What's wrong with V4?

[Tim]

Well, it's been over a month since the V4 launch, so you guys should have had plenty of time to form opinions about it. As usual, most of what I hear is the positive stuff. While I'm definately not complaining about the good feedback, it always helps more to know the negative things.

What is annoying? What part of the game is a pain? What makes it boring sometimes? What makes you want to scream? That kinda stuff. Be brutal. As long as you're being honest, I won't take offense. No poll options here because I don't want your answers to feel limited.

Go nuts!

[alSeen]

ok what REALLY ticks me off is when i have an extremely good tali and i cant use it just by one point! lol but seriously, the market (the one people put items in) needs to be improved because i feel sorry for anyone trying to sell something in it. i doubt anyone really checks it out because nothing good is in there. or what IS good is so overpriced its crazy. that and when one person in your clan stops playing or leaves it and u cant really know who (in a larger clan anyway) left unless u r looking specificly for that person. so a memo for that would be nice for the clan leaders. (like so and so quit, so and so was kicked for not playing in the past 2 weeks, ect)

[alSeen]

ive also noticed that the pop up map is wrong, nothing big just a little annoying.

[Mat Cauthon]

the one thing that really bothers me is the fact that I and most of my clan have over 90% wins in the older versions this never happend over lvl 10 seems like nobody is really fighting people just ncp's plus the game is just too quiet I am going to have to go on a recruiting rampage!

[alSeen]

yeah WAY too quite. it seems a good many r playing, just none talking outside of clan. maybe we should just have two clans and fight to the death! ha ha ha! (that way everyone can talk to at LEAST half of the players any time they want )lol

[Crom Cruach]

I personally find V4 has 2 big problems, and both have to do with latest additions to the game that fail to be the big improvements I hoped for.

1)The quests system is flawed

- even after completing a NPC quest the "hunt" button doesn't go unless you check the quest page.

- if you log off leaving a NPC quest unfinished, when you log back on you find the "hunt" button still on even if all the quests have expired

- there's no "expire" button for the self created quest

- the item quests are impracticable after the first few levels because they ask for low levels items, which can't be found in drops after a certain level

- even when practicable, item quests are unbalanced because they ask for too many items and give too little a reward to be considered worth trying (an option there could be asking for just 1 item to be found, and every second item would multiply the reward)


The consumable system needs to be scaled to levels

- as they are, consumables are too powerful at low levels and almost useless at higher levls

- consumables should have multiplying modifiers (like +X poison instead of +2 poison) and the coefficient should rise evenly with their price

- consumables should be used according to the player's level (levels 1 to 5 could use consumables with 1x modifyer, levels 6 to 10 could use cons. with 2x modifyer, and so on)

[alSeen]

well the 'hunt' button DOES disappear if u finish a quest (i know cuz ive done almost literally hundreds of them, i have 5 alts and all i do is those quest ;D) and even when u log off and the quest expires, the hunt button does stay there but what use is it (espeicially since u get no reward for the quest). the item quests do lack in excitement but i only use consumables (other than the stamina ones) only after i finish my duals to get a small edge on anyone attacking me. so how have these really failed? (the expire buttons a bug, tim already told us that.

[alSeen]

i was agreeing with u on the consumables and the item quests

[Crom Cruach]

Hem sorry alseen, I'm deleting my post then and let others comment.
By the way, I have a suggestion to solve the problem you were talking about, of clan leaders unable to control people coming and going or those who stop playing.
There could be a log for each player, recording their every "movement" in and out clans, and also the date of their last log-in the game.
These logs needn't be accessible by everyone, but just by clan leaders.
This, along with the possibility to make the ban from clans permanent, should give clan leaders full control.

[alSeen]

hmmm... thats a great idea crom. hope tim is reading this

[Tim]

*reading*

Glad of the input so far! Waiting to see if anyone else has comments before I hop into to the conversation.

[devindrangdorak]

I think that it would be cool (maybe) if you could augment the weaves like you can the weapons with talismans. In the books, depending on how the weave is spun, different things can be done. Like the weave to bond being similar to the weave to make Elayne and Aviendha first sister, ect...

[Tim]

Changed my mind and decided to weigh in to what's been said so far:

• Market: Totally agree. In the history of the game, even in Craig's versions, it's been a struggle of finding a balance between making the shops important and keeping the market relavent. Most of my changes have pushed the shops back into the spotlight at the expense of the market.
  
