goose

I like italics.

Other people have made this point for me above this post, but I'm going to summarize anyway. I hate to always hammer on with this point, but the reason for this specific issue is that pre-alpha. We're *so very close* to proper alpha now, to the point where you can see the individual pieces of what will eventually constitute the endgame grind, but you have to remember that at this point in time, you're seeing an incomplete picture. First of all, farming for anything is harder if it isn't spring. Drop rates across the board are just...lower. Second of all, major systems that will either reduce the need for or increase the efficacy of these things are not in yet (thralls, blueprints, factories) Third and finally, there is a distinct lack of the interconnected market system that is supposed to be a huge part of the game's economy (thralls, blueprints, EK marketplaces, player-populated vendors, multiple types of campaign worlds). It is true that, right now, the grind for the things at the endgame probably sucks. But that doesn't mean it's broken - that just means this is a test, and people really need to keep that in mind. Edit: one day soon, I will have to change my signature, but until then, it remains relevant.

And you added coffee to the game. Nice.

Nooooooooooooo I was too busy to check in all month and missed the fancy coffee mugs! This is the saddest of days. One day I will make the Crowfall symbol out of a bunch of gold mugs that I crafted, and it will have to suffice.

So I'm a little late, and my first post in weeks is another one partly about ESO, but it's the only MMO I've been around for the entire lifespan of, so whatever. One possible fix for the longer-term campaigns is a way to end them earlier the longer they go on. That is to say, the longer a campaign goes on, the less strict the requirements to end it early are: 90% control for 3 days down to 75% control for 3 days at day 30/90 and 60% control for 3 days on day 60/90, or what have you. That way, if there is a truly dominant faction, the campaign will wrap up quickly and people will cart their lower-quality springtime loot back home sooner. However, the longer a campaign goes on, the easier it becomes for a faction's lead to be "dominant," which will A: mean that only the most engaging and engaged campaigns will actually stay live, and B: may engender additional investment from the people on the losing side, if the fall and winter prizes are important or interesting enough to warrant staying in the game for. It's hard to say how to tune this, or if my theory will even hold up to actual gameplay, but I think it's important to let player engagement dictate the length of campaigns until we have the data, so that nobody gets locked into a 90 day campaign and burns out because they feel obligated to participate even when nothing is happening. Another way to avoid this is more obvious: add meaningful, but small-scale, engagements that can be interacted with multiple times a day, or whenever you want, and leave the main attacks up to something vaguely resembling the old Bane system. That way, at least people know when something is going to happen, so even if it takes a degree of the wartime element of surprise and associated realism away, it will give players a chance to set time aside to log on, to prepare, and to actually be present for the epic parts of a 3 months story. Now, as for my foreshadowed mention of ESO, I want to point out that when that game first came out, the big large-scale campaign PVP was the only PVP, and...a lot of people just didn't give a poorly made socks. It took them two years to add matchmade battlegrounds, to which they attached meaningful (but not overpowered by any stretch) prizes that made them worth doing. Now, THOSE are popular. More popular, in fact, than either the faction wars OR actual endgame content. I will be the first to admit that there's a degree of frustration involved in having people who want to go through high-difficulty endgame content who have never played the endgame content despite being at level cap because they got there exclusively through PVP, BUT I DIGRESS. I feel like this should be one of the options. Matchmade PVP in the Dregs would, while not something that I think most of us signed up for, be an interesting addition to the game, and would likely draw and help retain a lot of people who would otherwise not engage. Additionally, it would be something for people to do if they are already logged in and their campaign is in downtime. Further, the Dregs as a campaign world leave open the thematic option of having any number of different matchmade fights in isolated pockets of it. You can do 4v4v4 or free-for-all; you can have people bring their best gear and duke it out in an arena; you can have people spawn in naked and have to hunt down resources and try to escape within an hour while fighting enemies, the elements, and each other (The Division's Survival Mode was the best thing about that game; fight me). The only thing that these things really need is to be readily accessible and matchmade, and the people will try them out.

