Tyveil's page

I don't know.. I think the new player experience needs to be pretty high priority. It's the reason I gave up on Alpha and nearly gave up on EE as well. If I didn't find a good group of very helpful players (7th veil/Phaeros) I likely would have left again. People who give up on a game often don't come back because of that first impression. I'm willing to bet turnover at this point is still far higher than it needs to be. There are some really big bang for the buck items that could make the new player experience much better, namely gating feats and some better UI guidance on keyword matching. Tutorials can be lower priority.

Point being, however it is accomplished, the return for effort must be greater for defense than attack, otherwise it will always be more effective to just go take another tower that is undefended than to defend your current holdings.

In LOTRO, this is accomplished via NPC defenders assisting in the Keep (Tower) defense. I don't think that strategy seems quite right in PFO. Maybe a "buff" for the defenders? Or traps that can be crafted and added to a tower that can cause damage or debuffs to would be attackers.

I think GW needs to have a better tutorial that at least gives everyone a basic idea, then they need better tool tips that are smart, that tells you which keywords are matching, as well as telling what bonuses you get.

For instance, lets say I am Archer level 4, and I am looking at Soldier's Chainmail +1, and +2, I should be able to mouse over them and see that certain keywords are lit up. Furthermore, it should also indicate the bonuses you get in a + format, like so:

Soldier's Chainmail +1
Tier 1 Medium Armor; grants keywords based on upgrade: Medium (+0), Military (+1), Flexible (+2), Supple (+3)
+110 Hit Points
+42 Power
+2 Fortitude Defense
+4 Reflex Defense
+2 Afflicted, Bleeding, and Exhausted Recovery

Soldier's Chainmail +2
Tier 1 Medium Armor; grants keywords based on upgrade: Medium (+0), Military (+1), Flexible (+2), Supple (+3)
+165 Hit Points
+63 Power
+3 Fortitude Defense
+6 Reflex Defense
+3 Afflicted, Bleeding, and Exhausted Recovery

This is a fantastic suggestion, and not something that should be considered "low priority". Something that clearly displays what keywords do and what keywords are active IN-GAME is critical. Even if it wasn't on a tooltip but somewhere on your character stat sheet (where it should also be), that would be a huge step up from what we have now. Until such a system is in place, PFO will continue to frustrate players. I don't want a SIMPLE system with no depth, I just want a system where the information is AVAILABLE (in game).

I love that the game is so open ended, but that can also be a problem. After playing dozens of hours in alpha and still equipping nothing better than loot drops, I don't really understand what I should be doing to improve my character. I keep improving achievements which in turn allows me to train feats. I get that. But I don't really have any screens that clearly show me my improvements or stats. I'm increasing feats just because I think I should be.

Understanding crafting and how I can use it to improve my character seems to be a big hurdle as well. The keyword system is not intuitive at all. I've had it explained many times and I still don't get it. Just show me what "keywords" are active(?) and give me the numbers. Let me compare different armors and weapons to see which is better for me.

I hope people get over the grinding thing. There should be a grind, it should be fun though. I wish games would just stop billing "no grind".

Yea I really don't get why they made the decision with coin. It should also be a local coin economy. If you need to get your coin from one bank to another, that should be a decision you make understanding the risk of transporting the coin.

I remember 10+ years ago playing Dragon Realms and occasionally I would haul 6+ months worth of coin from one town to another. My heart would race during those trips, worried about bandits and pickpockets. You're taking one of the adrenaline filled adventures out of the game for traders/merchants.

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Here is our vision of how this is supposed to work (in the MVP, not long term).

You go into the wilderness and kill monsters to get crafting components and coin. The more monsters you kill, the more components and coin you get.

You bring that stuff back to town and sell it to the crafters. You use the coin you generated in the wilderness and the coin you got from selling the loot to buy upgraded gear so you can kill different monsters and get more valuable crafting components and more coin.

You notice every once in a while while doing this that you've hit an achievement which may be gating your training.

You should find relatively quickly that the time required to accumulate enough XP to advance your training roughly correlates with the time it takes to kill enough monsters to clear the gate.

So it should not feel "grindy" in the sense that you are mindlessly killing monsters for no purpose other than racking up a kill total.

I have the impression some people would like to eventually ONLY do PvP and nothing else. Or at least mainly get their income from PvP at least. For them any killing of PvE content at all is probably an issue.

Yep, and I think those people should definitely be welcome in this game as well. I hope they think of something with achievements to allow it to be a possibility.

