Quote: Destinations on 04/09/2012, 04:19 AM - view

The problem with any bounty system implemented in any online game is that it is almost always the ganker that collects on the payout.

Example in case: A friend of mine in EvE Online plays a pirate. No less than on THREE seperate occasions she racked up a bounty of more than 500,000,000 ISK. In all three cases she jump cloned to a trash clone and undocked in her pod (EvE Equivalent to being naked.) She had an alt standing by in a cheap little frigate just outside the station (town) and proceeded to gank herself. The result was her alt collecting her own massive bounty which she then sent to herself.

The case would be the same here. A ganker goes around and kills lowbies in Fey Forest all day long. He gains an impressive bounty. Then after it gets suitably large, he has either an alt on another account (or perhaps the ganker is his alt) or a guildy kill him. The bounty payout is then either his or split with him and his guildy.

Ultimately, the only way to properly balance the decision to gank is to place massive penalties on the act of declaring Outlaw itself. As such players will have to be far more serious about evaluating the risk vs the reward of ganking. Ultimately the reward for both gankers and "heroes" will be their emotional satisfaction from ganking or killing the ganker.


@OP
Ganking isn't necessary in a properly built PvP MMO. Will it be there? You bet. Is it necessary to the success of the game and fulfilling experience for the majority of the players? Absolutely not.

This weekend was absolutely terrible for new players who started out on the PvP servers. I for one, believe that a very large fraction of the older player base declared Outlaw out of sheer boredom during this past Beta Weekend. Once the game goes live I highly doubt it will ever be this bad again, but during a beta event like this I'd say it seriously put a crimp on players experiences who haven't had a chance to play in any early testing event.

During any future Closed Beta test programs I'd advise En Masse to disable the Outlaw feature or offer players premades so they can better evaluate the changes and/or the game.

The purpose of a ticket is to request help that you 'think' only En Masse can provide. The purpose of a forum is both for community discussion AND community feedback. The purpose of this particular thread is for my own feedback.

I may not be able to stop y'all from posting in it, but I can report ya'll for spam until they enhance these forums to permit custom reasons for reporting threads.

Now, please show some courtesy and refrain from posting in my feedback thread. If anyone feels that something merits further discussion, then please make a new thread for that purpose.

This is MY feedback thread from MY experience this weekend. Stay out! You can discuss people's concerns and proposals elsewhere.

This thread is for the benefit of En Masse Entertainment and Blue Hole Studios.

So I have finally gotten a chance to play through. Some of it is really cool. Some of it is meh. A small bit is just >> "Why?". And a small bit is just plain bad.

If I get the game later on and play it, it won't be any sort of hardcore, and doubtful on a PvP server.

The Good:
(1) Looks amazing - graphics are just so sexy. Some of the environment could use some more work, such as the fire pits in various quest hubs, but overall it is just plain sexy. Characters are just, :)
(2) Control responsiveness - I kinda worried about this a little bit due to the nature of how combat works, but I gotta say it is really spot on. Doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement however. Recommended tweaks are permitting key-remapping on keyboards and mice, and a first person view like that used in shooters.
(3) Questing - It is clean. That's all there is to it. Some might complain that they are boring, I had a WoW guildy complain that he couldn't simply auto-pilot through them, but they are well done. The translations are very well polished minus some small grammatical errors. The voice overs are excellent as well.
(4) Leveling - Pretty quick. Not super fast, but it isn't slow either. Tells me the game really starts at cap. If as much attention that has been givin to leveling is seen at cap this game could have some real staying power.
(5)

The Mediocre:
(1) The User Interface - It is clean and does work. However, it is also confusing with the control system. To take the UI from Mediocre to Good, I would recommend creating a first time log in tutorial (with skip option for returning players or players expanding to a second account) that gives them a detailed walk through of the UI and how both modes function.
(2) The Help Menu - The fact that it is here, and with a fair bit of reading between the lines and help from other players, it can be deciphered, is nice. However, the shallowness of information it contains towards answering basic questions puts it on the borderline to being BAD. The Help Menu really needs some solid fleshing out.
(3) The Launcher - Any game shouldn't need the launcher to remain running in order to function. Period. However, I haven't seen any performance issues so I won't call this "Bad".
(4) Looking For Group / Party Creation - Just feels clumsy. Nor is it intuitive in the least.
(5)