  I have some thoughts to making the market more valued again, but not sure which way to go:
  • Could make shops more expensive. Items cost double their worth at shops, but still sell for half their worth. Would make it worth the effort to try to sell items on the market without having to compete as closely with the more expensive shops.
    
  • Limit item availability at shops: Either reduce the number of items at the shops, or only have a set number available at a time. Would force people to search the markets to find the item if the shops are less likely to have them.
    
  • Expand market functionality: Allow users to create their own 'shops' to sell their unwanted items. Shop would have it's own inventory storage so the items on the market wouldn't count towards your inventory (wouldn't be able to take your own items back off the shop though, as otherwise people would abuse this). Perhaps even add extra bonuses for the best shops.
    
  
  
• Inactive Clan members: I've always tried to strike a balance between anonymous play and active play. So people don't even like that it shows when their online. However, I think that the suggestions for either a clan leader knowing how long since a clan member was last active or at least a notification when someone has been inactive for x amount of time would be benificial to Clan leaders. Probably won't go so far as to record their every movement though.
  
• Popup Map Mismatch: Yeah, Ed's kinda dropped off the map (though I haven't really tried pushing him for it). Will update as soon as I can. If nothing else I can take a screenshot of my crappy Word map and upload that.
  
• Exploring vs Dueling: I agree here too. My goal with reitroducing NPC duels was to offer a more convenient alternative to hunting down the potentially few players in your level that are worth dueling. Exploring gives you a benefit in finding items to sell (likely more than you'd win from dueling) while Dueling still offers more XP.
  
  However, it seems the convenince of Exploring has made it by far the prefered option. I have a few ideas on making Dueling more worth it (one of which I don't want to discuss quite yet ), such as tweaking the experience gained or making duels effect clan score more.
  
• Quietness: Yeah, this always seems to be a problem. People start out each version active then fade as the version goes on. Not much can be done short of recruiting more players to join. I'm also thinking that part of it could be that there are SOO many boards (each town board + clan boards) to keep track of that the it spreads the little activity we have pretty thin. I'm considering removing the individual town boards in favor of a single/few boards for everyone. Also considering just removing the town boards and creating boards on the forum to use instead, as they allow for longer term storage anyways. Clan boards will likely remain untouched though.
  
• Quest System Issues: I whole heartedly concur. A lot of this stems from me falling behind schedule on the coding end last version and launching things sooner than I probably should have. User generated quests weren't fully complete (expire option not working) item quests at higher levels weren't tested. I hope to rectify this next version be in my mind 'finishing' what's there for quests and adding new functionality also.
  • Specifically for item quests, I think I might rework how they are done. Its supposed to choose an item based on the average level of people in the area when the quest is generated, but my formula skews strongly to lower level items, most of which can be found easily at most shops. Instead of asking for X of a semi-specific item (by semi-specific, I'm refering to the fact that the talismans are left someone open), I might change it to ask for an item type (ie. Axes, Shields, etc). Your reward would be based on the 'level' of the items you choose to give. This leave the quests simple to complete, but make it worth the time if you want to put forth extra effort.
    
  • Note about the 'Hunt' button: While the button itself may be accessible from going to expired pages and the address may indicate 'hunt=1', the functionality of hunting stops after you've completed all NPC quests in that area. So if after you beat the 5th and final Bandit in a quest to beat 5 Bandits, even if you manage to select Hunt, your odds of fighting a Bandit are the same as if you had just hit 'Explore'.
  
  
• Consumables: Agreed these definately need balancing. Its was an issue of making them worth the cost early on as well as later, without being overly powerful at high levels. As it is early on, they give good benefits, but at that point every silver counts. At higher levels, the cost is as insignificant as their effect (other than food, who's effect is still the same but the cost is insignificant). Definately agree these need tweaking, but I don't want conumable effects to get out of control.
  
• Weave Tweakability: I changed weaves this version to make them grow stronger as the players do. I'd like to take a poll of what people think of this before I tweak them further, though I do have a few ideas up my sleave that may effect weaves more than the other weapon types. The ideas aren't fleshed out enough that I'm ready to discuss them though.
  

