What Nevrax Should Prioritize to Help This Game Succeed

[korin77]

Hah hah Nice one Cerest. I guess I better make my migration into Matis lands soon before theres an army of kitin waiting at my door.

[jdiegel]

Hah hah Nice one Cerest. I guess I better make my migration into Matis lands soon before theres an army of kitin waiting at my door.

Which could meen this is also there way of forcing us to get to the point where we can handle an army of kitin before one arrives.

People playing around in the roots did prompt those Kitin patrols that have been tearing me a new one.

[kisedd]

Most people have said things that I have thought already, no need to repeat that.

At low levels its very difficult to harvest quantity and to prospect to find the things that you want. A week ago it took me two hours to gather enough choice mats to make 2 weapons. Today, now that I'm a lot better harvester, I was able to harvest enough mats for 3 weapons in less than an hour. Because harvesting starts off very slowly, vendor mats were available up to level 25. A couple days ago these were raised to 50.

I don't see many melee fighters selling any mats. Don't blame harvestes for not being able to supply crafters. Nobody is selling mats to help crafters level up with. There are a few guilds out there who supply their own crafters with huge amounts of supplies, but that may be more of an exception than a rule.

Crafting in Ryzom, from a leveling standpoint, is as tedious as in any other game I"ve played. Make lots and lots of items to level up your craft so you can meet the small demand of the player base. Since combat players level up faster than most crafters can level up, the demand for quality items is often far greater than those who can supply it. A few hard core power gamres meet a great majority of the demand, while everyone else is left with a tedious level grind and nobody to sell to. Another reason the mats were put onto the vendors for crafters to level with. I'd rather be forced to make less items with fewer mats to level, but that is a decision not in my hand.
Player based economies are tricky. How to you keep everyone from being a crafter. Many games have far more crafters making a certain item than players who want those items. In DAoC the tedious level grind was in place to make sure most crafters never made it into high levels to supply goods. Maybe not the best solution, but it did work in a twisted sort of way. In SWG, there were so many artisans when the game came out that prices fell into the dirt, the only way to drive players away from crafting and help balance supply and demand. Both are hard lesssons for players who just want to have fun.

One thing I know about MMOG's, is that you have to give the economy time to work itself out. Hasty changes to the system to appease a few players, can have major impacts on the entire game.

[Cilar]

I don't agree with the first poster about what the game lacks. For me, the most important thing that Nevrax must add to keep people playing Ryzom is the quests. I mean long quests with story, background ,etc.
Storyline matters or not ?
What will make people hook to this game will be the quests and the story.

[lyrah68]

I will reply within the original and denote the start of MY comments with *** and end with ***

I'm sure I'll catch some flames for this, and some folks will disagree, but I'm willing to bet that *most* folks will agree with this post and probably add a couple things I didn't think of.

Nevrax, you have a tough challenge making this game succeed. You blew it with a poor open beta that made most of the "early adopters" and "opinion leaders" go back and tell their guildmates and gaming friends and the blogosphere in general to just not bother with this game. Especially considering that Blizzard understands how important the beta reception of a MMOG really is. Hell, even the closed beta of WoW is an amazing, polished gameplay experience compared to pretty much any previous MMOG's open beta or even release gameplay experience. Word of mouth about WoW will guarantee major success for WoW. And they're not even in *open* beta yet.

But the fact that you blew your first impression with gamers with your botched open beta is water under the bridge. You have Wow coming out within the next one to three months. EQ2 (not as good as WoW, but still solid with a huge fanbase) in the next 2-5 months.

With these two marketing behemoths just over the horizon, how are you going to ATTRACT a fanbase now and KEEP enough of the folks who try out your game because they're bored of the current fare and looking for something to do while they wait for WoW and EQ2 to come out? MMOG gamers are becoming more experienced, more discerning, and more jaded. We've all played the games that showed good promise yet failed miserably. Take Horizons, as a recent example. There are others, too.

***not sure what open beta you were discussing, I was in the final open beta and have recently betaed about six games, some which folded in beta, others are still in beta, others have quietly released. BUT without fail, this beta, final OPEN beta, was clean, realatively lag free and more enjoyable than ANY other beta I have been in (about 8 to 9 games at this point over three or four years). I was SOLD on the game IN beta about two weeks before release.***


SoR has great promise. Excellent graphics; just top notch. Great setup for a storyline. Unique SF/Fantasy genre. Combat mechanics and graphics are good to excellent. You have a unique twist on crafting. Large, interesting world.

