entirely, not allowing them to be finished. There are some quests that are certainly "harder" to complete because you need to closely read the journal. But there are definitely several that just stop functioning. Quest rewards are varied. Some of them drop items that perhaps you plan to add usefulness to later, but many of them drop items that just waste space in your inventory. Some quests must be classified as "harder" because of the areas you are meant to go to, and give higher rewards, but in reality, they are easy and provide much higher reward than necessary. In particular, the Tin Ingot reward for the Highwayman Hills caravan mess (which seems to be a bugged quest that eventually doesn't complete/can give you endless Tin Ingots), the reward is a rare Tin Ingot. This is great for making those higher tier tools and something that is achievable way earlier/easier than it should be, negating the crafters. Also, I would end this section by saying, there is definitely a hard line to walk between making a quest interactive (i.e. reading what it actually says to figure it out) and making it so obscure that future gamers in 1.0 Live will just look up tutorials. I know that is always a choice, and the ones that will do it will do it, and the ones that will wait until they absolutely can't figure it out to do it will do it, but this might be refined a little. Maybe have keywords underlined to point the hints out? Not personally sure how to approach that, but this might need tweeked a little. Oh, and obviously add voice overs that just play in the background while you move on, no body got time for reading all that.
Leveling just seems off. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a slow pace. But its either that or just let me max out (please don't let me just max out). This might be "sped" up for Alpha, but people are talking about 76 hours to level 25. Sure, that seems like a lot, and maybe the future holds higher levels than 25 (and certainly there are things like weapon skills that go beyond 25), but its not slow enough to slow me down. Levels 1-10 go by so fast that crafting at that point is pointless (more on that later). I can realistically only speak after that from levels 11-16 currently, but that also has seemed to go by pretty quick. If you want to slow things down, make XP penalties more harsh. Make it possible to lose levels. Standardize XP gains from mobs. Take a look at what they did in Lineage 1. The game realistically had no upper level limit because you would play an entire year and get one level at 60-70 ranges. ARPGs do this now with a secondary leveling system after max level (paragon levels, etc.). I know that that is in your face hard for some, but it makes XP mean something. You can stop gaining abilities earlier on, when a reasonable human puts in hours to the game (maybe that is 25), but then you just keep going to make XP and killing mobs mean something. Think about the player in town that is a level 44 hero, been around the block so many times his shoes have worn spots in the pavement being looked at by a player that's 19 and still thinks hes a hot-shot. The 44 knows what it means to risk dying and the 19 knows what it means to either be on the 44's good or bad side. Let your players become legends or part of the NPCs.
Crafting... oh the crafting system. Levels 1-10 in crafting, corresponding to the gear you would use during your player levels 1-10 can be SO TEDIOUS to make that its useless to even try. The gap from a Legendary piece of pre-level 10 requirement gear, and a common level 10 requirement gear is just not worth trying to get the impossible to find rarities in the quantities you need. A SPELLBOOK, something that that the only metal bits should be a fancy cover or a book mark requires 20 Copper and like 1 piece of paper!?!?!? Make your materials make sense. Flip that cost, even if it means making me harvest materials to make the paper. Also, don't just flip that cost and make me farm 20 high tier trees instead. By time a player hits 10, I had a quarter of the materials needed to make them 1 piece of gear. By the time a player hits 10, the gear I could make them they already got as a drop in better quality. Crafting seems pointless and a lesson in some real futility at Novice. Its also hugely expensive to undertake for that time period, meaning slowing down further your crafting to go get glint drops to fund your process, and furthering your xp gap that again makes your crafts pointless. Levels 10-20, Apprentice, gets a little better. There is a chance, that if you play just as much as someone that is grinding out levels, you might just barely be able to make them gear in time for them to hit level 20. The problem is though, that person grinding levels is also getting drops. Meaning, guess what, back to the same issue that you would need heroic to legendary drops from harvesting to even make it impactful for them. And then guess what happened to the crafter again? This time a spell book is 40 Tin and 20 Copper/Zinc! I have no clue what book collection you have in your house, but goodness gracious you need to take that lot to your local recycler and never work again, away on your beach resort house. Reminder, that 40 Tin and 20 Copper/Zinc, needs to be Legendary to hit that max. 60 Legendary drops. When it takes the xp grinder 1 drop to instantly negate you. This is also where I will later talk about the auction house issues, as the drops rate is not just on the shoulders of the crafter or the xp grinder, but on glint farming that could simply pay for the items. 60 legendary resources cost vs 1 epic-heroic equipment cost will never be close, there is simply no way it could be. That is with of course the exception to max level gear. Which always runs the risk of becoming obsolete when/if you release and expansion that increases max player level. I can only speak to the efforts of Apprentice. So I will go no further than to say, HOPEFULLY it gets better in the next tier. Even still before I depart this topic, let me say that everyone being able to novice a skill hurts those that try to get anywhere in those skills. Lock it behind quests, lock it behind a set number of skills (6 novice, 5 apprentice, 4 journeyman, 3 master, 2 grandmaster), lock it behind something, anything, or make the crafts low level consumables only.