You mean like in the vast majority of other MMOs through all of time? Back in Shadowbane, the level cap went as high as 70+ eventually, but it was fast enough that nobody complained. Here, it seems like leveling will be even faster and to a lower cap. You could make a new toon and level cap them in a weekend back when. I don't see this as an issue.

That is exactly what I said, yes.

I feel like we're talking past each other with this "cap" discussion. The previous mantra, upon which my position was predicated, was that the cap wasn't reachable. Ever, by anyone. Ergo, there wouldn't ever be more than one way to reach the CAP, but there could potentially be more than one way to reach the closest possible number TO the cap. However, even if every single one of those ways to "the cap" involved a potion, that wouldn't mean there weren't multiple paths to "the cap." That would be like saying that they're removing the concept of multiple paths by requiring the use of or attaching bonuses to crafting tables. Has the idea that no crafter would ever be able to max out all of the available experimentation pips on a top-quality crafted item changed since I was active, or am I missing something else? Edit: and just to be clear, there's no reason this couldn't be gated by in-game features - for example, crafting tables already increase the experimentation pip cap for gear crafted at them, right? So why not make less defensible and more desirable crafting tables that rotate quickly, or something in the wildcrafting system, or campaign victory awards, that allow the temporary production of higher-than-high-quality gear in small amounts, or make recipes that exceed normal available stat values not blueprintable? If the core concept that the cap is unattainable has shifted since I was paying attention, that still doesn't necessarily preclude tools like this from being usable in a way that is helpful both to new players and old ones. You just have to stop thinking of them only as a crutch and find other potential ways to use them that don't unbalance the game.

I want to add on to this, actually. I would posit that potions like these could in fact be the exact opposite of a crutch - they could be one of the ways by which a true master's craft is defined. Remember that the ultimate goal way back when was for the number of pips available to exceed the number of pips it was possible to fill. The way I see it, a true master crafter with all of the available skill points allocated, decked out in top end crafting gear, working at a crafting table in a keep his guild fought to control, after using potions and food that grant him yet more additional buffs - only when all of these various pieces came together would he be able to crank out one or two absolutely batpoorly made socks crazy strong blueprints during the duration of the consumable buffs. If potions that just grant you more pips for a short duration make it to live, I'd like to see them require valuable ingredients and be hard to create, or have the higher quality ones be substantially more difficult to craft and have correspondingly higher value. A potion of +1 pips could be useful for a new player, and a potion of +5 could be useful for a master. So..why not two years of passive training OR this rare potion to get high-quality stuff OR two years of passive training AND this rare potion to get the ultra fanciest potato on the whole damn server? POR QUE NO LOS DOS?! Edit: batpoorly made socks crazy is now a thing and you can't stop me.

It's an old holdover from things like MUDs, where dev intervention was a major form of storytelling. But one misconception I picked up from your reply is that it involves dev time. It really doesn't use any - it's literally just a developer sock-puppeting an NPC body with dev commands. All the dev work for those NPCs has been done already - they're just controlling it manually instead of running the AI, and giving it superpowers with a few typed lines in the dev console. So..think of it more as a roleplay experience, used to drive the plot, and not as a dev time sink or a way to influence the outcome of a battle. Though..I suppose it COULD be the latter. Usually isn't, though. Edit: and then I posted this and saw a second page where someone else addressed this like a week ago, so custard me, right?

Ha. I actually didn't know it was quite so hectic at the launch of SWG; my experience with their marketplace is all secondhand, and after things had chilled out a bit, apparently. But even still, if the market behaves anything like that at launch, it'd probably be considered a resounding success, so stressful or not, fingers crossed? xD

