Posts made by FibS

Good luck everyone!

I'd just like to point out that paid games aren't free of this kind of player either. ~_~

I'm unfortunately not sufficiently fluent in any language but English but I can give a few tips to make localizing text easier in general for the future.

• use simple words without any cultural implications
• use a mostly formal tone
• avoid second-person speech ("you", "your")
• place all embedded number variables at the ends of strings (e.g. last logged in 3 days ago --> days since last login: 3)

Always assume you will have to start fresh at launch.

However, also assume that if the cash shop is available in beta, you will get back your purchase value for launch. Some games even give you extra back like Warmonger.

If the game has procedurely generated content, I might not find/unlock the same abilities and thus I might not be able to reproduce a bug under the same conditions after a new build. Is that correct?

It is not!

Procedurally-generated is different from pseudo-randomly generated. Procedurally-generated just means the content is not technically there yet and is built from a "seed". If that seed remains the same the content will be identical no matter how many times it's generated.

However, most games mix the two. For instance, a treasure chest may be in the same place every time, but what's inside of it is RNG each time it's opened.

Fractured is planned to be a buy-in game with no mandatory subscription. The price tag at launch is expected to be between US $20 to $30, possibly less during Early Access if applicable.

The cash shop is currently planned to hold buy-what-you-see cosmetic items only. No stats, no boosters. Lootboxes can be earned, but not purchased, and also only hold cosmetic items.

The cosmetic items currently listed under the Foundation rewards are unique to the Foundation, other than maybe the lootboxes. I don't know if or when the Foundation reward system will be terminated.

A Kickstarter will launch within the next few months, and one of the backer rewards will be Foundation points.

Pre-alpha access will take Foundation progress into account, but alpha and beta will be only as a direct reward thru Kickstarter.

@vicious said in How similar to Albion Online?:

Uo pop dropped by 50% when they did trammel-felucca (pvp world pve world) then another 20%-30% with age of shadows, and even more when they introduced insurance for equip

You've got it backwards. Ultima Online's problem was not that it became a casual game; it's that it absolutely never did.

Ultima Online was originally designed very thoroughly as a hardcore game, regardless of whether you were a PKer or not. Its mechanics are complex and frequently not directly shown to the player.

This already marked the game's (slow, eventual) doom, as they noticed with their player base slowly dwindling. Old players were leaving but no new players were showing up, because the learning curve and the open PK environment harshly discouraged new players.

So they tried to force the game to be what it wasn't (casual). That would have worked out just fine, if they had succeeded, but they were trying to sell a chili dog dressed as a salad. After all their clumsy changes UO was still not a casual game, so it didn't appeal to casual gamers, and it ruined all the hardcore mechanics, so it no longer appealed to hardcore gamers. That is, it no longer appealed to anybody and so nobody played it.

The game would still have eventually died because hardcore and/or open PK games discourage new blood from joining. It just died faster when they botched the surgery. It would've been smarter to make a new game entirely and run both to their natural conclusions.

Fractured won't have this problem, because you will not be forced into an open PK environment as a new character, and because the power gap between a new character and an experienced one is much lower than in UO anyway.

Star wars galaxy was going well , then they did NGE, simplify the game the grind the classes, les punishment , it lost 80% of players in 6 months.

Oh boy, you're going for that can of worms?

Star Wars Galaxy lost a huge chunk of its playerbase overnight, and here's the actual reason why.

Remember when everybody absolutely hated "midichlorians" and how they de-magical-ized the Force? In the original Star Wars Galaxy, Jedi were implemented but the players were never told how to become one, and everybody loved that. You just explored the game world hoping one day you'd tap the Force and become a Jedi - or you didn't, and became a doctor and/or danced on street corners for money, because it's not like everybody was a godlike Jedi and you had to compete with them. It was expected to take nine years for a single Jedi to show up, and so nobody paid the idea any mind because it was basically an urban myth, the way Jedi were supposed to be in the lore.

... and then two years into the game - before NGE mind you - LucasArts wanted some quick cash by hyping up Jedi so they added a hint system on how to become a Jedi and the game quickly devolved into min-maxing to become the Best Jedi. No more exploration, no more varied professions, everybody just went straight for Jedi immediately. Not only was it no longer a mystery, but it was no longer rare or valuable or legendary. Even worse, because of the very specific requirements to become a Jedi, people forced themselves to go against their preferred playstyle to chase the Jedi cheese at the end of the maze, so the game devolved into yet another typical grindy MMO instead of a diverse virtual ecosystem. Even if you yourself continued to play the same as before, you wouldn't find anybody else to play with because they were all becoming Jedi.

