McTan

I feel the same way, but the ship has sailed on them making coherent gameplay systems that don't require external motivators. This line of, "just make a game that's super fun" has sailed, and instead we have a game where nobody logs in because there is nothing to do and therefore there is no fighting. They simply need things to do that are scarce and therefore contested, to drive PvP - the main fun of the game. They did not manage PvP for PvP's sake in this game, so they need PvE to drive PvP I'd like for them also to do some more active PvP zones with divine favor rewards like DAOC pvp or WHO pvp lakes

Yes, Crowfall needs Divine Favor cards to be expanded and answer the question "what should I do now?" Too many people spend too much time standing around in Crowfall, and eventually they realize there is no reason to login at all. Hourlies, dailies, repeatables, individual scores for glory, wealth, power. GG

It's terrible, it's been terrible since its inception and will never be better. I know some people enjoy it, but those people are gluttons for punishment, and they are too few to build an entire system around. Shoulda been gold NPC crafting from the get-go.

How's that? Enough?

You have received more than enough cogent feedback on this over the years, and chose to ignore it or move it to the back of the priority list. Ideas like: Overhauling Divine Favor to exist, score-wise, primarily at the individual level Overhauling Divine Favor to have hourly, daily, etc. duration cards More cities and significant city maintenance - making gold more valuable. You need the biggest guilds to have stuff, but need gold and the smallest guilds to have gold, but need stuff. Guild taxes More connected parcel-to-parcel, outpost-to-outpost conquest system (we need to know where the "war front" is) Make every building, including forts and outposts, use sacrifice to rank up not building materials & introduce many more ranks, that do things like spawn chiefs instead of captains or kings instead of chiefs, as guards. There is simply not enough to do. If there was a lot to do, then people would fight over it.

Yes, the EK system as it is now is complete garbage that would barely make the grade in 2000. Horrible button-less UI, horrible asset management, horrible permissions system, awful use of space, no signposting for visitors, needing to spin it up, and needing to full logout, login. It's horrendous, it always has been, and it always will be. It is, however, not on my list of things they should think about, since the game itself - that which feeds EKs - needs massive triage immediately.

Ended the New World open beta with a Crowfall server crash

My postmortem on Crowfall will include the following: Shadowbane was right there. Talking to Raph Koster and other "MMO-theorists" was a waste of money. Should have been talking to longtime guild leaders, at a frequent and meaningful guild round table, about what is absolutely imperative to use from Shadowbane, UO, SWG, EVE, Albion. Not a discussion about what you want to build, a discussion of what you MUST build for this kind of game. Things like: meaningful property placement, ownership, and ranking that emboldens guild identities; completely functional and smooth inventory and guild management and a robust permissions system; a scaling economy need for gold at the guild level via ownership; non-uniform resource distribution; an ability to make utterly unique and ingenious character and group specs, even if they suck; a world that does not have portals; a world that has vibrant identities via biomes. Ultimately, CF designers never took enough time to understand why Shadowbane had a cult following, and take all of those design ideas and port them. You cannot build a PVP MMO game in which the "positive" endgame (ownership) is more rare than the "negative" endgame (destruction). I went to many sieges, but never owned or built a keep. There are guilds whose identity is built around destroying enemies and that's great, they have a real place in these games to foil other types of guilds; if they aren't especially toxic about it, it actually rallies other players to engage more. But, you cannot force guilds who don't want to be that kind of aggressor to constantly engage in these ways. It must be true that the percent of guilds who own something semi-permanent be much higher than the percent of guilds who lose property by force. Look at the number of smallish guilds and alliances who simply got wiped off the map within two-months. Put another way: owning a city should be very common, ranking that city should become exponentially harder, and destroying a city should be very rare and purposeful. There were very few sieges "just for the hell of it," in early SB. It was because the guild competed for resources or killed your farmers. Not simply because they existed. You cannot build a meaningful lived-in world without a really strong economic infrastructure. This includes: really, really, really thinking about currency sinks. The way you keep everyone from owning R10? The material need (gold) needs to be contested, but it must also be fairly common. And the biggest and strongest guilds need to need exponentially more gold (that is, more gold per person). In Crowfall, you need less gold per person because crafters can support the whole guild and there is no scaling maintenance, ranking, or tax. Shadowbane worked because a 5-man team dedicated to farming could build and own a city. Could they get it to R10 and keep it there? Probably not, without duping, unless they played an amazing economic game or ran a very popular economic open-city. You need to give people an overwhelming desire for gold, more than they could possibly farm. Then, you give them ways to create value via ownership location, strategic marketing, strategic harvesting and hunting (disc hunting), and politics. The ratio of currency that is erased from the database (true gold sinks via NPCs, maintenance costs, taxes) to the lifetime currency farmed needs to be much higher than it is in Crowfall. We already started to feel like gold was meaningless, the only gold sinks left for our guild were individual major disciplines...In other words, you need the strongest guilds to need gold more than stuff and the smaller guilds to need stuff more than gold. You cannot build a game for unicorn-type players. Building a game for hardcore PvP and hardcore crafting has only one proven solution: cooperatively owned property that is maintained by many people. Your hardcore crafters become hardcore city managers, managing the gold flow and resource use to map out, build, and rank their city and then use the NPC crafters efficiently. The model of hardcore individual crafters requires people who really don't want to fight much to be integral to the game. These people - hardcore PvPers and crafters - are unicorns, and building a game that relies on their existence was flawed from the start. Here, the city management goes too fast, involves too few people, disconnects from normal economic loops because it uses a unique material gotten in only two ways. Shoulda been gold, shoulda had more ranks, shoulda been more meaningful. You cannot build a game using a principle of minimum viable product and expect big things. MVP has no passion, it is a completely lifeless strategy used for technology in general that just cannot ever translate meaningfully into entertainment and gaming. You cannot build an MMO using a principle of "easy come, easy go" for everything. People need to care about their characters (RPG) and their influence or engagement in the world (MMO) You cannot build an MMO using a principle of "our players don't have a lot of time". Yeah, your funding audience, especially at kickstarter, is probably a standard deviation older than the median of the age distribution curve of MMO players. But your playing audience didn't need to match your funding audience. Building a game around the idea that "our players are adults with kids, and only have a couple hours a week" just doesn't work for an MMO (and maybe doesn't work in general). You cannot market an MMO, in this marketplace, when you had no NDA. People buy hype. Valheim wasn't that amazing of a game, but it caught the hype train and rode that sucker to millions. Neither is New World, but they'll do the same. Frankly, Crowfall could have done the same if they kept it quieter.