Weather. I have seen it. You have talked about it. I am sure the plan is for this to come. Hopefully. Looking forward to it. Please let the weather effect spells like mages use or elements that summoners might use. Have it effect crafting. Fishing timers. Make the moon effect fishing. See what Final Fantasy XI did here, that's all I will say. I know your working on it, just putting it in writing to say I am sure you have lots of ideas, and I hope to be able to see them. As of this post, its just GPU usage.
Items, I like that the armors are race specific. Good job on making things unique to the race, making that choice actually mean something. I think it would be good to differentiate and balance the armors. Heavy slows you down but makes you take less damage, Light doesn't slow you down and gives you more bonuses to stats, but you take much more damage. Medium cannot just be the best choice. It cannot be the balance between taking less damage and getting more stats. Give it something unique as a benefit. Some games use the dodge differential difference (see Remnant). Some games make it focus rangers or other specific classes. I think that currently the "meta" will be, go medium because you want a balance of physical and magical protections, the longer your alive, the longer you do damage, the longer you do damage, the more damage you do, regardless of the numbers you are seeing. That is, 3 seconds to do 1 big 1k hit and then die is worse than 10 seconds to do 10 250 damage hits per second (total 2,500). The gamer trinity (Tank/Damage/Healer which pairs with Heavy/Medium/Light), in my humble opinion, only works in a three class system. The moment you span out, and start adding utility builds, hybrids, etc., you lose the war and balancing that becomes no longer a beautiful act we all pay to go to a fancy building and watch and more like a fiasco that's displayed behind closed curtains at the circus that hops from town to town to dupe new audiences into believing the man really does indeed have 3 heads. Balancing... ahh balancing. Yup that is a topic for later down the line.
We are later down the line, Balancing. Tanks can heal and take less damage? Bards can provide themselves with HP/MP regen and deal damage? Rangers can burst big numbers upfront and then die the moment they are touched? Healers and just play the long game and kill whatever they want? Mages have a damage shield but otherwise die like a ranger? As far as is my opinion, solo'ing from hardest to easiest is a HUGE GAP. Going from hard to easy like: Ranger/Mage/Fighter/Tank/Cleric/Bard. The difference on the ends is far to great. You might think then, well then don't solo join an party, its an MMO after all. But in a party, you can get away with a Tank and Cleric/Bard. Tank and Bard at least provides mana, Tank and Cleric at least provides bigger heals. Whatever else you add in there does not matter. Mage/fighter/ranger, it doesn't matter, it just speeds up the XP. This needs balance. If I have chosen a role that doesn't matter, the fault is not on me, the fault is on the designer for making such a class exist. I would say the ONLY possible exception to that would be if you added in a whole ton of classes. Which we have yet to see what your multi-class archetypes will bring, so open to being corrected further into development. Just asking you keep this in mind.
