Can't understand your intentions

[bilbous]

the guy pounding the anvil is just as likely, but you have to get his attention first. Crafting generates a lot of system messages and if they are going into the main tab then dialog gets lost very easily. This is why I uncheck every box of optional things to show in main. Options-> interface -> chat-tabs: first column. unfortunately this also serves to remove some of the standard emotes like /dance, /wave. etc. leaving only /me and /my which are preferred for that reason. /me waves shows up where /wave does not.

[LigH]

There will probably be /emote wave instead of /wave

[Pierre]

Yes to all of this:

Events would surely help but they tend to be targeted usually at middle-advanced players who already got some good skills and stats and need something new to concentrate on. I think that the hardest part where this game loses most of new potential players is next to the beginning, with long unpleasant times (walking, trying, dying), hardly intuitable mechanics and very limited possibilities.

I want to be honest a small and volunteer project like our can not compete in term of graphic quality, amount of content released per year and new features added with the rest of games supported by commercial software houses; what makes PS unique and special IMO is it's strongly oriented toward RP with an interesting settings behind.

I totally agree, PS has a unique feeling to compensate these lacks and is a rare 3D graphical world that sill lets players use some imagination.

and cheers, Eonwind, for the thoughtful response, you are one of the best 

Wish I could have made it to the last event, it sounded awesome, especially allowing the players to choose sides...maybe someone will post a summary 

Disagree about becoming competent being relatively easy - agree with Eonwind that getting to 50 is not so bad - getting to 100 (barely competent to my mind, as far as what can be done with the skill, what level mobs I can handle, what players I can tussle with) is painful.  And it's true that some players don't feel their character is done until maxed, i.e. they then feel comfortable settling into the realm and the RP in a fully immersed way.

I've always found forge workers super helpful unless mid-task, when they probably miss the main chat for the reasons Bilbous states.

More events and easier after starting the game, my 2 cents (pulling one cent from Eonwind and one from Echoes91).

[Cairn]

Several parts of these posts were tl;dr, but I do have one comment I'd like to throw out there:

To all the old players who are pretty much just saying "If you don't like it, than leave" - this is not the solution. You need to respect other people's opinions and allow them to have complaints/suggestions. We will only continue to get better through these suggestions.

The flipside of this is obvious:

to all of the new players: Play through the game first, and make sure your suggestions are not unfounded or haven't been made yet. Do some of your research, so that when your voice is put out there, it is loud and clear, with a goal in mind.

We can't just be pushing away new people, folks. We have to work to include others.


Towards the matter of events:

Most new players won't make it to events. They'll come into a barren, mostly player-free world, and run into people too busy to help them. They will then log out, and visit a different game. Yes, it's mostly they're fault, but we need to be able to grab them up into this world as soon as possible. Events can help with this, but taking time out just to acquaint new players will help even more so. The revamped starter quests & starter area are a huge boon in this regard.

[bilbous]

it would help if some of the equipment in the tutorial area was usable as it would give established characters a reason to linger and to be available to answer questions. Then again, it could be abused so maybe not.

[Cairn]

Ehh, that's a thought.

I kinda have the opinion that if people won't even make it all the way through the tutorial, then they're just not going to want to play this game anyways. We can't hold their hands too much, haha!

[Zoomzoom]

I have to say, after trying to get back into this game again, I also find the long grind very discouraging. I'm not sure how I had so much patience back in the day. Even getting into the 60's for a skill is excruciatingly slow, not to mention there's more than 100 levels to go after that. Maybe if the skills capped at 100 I'd be okay with it, but this is too much. I have played many games with hard grinds such as Wurm, but I wouldn't hesitate to say Planeshift might be one of the grindiest.

I understand the intention might be to make capped skills rare, but that's disappointing for people who want to finish their characters, and not feel like the cup is left half full if you know what I mean. All of the important fights are done via roleplay anyway, where winning is not only unimportant, but determined by the story and imagination. It's for this reason I miss the days when the caps were lower. It meant less time invested in grinding, and an overall simpler (and fun) leveling experience. But now I think the game has become bloated with grinding, especially for combat which seems to be nearly impossible to level high without devoting months of time doing lots of clicking, which can even be physically harmful. Some skills like miscellaneous crafting skills might not even be useful enough to grind. So not only does the grind deter players, but it prevents you from experiencing certain content and testing it. Something you should not want as an alpha game developer if you want new players to stick around, especially with how few players there are right now. And I would rather have an easier game to get into than have more time to level, because even if you had maxed all of the skills you want, you can still settle down and roleplay, finish all the quests, make a new character, or start a business which are all probably more interesting anyway.

This is because the grind is one of the least interesting parts of an MMORPG. Planeshift's forte is quests, exploration, and roleplaying in my opinion. So why is there so much emphasize on grinding? You should be able to sell to players, explore most the content, and fight tough enemies without having to pass a long grind first. And with how slow the leveling is, this also means that old players are going out and doing all of those things successfully, not you. It rewards the old players while giving the new a lot of trouble. It use to not be this way before, and all you needed was a good weapon, but as of the combat update it seems to be much more of a problem.

If it wasn't for the lore and roleplaying in this game, I would have quit long ago. I'm not young anymore, and I don't have the time to waste auto-attacking training dummies all day, and I imagine the same goes for most of you other players. I personally have tried introducing several people to this game, and they all quit. Do you know why? It was because of the grind, and that sucks, especially since they were interested in the game but the grind got in the way from what they wanted to do. It's stressful, both mentally and physically. And as we enter an age of games that are more streamlined and less 'hardcore', I fear that Planeshift will fade from disinterest with the coming generation of gamers if this state of the game persists, so I speak for a lot of gamers when I'm saying this. There's nothing wrong with a hard MMORPG though, don't get me wrong, but there's no difficulty involved leveling a skill high in this game. It's easy but is lots of time you're willing to do the same thing, and it's not just that I don't have enough time, it's also not fun to do in the first place. Gaming is my hobby because I want to enjoy doing something interactive in my spare time, not work more, which is basically all I'm trying to say. 

