General Feedback.Follow

Copied and pasted from other places I've posted things. Sorta leaving it all in one spot as one long feedback post.
[Game Content]

As far as levequest go: I love them for what they are. If I get on and only have 20-60 minutes to play, I could run out do 2 of these things, get my XP for the day and be done, as well as feel like I've gained something.

My issue with the quest content of the game is that there is no depth. There are dozens of NPC's in each starting town but hardly a quest in sight. The first thing I do in MMO's is run around and talk to the NPC's, get some early quests done and get a feel for the situation of the game. As much as I love interacting with people, I would like to be able to interact with NPC's that have a decent amount of depth. An NPC that tells me to bugger off a level 1 but asks me to gather secret documents that he lost in an ambush at level 25, and the idea that you knew he'd give you something to do eventually, but you didn't quite know what. Right now this game is essentially an interactive chat room. There is so little meaning to anything you do besides interact with others. It's like they took the Role Playing out of Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get my point across well enough or not, but this game seems to have been designed purely for several thousand people on one server to make the entire depth of the situation in the game. There is nothing to supplement the game if you don't have a group of friends to RP with. Go read up on a lists of quests and the things that NPCs want you to do in any other RPG. You can boil them down to the same basic principles as any other RPG. The difference is how they are presented. I can give you 1000 pages of raw statistical data and say I've given you information that you requested (levequests), or I can organize the data, interpret and give a generalized statement as to it's meaning, allowing you to delve further into it if you felt it was necessary (properly written quest using basic go here and kill that quest function).

Again, I don't know if I am getting the right point across, but I hope you can forgive my horrible analogies and see what I'm trying to say ^_^





[Combat and XP gain]

Now, on to combat. Combat itself isn't horrible, but the way some skills become necessary very early in the game upsets me. Chakra, for example, seems to be necessary, and is attained at an exceptionally early level. Why? who knows. All I know is that a self heal ability that requires no MP is going to be a necessary skill. Even with subjobs in XI, you needed something that could heal you most times.

Crafting, this game seems to have been designed around crafting. Leveling up makes much more sense for a crafting game than a combat game. Honestly, I think that how you gain xp from crafting and from combat are so completely opposites that it should not ever be mixed like it has been here. Again, I like how experience it gained for crafting, but not that the same methods are used for combat. Unfortunately I don't have any solutions for this. I would like to see experience gained from monsters be more defined and gain relative to the strength of the monster towards the individual player.

I would also like to see it where as the relative strength of a monster increases, the penalty for multiple people in your party decreases. Red mob = 100% gained by all members of the party. Yellow mob you lose 5% of your potential XP per member. Green mob you lose 60%. Blue you lose 90%. Something like that, though those numbers are pretty horrible. Or possibly have the total experience gained be divided by the number of party members, with bonuses depending upon the size of the party and the difficulty of the mob relative to each player. For example, Red mob with 15 party members, after the fight you get a total of 15000 in skill ups between all of your party members. Every member would get 100 xp, + a bonus for the mob's difficulty to the particular player. Red mob would give that individual a 100% bonus towars XP gain. So if the mob was red to you, you'd gain 100 XP, + 100 more bonus XP. If it was yellow to you, the xp bonus would start to drop off to 75% for example.


[Economical]

Auction Houses: Every MMO I've every played (even runescape now) has some form of auction house. Some games even feature it as a metagame (Eve). In the end, it is the most efficient way for players to exchange items. ESPECIALLY when there are no regional servers. This isn't to say that market wards have no place. Indeed, they have a tremendous place in the community when you limit the amount of items that you can put up for auction at once. This has also always been a factor in every MMO I've ever played. Infinite buying capacity matched with very finite selling capacity.

Other ways to improve this would be to let a linkshell have it's own shop space, like a mog house space. The LS can have their own retainers set up in a spot, making it easier for other linkshell friends to buy within their own community. This also opens up the option of having the shop either be private or public. Maybe even having payed for advertisement allowing for players to advertise for their shop in the shop list. You may even be able to let a linkshell, with a certain fee, ofcoarse, pay a rental fee for a shop front and run a shop from an actual space in the area. Many things you could do with this to make it even more fun. In the end, I do like the market wards as a wonderful alternative to having to leave my PC running all night, but it is only great as an alternative or a means of selling a large amount of items. For those of us looking for a specific item like armor or weapons, an auction house may be much more convenient. In the end, you may just want to have the market wards make a comprehensive list of all items up for sale and put it in a menu like an AH separated by category for players to browse and sort through as well, and this would solve all problems.



[Misc]

And my very last complaint that I have had since alpha day 1 is that the fishing and mining and tree cutting has so much redundancy in it's menus. Can we streamline this a tad bit? Not a big deal but it does annoy me.

Macros: There is nothing wrong with making client side files for setting macros. Hell, even having client side files to set skill sets so players don't necessarily have to be in game to set them is alright. I would love to see scripted macros that can be edited outside the game in a text file, as this would allow for macros to be made much more quickly.




as a last note, I would like to make a suggestion on the combat system that I think needs it's own section.

[Stances]

Instead of having the 2 different basic attacks, the strong and the normal, why don't they make "stances".

What they do:

A stance would be what kind of attack your character would execute regularly as your "auto attack". Different stances would have different effects. Many stances could be unlocked as well as part of a class.

Examples:

Normal - Your normal attack. Nothing special
Defensive - Increases your defense but proportionally decreases your attack.
Aggressive - Increases your attack but proportionally decreases your defense.
Assault - Decreases attack power of a single hit, but attacks 2 times a turn. Dual wielding would result in 4 attacks.
Tank - Increases defense (physical and magical) and enmity gain. Increases defensive skill gain rate (shield skill for example). Decreases weapons kill up rate and attack power. Decreases evasion.
Focused - Increases magical accuracy. Decreases magical evasion.
Channeling - Prevents auto attack. Decreases spell cost. Character is immobilized in this stance.
Wards - Increases the effectiveness and allows skill gain skill points faster from defensive and curative spells.
Enraged - Drops defense to 0. Increases attack power proportionally. Increase enmity gain by 50%.
Sentinel - Burst enmity gain. Character immobilized. All defenses increased by 50%. All offensive power decreased by 50%.



Those are just a few that I can think of off the top of my head that would allow auto attacks to have different effects (Didn't put in any special effects like defense boost from attack or what not. I think they should move those kinds of effects over to weapons).

The idea is that the auto attack will behave differently with this. It also reduces the redundancy of the current combat system while increases the actual value in it. If every class had 3-5 different stances to choose from, it could really add to party battles for instance. Hell, it might even make the combat both fun and interesting, 2 things I find it severely lacking.