Goblin Squad Member
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Does the XP backdating apply to destinies twin also? If not, I can't see it will stop the race to log in once EE starts.The simplest way to handle Destiny's Twin is to have it point to the same Total XP Earned field in the database.
That only works until someone changes the XP accumulator for the "main" character, which they indicated they'd decided against.
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Goblin Squad Member
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All of which ignores the question of whether losing your DT if you delete the 'toon satisfies the commitment of:
"As long as your primary character is earning skill points, so will its counterpart - FOREVER!"
Note: the capitals and exclamation aren't mine, they are from the kickstarter page.
I think there will need to be some discussion of what "FOREVER!" means if the DT is implemented as recently stated.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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Including this note in the Advanced Gear section:
Gear has 3 tiers. All Keywords on Tier 1 items are “minor”. Tier 2 items have a “major” Keyword and Tier 3 items have 2 “major” Keywords. Tier 2 and 3 items provide substantial benefits over Tier 1 in the combat system and you can read more about that in the Combat Guide.
Note: +3 items have 4 “minor” Keywords. Rank 4 Feats currently Activate their first “major” Keyword and 3 “minor” Keywords. You’ll need a Rank 5 Feat to activate all 4 “minor” Keywords on a +3 item.
(edited again)
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CEO, Goblinworks
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@Nihimon: Here's how DT is going to be implemented:
On the character selection screen, each slot has a control for "Destiny's Twin". If you turn that on, that character starts earning XP, and the control goes away.
That character keeps earning XP forever until you delete it.
That's the whole system. There's no longer a relationship between two characters.
Including this note in the Advanced Gear section:
Note: +3 items have 4 “minor” Keywords. At +4, the item gains a “major” Keyword. Rank 4 Feats currently Activate their first “major” Keyword and 3 “minor” Keywords. You’ll need a Rank 5 Feat to activate all 4 “minor” Keywords on a +3 item.
(edited)
Very wrong- or I have totally misunderstood something about keywords in this game.
Correct:
Note: +3 itemsgear and weapons have 4 “minor” Keywords. At +4 and +5, gear and weapons gain 1 or 2 extra random "minor" keywords. At Tier 2, gear and weapons gain an extra "Major" keyword (which is equivalent to 4 "minor" keywords). Rank 4 Attack and Utility Feats currently activate their first “Major” Keyword and 3 “minor” Keywords. You’ll need a Rank 5 Feat to activate all 4 “minor” Keywords on +3 weapons and gear- regardless of item Tier. At Tier 3, weapons and gear add a 2nd "Major" keyword. The 2nd "Major" keyword can only be activated with a level 6 Attack or Utility Feat.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Caldeathe's comments make me think Dwight from The Office.
False: Left clicking selects the node, but Right-click is required to harvest.Harvesting
Left-click a Resource node to harvest it.
Having a TL;DR section is excellent. Definitely need to keep content together with well placed page breaks though.
I agree with Cal about being explicit on how some things like walk and run require movement but stealth and jump do not. And while this is hardly the place for it, holding forward while auto-running really needs to cancel auto-run, and if not there ought to be a notice that it doesn't. This will get you killed if you're expecting that rather common behavior and it fails you at the wrong time.
Accessing your Character, it quickly becomes obvious what this actually means, but it certainly evokes thoughts of needing to do more than click 'Enter World' at the character select screen.
On that note, you should probably either let people know that there is a pause before you can enter your account creds during login. Or use a splash screen to hide it until loading is finished, or optimize that bit. Really don't want new players to feel like they are doing something wrong when it just hasn't been fixed yet.
Pictures are needed, not in the TL;DR section though. Make a reference to a more detailed description below.
I agree that explicitly stating that xp refunds are not allowed and that some fore-thought should be exercised before making purchases is necessary. The other major thing here is giving players a clear idea of is going to be required for what. Dredging that info out of a spreadsheet is not user-friendly, and nothing pisses off people more than buying something that seems perfectly reasonable to expect to be in the progression they are after, only to find out they wasted resources on something that's actually completely unrelated/unnecessary.
Under Training Feats > Achievements the second sentence is not well crafted: " To make earn credit for an Achievement ".
For ability scores, it might be worth phrasing it slightly differently, e.g. "Ability scores have no mechanical benefit; they are used as a pre-requisite for feat training and also improved by training feats that are associated with that ability." or something to that effect. The info is there, but it could be more easily processed.
