yeah, what he said
done all the quests, tried all the skills, read all the books, etc
Well these days i only pop in once in a while to help some noobs by giving them some tria and/or weapons but in all honesty PS is a rather limited world. Once you've explored everything from Ojaveda to the Eagle Bronze Doors and gained access to the hidden area's through quests and read all the books in the library, magic shop, death realm and the Blackflame temple, it gets a bit repetative. Half of the players online are mining for platinum, a whole bunch is silently crafting, some noobs are shouting 'give me money plz' or 'lol how do u play diz game' and a handful of people are RP'ing tough characters in the tavern (yeah yeah /me glares back ...).
The game mechanics are limited too. Once you've mastered one weapon skill, you've basically mastered them all. Except for slight variations in damage, range and attack speed there isn't much that sets them apart. Creatures are either too easy or very hard. And a 'high risk, no reward' policy doesn't work: noone bothers to hunt cutthroats to get leather armor. And getting killed repeatedly by Dlayo Gladiators or Onyx Daggers for a 1:1000000000 chance to get a quarterstaff or a helmet doesn't seem to appeal either. At maxed fighting skill levels however its the only thing left to do unless you enjoy PvP (wich in PS means learn to time your attack, nothing more).
Crafting has its limitations too: takes very very long and once you are good you will never be able to make more money then it cost to train to get there. Regrettably the gap between looted weapon damage and that of crafted weapons is so big that an experienced player will rarely use any looted stuff. Cooking is a novelty amongst the crafts, but recipes are still very flawed (i'll make notes wich ones do not work), there are a LOT of missing ingredients, there's limited trainers for baking and economically it's even less plausible then weapon making from a IC point of view (I trained up to 100 cooking to see what it did for around 2 million i think, my Carp Delight doesn't even fetch 2 circles each). But lets not discuss the economics too much, all money goes to training, crafted weapons and guildhouses. Only the tria for the crafted weapons stay in the game, and since you allways need to spend more then you will earn with crafting, that is retroactive spending too. Once you can make a Q300 weapon it kinda gets repetative too.
And magic is so very bugged that it became my major annoyance of the game. Only around half of the 35 or so spells I have in my spellbook even have an effect (mechanics i mean, animation is a bonus), half of those are bugged in some way. There's a few spells that have a lot of use and most of those are overpowered (strength, life infusion, energy arrow, taste of death). And if there's a realms system, it should stand to reason that realm 5 spells are better then lower realms. Yet IG realm 1 or 2 spells seem to work the best overall. Plus there's no way to arm yourself against magic, so bug users that got CW or DW maxed will be able to kill everyone and everything from a distance. In fact magic training above lvl 20 is only usefull to gain effectiveness for the spells you allready have, there is no big challenge in getting to realm 4 and finding out you get a spell that does nothing, except several animations to show off.
Of course there should be random factors that make the game more fun. Events. I've participated in 16 registered GM events (a couple unregistered ones before they could be registered) and countless player events. Lately -last few months- however all GM's seem to be hiding, at least at EU hours whenever I look to see if there are any in game, and players rarely organise anything these days except the occasional tournament. I've played several other MMO's and even the simplest GM event can make the gameplay sooo much better. The game needs a RP infusion to spice things up and GM's are the key for that IMHO.
In other words, I think the game has a lot of potential, but even more flaws at the moment. I'm not at a point that i'm thinking of abandoning the game as some others seem to be, but gameplay is very limited as i tried to explain above. And with limited gameplay inevitably comes limited interest (to quote: "been there, done that"). Anyways i'll be looking forward to new content and improvements, as are many I conclude from the reactions in this thread. Keep up the good work.
