Things that improve my QoL in an MMO:
-Shared bank among alts. I don't necessarily want to share gold, but being able to shove items I got for my alt into a bank, and not need to mail it to the alt or trade it to a friend to give to my alt is preferrable. I often end up spending time collecting things that would help my alts along when on my main, and vice versa, and a shared bank for this would facilitate me greatly.
-Guild banks. Also a fun thing, I also collect a lot of things that would be useful to fellow guildies that I don't need, and/or would benefit for raiding/grouping such as potions and food. I'd love an easier way to give this to guildies without having to run across the world just to hand them 2 stacks of cooked fish, then run all the way back, or give up a spot in a group for it, etc etc.
-I am not a fan of transmog, but I can get behind player-made-from-crafting dyes, as long as the gear is recognizable. It really makes me happy to see a player in gear that I know and recognize. I want to see someone and know what gear they are wearing. I don't want to have to /inspect, as that's a pain.
-I sort of fear the /inspect option, and would like to be able to limit other players use of it on me, if not remove from the game entirely. I know a lot of people find it useful for making groups and ensuring the group will be successful based of gear level, but for me it's a source of stress. I want my skill to speak above my gear. I witnessed the real start of ilvls becoming a major thing in WoW over BiS for builds, or even BiS for play styles, and seeing a warlock who is one of the best players I've ever known be turned down for a raid in favor of a **** player with higher ilvl gear who then wiped the raid multiple times.... Well, I'm scared of it. I want this game to be about skill, not if I have the right offhand. Not having to worry about this makes life so much nicer.
-Community events/specific channels for community chatting. Pull it out of the trade and the spam channels, the way ooc worked out in EQ. I want to be able to talk to the people in the area/zones I am in easily. I also love community events and being aware of when they are happening. I am a social gamer at heart, and having designated events I get to play with others I normally wouldn't is nice. An example of this is the world bosses in City of Heroes (or WoW when that was a thing), where people would just group together and form a raid or two to send the beatdown on this randomly spawned boss, instead of the collective raiding guild goes into raiding zone thing.
-I second everyone with cosmetic items/cosmetic components in crafting. I loved being able to make a top hat to wear around, or a non-stats dress for pretty-ness.... Honestly, this would also help the RP community to have these items avaible by crafting and encourages more players to craft than just the lets-make-raid-gear crafters.
I've been playing on Agnarr TLP server recently, and it's given me a lot to think about regarding QoL features and how they impact play beyond the immediate convenience they offer. I'm way behind "the curve" so possibly my perspective is biased by the lower level band I'm playing in.
The Good:
The Questionable:
The Bad
kreed99 said:I would love an advanced friend tracker system. Allowing you to list a main and thier alts. Kindof like the eq guild manager system but just for friends and private to only you. With the pantheon touch applied to it. With the mentoring system i can only imagine the spreadsheet i am going to create so i can keep track of everyone. It would be much easier if i could rely on the system to keep friend’s character main/alt levels and race/class along with a note option so i can keep track of where we grouped last.
(After consideration, i am ok with not having this as this is quite stalkerish. Just give me a /who command or a way to see if someone is there without a /tell and i'll be ok.)
Withouth having such a complicated system, I'd like to have a non text based friendlist. Knowing when friends go online is the good part of saying "hi", and EQ's friend system an easily make you miss someone or beeing missed as you have to constantly use the / all friends command. I rescently tried to find back someone on P99 because I owed him some gear, and I spent weeks logging in typing my command again and again. In the end, the character disappeared from my FL which I guess mean that he deleted the toon, now I have no way to track him back and give him back his goodies, shamefull.
Often QOL seems to aim for easyness and convenience, and sometimes they are. Usually player wants to get rid of chores they have to do to keep the "fun part", withouth realizing the major part of the fun is factored by the chore they had to accomplish. Wow is a good example of that, with loot flowing from every pore of your skin, they have no longer a value, and what was earlier a rare or raid accomplished quality (purple) is now so common you can have 10 of them per day alone doing short, easy chores.