As an aside, is there any particular reason the team chose a wand instead of a foot as the icon to open the feats window? Not everyone carries a wand you know.
In combat, make note of the fact that some feats are slotted on the left, and some on the right. I still don't know what the difference between the two is, besides some arbitrary rule that says "No, you can't easily access these skills, you're stuck reaching to the 6 key for that one." Bad juju right there, I hate arbitrary keybindings, but until keybindings are a thing, be up front about it.
Under combat, P5, "If you suddenly lose all your attack icons, you probably hit “~” by mistake." This should probably bolded and italicized with something like "Protip: " or "Note: " prefixed to it. Same goes for other honorable mentions on things to watch out for.
Under PVP:
"If you attack another player character twice, ".. twice in how long? Log off? Day? Ever?
"If you attack the Thornguard they will become hostile to you and they never forget and never forgive.".. why not allow that second attack? (Assuming they're not in combat already, to avoid exploits.) People will absolutely attack Thornguards and completely by accident. Ask yourself this, did you ever attack the Priest of Discord? A vendor? Do you know someone who did? Let the player be killed as a result of the first attack, but let the second cement the hatred.
I know, that one is less a function of the document than the game, but this is the first I've seen mention of it. Just remember how different EQ would have been if the Priest of Discord remembered everyone who ever hit him.
Under Minimum Viable Product: "You’re seeing a game in a state of development that most players have never experienced." This was true until Destiny was released. You might want to make mention of that. ;)
Life in a Sandbox, give a quick definition of emergent behavior/gameplay. Fewer people have heard that than sandbox. Maybe make the paragraph about emergent play and link it to sandbox instead of convoluting the description. It's a great concept and one people should be familiar with. The whole paragraph currently reads like a senior manager's description of a job posting that people "in the know" are going to have to decode.
Getting into some of how to use the UI, one thing comes to mind. For the love of whatever gods you hold dear, get scroll events working on the UI. That is such a major usability issue and will hurt you when the non-hardcore come knocking.
For Chat, what classifies as Local? What is the "local map"? Players will wonder. I know I do.
The Tutorial, this needs to be mentioned in the TL;DR section.
The Combat UI, might make mention that relatively few feats use Power.
Nice work on the Ranged vs Melee section, that's going to be fairly critical for players to know.
Understanding Attack Actions:
(It's worth noting that I started to rage a little bit here. Then I remembered it's alpha. You guys need some serious UX love. Everywhere. I hope that's a priority once EE happens.)
The information in this section is solid. It's also going to be a bit much for a lot of new players to process. Maybe make a note that they should re-read this section once they've gone out and fought a few things, bought a few feats, etc.. then again, a picture is worth a thousand words, and that could very well solve the confusion that's like to stem from this section.
Great descriptions of what each stat is though, those are very clear.
That's all I've read thus far, going to put it down for a bit.
Edit: Holy crap, this is too long for my usual proof. I think I'll find a beer instead.
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Goblin Squad Member
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That character keeps earning XP forever until you delete it.
I don't think it should be possible to delete the DT feature except by deleting the entire account.
If this is, in fact, the way it gets implemented, I think it needs to be really, really clear that this is, in fact, what the customer wants. It should probably involve at least one more confirmation than deleting any other character and a big, bold sign that you are about to delete an account feature that you can never get back.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Including this note in the Advanced Gear section:
Gear has 3 tiers. All Keywords on Tier 1 items are “minor”. Tier 2 items have a “major” Keyword and Tier 3 items have 2 “major” Keywords. Tier 2 and 3 items provide substantial benefits over Tier 1 in the combat system and you can read more about that in the Combat Guide.
Note: +3 items have 4 “minor” Keywords. Rank 4 Feats currently Activate their first “major” Keyword and 3 “minor” Keywords. You’ll need a Rank 5 Feat to activate all 4 “minor” Keywords on a +3 item.
(edited again)
What is the actual difference between a "major" and a "minor" keyword?
I have been playing 2 months now and I don't understand this.
A +0 weapon with a lvl 1 feat activates 1 keyword
A +1 weapon with a lvl 2 feat activates 2 keywords
A +2 weapon with a lvl 3 feat activates 3 keywords
A +3 weapon with a lvl 4 feat activates 3 keywords (and a major keyword, but the weapon doesn't have one)
A +3 weapon with a lvl 5 feat activates 4 keywords.