A lot of the discussion in this thread is why I try to focus so heavily on explaining to people what pre-alpha means. A LOT of the issues people are talking about aren't issues with the game - they are issues with the existence of time. There is a reason why things like starter zones aren't in the game in pre-alpha test stages - they are useless in pre-alpha test stages. To be clear, pre-alpha is the period in game development where basic features of the game have not yet been built, let alone added to the game. If the developers wasted time making a new tutorial zone every time they added a new feature - and we're talking basic features, like "crafting tables" and "armor types," then they would spend 3x as much time building new tutorial sections for every new feature as they spend building new features. All that would do is slow down development. As I am constantly saying, the point isn't "if you aren't having fun, find another game." I have literally never said that about Crowfall. What I have said, and what I will continue to say, is the same as in my signature, which has not changed in over a year: We are in pre-alpha. If you don't like it, COME. BACK. LATER. When we are no longer in pre-alpha. When the features you are upset by the lack of have been coded and added. When the bugs and stability issues you are lamenting have been identified and fixed. This poorly made socks all takes money and man-hours; it doesn't just happen magically, and pre-alpha isn't even the phase of game development where most of it happens in the first place. BE PATIENT. And for the love of all that is holy, if you're going to back a game that isn't out yet, do a little bit of research and save yourself some pain. Nobody - NOBODY - has bought this game yet. We backed it. We invested in its future. The game isn't out yet. It is not yet for sale. You cannot buy it, online or in stores. I cannot stress the difference enough. You have not purchased a product, nor was that what you agreed to when you handed over your money, and ACE has been absolutely crystal-clear about that, both legally and ethically. When I see complaints based on the idea that someone thought they had "purchased" a "game," it is all I can do not to reach through my monitor, grab them by the shoulders, and shake them until they understand the difference. If you clicked through all of the pages where ACE meticulously detailed what you were and were not paying for and when you would get it, but still came out the other end expecting a fully functional, finished product, downloadable as soon as your payment cleared, I don't know how to politely inform you of the reality, and there is a point at which I will cease to try.

Mm..not the takeaway for me. Food should be a factor of the overarching strategy of the game, sure, but in my book, the major determining factor in who wins in pvp - even in a protracted 6v6 fight - shouldn't be the chicken ticker. [Edit: I read more of the posts on the second page after posting this, and like a lot of the ideas. ^^-b] Maybe the answer is reducing the impact of starvation? If the drawback isn't one that is going to single-handedly lose you a fight, then it won't be as severe of an issue in combat, but if it serves to make it more difficult for you to persist in other areas as well, it could still cost you a campaign. I'm not sure exactly what that would look like, but regardless, I don't think it should be possible to win a duel of any duration by starving your opponent to death, even indirectly. Edit: maybe a better answer is to raise the floor and the ceiling for food buffs - remove the penalties associated with starvation, but either proportionately or even further increase the benefits, especially for rarer and higher quality foods. That way, not having a food buff will never single-handedly knock you out of a fight, but HAVING a food buff will be a significant boon. This serves to both place value on food and prevent the lack of it from being the single most important thing in combat. I hate to use one of my least favorite things from late in Shadowbane's life cycle as a point of reference here, but the absolute hogwash Greater Concoction Potions you could buy from any alchemy vendor toward the end of the game's life actually functioned fairly efficiently, even though they were drastically overpowered, in my estimation. For people who played Shadowbane before they got added: Constitution +55 for 3600 seconds Strength +55 for 3600 seconds Intelligence +55 for 3600 seconds Spirit +55 for 3600 seconds Dexterity +55 for 3600 seconds Defense +145 for 3600 seconds Mana Regeneration +135% for 3600 seconds Attack Delay -36% for 3600 seconds Does not stack with healer blessings or wizard enchantments. This might have been overpowered, except that everybody had one active all the time, no exceptions. They basically served as a crutch for systems that had been tuned and re-tuned so many times that they no longer resembled their original intent, and by just existing, they served to speed up the pace of combat. So..as a proof of concept, at least, they work, though as I said, they were among my least favorite parts of the game. But being able to have powerful, but less generalized, food buffs that granted large and narrow bonuses might be a sound solution, here. Starvation might no longer hamper all of your base resource regeneration and prevent you from hitting buttons, but the lack of a food buff could represent being much more squishy or hitting much less hard or..any number of valuable things that might be further supplemented for shorter durations by alchemy. Add to that some campaign-success-specific drawback for starvation, like maybe..reduced building/crafting/repair speeds or something something morale, and it would still be a valid strategic choice to starve out an opponent during a campaign, but without being able to starve them out of a duel. I dunno, I'm just spitballing, here. Maybe this is a terrible idea that I'd scoff at in the morning. Edit: actually, now that I think about it, that's sounding an awful lot like how Elder Scrolls Online handles food and alchemy. Food buffs last an hour or two and usually impact health/stamina/magicka and/or regen rates for the same, while alchemy bonuses last closer to 45 seconds and have much more diverse and interesting effects. But..their approach does work quite well, and allows for a reasonable amount of diversity in what gets used where. I'd like to see Crowfall do a lot more with the systems than ESO does, though, regardless of how similar or different their systems end up being. Just for an idea of scale, though, as a DPS, your food buff accounts for about 1/4 - 1/3 of your max health and around 10-15% of your maximum [relevant resource] and [relevant resource regen rate], depending on how exactly you choose to buff yourself through food. At the same level, rarer foods provide more buffs, but less of each, while less rare foods provide more of fewer buffs. So if you, a stamina-centric character, have 12k hp, 30k stamina, and 1500 stamina regen per tick without a food buff, you could opt for a blue food with 5k health and 4.5k stamina, or a purple food with 3.5k health, 3k stamina, and 300 stamina regen per tick, or...something else, I guess? Meanwhile, alchemy could heal 8k stamina, health, and magicka, and provide you with 20% more regen for each of those for the next 45 seconds, or could nix the health and the magicka in exchange for increasing your stamina damage by 20% and critical rating by 15% for the duration, or..a number of other possible combinations, both offensive and defensive. The number of viable options is small, but not negligible. I'd like to see the number of viable options be large, but the reality is that there will likely always be 2-3 "best" foods/potions/stats/etc etc etc once the minmaxers get their hands on them, so I'm not sure how much dev time is the correct amount to dedicate to this, beyond ensuring that the primary issue detailed in the first post isn't gamebreaking.

