No need to be alarmed at this stage. Its early testing and some godmode functions are still active. Ben hit those concerns on the head, they will be tweaking stuff up until release. They gave disclaimers at the beginning on all streams they have done. Pre-Alpha gameplay work in progress yadayada im sure Ben has a script he has typed out.
BenD said:Hi Teberius, good observations! To address some of them:
- Leveling has been turned up drastically during pre-alpha to accommodate for the limited hours the pre-alpha realms are available. We need people leveling quickly to test different content.
- Similarly the death penalty has been temporarily disabled in this build to allow for more efficient testing. The death penalty and corpse runs will return in a later pre-alpha phase.
- Out of combat mana and health regen is constantly being tweaked. We expect it will continue to be tweaked right through beta.
Thanks.
People need to realize nothing they see is how the game will be in terms of balancing at this stage.
I'm not concerned at all at this time. Its all pre-alpha and still lots of testing. As for the long spawn timer, I heard or read that rather than long spawns like the old days there is a chance that spawns could migrate and not be in the same place all the time.
I hope this is true because it makes things more realistic that people and animals move around. Its also nice for people to stumble upon random spawn and not have to worry about someone coming in at the last minute to steal the kill they had been camping for for hours or days. It use to happen all the time on EQ in West Karana...you know who you are. :D
Porygon said:Tiberius said:finger wigglers
I will never call them casters again.
While "finger wigglers" may be the collective noun for us casters, there are definitely shades of grey (I am told about 50, but that seems a lot of classes) here!
For example, the preferred term for Wizards is "AFK-ers".
PS: There is merit in the idea of a 3-bullet-point testcard being added above the main screen for any future streams - these points to cover the main 'compromises/fixes' in place to facilitate current testing that are absolutely not 'intended'.
Eg:
- Corpses - Players currently respawn with all gear/no corpse to speed testing.
- Respawn - Currently set at preset positions to aid testing timescales.
- Exp rates - Artificially raised to test leveling process during Pre-Alpha
Evoras, is an accredited member of the Finger Wiggler's Union
Pre-Alpha, Alpha and probably Beta will have things tweaked from time to time for testing purposes. Nothing is set in stone until late Beta, so take what you currently see with a grain of salt.
As for the casters, I prefer "glass-cannon's", "spell-slinger's", or if we have to get derogatory "bookworms in bathrobes." ;)
I will add this, the best laid plans, don't always work out.
Not until the game gets tested with a full server pop will glaring issues present themselves. It's just the nature of the beast.
You may think you have a zone design perfect, with spawns working exactly as you want, drops balanced, etc. And when that horde of locusts (players) descend on your zone and chew it to bits you need to run back to the drawing board.
Lord British talks about their experience with this problem in original UO on Ars technica. Essentially trying to figure out what and how players will go about doing things can play chaos.
Here's a link to the video in case you are curious, it's somewhat entertaining. https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-online-the-virtual-ecology
Tiberius said:One was the Leveling pace, If you take out all the Deaths, med time, travel time Etc, the time it took the players to level considering that they didnt kill a huge number of mobs, AND the fact that they died a lot ( which seems to indicate there is no death penalty, at least not yet, And they spawned fully equipped, of cource this could have been done just for the stream for ease ) they leveled pretty darn fast.
Which brings me to point two that we noticed which was lack of death penelty ( Of cource it IS pre alpha and we understand this, So it *might* be that is isnt in game yet, But if it is, then it doesnt seem to do much)
The leveling pace isn't finalalized yet. So I wouldn't worry too much until later. Those things get tweaked all the way up to open beta and right now they have some things tweaked a bit higher for pre-alpha (this was also mentioned during the stream by Joppa) testing just to expediate things. Right now the real test is on functionality, pacing will come later.
As for corpse runs, I believe they were simply off for the stream. If you've seen the previous streams, they did lose their gear and such and had to run back nekkid. ;p I believe it was off for their group just to make the stream easier. That's not to say that that won't change either though. One can never say for sure until we hit late beta what form that may finally take. But for now I'm pretty sure it's still in as I'm pretty sure they even mentioned in the newsletter how one group took a break from leveling to help another group retrieve their corpses.
Another concern was Mana regen, Personally i thought it wasnt that bad, but 3 or 4 of my guild mates thought the out of combat mana regen especially was Way to fast, Im sure this will get adjusted over the course of development.
Joppa mentioned during the stream that the pacing of regen is being tweaked. They're looking for the "sweet spot" that will provide some socializing downtime and encourage group camp spots but not be too overbearing. So this will likely change as the game gets further along. I like longer regens as well as it not only provides social downtime, but also gives a use for those rare hp/mana regeneration items and hp/mana regen buffs.
Several of my guild mates didnt like the fact that the streamers spawned fully equipped and thought it made death trivial, Personally i think they are worrying for nothing, i think this was done for the benefit of the stream to speed things up and not waste valuable time with things like corpse runs, and Xp loss. i could be wrong of course.
I covered this one above. :)
Another was a coment about there isnt going to be any LONG named spawn timers Eg: several weeks to a month spawn timer, even a week timer is good. Personally i like long timers on named mobs, it keeps the awesome loot they drop more rare and saught after and stops the market being flooded with these items, keeping them rare.Are there any things from the lastest stream/streams that have You a little concerned? if we keep them in one place it would make it easyier for the devs to find.
