Ryzom

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

----------

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.

No mention of all the system issues. People reporting constant freezing. Compatibility issues. Graphics card issues. Network issues.

Personally, I think they should devote a patch just to that.

Other than that, I disagree with your traveling philosophy. I like the fact that it is incredibly hard and takes much determination to do at low levels. I can't wait to see what it takes to march a group through the roots. To me, the challange of getting to other lands is my favorite thing on the content list. The only thing I'll give you here is that Trykers should have at least some chance to sneak across, comparable to other species.

I also have no plans to check out EQ2 or WoW. WoW sounds boring as hell and I ain't touching SOE with a 10 foot pool.

jdiegel wrote:No mention of all the system issues. People reporting constant freezing. Compatibility issues. Graphics card issues. Network issues.

I also have no plans to check out EQ2 or WoW. WoW sounds boring as hell and I ain't touching SOE with a 10 foot pool.

The technical issues are a given. They're expected with any MMOG. And they're not affecting everyone. Plenty of people are playing the game despite the periodic lag spikes, etc.

The issues I mentioned affect everyone. Also, it's usually a different team of coders that fix the technical issues versus the game design issues I've brought up. The two sets of issues can be worked in parallel by the devs and QA.

As for WoW and EQ2, I agree that SOE is evil incarnate and their games suck overall. Also, the folks I know who have beta tested both games have said that despite the visual glitz of EQ2, WoW is overall a better game. As for WoW itself, it is the complete opposite of boring as hell. I've played every MMOG. I've been in WoW closed beta for months. WoW is not groundbreaking in any way, but they have taken what is best about every MMOG to date and rolled it into one game, and they've kept out the stuff everyone hates about every MMOG to date. It is a fine, polished, fun gameplay experience for both casual gamers, soloers, and more team-oriented people. It has the best loot vs. crafting system of any MMOG to date. The uber loot factor surpasses even that of Anarchy Online, which has been the best to date.

A. It is TOO hard to get around among the 4 different lands.

This is completely relative. IT may be too hard for you, but what about for a guild to travel together? Your not supposed to just be traveling across the world 'cause I was bored'. not to mention, that there is supposed to be a good deal of inter-racial stress and angst. It should be hard to go somewhere else and survive.

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.

This is a problem that I'm sure is being worked on. That, or the little slaves are meant to have a harder time. No one has come out and said this is a bug yet, that I know of.

C. Harvesting

Harvesting seems to be perfectly fine. The problem is that the crafters are using harvested mats for practice instead of only for use. vendor mats are for practice! You can pull plenty of high quality mats froma since source, and never deplete it, you just have to pay attention to the node, and keep it alive.

D. Provide Armor and Raw Materials above Q50 on the NPC vendors.

The only reason people think that armor and weapons decay too quickly is because they are using things above their level to handle. this causes rapid decay.

E. For Jenna's sake, please fix ranged combat ASAP.

It's important to craft ammo, helps get the range craft skill up, and comes with the added bonus of being usefull. It's also not really all that expensive.

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.

This isn't a game issue, this is a player attitude issue. If temed, at level 20, just like the newbie quest says, if you teamed up you'd be fine on the mainland. But people stay until 35-40 (and keep reccomending others to) so then they don't need to group. People not training support skills or learning how to team up, is something that the player base needs to fix itself, not something that can be patched.

jdiegel wrote:
Other than that, I disagree with your traveling philosophy. I like the fact that it is incredibly hard and takes much determination to do at low levels. I can't wait to see what it takes to march a group through the roots. To me, the challange of getting to other lands is my favorite thing on the content list.

I have to agree here, it is kind of nice to live in a world that still feels dangerous and very large. It's still thrilling to explore and find out what you can take on, and what will kill you instantly. A greatt deal of the people in the game are still fairly "young" characters, with many not having reached 100 levels yet. It's nice to know that, I will have a challange for a long time ahead of me. The inability to travel great distances at a lower level only makes it more exciting when you finally do. It was prettty cool when other races finally made their way to Zorai lands and made contact with us, like it had been some increadible journey just to get there (and it was). I can't wait to make my way to other lands, but the Zorai-lands are keeping me busy right now, and there is still a great deal I have not seen. Its refreshing to be in a world that's not already mapped out and picked apart on a 1000 fan sites, with every point of interest and spawn point and quest and monster listed in a conveinent column. It is too harsh to travel at lower levels and it should be. We've all been in this world less than a month now, why would I already want to feel bored with it?

Your backwards. Wow wont be out for another 3-5months were as EQ2 is set to release in late November.

I never played the open beta of this game so I am not sure what the beta experience was like. I did play in many other betas, Lineage 2, EQ, DAOC(start to finsih) and WOW. Each game has its one problems and ambitions for beta. BLizzard has always had strong betas and stable releases. They take their time and try and get everything right before release. This is extremely annoying as they always push back release dates which annoys people. I can see them doing this with WOW.