Withouth pushing things away, I do think that most "QOL" should only be 2018's versions of EQ classic functionnalities. EQ worked as a mud with graphics, but most remained chat based because it was how Brad knew things worked back then. With current game engines, things should be less text based, but not easier.
Aggregate looting with a non automatic loot sharing will lead to "mass ninja" of good drops, as an example. While it's convenient in games where you kill mobs as a dozen, is it really usefull in a game where kills will space themselves, and mobs drop every 30s or so ? Single loot is manageable in this setup.
Shared bank slot is only a player convenience, especially for mules. But since banks will mostly be location specific to avoid an overall economy in favor of a local economy, you might only end to be able to access a specific city bank shared slot each time, resulting of no way to trade between your toons if they are far away. Because if not, people will simply use "shared" slots to send wares to their far away mule and sell things for higher there.
Weapon quickswap, as long as it's not "bar fastswap" ala GW2 / ESO, I guess it can't hurt to have a "weapon" slot and a "scabbart" slot, with the ability to switch them back and forth. But no more, no one is a living armory.
tehtawd said: This is probably going to get me drilled but hey, Id like to add something. A compas. I would like the 'convenience' of a small compas which also includes your loc. It isnt a mini map, but its good enough for me. -Todd
Lol, you just ask for trouble! ;^)
I'm starting to realise how funny the puritanical purists sound. Like a grand-parent insisting things were better during the second world war. Don't be scared of them, Todd! Hehe.
As with a lot of things in games, especially role-playing games, they can only be analogs of reality. A compass is the simplest way to represent an adventurer actually having a good idea which direction they are facing. They might not actually carry "a compass" in their hand, but they know which way is which from the sun and moss on trees and stars and prevailing wind direction and other trailcraft, etc etc. However you want to excuse or role-play it, the annoying silliness being an adventurer with no sense of direction is less immersive than having a subtle compass in the corner of your screen.
To be honest, I'd be happy with Sense Heading skill, though. That is perhaps more immersive and less obtrusive.
Personally I would like to see a basic map in game too, as I find it less immersive and less realistic to imagine my 'hero' stepping out of a village into the wilderness without thinking to ask the locals about surroundings and landmarks and points of interest. Sauntering out stupidly unprepared and getting lost isn't 'heroic' or fun to me. It's also way less immersive to go look at a Wiki page full of spoilers and adverts when all you wanted was a simple map to help navigate...
Not all "quality of life" things are justified simply by them making things 'easier'. A lot of things totally make sense and make the game better. The QoL improvement is just a side-effect.
It's interesting you include a /loc with your compass, though, Todd.
Having a /loc (X, Y, Z map coordinate) is a *way* more powerful tool than a compass. With a /loc you can tell exactly where you are relative to someone else (who can /shout their /loc) or something else you've been to and you can precisely plot a map as you travel. As primative as it sounds, I would say a /loc system is one of those features that *is* too powerful and immersion breaking. It's basically a crude but effective GPS locator.
I think if you are at the same bank the shared bank space makes sense. Like having a bank deposit box that multi people can access. It makes sense not to have it accessable at other banks unless its just money and you pay a fee to transfer it from the other bank. Make the banking system real give us COD with interest rates lol
fazool said:Not one single "do all" button. For example, when I am in a dangerous place and I kill a mob, it needs to be risky for me to go to the corpse and rifle through their pockets and loot their stuff, piece by piece. The sheer terror of sitting there one-by-one clicking and looting items made the game seem real. Having a dumbed-down, instant-gratification button that magically loots all or drops all, is just another example.
Seriously, most folks clamoring for that type of thing, under the guise of "convenience and annoyance-avoidance" really don't want a virtual world to live in - they want to log in, mash buttons and kill things and every single immersion thing that gets in the way of that is decried as "wrong".
And good God, chat bubbles are the worst cartoon nonsense ever.
In 1999/2000 EQ did everything right. Everything. It wasn't about being easy and convenient. It was about being an immersive world to live in.