People need to stop expecting the game system to handle everything with policing PvP. The largest detractor from open ganking will be how the community responds to it. Characters at high levels may have less to lose as far as not having access to town services, but they have a heck of a lot more to lose when a group of bounty hunters puts them on their hit list, or they become blacklisted by the players.

Baited breath... F5... heart skips a beat, page not found.. F5.. recheck thread... F5... bio break... F5

Thank goodness. I can now be productive this week.

Tyveil wrote:

Andius the Afflicted wrote:

I'd like to see death penalties beyond just gear loss. I remember in LotRO dying added "dread" to your character which I know lowered your maximum health and I believe also lowered damage and healing output.

Death is LOTRO was a joke like it is in most other MMORPG's out there. I'd like to see death be a real event. You die, you don't immediately leave your body. If you leave your body (depart) without any clerical intervention whatsoever, you permanently lose XP. With clerical intervention you could be raised (should take a lot of skill) or players can use other skills to reduce or remove your XP loss upon departing. Both of these options should take a significant amount of time, based on the skill of the player performing the clerical acts. This type of system would make dying a serious ordeal but not one you can't recover from, and it would pretty much remove the usage of "travel by suicide".

I'm also in favor of removing "bind points" unless it's accompanied by a skill that takes a significant amount of time to train.

This is pretty much EXACTLY how death was handled in an old text-based MUD called Dragon Realms in which I first started online RPGs. With the 25% item destruction in PFO, this may be a bit extreme, but I could see doing a temporary XP loss, although I think a 2 minute temporary stat reduction would be better. I do like the idea that any of this could be mitigated by a cleric, although I wouldn't make the item destruction cleric mitigate-able, as that would change the economy and the items are not your soul. ;-)

You caught me. Dragon realms is the game that I still go back to as having some of the best MMORPG systems to date. I love the way death was handled there, and they also had open PvP, yet it rarely happened unprovoked. Clerics and paladins had real purpose and could spend a lot of time just raising/rejuving people and building up those skills. The reason I am watching PFO so closely is because it is the closest thing I've seen so far to a graphical Dragon Realms, with numerous improvements.

I agree, it's the only thing I don't like the sounds of in PFO. I prefer diminishing returns for players who play a lot, as opposed to character development being completely disconnected from actually playing your character. Guess I'll just have to see how it plays out because unfortunately it is core to the design and won't be changing, and there are too many other great things about the game to keep me away.

Simultronics did a good job with special ticket-based adventures. Purchase a ticket and you gain "entry."

Dragonrealms and Gemstone. These two games are worth looking at for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is how they deal with ticket-based adventures. Their Guide program and support RPing in general is also inspirational.

Microtransactions are nothing new, and they will definitely be present. Just a matter of doing it well.

Exactly the games I was thinking of when I referred to content costing MTX. Their model worked very well IMO. I never felt like I had to do the content, but it was a fun diversion when I did and sometimes resulted in unique items (nothing that would give me a competitive advantage, just something recognizable).

The graphics seem just fine to me. Far more interested in them getting the gameplay right. There are plenty of crappy games out there with fantastic eye candy for those who are interested in that sort of thing.

It's fall 2013. Just wondering if the simulator is out and where I can download it? Thanks!

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2pcpx?Announcing-Pathfinder-Online-Pit-Fight

Hopefully, the overall design will not allow any one interest to dominate any one area of play. It will not be fun if there is one major kingdom that dominates all, or trade becomes impossible due to a 3:1 bandit ratio, or PVP is impossible due to a huge band of "Brothers of Ganking". A short dominance in an area sounds like fun but not a long lasting one. My two cents.

Again this depends on the scale of the world and will be localized. Don't like the economy in the area you're in, or the high ratio of bandits, or anything really? Pick up your stuff and move. Sure it may be an inconvenience, but it will also be fun for many people to find their niche in the world.

There is no instant transport/mail. If someone tries to corner and move a resource, you can kill them and take their stuff.

There are no global auction houses. You have to buy at a local market and take your purchase where you want it (opening you to ambush that way as well).

I was going to ask about local economies before I saw this reply. This, folks, takes care of everything. It makes economies vary by location, makes merchant/trader professions meaningful, and makes it impossible to corner the market in the entire game (such as what happens in WoW). I'm very glad they are going in this direction, please no global AH, ever!

I don't think you want the community from MMORPG.com to play this game. Just saying...

The subscription model will weed out 90% of them. This is the #1 reason why I fully support subscription models. Please GW consider never going F2P. It's the same reason you go out to eat at nice places.

We are bringing this one to it's knees.