The Bad:
(1) Outlaw PvP Flagging - as it currently stands it permits massive abuse. PvP is fun, consensual and other wise, however Outlaw flagging should be done only in a major city and should not be reversible until you got back to the city. Outlaw mode should also come with harsh penalties on death and lock the player out of most all other content until they "repent their evil ways". They should not have penalties in combat as that would make Outlaw pvp totally pointless.
(1 Explained) To continue on this and highlight why I say the above. I gave my first go on the first pvp server on the list. I don't know its name. The limitations of the Beta Test seems to have left allot of players bored. With nothing to do, most inevitably ended up declaring Outlaw and set out to grief players vastly lower than their level. This is fine up to a point. When the number of players, like that seen over the Beta Weekend, that declare Outlaw get so large that no one newer to the game can accomplish anything in any fashion. At this point the very player base will drive off newer players and customers.
(1 Solution Proposed) The solution I proposed in the first part is to put massive penalties on declaring Outlaw, such that an Outlaw cannot engage in any game activities outside of undeclaring Outlaw and PvP. They should be bared from the bank, merchants, teleports, Pegasus Transportation, battlegrounds, dungeons, raids, and from consideration for positions of power on the server. An outlaw cannot run for Vanarch and a Vanarch who declares Outlaw should loose his position instantly. (After all the dude did just declare himself outside the games politics.) I don't know if such gameplay penalties would constitute sufficient reason to keep most people from making the, otherwise easy, decision to grief others, but hopefully it would.
(2) Names - Permitting people to create names like Ipwnu or Jack.Daniels, I believe, really detracts from an MMO. I also believe that it promotes stupidity in players since they don't have to bother coming up with a good name.
(2 Solution Proposal) Restrict certain characters from names including punctuation. There isn't really anything that can be done about "Ipwnu" and like names, other than players policing themselves and reporting them as in violation of naming policies or offensive in general.
(3)

The empty (#) bracket categories will be for future notes that I observe as I play through. At this time, because griefing on the PvP servers is so extensive, I am now going to re-roll onto a PvE server and look more into the game.

In the future, En Masse, I would strongly advise wiping after EVERY Beta Test or giving access to premades to those new to it.

Edits: Mediocre (4) added; Bad (2) added; Mediocre (5) added;

Since the CBT5 forums are not yet up. I'm going to use this thread to post any bugs I spot as I play through. First up:

(1) Quest Grammar/Spelling Bug: The Faerie Emissary - Third paragraph, second sentance, "Can you protect her as he travels to Lumbertown?" Himir (the fairy) is a female character. The quest text correctly gets her gender right up until the point I bolded. Should read, "Can you protect her as SHE travels to Lumbertown?"

A guy in my World of Warcraft guild. Sheesh, there are other MMOs out there and you are permitted to play more than one simultaneously.

who hooked me up with a Beta Key. /win

See ya'll in CBT5. ^^

Remember folks, the game is still in the closed beta testing. While your characters from each beta is carried over to the next, they will be wiped for the start of the open beta.

When a game is completely and utterly new, NO ONE has anything. It will take time for the economy to flesh out.

When World of Warcraft launched, I recalled hearing a story about the first Epic BOE to EVER drop on a particular realm. It sold for a whopping, AT THE TIME, 45 gold. It was a bow and took the lucky hunter's ENTIRE guild to pool together the funds to purchase it.

Today, it is considered standard for poor players to have over 10,000 gold. The moderately rich tend to have 150,000 gold. The rich tend to have over 300,000 gold. The super rich tend to have at least one gold capped toon, sometimes more.

Asian MMOs tend to follow asian currency appearances which means they don't break things down into "coin change". You sit there and go "HOLY CRAP 400K FOR THAT??!?" In other asian made MMOs this is usually considered chump change. Take the precursor to Tera Online, Linage II, the average player there is considered decently off if they have around 100,000,000. Yes 100 million. The rich tend to have 1,000,000,000+ or over 1 billion.

A side note after the last statement: Tera Online started when some key developers left NC Soft Korea to start their own company. Lineage series was what they had helped create and they had been working on Lineage III. So it is a fair statement to call Tera Online a successor to Lineage II even though there are vast differences.

Finally, if you are going to test the economy, crafting, enchanting, and other material aspects of the game, look more towards testing for accessibility based on how the developers present things.

For example,
Everyone complains about the first crafting quests players see. It has been stated many times they are presented in a tutorial quest fashion and yet are prohibitively expensive for new players. This is a valid complaint.

However, for the rest hold off on final judgement until you can test these aspects of the game at the highest levels. It could turn out to be fairly balanced once the community's average level is much closer to true-game levels. (I use the term true-game over end-game since the game technically doesn't have an "end".)

If you actually bother to read the thread saying how crafting CAN be cheap. They are saying to NOT do the quests pertaining to crafting.

Instead farm farm farm. Obtain all obtainable mats while you are out killing and slaying and then using that to level up crafting.

Does anyone have a video made from the Closed Beta Tests to date with time spend using the enchanting system? A detailed video of your experiments to date would be preferable.