As for the incredibly flawed argument "make that a user preference and you can just turn it off": that's absurd - as soon as you do that then whole world has different scales of progression and experiences. For example a "loot all" button, yes of course I could force myself to loot things one at a time, but if other players are not doing the same, then they progress at a pace and I can't keep up. And if their goal is to hurry their progression, again, they are button mashers.
I hate the armor dyes and ornamentations. A lot of the goal-questing is to get something that looks cool (firey avenger for example) - having everyone have infinite styles just makes this a cartoon.
These whole topics grealy discourage me because it reminds me of the population that ruined the MMORPG genre....
I also go not like the idea of easy buttons like loot all and craft materals auto pulled from and intentory. In my opinion these type of things go against what VR is trying to create.
Some people really dislike inspect. I say look away! Give me Magelo, let me broadcast it out there!
I find that things we are used to in eq1 are going to be hard to overcome.... but people will do because the game is going to be so much better. I would "Like" certain things, but i will take whatever they give me.
I also am on board with the idea that there a few too many rose-colored glasses being worn. Things that were implement newer than 20 years ago seem to get dissed on a fairly regular basis here. Some of the concepts maybe were not even technologically possible 20 years ago or just used too much computational resources to be viable. I like slash commands, but that doesn't mean that its the cream of the crop for aquiring information about your surroundings, it is just what was available at the time two decades ago.
I respect and am fully looking forward to the game and the return of meaningfulness of the community and guild. A vibrant community is something I feel has been nearly lost in recent MMO releases. Again as an example; ESO and its 5, yes 5, guilds you could be in. Wrong answer; a guild is a family and it is singular, a group of guilds in an alliance is similar to an extended family. Saying that, I do not feel that every single mechanic imaginable and under the sun should force grouping or interaction with the general community. See below:
Any trading mechanism that disses the non-typical workers schedule and overly favors the 9-5, Mon-Fri crowd is a QoL issuse. Sitting and yelling in /trade to buy or sell something during prime time is nothing but prioritizing the 9-5 crowd because prime time is usually 1-2 hours after they are off work and the server is the fullest. For the folks that work weekends, evenings, nights or get deployed for extended periods, they need a buy/sell mechanism that is plug-n-play and is 24/7/365; a system where they are not disadvantaged. WoWs AH actually neutralized this issue, DAoC with their non-AH housing merchants did as well. ESO was incredibly unfriendly in this area.
Quality of Life to me includes certain mechanics that speed something up, removes the ho-hum, or downright allows me to have fun playing the game instead of Alt-Tabbing to type in Word or OneNote, or acess third party websites.
Other ideas that might be considered QoL: Making drawings (screenshot works too) of the area and saving it within the game but not having to Alt-Tab out of the game to access it. Achievements seem to be all the rage nowdays, Warhammer Online allowed you to wear them at your belt. A bestiary type journal. Copying looted notes to a journal vs taking up a bag slot.
nexus said:I also go not like the idea of easy buttons like loot all and craft materals auto pulled from and intentory. In my opinion these type of things go against what VR is trying to create.
Quite the opposite, things like loot all and craft materials being used from the inventory for an already discovered recipe are right in line with VR's vision. Those are QoL changes that remove the needless tedium associated with those systems. They've said a number of times they are trying to avoid tedious and/or repetitive tasks where possible and that anything that you may end up doing relatively frequently needs to be supported by an intuitive and easy to use UI and interface.
I like all the ideas except one.
Sell junk button— if there will be items that are clearly junk, implement a "sell all junk" button when interacting with merchants
Part of learning the world in EQ was figuring out what was worth keeping ... what was a quest item or junk or crafting material. If you have a sell junk button, it already tells you a lot about which items have value beyond selling to merchant. It's a great feature from a pure ease of play aspect, but, with the sell junk option, would you ever find that rare crafting item you needed when dumpster diving? (aka buying items other players sold to merchants.) So while it can make that part of the game easier, I think you lose in another aspects of the game, like learning about the world and items. I made a lots of money dumpster diving because other's didn't bother to learn about those things. It seems like a little thing, but having to learn about a detailled world keeps people interested and playing.