Well, before I even bother to recruit others. I got to have a Linux client, for all my friends only use Linux. For me to up my pledge, I require a Linux client to be able to make use of the add-ons. And I must say some very nice add-ons exists and love to get. With no Linux client, what's the point, other than just going for the PDF super pack with Emerald Spire PDF.

Where do you find all these people who use Linux? I've been in IT for 15 years and haven't met anyone who only uses Linux as their OS (they may use it, but always have a dual boot). Honestly just curious. Also how many games are supported on Linux? Specifically MMORPGs.

It's a single player game with multiplayer components, kind of like StarCraft 2 with a subscription fee.

Exactly! This is the way MMORPG's have gone. And although Ryan has explained it very well I still have trouble with it. I guess it's kind of an "I told you so" moment for me, although nobody was listening but me.. lol. This is why I'm so excited for PFO, finally somebody in the industry gets it. Albeit about 10 years later than I got it. ;) Maybe I'll try to dig up some of my forum posts from 10+ years ago, although I'm sure they're long gone by now.

First, on a forum post I think IMO is assumed, I hope :)

The thing is even when the first graphical MMORPG's were coming out I was disappointed because they weren't sandbox enough, and the industry has done nothing but go in the other direction since. There are plenty of single player themeparks out there, why do we need them in MMORPG's (or ever need them)? Themeparks are best suited for single player or small LAN type play. MMORPG's keep implementing things like instancing which just further proves themepark doesn't work for a MMO environment.

Well, they see the success of WoW and copy that. Thats the way of the world. It doesn't help that there have been few, if any, "successful" sand box games.

The ones I've seen have been pretty pathetic attempts. There are actually some good sandbox text-based MMORPG's that are still around after 15+ years. Eve was probably the best attempt, just not really all that into flying around open space. ATITD was a great sandbox, just horrible graphics and pretty limited gameplay. I just don't understand how you can even call something like WoW a model to copy with as huge of a budget they had to spend to create the game and what they spend on each expansion.

So I'm playing through a popular MMORPG's latest expansion. Most towns I stop in, finish a handful of quests, and within hours I'm moving on to the next. How did devs ever believe such a model would be sustainable / profitable.. and if it is, sandboxes will be 10x more profitable. I'm fine with setting up camp and staying in the same area for months, as long as I have quality player interaction and there are fun things to do. I just don't get the themepark mindset or why it ever became popular, it's such a waste of dev resources. We could have 10x the games with 10x the quality if everyone just started with sandbox and stuck with it.

That is fine that there is a limit on group size. But, whatever you do please do not balance content around predetermined group sizes (for example LOTRO makes content for group sizes 3, 6, 12, and 24). It's a major pain to try and get the sweet number and makeup of characters. Difficulty should just be determined by spawn rate and mob difficulty. A group of 10+ should be able to obviously take on much more difficult challenges. But they do so by going to different areas (with possibly much higher level mobs).

Tyveil wrote:

The current market is tired, boring, and completely unoriginal.

This is really a very one-dimensional view of a market that is actually incredibly varied and is experiencing constant innovation.

And it's people with the $ who think like that is the reason MMORPG's have fallen so short of what they could be over the last decade. They need to stop patting themselves on the back and come up with something good. MMORPGs have been nothing but single player games with some multi player interaction. And it seems like the trend is continuing in the wrong direction (see SWTOR).

superfly2000 wrote:

George Velez wrote:

“lessons learned from other games”

The best would be to not look at the MMO games at the market at all. Instead look at older multiplayer RPG's...

At least that what I would want...

I'm not sure if that's what realities of market and making money want nowadays.

It would be better than drawing too much inspiration from current MMORPGs. The current market is tired, boring, and completely unoriginal. Somebody has got to break out of the mold. Unfortunately I think money keeps driving the decisions to keep with "what's working" even though really it's not.. MMORPGs could be 100x better. Paizo is definitely taking steps in the right direction from what I've seen so far.

Ryan,

I've gone back and read a lot of your posts and I have yet to find an idea I don't agree with. I was very disappointed when early 3D MMORPG's came out because I knew the game design wasn't right for an MMORPG (too much theme park and not enough sandbox, as you have put it). I realized every MMORPG after would follow, what do you know we have 50 EQ clones since that day. Whatever you do, please stick to your guns. I'm not sure how you're getting the backing and support you need when it seems everyone thinks other MMO's have already done it right and just need "tweeked" in areas. I sincerely hopes this game makes it through to launch without any compromises. If so you for sure have a lifetime player here. Best wishes and looking forward to future updates.