Will discuss other issues as their brought up or further discuss any of the issues already raise the best I can. Go Team!

[almordre]

Market - If Market items didn't take up inventory space, I'd throw a good amount of stuff out there, but I hate tying up inventory slots and trying to keep up with what's been there too long, etc, so something that stored Market items elsewhere would be great.

Inactives - I've always thought it'd be handy for the clan leader(s) to know when someone joined/left the clan, maybe just an automated message or something for simplicity. I've always gauged player activity by watching levels, so if the player doesn't level for several days, they're 'out to lunch'.

Map - just a reminder - the hatchet-job line map I threw together is still in the "Discussion" section -"Alternate Map for v4", about halfway down the list. it ain't pretty, but it'll get you where you wanna go... I keep the jpeg on my desktop, and just open it locally whenever I get "lost".

Duels/NPCs - I ran NPCs for the early part of the game, but once I got enough gear to feel sort of competent, I've been making the rounds running duels against anyone within a few levels. (It's seemed odd that most of those players haven't come around and returned the favor.) NPCs are a much better bet for XP, though - currently, lvl50+, wins against NPCs are 98%+. (think you'd said you were trying to trim that back a bit). Seems like they were a lot harder early on, and even in mid levels (20+), but have gradually gotten more consistent on the 'win' side, to the point that my two lvl50+ alts lose maybe 1-2 a day, if that much.

Quests - I've liked the 'equip' quests - good way to get good gear before you can afford to just run out and buy it, but I've never even tried a 'gather items' quest, because the money rewards always seemed to be notably less than what the items would 'sell' for, especially if you had ANY talis to throw on them, and the relative lack of inventory space early in the game made it very unattractive to hang on to multiples of the same item. The 'Hunt' button has always disappeared after hitting '100%' in the quest for me, and when I've kept hitting 'reload' on a hunt page, after the quest hits 100%, I start getting other varieties of NPCs anyway. Maybe it's a page cache issue for some folks?

Consumables - Pretty much the only consumable I've had any luck using is Andilay for Speed. The others never seem to make much of a difference. Everything else is based on %, and at the lower levels, +8% of nothing is still nothing, and by the higher levels, everyone's jacked up on so much Speed, nothing else matters except trying to match or better their Speed so you can get in a hit.

Weaves - I've really liked the scaling weave power this time. I can kind of see the case for not tali'ing weaves - a Fireball is pretty much a Fireball. I mentioned something in an old suggestion about modifying weaves, though. Here's what I can remember - Early on, Rand fought primarily with his sword, then threw in the occasional weave for good measure, then later on switched to balefiring palaces out of existence. I think it'd be sweet if you could set the power/pt usage of weaves manually, or have them just use whatever pts are left over from your other gear and scale dmg/effects accordingly. That way, if you want to fight with your shiny Heron Mark Blade, and toss the occasional exploding rock as an afterthought, you could, or you could put on some healthy armor and put everything else you had into flinging fireballs around. I'm guessing that once the stats were balanced out, it wouldn't function much differently in battle than current gear sets, but it'd be a fun customization. The only 'benefit' to it would be a little less scrambling around for off-hand gear, since the total dmg/stats would still be limited by the available equip pts.

Other - I still have some concerns about some stat balancing, too - the worst of which is Speed (seems like someone mentioned Speed as "overpowered" last version). I could go into detail about what results I'm seeing, if it'll help. Also, there are those two 'clerical' glitches hanging around that I messaged you about a while back...

[alSeen]

well i agree with almordre but tim please, PLEASE!, dont mess with speed because it is HELL trying to add speed on higher levels (with talis since im not a hunter or bandit) to good weapons so i wont lose all my fights.

i really like the idea about weaves using up all the availabel EQ points and i would like to dual wield weaves and swords (or ect )

and on the market, if we could sell stuff, without it taking up our inventory, it would help INSANELY i bet. but make it a global market cuz traveling's a pain when u didnt memorize all the different paths to take.

and on the town boards, maybe u could just combine them all so whats on one is on all of them so people can talk from anywhere to anyone (not WoT proper but we really dont have enough people to do much otherwise. but keep the clan boards the same.

PS. i like the ideas with the clan leader (since i came up with most of them ;D)
PSS. PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY POSTING!!!!! i thought everyone just forgot about the forums