goose

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.

..and I'm the one not open to productive discussion. Fair enough.

Yes, and as other people have pointed out, the valid parts of your commentary have already got many many many many MANY active threads filled with productive discussion on how to further the game in the future. Why not go read some of those and educate yourself instead of arguing with someone you don't think is open to productive discussion? Edit: also, no, forums are not for bitching. The fact that people go to them to gripe notwithstanding. This isn't your dumpster when you're having a bad day, and if you try to treat it as such, expect some vitriol to come flying back out, because some of us recognize that the dev team works their ass off to make this game come to life, and would like to see them appreciated and successful when the game launches.

Trying to sell someone on a game in pre-alpha based on available gameplay features in pre-alpha is like trying to sell someone a table based on a single table leg. Obviously that leg will not have all the features and functionality of a finished table, because it is not a finished table. Stop treating it like it should work as well as a finished table and suddenly, your expectations are being met.

Not set on KEEPING it boring. Set on FINISHING THE BORING STUFF QUICKLY. Pre-alpha is ALWAYS BORING. Pre-alpha testing also does not resemble the finished game. What part of that is unclear?

Some of the changes you suggested are just switching variables around. Some of them are much more significant time investments for the developers. All of them seem to be centered around the idea of making the game more fun, which again, is not the focus of pre-alpha testing. This isn't the game yet; the goal isn't fun yet; the advertising push starts when core functionality is online; etc etc etc. That's what pre-alpha is. It isn't for everybody.

In point of fact, I don't even disagree with the premise of the thread. But at every interval, from the first post onward, you've been extremely combative and unwilling to entertain the thought that A: this is working as intended and B: it will not work this way when the game actually launches. Pre-alpha testing is not supposed to be fun. If you aren't having fun, that is neither a bug nor a feature - it's just..what pre-alpha testing looks like.

You don't get brownie points for making suggestions if you insult every forum veteran who tries to talk to you about your suggestions. Edit: at least, not with me. For all that my opinion matters.

And again, expecting this sort of change to be made during pre-alpha game testing implies a fundamental lack of understanding about what pre-alpha game testing looks like and is for. The issue isn't your word choice, but the premise upon which your suggestions are predicated.

That said, having now read most of the rest of this thread, it sounds like you've already got the "work with other people" thing down, so maybe [half an hour later] ...I had a suggestion for possible fixes to the crafting system, but my housemates got home a day early and now I forgot. Oh well. I'll edit this if I remember what I was typing. Edit: ooh! maybe a thing! So..a thought or two, combining bits and pieces of other peoples' ideas. Moving all the crafting timers to the final combine seems good, even though it kind of destroys the idea of a crafter who specializes in making bombass sword hilts, and just the hilts. I like that idea in theory, but in practice I'm not sure if the game's population will be large enough to support it, or that even if it ends up being so, that this will be an appealing option for enough people to sustain such a granular market. Enabling skilled crafters to minimize or nullify the crafting timers for lower-quality gear, giving them a way to rapidly clear stockpiles of low-quality materials while also providing PvPers with disposable gear to use on suicide runs or for dueling or other endeavors likely to waste durability. Maybe reducing the experience return for throwing garbage-quality gear into a fire if it was crafted by someone whose skill was this high could allow this to be used without making it possible for master crafters to speedrun new vessels up to level cap. Like, have the experience reward correspond not to the quality of the gear directly, but the amount of effort it represents (at least, lore-wise), so that a low-quality sword that a master swordcrafter bangs out in 15 seconds is worth less experience to them than the exact same sword would be for a less skilled crafter? Dunno how hard that is to code, or how relevant a problem that is to circumvent, but if that's a problem, then..maybe it's a solution. I think I had something else. Will maybe remember tomorrow.

I highly recommend never doing this when testing a game, because extra tools are provided specifically to offset the lack of things that will be in the finished game. Like lockable containers. As a general rule, if there's a neat bug-looking trick that can be used - but not exploitatively - to mimic convenience features like boxes, odds are that it was either A: added intentionally for that exact purpose, or B: added by accident, but left in by the developers because either 1. it is a low priority fix, 2. because it makes testing easier, or 3. both of the above. This is pre-alpha testing. Use every edge you can if it makes it easier for you to help the dev team finish the game faster. There is no shame in it - the primary purpose for opening the game up this early in development is for us to break it. Edit: all of the above, and also, it's a waste of your time to stick to mechanics you plan to use in the finished product, because odds are none of the things under that umbrella will BE in the finished game. At least not in anything resembling the form you've been using them in. Example: all of the storage mechanisms that exist in the game right now. Re-edit: and while I do understand that you're saying that you don't plan to test crafting because you don't plan to craft once the game goes live, and that is fine, that is double the reason to use whatever extra tools are available to you, because the only thing that will definitely persist between today and whatever iteration of this game is the one that makes it to launch day is that you will need to rely on other people, and there's no reason not to start by filling up volunteer corpses with rocks. That is my favorite sentence fragment of the ever.