Alpha Events and any other future events. Just stop doing streamer only events unless you plan to do other events as well. This hurts the hearts of the other "normals" I have talked to that could care less to watch people streaming the game they are currently playing. Sure, the streamers are providing you with advertisement. But what good is advertising a game that is full of bugs. Let those of us that are reporting bugs non-stop also enjoy a little fun. Besides, it will probably be fun for you too. Just imagine randomly popping a server message up that says, you have a minute to clear out from Highwayman Hills or else your going to be part of an event. Then all of the sudden bandits everywhere, a leader appears, etc. 30 minutes later, there are stories to sit around the digital campfire and laugh about, then we go back to bug reporting. It will also be good for you to stress your server. I have been extremely put off by the fact that you have handed free mounts off to streamers simply because you decided to look at their stream and interact with only them. The fact that one of your interactions you literally told people to leave the zone so that you could interact with one of the streaming guilds... Like... do you hate the rest of us? Surely the answer to that is no, so stop making us feel that way.
I am going to let me hands rest and give you the opportunity to read and comment/question if needed. I will try to come back to this later to give more feedback. I will end by saying, I know I am not the average gamer. I am just very nearly 40, and started MMOs with Ultima Online, Lineage 1 (alpha to server shutdown), FFXI, FXIV, Tibia, Dragon Nest, Metin 2, Wakfu, WoW (briefly), Lineage 2 (briefly), Age of Conan (briefly), Lost Arc, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, New World, and I am certainly missing a ton more. I have participated in MANY Alphas (free and pay to play), I have participated in MANY Betas (free and pay to play). Here is your feedback from just an dad gamer now that has nearly seen it all, and is still hoping to see more.
Animations need to be looked a little closer, some either break future animations or simply get stuck in a never ending loop. I.E. Horses freeze in animations, chest looting repeats animation repeatedly.
Questing needs to be overhauled. The quest portion of your inventory does not work. Several quests just bug out entirely, not allowing them to be finished. There are some quests that are certainly "harder" to complete because you need to closely read the journal. But there are definitely several that just stop functioning. Quest rewards are varied. Some of them drop items that perhaps you plan to add usefulness to later, but many of them drop items that just waste space in your inventory. Some quests must be classified as "harder" because of the areas you are meant to go to, and give higher rewards, but in reality, they are easy and provide much higher reward than necessary. In particular, the Tin Ingot reward for the Highwayman Hills caravan mess (which seems to be a bugged quest that eventually doesn't complete/can give you endless Tin Ingots), the reward is a rare Tin Ingot. This is great for making those higher tier tools and something that is achievable way earlier/easier than it should be, negating the crafters. Also, I would end this section by saying, there is definitely a hard line to walk between making a quest interactive (i.e. reading what it actually says to figure it out) and making it so obscure that future gamers in 1.0 Live will just look up tutorials. I know that is always a choice, and the ones that will do it will do it, and the ones that will wait until they absolutely can't figure it out to do it will do it, but this might be refined a little. Maybe have keywords underlined to point the hints out? Not personally sure how to approach that, but this might need tweeked a little. Oh, and obviously add voice overs that just play in the background while you move on, no body got time for reading all that.
Leveling just seems off. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of a slow pace. But its either that or just let me max out (please don't let me just max out). This might be "sped" up for Alpha, but people are talking about 76 hours to level 25. Sure, that seems like a lot, and maybe the future holds higher levels than 25 (and certainly there are things like weapon skills that go beyond 25), but its not slow enough to slow me down. Levels 1-10 go by so fast that crafting at that point is pointless (more on that later). I can realistically only speak after that from levels 11-16 currently, but that also has seemed to go by pretty quick. If you want to slow things down, make XP penalties more harsh. Make it possible to lose levels. Standardize XP gains from mobs. Take a look at what they did in Lineage 1. The game realistically had no upper level limit because you would play an entire year and get one level at 60-70 ranges. ARPGs do this now with a secondary leveling system after max level (paragon levels, etc.). I know that that is in your face hard for some, but it makes XP mean something. You can stop gaining abilities earlier on, when a reasonable human puts in hours to the game (maybe that is 25), but then you just keep going to make XP and killing mobs mean something. Think about the player in town that is a level 44 hero, been around the block so many times his shoes have worn spots in the pavement being looked at by a player that's 19 and still thinks hes a hot-shot. The 44 knows what it means to risk dying and the 19 knows what it means to either be on the 44's good or bad side. Let your players become legends or part of the NPCs.