But you are blowing it big time with your early adopters:

A. It is TOO hard to get around among the 4 different lands. The poor Trykers, especially. People like to explore, see different things. Very few people want to wait until the "end game" to be able to see something different than the same old scenery. Sure, the Matis, Fyros, and Zorai can SNEAK into each others' lands, but that is time-consuming and involves lots of exp debt. It's stupid to make it so difficult for low and mid-level characters to explore and see different scenery and fight different mobs. You should either clear out the herd density around the connection points between the lands, or else provide teleport-based travel from cities in one land to cities in another land.
***Horizons did this and it was HORRID, you paid HUGE level based fees, which ended up with a world FULL of level one mules to carry things. OR running across Horizons TOTAL void of a world, NOTHING for miles and miles***
B. It should be a MAJOR priority for you to give the Trykers harvesting parity with the other races. Fix the Q50 max mat problem ASAP. Like by next week.

C. Crafting is good. Crafting is fine. But Harvesting is too slow, time-consuming, and tedious. You need to speed up the process of locating and prospecting specific mats needed for specific crafting needs. It should be easier and faster to find a specific mat type and grade. You should be able to prospect more mats from a node before the node is depleted. Why? Go listen to the region chat in the mainlands. You see a bunch of "Looking to buy Qxx Pike" or "Looking to buy Qxx armor" etc. You see the same person asking over and over for 30 minutes or more. Yes there are some crafters providing these items. But not nearly as many sellers as there are people who want this stuff. When you ask on region chat why this is so, you invariably get the response that finding and digging stuff up is boring. It takes a ton of mats to produce most items, especially medium and heavy armor. Make harvesting faster and easier. Fix the Locate stanza so that it puts a marker on the compass for the located node. Fix the Locate stanza so that if your action includes a brick for a specified grade such as "chosen", the action will locate ONLY chosen, not fine or basic too. Then tweak the extraction process so that a given node yeilds about 4x as many mats before the node is depleted. Make those two simple tweaks and you'll see a LOT more crafting willing to provide goods to the players who don't like to craft.

D. Provide Armor and Raw Materials above Q50 on the NPC vendors. Forget weapons, everyone knows that your weapon stats are of prime importance and they'll do what it takes to get excellent crafted weapons for the appropriate damage output. But armor costs are fairly expensive given your too-fast item decay rate. Give players short on money the option to buy armor of an appropriate quality level from NPCs. Yes it's inferior to crafted but at least you can get your hands on something halfway decent relative your constitution stats and your fighting/magic level. And it's cheaper so the fact that you're wearing it out often doesn't require you to go farm lower level mobs for three hours for the cash to buy another set of crafted armor. You know how frustrating it is for a lower level character to watch a higher level character mowing through all the "good" mobs in that lower level area? As for providing raw materials above Q50, the idea here is to allow your crafters to level up their skills faster by not having to harvest all the mats they need to skill up.

***I am a level 51 Forager, so I speak with some measure of experience when I say, you have a SMALL point. We DO need a skill that is like "Ignore lesser materials" and I would be willing to PAY for such a skill (Ignore all under choice 20 sp and so forth) and even spend precious focus on it. And I have NOT stepped foot off newb land since crash test beta, BUT I know on newb islands it IS possible to harvest 25 units from ONE node, turn ten degrees to 20 degrees and harvest THAT node, same material, same GRADE, for 25 units. I have made FOUR magic amps, two suits of light armor, three 2 handed swords, three one handed swords ALL choice grade Q20 of the best kinds of materials for the job. I had to run to ALL cities BUT the NE town in Fyros lands (now I KNOW Fyros has it a tad easier than other races, we have a visual clue on where to look with Micro vegitation set at 10% look for the "Freckles" or pebbles. And I personally FEEL that we have more nodes than Trykers, but it shouldn't be IMPOSSIBLE for other races). I did this in LESS than five hours.

IN this time I gained THREE levels in Forager, getting ONLY 450 to 350 xp PER node. Hint, do NOT pull more than ONE unit per try. Use Gentle quality with agressive speed and rate. SIT when the heartline gets too close to gone, and ACCOUNT for ANY lag you get. Better to get NOTHING than to blow the entire area and ALL nodes within roughly ten meters of you for FIVE to ten MINUTES. I have found the control S feature nice, I can stop the current extraction and be prospecting the node again and just in time take the item and start another extraction. This cut the time by about 30%.