So how did LucasArts respond to the rapidly growing concern that players were no longer encouraged to explore and participate in the game world on their own terms, i.e. that the game was becoming a linear grindfest?

They made it so players no longer could play their own way.

Earlier I implied that you could become a doctor slash dancer if you wanted. And you could, or just about any other hodge-podge mix of skills you liked, before NGE. With NGE, you were now forced to pick a strict class - one of which was Jedi, the complete and utter antipode to its former elite and secretive nature in the base game. Any and all additional skills got neutered as the entire game became focused on fighting enemies and gaining EXP, like World of Warcraft.

This didn't make the game "more casual" - quite the opposite, it took out everything casual. Rather than choose skills for fun or for roleplay you had to choose them to maximize your combat efficiency.

And just like that, the players vanished overnight. Many demanded refunds, and Sony said they'd get them, and then changed their minds. The bastards.

I can go on and on with examples like that

And I can go on and on about how they are not a case of failing to cater to an entitled minority.

The pre-alpha might come in the next few months. The alpha might come in the next year. The beta might come in the next two years. The full game is probably three or more years away.

If anybody else can reason a closer estimate, go for it lol

tl;dr: yes

@rayzorwire said in An MMO Free of Levels and Classes?:

@fibs I agree with what you have said but also take into account there may be times where being able to switch between physical and magic damage could be important. We don't know the full mechanics of the game but I'm sure there are bound to be creatures that have high resistance to a type of damage and having the versatility to switch types could outweigh the loss of DPS. There is also the trade off between a lower DPS for higher survivability. As with all games when you look at things from the perspective of which gives me the highest DPS without weighing any other options then that's when you have cookie cutter builds. Lastly, there is also the fun factor. Some people, myself included, like to make various builds just because it's fun to experiment.

If Fractured is designed so that raw DPS is not a consistently viable strategy (please do I am sick of pretending math class is a video game) then this would count as addressing hybrid viability.

@jetah said in Pre-Kickstarter Exclusives:

@fibs

crowfall and cu are my current pre-alpha and alpha MMO's. I've seen many people posting negatively about Crowfall and yet it has a low entry to pre-alpha at 50$. I haven't seen that much negativity about CU because it's currently 250 to get into alpha.

You said earlier that the price affected the quality of feedback, but here you're saying it affects the volume of "negative" feedback. Do you mean poor quality feedback or disapproving feedback?

I don't think Fractured will be very comparable to Albion Online, other than that both are top-down MMOs.

• Albion is focused on combat and trading, while Fractured is focused on exploration and dynamic environment
• Albion is extremely grind-heavy; Fractured has no EXP to speak of, and mini-quests / achievements are used to progress skills
• Albion is PVP-centric at endgame. Fractured has three separate planets with full early-to-endgame content for PvE, Lawful PVP, and Lawless PVP. Residents of these three planets have some freedom to travel between them, but it is not entirely unrestricted
• Albion's endgame is furthermore limited to particular red or black sector maps, while Fractured arguably has no coherent endgame due to not being experience-based, and also has RNG dungeons / Asteroids that will likely serve for guild competition and replay value

Good luck!

@jetah said in Pre-Kickstarter Exclusives:

As others have said, the server is a server. it isn't a 486 cpu trying to handle 1k connections. testing has a few parts: network code, stability, game mechanics and more. Beta is for network code, client and stability for multiple users. Pre alpha is to make sure there are no detrimental bugs that shut down the server, clog the network or crash the client. pre alpha is more of a proof of concept that things can work.

And where are we right now, when the Kickstarter is about to launch? Oh right, in pre-alpha.

You can expect feedback about game mechanics to matter no earlier than late beta. Where we are now our feedback is irrelevant, because nothing we're going to be seeing will reflect the current vision for the game for us to criticize. Fractured's mechanics are especially interconnected by the standards of MMOs, and thus we can't provide worthwhile feedback until very late in development when all of these mechanics exist in a near-final state for us to see how they influence one another.