Crafting... oh the crafting system. Levels 1-10 in crafting, corresponding to the gear you would use during your player levels 1-10 can be SO TEDIOUS to make that its useless to even try. The gap from a Legendary piece of pre-level 10 requirement gear, and a common level 10 requirement gear is just not worth trying to get the impossible to find rarities in the quantities you need. A SPELLBOOK, something that that the only metal bits should be a fancy cover or a book mark requires 20 Copper and like 1 piece of paper!?!?!? Make your materials make sense. Flip that cost, even if it means making me harvest materials to make the paper. Also, don't just flip that cost and make me farm 20 high tier trees instead. By time a player hits 10, I had a quarter of the materials needed to make them 1 piece of gear. By the time a player hits 10, the gear I could make them they already got as a drop in better quality. Crafting seems pointless and a lesson in some real futility at Novice. Its also hugely expensive to undertake for that time period, meaning slowing down further your crafting to go get glint drops to fund your process, and furthering your xp gap that again makes your crafts pointless. Levels 10-20, Apprentice, gets a little better. There is a chance, that if you play just as much as someone that is grinding out levels, you might just barely be able to make them gear in time for them to hit level 20. The problem is though, that person grinding levels is also getting drops. Meaning, guess what, back to the same issue that you would need heroic to legendary drops from harvesting to even make it impactful for them. And then guess what happened to the crafter again? This time a spell book is 40 Tin and 20 Copper/Zinc! I have no clue what book collection you have in your house, but goodness gracious you need to take that lot to your local recycler and never work again, away on your beach resort house. Reminder, that 40 Tin and 20 Copper/Zinc, needs to be Legendary to hit that max. 60 Legendary drops. When it takes the xp grinder 1 drop to instantly negate you. This is also where I will later talk about the auction house issues, as the drops rate is not just on the shoulders of the crafter or the xp grinder, but on glint farming that could simply pay for the items. 60 legendary resources cost vs 1 epic-heroic equipment cost will never be close, there is simply no way it could be. That is with of course the exception to max level gear. Which always runs the risk of becoming obsolete when/if you release and expansion that increases max player level. I can only speak to the efforts of Apprentice. So I will go no further than to say, HOPEFULLY it gets better in the next tier. Even still before I depart this topic, let me say that everyone being able to novice a skill hurts those that try to get anywhere in those skills. Lock it behind quests, lock it behind a set number of skills (6 novice, 5 apprentice, 4 journeyman, 3 master, 2 grandmaster), lock it behind something, anything, or make the crafts low level consumables only.
Weather. I have seen it. You have talked about it. I am sure the plan is for this to come. Hopefully. Looking forward to it. Please let the weather effect spells like mages use or elements that summoners might use. Have it effect crafting. Fishing timers. Make the moon effect fishing. See what Final Fantasy XI did here, that's all I will say. I know your working on it, just putting it in writing to say I am sure you have lots of ideas, and I hope to be able to see them. As of this post, its just GPU usage.
