Hey guys, me again,
First, I really want to say that PS is a great game in the making. Tons of potential and I don't want to whine about what may or may not be implemented or how it's done, but I should relate my recent experiences here. I do jump around a lot playing games and there are a ton of them out there. PS is not the only free MMORG. In many ways it is the best, in others it's got a long way to go. When I play a game, I am looking for something to draw my attention in and hold my interest for a while. I've read a few threads about how player numbers are down. Here is a thought on why.
I recently had a few hours and was looking for something to do. I decided to play PS for a while. So I log in. New patch, great! Updates perfectly and runs. So far so good. So I go in and decide to go exploring. I start running. 30 seconds later, I have to stop and sit for a couple minutes to regen stamina. Get up, repeat. Get up, repeat. I find a small area I don't remember going to, so I zone in and am thoroughly impressed by what I see. The Bronze Door area with the cave and massive waterfall, excellent. Somehow I missed this little out of the way zone, so I'm psyched! So I keep running. And sitting. Repeat. I'm trying to explore this little area and I constantly have to sit and rest. Sit, rest. Get the picture? It seems I have to sit 2 minutes for every one minute of movement.
But anyway, I keep going because I'm kind of used to this. Now I'm up on the top of the keep above the waterfall. I'm looking around because I picked up a quest to find some people. I click on someone far away to see his name, but apparently I missed by a pixel and bang, I run off the edge into the waterfall and die. Now I'm in the death realm, and, because I have no place to store anything, I carry my stuff with me. So when I get out I'm overloaded, of course, and now I'm sitting there for a half hour unable to do anything. Half hour passes, I get up and start trying to find my way back cause I hadn't spent enough time there and really wanted to see that zone again. Add to the fact that I really don't quite remember how I got there, and now I have some exploring to do again.
Run, sit............., run, sit............
Finally get back and it's now two or three hours that I've been doing this and I've spent more time sitting than playing. This is NOT fun. So I log until the mood strikes me again to go back and play.
So I know many of these complaints have been posted before, but I really wanted to relate an experience from a perspective of people who are just trying to find out what PS is like. I do feel a new player will spend way too much time sitting and that needs to be fixed (also the "click" thing too, but I turned that feature off and shall never turn mouse-run on again).
Suggestions:
1. Give every player some off character storage. I know the bank is coming, give it some priority. I also know guilds have some form of it, new players won't be in guilds, and many players, such as myself, will chose to stay out of guilds until we're more sure of the game. If I could just store all that ore and crafting supplies off character till I wanted to use it, then I wouldn't be so overloaded all the time. This is pretty standard, and that alone would have saved me a half hour of sitting with the death curse unable to move. Also, not asking for the death penalty to be removed, I'm okay with it as it is, but we get trapped into the condition where we can't plan for it.
2. Relook at the run/sit ratio. I know it's somewhat related to our carrying weight, but consider new players who start with very low stats. They are deciding whether they're going to play and if all they end up doing is sitting all the time, they aren't going to stay. Please understand that I am not asking for encumbrance or stamina to be removed. It's a great feature, but I think we should only take a stamina penalty when we're running, and when we walk we very SLOWLY regain it, but we don't lose it. That way we can keep moving and not have to sit so dang much. If we chose to sit, we regain it much faster such as when we get to a group of monsters that we may need to fight. The point is, keep us doing something, anything, that shows some progress. Making us stop all progress constantly is not a good way to keep people interested. The ratio of running vs. sitting for an average character should be at least 1:1. From my experience, the combat usage of stamina is fine, it's just the run/sit/walk ratios that really need looking at.
When I started playing PS years ago, I don't remember this kind of frustration. Seems it has evolved to this over time and should be relooked at.