I expect they'll probably have a few mob exceptions to the rule. Unfortunately today's gaming world is very different from 1999. And even though many of us would probably enjoy a return to some of the old rare spawns, data miners and external websites, add-ons ect. kind of ruin that aspect of gameplay and take out the competitive part of the spawn game and make it easy to be monopolized. However, I expect there will probably be some timed mobs or placeholder spawns. Tiem will tell.
As for concerns...not really except maybe the preception stuff. I would have liked to see that followed through on a bit more. We got to see a couple of text prompts but that was about it. That and the mob dispositions were not in yet. I want to see things when they have the first world build in pre-alpha 4 so that we can see how the roug draft first pass of all the bells and whistles will work. So hopefully they'll have another stream lined up then.
Regarding the concern about Mana and HP regeneration, I have not yet decided if I am worried things will be too "action oriented".
We have to understand that the characters in the streams often have full armor that they may not have when actually going through that content. The streams may better represent what a twinked group may look like. Even in EQ a twinked group could non-stop pull. However, in EQ a twinked group would have to stay sitting to keep meditating during combat, they just wouldn't need as many 'med breaks'.
I think what people are noticing in the streams is that there does seem to be very little med time. Everyone seems to be standing the entire fight, rather than strategically deciding when to sit and regen. But I don't know, with the need to keep moving in a stream to show off content, I can understand why they don't park in a spot.
So yeah, I still don't know how I feel about it, but I do have things that are influencing my thoughts on it.
Please remove the trumpet sound when a mob aggros. It's blaringly out of whack in terms of sound and volume (not loud volume, just out of place volume). It's not a bad idea, just the sound is the wrong thing.
zewtastic said:I will add this, the best laid plans, don't always work out.
Not until the game gets tested with a full server pop will glaring issues present themselves. It's just the nature of the beast.
You may think you have a zone design perfect, with spawns working exactly as you want, drops balanced, etc. And when that horde of locusts (players) descend on your zone and chew it to bits you need to run back to the drawing board.
Lord British talks about their experience with this problem in original UO on Ars technica. Essentially trying to figure out what and how players will go about doing things can play chaos.
Here's a link to the video in case you are curious, it's somewhat entertaining. https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-online-the-virtual-ecology
Absolutely, haha! The amount of stuff that can go wrong when a full load hits an area/content for the first time is alarming, not just from a 'woops, we didn't think of that' perspective, but also deep down in the dark depths of the hallowed code. Pretty rare, but I've seen situations where when a content patch was pushed from the internal staging/prep server, to the actual production server, critical elements of the content just literally stopped working and there was no way to have predicted this because it all worked fine internally. Alarms sound, producers run around screeching like pterodactyls and the dreaded 'FIX IT DIRECTLY ON LIVE' button gets pushed which causes a stampede of angry programmers XD
Kittik said:Please remove the trumpet sound when a mob aggros. It's blaringly out of whack in terms of sound and volume (not loud volume, just out of place volume). It's not a bad idea, just the sound is the wrong thing.
I kind of noticed this as well these last streams.
Best case would be to make it a user setting. Maybe visuals bu tno audio? Or - maybe even allow you to set your own custom sound(s).
Rokuzachi said:zewtastic said:I will add this, the best laid plans, don't always work out.
Not until the game gets tested with a full server pop will glaring issues present themselves. It's just the nature of the beast.
You may think you have a zone design perfect, with spawns working exactly as you want, drops balanced, etc. And when that horde of locusts (players) descend on your zone and chew it to bits you need to run back to the drawing board.
Lord British talks about their experience with this problem in original UO on Ars technica. Essentially trying to figure out what and how players will go about doing things can play chaos.
Here's a link to the video in case you are curious, it's somewhat entertaining. https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-online-the-virtual-ecology
Absolutely, haha! The amount of stuff that can go wrong when a full load hits an area/content for the first time is alarming, not just from a 'woops, we didn't think of that' perspective, but also deep down in the dark depths of the hallowed code. Pretty rare, but I've seen situations where when a content patch was pushed from the internal staging/prep server, to the actual production server, critical elements of the content just literally stopped working and there was no way to have predicted this because it all worked fine internally. Alarms sound, producers run around screeching like pterodactyls and the dreaded 'FIX IT DIRECTLY ON LIVE' button gets pushed which causes a stampede of angry programmers XD
Well if that happened then they have a problem with release/version control.
My last studio I built a browser based release software tool that controlled the release of patches and hotfixes. It required a go-ahead by each leg, Programming, QA and Eng. Each department had a responsible party that had to physically push a (web form) button to confirm they were authorizing the release, and not until all three had said ok could the software be pushed out. The software tool did all the work. Recorded who, what, when, and also pushed out the chosen version.
The tool also allowed for backing out a bad push, although that was very, very rarely done. Usually you would just hotfix.
It worked very well in reducing the number of improper version pushes dramatically.
Kittik said:Please remove the trumpet sound when a mob aggros. It's blaringly out of whack in terms of sound and volume (not loud volume, just out of place volume). It's not a bad idea, just the sound is the wrong thing.
I don't mind some type of alert when agroed. It could be toned down a bit though. He did say in another thread that pretty much all audio will be updated by launch.
Kittik said:Please remove the trumpet sound when a mob aggros. It's blaringly out of whack in terms of sound and volume (not loud volume, just out of place volume). It's not a bad idea, just the sound is the wrong thing.
I like the oldschool sound but I agree with you. In general the in-game volume was too high in both recent streams. It is a little annoying when trying to listen to Joppa answering a good question.