They really borked their harvesting and crafting system by giving guineas the third ring slot passive. It's so OP that endgame is all guineas for crafting and harvesting. That passive needs to be deleted and something else needs to be substituted in.

1) Tough poorly made dergs for those guilds. The game needs players and payers, not those guilds. 2) Fine. 3) I'll believe it when I see it. 4) Permissions system should have been in this game from the start. Should never have launched without it (let alone no Guild UI). 5) This is super necessary. 6) Just get rid of GR and do Shadows and Dregs. 7) I'll believe it when I see it. 8 That guilds will still use politics is a red herring. The system makes this behavior default right now, without alliances, the system makes people work for it. 9) Should have cheap cosmetics in cash shop from day 1. 10) Gross. EK hopping is a nightmare.

It is sadly time to go to very short, different rule-sets dregs, so that they can use those of us still around to do A/B testing for their rerelease. Rapid fire, one a week, with different rulesets and beta accelerated costs again. It was a shame they never tested different rulesets in beta, with the exception of per member cards which got zerged out of existence. They had a 'chilling effect' on guild recruitment, but not having them had a 'chilling effect' on game recruitment. Which is worse? Needing to cut some people from your guild roster or having nobody around to play the game at all?

Crowfall has very high highs and very low lows for me, when it comes to fun. Unfortunately for them (and the root of the game's problems) - the lows are much, much more frequent than the highs.

They trapped themselves with convoluted ideas about player behavior. We want to own things, build things, kill people, and burn things. But, the balance must, must, must be way heavily skewed to ownership. Like we own things and build things, so that we develop a world and an identity in the game. A place that is ours, and that we care about. Cities and properties can't be easy come easy go. They made cities easy come (for alliance) easy go, and gear almost the opposite. And the Shadowbane model was right there.

GG Whax BG Ace

They original vision laid out the idea that sacrificing MMO permanence for resetting campaigns would create a renewal of energy instead of a dwindling attention. This revolved around many different campaigns, starting and finishing differently, in a dynamic universe. Unfortunately, this has not panned out in the slightest, and all dregs are on the same timer (now there is only one, anyway). The 2-3 year experiment in imports, exports, and dying worlds...has yielded results. If I were them, when they rerelease, I'd revert to a simple MMO world band, with set names & locks to what server. Then, greatly, greatly improve and stretch the city ownership and building mechanics, so that they last indefinitely with significant, scaling maintenance and taxes. People expect to have a home in their MMOs, and, whatever the merits in theory for resetting dregs, it hasn't worked in practice. Most of the time, dregs end with a whimper (they even just equalized the conquest points for...reasons). Divine favor should be individual, consolidating into guild tags when individuals earn it, and permanent. Worlds should be permanent (or as permanent as MMOs get). I was once in favor of the experiment, but the evidence (which is contextualized by the rest of the game's fun) is that it is not working in Crowfall. Time to go tried and true. Allow exports and imports to be earned and have cost (like a shipping cost).