I implore you developers to reduce the amount of time training takes. I like Planeshift a lot, and I have a lot of fond memories with it, but I don't know if I can enjoy it much longer with how much of a boring timesink it has become. However, if that timesink were more interesting things, that'd be great. But unfortunately, it's the skill grinding I am talking about. We are just testers after all, and the game is not released yet. So do not be afraid to change the experience rate, we are testers and we are giving you feedback, so this is exactly something you should be tinkering with.

Some other ideas I have are for quests to level certain skills (possibly repeatable), increasing skills increases their associated attribute, or the use of training weapons that are fast but very weak. Also, the cap for skills could be lowered, but in turn each level would be more important than before.

[cdmoreland]

Grinding has become easier with the change of not going to trainers at every level. There are players that never grind and just role-play, others that grind and never role-play and some that do both. It should take some time to master a skill but one can be proficient at lower levels (except music  ).

There is no other game that I've found that offers so much for free.

[tman]

I understand the intention might be to make capped skills rare, but that's disappointing for people who want to finish their characters...

I personally don't think a character should ever be "finished."  Nobody's perfect, and the Mary Sue phenomena really kills immersion in most MMOs.  Taking a long time forces people to pick one or two things to be great in, at the sacrifice of others.  If it's easy to max skills, then a lot of people are going to max all their skills and the diversity of characters disappears.

With regards to the rest of the issues, I can understand where you're coming from.  I've always thought that the focus should be on helping new players become regular players.  The beginning stages of this game were hell (which I didn't mind all that much, Morrowind is my favorite single player game ever) but I can see how that can drive people away.  Information should be easily accessible in-game for those who seek it out.  The library is great, but it can be hard to filter out the random world backstory content from the "I'm new and this will help me with the game" content.

tl;dr:  I like that it takes a lot of effort to become god-like in this game, but progression at lower levels could be faster and information for new players shouldn't be hard to find.

Edit:  I am strongly in favor of alternative ways of leveling up.  Especially, periodic quests that reward you for using your skills by giving practice points toward skill level instead of just experience.  Crafters can be requested to make products, combat users can be requested to kill specific enemies, etc.  Since trainers no longer do anything in-game, the former trainers can now be skill quest-givers.  You could even make them choose between skills (ie getting a sword quest from trainer A prevents you from also getting an axe quest from trainer B).

[Rigwyn]

We have discussed dynamic abilities in the past, where using a skill makes it stronger, and not using a skill causes atrophy in that skill.  Many folks disliked that idea since skills were so hard to come by. The problem is, once you max your skills, you are done, and once you are done, it kind of kills the growth experience a little - perhaps more for some than for others.

Since we now have half of this in place - skills increase automatically with use, why not consider the second half - atrophy as a result of non-use.  Perhaps such decay could be rigged in such a way that it is not a game killer. If you have atrophy in place, then perhaps you could speed up training a little bit more without having to worry about everyone hitting a permanent plateau? In such a case, losing skills from long periods of being away could be retrained fairly quickly.

[Illysia]

What about having skill atrophy tied to practicing other skills instead of time? Make it a trade off but make skills atrophy at a slower rate than they build.

[Rigwyn]

Its a possibility. The whole point in having atrophy is to address the problem of skill maxing. To date, the problem of skill maxing has been effectively addressed by raising the ceiling on stats or making it hard to max skills. Raising max stats from 200 to 400 was basically equivalent to cutting player's stats by 50%, except the latter is more discouraging because you *feel* like you are losing something with with the former, you feel like your potential has been raised. xD

There are still more issues with this - for example, how to introduce atrophy in a way that is fair to grinders , role players, frequent and infrequent players.

[Illysia]

Well there is also the possibility of skill reduction from repeatable quests as well. So maybe you can risk getting injured in a quest and if you do get injured, say your hand, you lose a little skill in skills that require your to use your hands like leatherworking, pottery making, and so on.

[Zoomzoom]

I understand the intention might be to make capped skills rare, but that's disappointing for people who want to finish their characters...

I personally don't think a character should ever be "finished."  Nobody's perfect, and the Mary Sue phenomena really kills immersion in most MMOs.  Taking a long time forces people to pick one or two things to be great in, at the sacrifice of others.

Just because you have a max'd character doesn't mean you can't roleplay a weaker one. And anyway, the things you can do at high level in this game seem pretty tame. You might be hunting Ulbernauts but you won't be doing anything "Mary Sue" like. However, back in the day creatures were even easier to kill, and higher skills matter now. But getting a skill high (not maxing it) is very time consuming, and is more important in this version, so I felt they could do with an increase of experience gain. At least certain skills, like shield handling and magic which seem extremely slow.

What about the skills that don't make you Mary Sue though? Cooking, smithing, alchemy, etc. Still very grindy nonetheless.

[bilbous]

Shield Handling is only difficult if you have too much armor skill as your shield never has a chance to come into effect. If you dodge every attack there is no chance of getting shield practice. What some people do in this case is to equip a shield start an attack then equip a second shield and switch to bloody stance. This is very OOC. Hopefully this is something that will be affected by the new combat system coming down the pike.

Armor practice is super easy to come by, just trigger a swarm of attackers and let them attack you until you fall asleep from boredom. Hopefully this too will be dealt with in the upcoming update. Armor is the easiest thing to train.