Are you expecting people to have better access to tier 2 weapons in EE? At the moment it seems perverse that you gain nothing from lvl 4 feats. Why not just have lvl 4 feats activate the 4th keyword and lvl 5 feats activate the major keyword? It seems like complexity just for the sake of it.
I currently have +3 weapons and lvl 3 feats. I am going to spend thousands of XP and get no benefit from it until I spend another thousands of XP. It makes tier 1 +3 weapons pointless.
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Having a TL;DR section is excellent. Definitely need to keep content together with well placed page breaks though.
...
Edit: Holy crap, this is too long for my usual proof. I think I'll find a beer instead.
Kinda wish you'd put "TL;DR" instead of "Edit:" :)
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Goblin Squad Member
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What is the actual difference between a "major" and a "minor" keyword?
I've added a few tabs to Nihimon's Reference Sheets at Pathfinder Online (Public) that will hopefully make this clearer. Check out the tabs Weapons & Armor, Weapon Feats, and Armor Feats.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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The difference is very substantial. The BIGGEST effect is the change in the RNG result though. You'd much rather have a T2 armor than a T1 ESPECIALLY while we don't check to see if you Activate the Major Keyword before you get the improved RNG (unlike weapons, where we are already checking).
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
And I still thinks it would be a good idea to change the enumeration of the Attacks to be similar to that of the gear.
Instead of Chop-1, Chop-2 etc
it would be better with Chop+0, Chop+1 etc
To make it easier to understand the correspondence with the keywords of the weapons.
the keywords are confusing enough without having two different scales of index.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You've used formatting to help make hierarchy and chunks more visible to your readers, so they can understand, store and recall all this complex information. That's great--having a high-order category (Managing Characters) visible as a section in bold w/ largest font, and then sub-sections headed in bold with a middle size font, and then entries with italics--all that is great.
-You could leverage that further by chunking through white space. At least on my screen, everything has some the same spacing. But having less white space between things-that-go-together, and more white space between things-that--are-apart, you can help users better cognitively "chunk out" the sections, and also find what they are looking for when they skim through. In this document, I would recommend multiple lines between sections, an additional line between sub-sections, and leave entry sequences (e.g. [/i]Training XP, Destiny's Twin[/i] etc.) as is.
-You might want to use text boxes to highlight "good to know" stuff. Most of the entries are "These are this, those are that," info. But sometimes you lay out implications, e.g. attack of opportunity for ranged attack, or slotting if you equip two weapons. Boxing that text will help user's recognize there is some good to know stuff to be attentive to.
-If you have the time, both a table of contents and a glossary would be helpful.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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My workflow process (for the curious) is to get the text written in word, and then to flow that text into InDesign where I work on the layout and presentation (and graphics, etc). These PDFs of Word docs are just ways to look at the text since everything will be reformatted when I move to the next phase.
My workflow process (for the curious) is to get the text written in word, and then to flow that text into InDesign where I work on the layout and presentation (and graphics, etc). These PDFs of Word docs are just ways to look at the text since everything will be reformatted when I move to the next phase.
Interesting. That is a workflow I should probably adopt now that Pages is useless as a design and layout tool (I'm writing my guide in Pages 09 on my old Mac right now).
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm only half way through the doc and all of my feedback is editorial.
"If you gain the Attacker Flag, for a period of time, other characters can attack you..." [remove the comma after "time"]
"The red portion..., the blue portion... and the yellow portion" [missing oxford comma before "and the yellow"]
"A character firing a bow standing next to a monster using a sword will take damage faster than the same character using a sword as well." [this was hard for me to parse; maybe "Generally a character firing a bow..." and drop the "as well"?]
"The Range will describe the area of effect of the attack." [I stumbled on "area of effect" - this phrase has a strong semantic association with things that effect a large area (like a fireball) - maybe: "The Range will describe the maximum distance at which the attack will have an effect." ?]
More if I get the time. This is an excellent document and I can't wait to see it w/ pictures and diagrams!
Cheers!
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Goblin Squad Member
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| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Suggested wording for Flags:
Whenever you attack a Character with a white name, and that Character is not a Sanctioned Target (due to Wars, Feuds, PvP Zones, etc.), that Character is added to your Targets List. If your Targets List was empty, you gain the Aggressor Flag and your name appears red to that Character only. If your Targets List was not empty, you gain the Attacker Flag and your name appears red to everyone. If you attack a Character in your Targets List, or a Character in your Targets List dies, you lose Reputation. When your Aggressor Flag wears off (60 seconds), or when your Attacker Flag wears (30 seconds after leaving combat), your Targets List is emptied.