But, everyone's opinion of where the line is, between fun discovery and drudgery, is differnt, and I could live with this in game.
disposalist said:tehtawd said: This is probably going to get me drilled but hey, Id like to add something. A compas. I would like the 'convenience' of a small compas which also includes your loc. It isnt a mini map, but its good enough for me. -ToddLol, you just ask for trouble! ;^)
I'm starting to realise how funny the puritanical purists sound. Like a grand-parent insisting things were better during the second world war. Don't be scared of them, Todd! Hehe.
As with a lot of things in games, especially role-playing games, they can only be analogs of reality. A compass is the simplest way to represent an adventurer actually having a good idea which direction they are facing. They might not actually carry "a compass" in their hand, but they know which way is which from the sun and moss on trees and stars and prevailing wind direction and other trailcraft, etc etc. However you want to excuse or role-play it, the annoying silliness being an adventurer with no sense of direction is less immersive than having a subtle compass in the corner of your screen.
To be honest, I'd be happy with Sense Heading skill, though. That is perhaps more immersive and less obtrusive.
Personally I would like to see a basic map in game too, as I find it less immersive and less realistic to imagine my 'hero' stepping out of a village into the wilderness without thinking to ask the locals about surroundings and landmarks and points of interest. Sauntering out stupidly unprepared and getting lost isn't 'heroic' or fun to me. It's also way less immersive to go look at a Wiki page full of spoilers and adverts when all you wanted was a simple map to help navigate...
Not all "quality of life" things are justified simply by them making things 'easier'. A lot of things totally make sense and make the game better. The QoL improvement is just a side-effect.
It's interesting you include a /loc with your compass, though, Todd.
Having a /loc (X, Y, Z map coordinate) is a *way* more powerful tool than a compass. With a /loc you can tell exactly where you are relative to someone else (who can /shout their /loc) or something else you've been to and you can precisely plot a map as you travel. As primative as it sounds, I would say a /loc system is one of those features that *is* too powerful and immersion breaking. It's basically a crude but effective GPS locator.
Wow. Thanks for not chewing me out. I literally within an hour of posting that received notice of a death in my family. Wasnt looking forward to what my post did. You know... Its the little things like respecting other peoples feelings that make me like this community. I wish i posted more often like in the past but life just keeps getting busy for me these last couple of years.
Anyway.. Thanks. Think ill just lurk while i deal with whats going on. Pantheon is a good distraction.
I didnt realize loc was so powerful. Perspective is great.
-Todd
Slash commands are definitely still needed! EQ1's /lfg and /who (or /who all) still beat the snot out of GUI grouping tools in every other MMO since. Elder Scrolls Online is a key example of a crappy GUI auto-grouping tool that gives you no feedback on how deep in the queue you are, bugs itself out constantly, and doesn't allow for players to earn a reputation as good or bad group mates. All Pantheon needs is EQ1's /lfg flag (to indicate you're looking for group) with a text field afterwards (to indicate what you're LFG for), and let the players learn to do /who all LFG 45-50 Dire (or however you designate level and class). It was so much better this way than any games' system I've seen since. And its so easy to do. Don't waste development effort on anything "better" (it won't be better)!
tehtawd said:disposalist said:tehtawd said: This is probably going to get me drilled but hey, Id like to add something. A compas. I would like the 'convenience' of a small compas which also includes your loc. It isnt a mini map, but its good enough for me. -ToddLol, you just ask for trouble! ;^)
I'm starting to realise how funny the puritanical purists sound. Like a grand-parent insisting things were better during the second world war. Don't be scared of them, Todd! Hehe.
As with a lot of things in games, especially role-playing games, they can only be analogs of reality. A compass is the simplest way to represent an adventurer actually having a good idea which direction they are facing. They might not actually carry "a compass" in their hand, but they know which way is which from the sun and moss on trees and stars and prevailing wind direction and other trailcraft, etc etc. However you want to excuse or role-play it, the annoying silliness being an adventurer with no sense of direction is less immersive than having a subtle compass in the corner of your screen.
To be honest, I'd be happy with Sense Heading skill, though. That is perhaps more immersive and less obtrusive.