I wasn't referring to myself when I pointed out your animosity toward vets. I came in here being a bit of a hooligan because of what I read from you earlier in the thread. Your disrespect and unwillingness to have reasonable discussions was the basis I started from, so I didn't expect any different. But...this also does sort of drive the point home, no? Edit: just to reiterate, I agree with some of what you've said and disagree with some of what you've said, but I disagree with how you've said all of it, and how blatantly unwilling you are to accept anyone who disagrees with any part of what you say might have a point. I've seen how you treat anyone who doesn't immediately agree with everything you say, and I'm not really interested in having a discussion if you continue to do so, as you have so far continued to do. Some of your complaints are valid complaints that have been addressed in other threads and by the developers. No need to rehash the same arguments over again. Instead, I've tried to provide with the tools to find the other discussions, those tools being A: the forums, and B: the link in my signature. And C: reading, I guess. Use them as you will.

I mean, the way I test is by logging in 2-3 times a month to see what's different, because I don't like testing. I've done it for a paycheck, I've done it for free, and ...I don't do it for fun in either case, 'cause I don't..find it...fun. At the end of the day, feedback like yours is good, and more of it is more good, so I don't mean to seem like I'm poorly made socksting on your opinion - I am not. Just saying that pre-alpha often benefits from a shift in mentality that, anywhere else, might be considered detrimental to the gameplay experience. But it isn't my opinion that pre-alpha testing is more about how to break the game than how to optimize it, just so we're clear. Until pre-alpha ends, every new patch is a chance for everything to break, because pre-alpha is building the bricks and the foundation that will be used to construct a house, and sometimes the bricks come out round and no one is quite sure why. The more round bricks you can ensure come out brick-shaped before you need to start layering them on top of one another, the fewer bricks will need to be taken back out later on. Best analogy I can come up with. But every little (or large, from the sound of it) bit helps, and like you say, we all test in our own ways. Edit: hmm. in retrospect, I guess it is kind of my opinion that pre-alpha testing is "MORE" about breaking the game than about optimizing it. honestly, you're laying the foundation to do both in roughly equal measure, so..I might be putting more emphasis on the part of that equation that I got paid to deal with. coders optimize; game testers break. neither part is necessarily more important than the other, but only one of them requires someone know how to talk to Unity.