EQ and other games always rush through the beta and try and fix the minor problems and such and then release a not so finished product. This is usually fixed up with in the first couple months of gameplay with huge patches and lengthy down times. They do this to meet the demand for the game and have it released when they planned the release. The public and other people get upset when they are given a date and then it is changed. So instead of making everyone angry they release the game the way it is and then work through the troubles like they are now.

mikwana wrote: C. Harvesting

Harvesting seems to be perfectly fine. The problem is that the crafters are using harvested mats for practice instead of only for use. vendor mats are for practice! You can pull plenty of high quality mats froma since source, and never deplete it, you just have to pay attention to the node, and keep it alive.

I for one would NEVER use harvested mats for practice. That's insane given how hard it is to get harvested mats. I have no idea what voodoo you use for keeping nodes alive, but they sure go dead for me in a hurry.

As a weapon crafter this one really resonates with me. I spent several hours the other night gathering enough resources to make 3 weapons for customers, and I already knew where the mats were! Between not getting the right quality mats, not getting enough before they were exhausted, crafting failures (TWICE I was trying to make q50 weapons and they came out sub-q30, with all choice mats), I spent over 3 hours making 3 q50 weapons, and at the end was completely out of mats. If I want to do any more crafting, I'll be back out in the dirt for another several hours before I can make 2 or 3 more weapons. The whole time I was advertising to buy mats from harvesters, but understandably no one was selling. You just can't get enough mats to have extra leftover to sell. Either that or the people who can play 8 hours a day are just hoarding them, which is what I would do if that were me.

The result is that even though all I want to do is craft, I have to spend so much time harvesting that I am 7 levels higher in harvest than I am in crafting! I spend on average 3 hours of harvesting for every 5 minutes of actual crafting. This is ludicrous. You can be a harvester without crafting, but you can't be a crafter without being a harvester. I could never possibly meet the demand for quality weapons: it takes far too long to get the mats alone, much less spend time levelling. I would bet most crafters' spirits get broken right around level 50, when all your landmarks are obsolete and you have to start all over again finding your mat nodes...

phoenyx wrote:The technical issues are a given. They're expected with any MMOG. And they're not affecting everyone. Plenty of people are playing the game despite the periodic lag spikes, etc.

You seem to be referring to the people who can play. There's a whole slew of customers who can't. Read through the technical support forum some. The lag spikes are a very minor issue, imo.

I stand by what I said about WoW. I bet the majority of the people who will leave here for WoW never would have stayed here in the first place.

phoenyx wrote: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

----------

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.

Ok, first of all I'm really getting tired of people saying that every MMO on the face of the planet needs to do certain things to compete with EQ2 and WoW. Let me ask you this, have you actually played either EQ2 or WoW? If not let me sum things up about them.

1) WoW
I have played WoW. And I can tell you that there is nothing new in that game. I'm not the only one who thinks that either. mmorpg.com did a recent article on on players opinion of WoW. They said that if you like what is out there you will like WoW. It's a game that takes the standard MMO ideas and has polished them up to work in a very stable game. Howver if you have been playing MMO's for a long time or are tired of what is out there WoW will not hold your interest. So contrary to the popular opinion, WoW is not going to be the killer MMO that destroys everything else. It will be popular and it will gain a fanbase, but it won't be the holy grail of MMOs.
2) EQ2
75% of gamers will not be able to play this game. The system requirements are redicilously high. Plus it's still going to be Everquest. There are many people who simply don't like EQ. There are many people who don't like fantasy games. All of those people will be looking for other MMO's to play.

So lets just stop with the EQ2 and WoW doomsday scenarios. Those two game will probably be very popular. But not everyone in the gaming world is going to run to them.

Now on to your compaints:
a) Exploration of the game, especially visiting other races lands.
Using Zorai as an example. Do you know why it's hard to get to the other lands? Read the story and you will. The Zorai are suppose to have their lands deep within the Jungle. They aren't suppose to have a highway to their cities. Aside from all of that exploration is suppose to be extremely dangerious and rewarding. Part of the excitement of seeing another land is that you have to work to get there. If passage is made easier all that would happen is people would go to the new lands, fly through them, and complain there is nothing more to explore.

b) I can't comment on this as I don't play a Tryker

c) Refining an entire game system is not as easy as you make it out to be. Lets say today they upped the amount of resources as you suggest. How does that effect the game economy today? What about later when the story comes into play? Better yet let everyone have 4x's the amount of stuff then what do you do when the players suck the planet dry of resources in a short period of time. Remember that resources in this game are finite.

d)First I want to coment on this line:
"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?"
What that someone is going and killing all the sprighly yubos that you can't kill? People kill things that is in line with their level. Upper level players aren't going to go and kill Yubos when they are at the point to fight gringos. If a low level player gets frustrated that they can't kill something, then they need to work to get stronger to kill it, not complain about it.

As for having NPC's carry better items. Have worked on your fame? You do know that when you reach a certain fame level NPCs offer you stuff that they wouldn't previously, right? Maybe the setup is to make sure that leveling alone can't let you advance, that you need to work on all areas of the game.

E) Can't comment as I don't use ranged weapons.

f) I beleive the idea is to find a guild to help you.

I just want to comment that I really like the fact that the world is a dangerous place. I still get killed pretty regularly in my starting area around Yrkanis. Of course, some decent armor might help that (even the merchants are telling me my armor sucks, hehe).

But I like the fact that I can see how far I have to go in my levels to get anywhere. It gives me a goal to reach and I take the time to work on my sneaking abilities around those damn Gingos.