Items, I like that the armors are race specific. Good job on making things unique to the race, making that choice actually mean something. I think it would be good to differentiate and balance the armors. Heavy slows you down but makes you take less damage, Light doesn't slow you down and gives you more bonuses to stats, but you take much more damage. Medium cannot just be the best choice. It cannot be the balance between taking less damage and getting more stats. Give it something unique as a benefit. Some games use the dodge differential difference (see Remnant). Some games make it focus rangers or other specific classes. I think that currently the "meta" will be, go medium because you want a balance of physical and magical protections, the longer your alive, the longer you do damage, the longer you do damage, the more damage you do, regardless of the numbers you are seeing. That is, 3 seconds to do 1 big 1k hit and then die is worse than 10 seconds to do 10 250 damage hits per second (total 2,500). The gamer trinity (Tank/Damage/Healer which pairs with Heavy/Medium/Light), in my humble opinion, only works in a three class system. The moment you span out, and start adding utility builds, hybrids, etc., you lose the war and balancing that becomes no longer a beautiful act we all pay to go to a fancy building and watch and more like a fiasco that's displayed behind closed curtains at the circus that hops from town to town to dupe new audiences into believing the man really does indeed have 3 heads. Balancing... ahh balancing. Yup that is a topic for later down the line.
We are later down the line, Balancing. Tanks can heal and take less damage? Bards can provide themselves with HP/MP regen and deal damage? Rangers can burst big numbers upfront and then die the moment they are touched? Healers and just play the long game and kill whatever they want? Mages have a damage shield but otherwise die like a ranger? As far as is my opinion, solo'ing from hardest to easiest is a HUGE GAP. Going from hard to easy like: Ranger/Mage/Fighter/Tank/Cleric/Bard. The difference on the ends is far to great. You might think then, well then don't solo join an party, its an MMO after all. But in a party, you can get away with a Tank and Cleric/Bard. Tank and Bard at least provides mana, Tank and Cleric at least provides bigger heals. Whatever else you add in there does not matter. Mage/fighter/ranger, it doesn't matter, it just speeds up the XP. This needs balance. If I have chosen a role that doesn't matter, the fault is not on me, the fault is on the designer for making such a class exist. I would say the ONLY possible exception to that would be if you added in a whole ton of classes. Which we have yet to see what your multi-class archetypes will bring, so open to being corrected further into development. Just asking you keep this in mind.
Alpha Events and any other future events. Just stop doing streamer only events unless you plan to do other events as well. This hurts the hearts of the other "normals" I have talked to that could care less to watch people streaming the game they are currently playing. Sure, the streamers are providing you with advertisement. But what good is advertising a game that is full of bugs. Let those of us that are reporting bugs non-stop also enjoy a little fun. Besides, it will probably be fun for you too. Just imagine randomly popping a server message up that says, you have a minute to clear out from Highwayman Hills or else your going to be part of an event. Then all of the sudden bandits everywhere, a leader appears, etc. 30 minutes later, there are stories to sit around the digital campfire and laugh about, then we go back to bug reporting. It will also be good for you to stress your server. I have been extremely put off by the fact that you have handed free mounts off to streamers simply because you decided to look at their stream and interact with only them. The fact that one of your interactions you literally told people to leave the zone so that you could interact with one of the streaming guilds... Like... do you hate the rest of us? Surely the answer to that is no, so stop making us feel that way.
I am going to let me hands rest and give you the opportunity to read and comment/question if needed. I will try to come back to this later to give more feedback. I will end by saying, I know I am not the average gamer. I am just very nearly 40, and started MMOs with Ultima Online, Lineage 1 (alpha to server shutdown), FFXI, FXIV, Tibia, Dragon Nest, Metin 2, Wakfu, WoW (briefly), Lineage 2 (briefly), Age of Conan (briefly), Lost Arc, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, New World, and I am certainly missing a ton more. I have participated in MANY Alphas (free and pay to play), I have participated in MANY Betas (free and pay to play). Here is your feedback from just an dad gamer now that has nearly seen it all, and is still hoping to see more.
5
Comments
I am 33. I don't wanna have kids though, let me dodge the bullet dear God
The game of life has happened to you, from here you can only champion and get hooked on MMORPGs.
When I retire i wanna be like you, respect.
I've been on them since Evercrack and MUDs
I wish you success