At least, that's my understanding of the system. I would appreciate confirmation from a dev, if possible.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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After struggling with trying to explain the Feats/Keyword relationships simply and introducing more errors than simplicity, I've scrapped that original section and now it says this:
Advanced Gear
When crafting an item it can be advanced. Advanced items have “+” values (i.e.: Longsword +3).
Keywords are either “minor” or “major”. The benefit of Activating a “major” Keyword is substantially greater than Activating a “minor” Keyword. The Keyword names are just decoration, they do not have direct mechanical effects related to their names (at this time). (i.e: the Vorpal Keyword does not give the weapon a chance to sever an opponent’s head.)
Weapons and Armor always have at least 1 “minor” Keyword. With each “+” added in crafting, the item gains an additional “minor” Keyword up to +3. When crafting Weapons and Armor, there is no current mechanical advantage to making +4 and +5 items. Those advancements will be used in conjunction with a more advanced crafting feature that is still in development.
Gear has 3 tiers. All Keywords on Tier 1 items are “minor”. Tier 2 items have 1 “major” Keyword and Tier 3 items have 2 or more “major” Keywords. Tier 2 and 3 items provide substantial benefits in addition to their Keywords compared Tier 1 and you can read more about that in the Combat Guide.
All Tier 2 Gear has the Masterwork “major” Keyword.
Tier 3 Weapons have one or more of the following “major” Keywords: Artifact, Avatar, Avenger, Disrupting, Extraplanar, Hasted, Intelligent, Living, Slaying, Unstoppable and Vorpal.
Tier 3 Armor has one or more of the following “major” Keywords: Adamantine, Celestial, Crystal, Darkwood, Dragonskin, Eldritch, Empowered, Fiendish, Mithral, Sage and Shadowskin.
Note: The rank of a Feat does not indicate how many Keywords it Activates. Attack action Feats have 6 ranks, and Activate a new Keyword with each rank. Armor Feats have 11 ranks, and Activate a new Keyword with every other rank (and provide other bonuses on the alternate ranks).
Note: The 4th rank of the Attack action Feats Activate the Masterwork “major” Keyword, not a 4th “minor” Keyword. +3 Tier 1 items have 4 Keywords, but not Masterwork. This means that +3 Tier 1 weapons fill a very narrow niche: +3 Tier 1 items that gain value from different Feats than their +2 versions which provides some flexibility to character development and equipment selection.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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The reason I listed the Tier 3 "major" Keywords in the above section is that there's no way right now to tell from reading a Feat or item description which keywords are major and which are minor.
So if you were reading the document you'd at least know that if the keyword wasn't on the list, it was a minor keyword.
I could be convinced that it's excessively confusing to list the Keywords at all, tbh since "New Players" - the people whom this is targeted at, won't be able to Activate any "major" Keywords anyway.
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CEO, Goblinworks
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Suggested wording for Flags:
[...]
At least, that's my understanding of the system. I would appreciate confirmation from a dev, if possible.
In general I think that is how the system works. However since we don't have any of those systems in the game yet I don't want to encumber the new player with that info.
They just need to know that if they attack another player who isn't "red" twice in 60 seconds, they'll lose Rep and go red.
Good enough. You can mention that major keywords count as minor keywords elsewhere, since that i a math thing and this is not a math section.
I don't want to encumber the new player with that info.
This is the big key right here. TMI too quickly can overwhelm even the quickest of learners.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Dagger left out of the list of weapons that increase Dex.
#JustPFORogueProblems
Also, it's not intuitive to a new player that mace, club, and great hammer all fall under the umbrella of "Hammer". Especially since longsword and great sword are listed separately there even though they're both Heavy Blade, and/or if new players look at the separate Hammer Conk, Mace Conk, and Club Conk feats at Dreadnaught.
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Goblin Squad Member
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In general I think that is how the system works. However since we don't have any of those systems in the game yet I don't want to encumber the new player with that info.Suggested wording for Flags:
[...]
At least, that's my understanding of the system. I would appreciate confirmation from a dev, if possible.
The way I described it is the way it was working the last time I tested it. I think the only systems that aren't in place yet are some of the exceptions to the "whenever you attack a Character with a white name" condition.