I am not sure of the number of levels I gained, but I know I gained one level on the armor, and two or three on weapons that night. ALL I did was work orders. I also gained about three levels in fighter, due to running through the "gauntlet" the area of land between the two southern towns.***
E. For Jenna's sake, please fix ranged combat ASAP. Artillery is needed for dealing with huge herds. Nobody can afford to train up ranged combat because the ammo costs are insane. Drop ammo costs to practically nothing. Make good ammo avail on NPC vendors. Don't require players to craft ammo--it's enough that they have to craft the ranged weaps themselves.
***I agree with part of this too, there DOES need to be a few fixes on ranged. Number ONE, the rules that apply to OTHER crafting MUST be applied to THIS crafting as well. On my Tryker range fighter I make ALL my own ammon, I tried a batch of FINE grade Q20 ammo and pistol, using the stats on the materials to determine what I used. The q19 basic Kippee parts and Q10 basic goari parts made BETTER ammo than the Q 20 CHOICE parts and the stats said that it SHOULD have been the other way around. At this point, there is NO point in bothering to harvest Ammo OR gun mats. At least that was my week two experience, there HAVE been patches since then...things change...sometime for the better.

I think at the VERY least it should be possible to wisely hunt WITH a gun, the RIGHT mobs, and harvest...FROM these mobs enough materials to make enough ammo to KEEP hunting these mobs using a gun. At this point in game, I have HAD to switch over to sword/dagger combo for an HOUR to harvest enough to make enough ammo to even concider another run.***

F. You need to significantly increase the incentives for teaming up at lower levels. People hit the mainland and nobody wants to team with them. It's incredibly slow to level up defensive magic, for example, unless you're a member of a good-hearted guild. You should make the exp bonuses and the mat drops from mobs be much, much better than if you try to solo hunt. At all levels. Nobody is learning how to team fight effectively. Nobody is training up support skills that are needed at higher levels.

***I agree fully with the spirit of this one, if not exactly with your implementation. I would LOVE to see MORE xp per team member. I would LOVE to see more xp for team foraging. It would be easier to teach a neophyte forager one on one or two neos per experienced forager than it currently is to stop foraging and chat (if I could figure out how to do a chat macro, by the GODS I would. I want to help so much, but that means being torn in two different directions, HAVING to forage for mats, and having to stop to spread info.)
I would LOVE to see materials droped increased on team hunts. I think that loot for groups is a BIG weakness in the ONline gaming world...this game is NOT the first...won't be the last...to face this particular hurdle. I am not the only one to hope with my heart that they face all their challanges with grace and style and WIN.

I am not sure about the XP rewards to grouping. I joined open beta SO late that MOST of the earlier betas had out paced me and left newbland, and MOST of those left had LITTLE desire to group. But if xp was higher in groups, I am SURE that more people would do it. Reward behavior you want to encourage works EVEN on adults.***

----------

These things should be your top priorities for the early patches. You have a VERY short time window in which to keep your early adopters and get them to tell their friends and guildmates that "hey, SoR is a pretty cool and fun game." If you haven't done at least this much by the time WoW hits retail, this game will be in big trouble.

***I disagree on this, their MAIN priority MUST be bugs and lag. NOTHING will kill a game faster than LAG. Ask ANYONE...if you can't walk around, hunt, craft, whatever else a game has to offer because of lag...players WILL leave, in numbers too huge to allow the game to continue...Earth and Beyond and Horizons, both games dead due to UNPLAYABLE lag, and slavery to storyline OVER lag and bug fixes.

I personally could play this game SOUNDLESS, and storyless for six MONTHS if it was LAG free and bugs, mission errors and other playablity issues were fixed in a timely manner. (Main issues I have are storage, a banking system, better quality tools that STAY better quality and help with a small bonus to skills, FIXING the magic stanzas PRONTO so that you can get ALL damaging spells at all four levels and heal to a decent level prior to leaving for mainland at about 35.

At this point I am not spending a SINGLE sp over acid one and create sap crystal. But then I have plans on staying on newbland until I am level 50 in ALL skills I plan on ever getting...which is to say ALL skills including crafting branches.

I also feel that the SP costs on MUCH of crafting is insane. I know I could just shut up and grind using store bought...but I am a perfectionist...I would rather "do it right" and sell to players than to grind and sell to suppliers. MOST of the rerolls that I have heard of were either went to the mainland too early or mispent crafting sp or magic sp and fell they were gymped to the point of NOT being able to level.