Personally I would like to see a basic map in game too, as I find it less immersive and less realistic to imagine my 'hero' stepping out of a village into the wilderness without thinking to ask the locals about surroundings and landmarks and points of interest. Sauntering out stupidly unprepared and getting lost isn't 'heroic' or fun to me. It's also way less immersive to go look at a Wiki page full of spoilers and adverts when all you wanted was a simple map to help navigate...
Not all "quality of life" things are justified simply by them making things 'easier'. A lot of things totally make sense and make the game better. The QoL improvement is just a side-effect.
It's interesting you include a /loc with your compass, though, Todd.
Having a /loc (X, Y, Z map coordinate) is a *way* more powerful tool than a compass. With a /loc you can tell exactly where you are relative to someone else (who can /shout their /loc) or something else you've been to and you can precisely plot a map as you travel. As primative as it sounds, I would say a /loc system is one of those features that *is* too powerful and immersion breaking. It's basically a crude but effective GPS locator.
Wow. Thanks for not chewing me out. I literally within an hour of posting that received notice of a death in my family. Wasnt looking forward to what my post did. You know... Its the little things like respecting other peoples feelings that make me like this community. I wish i posted more often like in the past but life just keeps getting busy for me these last couple of years.
Anyway.. Thanks. Think ill just lurk while i deal with whats going on. Pantheon is a good distraction.
I didnt realize loc was so powerful. Perspective is great.
-Todd
Was at a family funeral myself two weeks ago. I'm sending you a virtual hug, Todd... Let me know when it arrives! A mature and considerate gaming community is one of the things I'm hoping for from Pantheon too. Chin up!
Some good ideas here, some I'm good with, some I'm not, and a few I'd be OK with some minor tweaks or limitations.
Armor Dyes: If armor is visually different, then I'm not againt dyeing, by that I mean Breastplate of Anger has these sharp edges, spiked shoulders (not cartoonish spikes), and some heavy reinforcing bands. Where Breastplate of The Gods is more smooth, rounded, soft edges, decorative banding and some engravings.
If the armor itself is very visually different, that it is identifyable regardless of color, then I have no problem.
Another solution would be that only certain parts of armor can be dyed, and those parts may not be present on all armor, for instance, only the banding and ornamental portions of the armor are dyeable, not the entire peice or the structural parts.
Compass: I have no issue with a compass, as someone else said, it would be ridiculous to think someone would wander off on adventure in to the unknown with no idea which direction they are going, and since some of the natural clues in the real world are not well represented in the virtual world, a compass would be a solution.
Friends List: This would be nice, something akin to a how IMs work now. A small window telling you who is on your list and who on that list is online. Being able to allow people to add you based on account or just character is a requirment though, so essentially people would have to send a friend request and you're acceptance would prompt you if your acceptance if based on your account or just your character.
Journal: An in game journal would be nice, something very simplistic, just enough to type in some notes with heading or subject matter, and a way to search your journal. Some auto input of things like the date, location(region/city name not coordinates) and the character name would speed up the note taking process.
Shared Bank Slots: For easier more secure transfer of items between your own characters.
disposalist said:...It's interesting you include a /loc with your compass, though, Todd.
Having a /loc (X, Y, Z map coordinate) is a *way* more powerful tool than a compass. With a /loc you can tell exactly where you are relative to someone else (who can /shout their /loc) or something else you've been to and you can precisely plot a map as you travel. As primative as it sounds, I would say a /loc system is one of those features that *is* too powerful and immersion breaking. It's basically a crude but effective GPS locator.
If disposalist gets to mention it again here, then so do I (lol)! This is probably my biggest gripe with the mechanics we know of thus far. I have to assume the devs have good reasons for including /loc rather than just precedence, but I do wish they would change their minds. Beggars can't be choosers though, so I'll take what Pantheon has to offer.
I agree with the OP's list, which all seems like good stuff. Compasses seem completely fine to me. I don't personally care about people dying their equipment, but I would prefer if you could always tell what category/tier of armor it is regardless of the dye.