Criticizing these mechanics before they are all fully implemented, as will be the case when the Kickstarter is launched, is simply worthless.

i'm just saying that the more people you get in for alpha the worse your feedback will be [...] you won't get as many trolls [at a higher buy-in price]

Yes, you've been repeating that, and you aren't any righter than you were the first time you said it.

Have you actually ever been in an alpha or beta for an MMO before? It consistently turns out that in reality (instead of in hypothesis) that buy-in price and raw playerbase size are both completely and utterly irrelevant to average feedback quality, which is consistently terrible because you are selecting for players, not testers. People who get into Kickstarter want to play your game and get a sweet deal for jumping in early. There are no professional testers who inconceivably pay you to let them test your game, that is the stupidest thing imaginable.

If you want good feedback, you handpick who gives you feedback; i.e. you actually go find a professional tester and you hire them. You don't open the gates, however slightly, and wonder why you're getting a bunch of idiots asking why your alpha game isn't entirely playable.

By the by, because the average feedback quality is unchanged by sample size, you will have better feedback with a larger playerbase if you are able to screen the feedback itself to ensure the dev team receives the best out of the entire sample, because you will just plain get a lot more feedback and the amount of good feedback will increase proportionately.

@kellewic said in Pre-Kickstarter Exclusives:

Only if their goal is load testing and not actual mechanics testing. Saying it's "absolutely not how testing works" is one hell of a faulty generalization since it's absolutely how "some testing works".

And fancy that, I covered "some testing" in the post you replied to.

The Fractured devs have made it quite clear they are not interested in our feedback on the mechanics at this time. And that makes sense, because none of those mechanics are remotely finished and they must all be together for us to provide any feedback on them. Any feedback we gave at this time would be utterly irrelevant.

@oobenonioo said in Pre-Kickstarter Exclusives:

@fibs said in Pre-Kickstarter Exclusives:

Yes, you do want "everyone" in testing. You're not asking them how they like the game design, you're checking to see if the server can physically handle all of them being on it at once.

I'm not sure where you're getting your information but not all pre-alpha/alpha/beta testing revolves around "can our server handle it."
Especially the pre-alpha where they are giving away between 100-1000 keys, which will be directly correlated to how many testers they want to be in their game during pre-alpha.

They are giving away this limited number of keys because they need to gradually scale up the server load. If the server runs for the first time and falls apart with 20,000 users trying to connect, they don't know if the failure point is 19,000 or 300.

They are still performing absolutely no feedback quality-based selection with this system.

@jetah said in Pre-Kickstarter Exclusives:

@vezin @FibS
problem is you don't want everyone in testing. many people will just 'play' the game but you want actual testers. people who feel committed to giving detailed feedback.

the higher they place alpha the better chances of getting qualified testers. they can put beta access at the lower tiers, imo, because most of the testing is complete, the features are in, etc.

That is absolutely not how testing works.

Yes, you do want "everyone" in testing. You're not asking them how they like the game design, you're checking to see if the server can physically handle all of them being on it at once.

You're testing to see if the server(s) can keep track of so many players and their procedurally-loaded content, you're checking to see if you run out of bandwidth or the server DDoS's itself with too much to process, you're looking for any bugs or glitches or oversights that break the game on a basic level when too many people are on doing various unforeseen things at once, and this is not something that any player can proactively help you do no matter how amazing their feedback is, other than by playing the game in as many different ways as possible and filling up your server crash logs.

Even if such "pro feedback" was desired, Kickstarter is not the way to do it regardless of how high you set the entry price. Kickstarter access is effectively an open alpha / beta, because you are not screening participants other than in how much money they're willing to spend, which does not correspond to feedback quality in any way whatsoever. If you want only "qualified" professional testers, then you run a closed alpha or beta where you personally invite everybody you think will be helpful. (Or personally invite them to the open alpha too, and kill two birds with one stone.)

It's the same as how companies don't send everybody a press copy of their game and ask them to review it - they send press copies to specific publications they trust to give them the reviews they want. (The fact those publications are all shills notwithstanding.)

A few Talents I've defined for my own world:

Cauterization - Fire-based healing tree. Almost all heals in my world are over time, but Cauterization allows faster / instant healing at the cost of temporary debuffs (e.g. stop bleeding by burning the #(!@ out of your wounds). Cauterization can also counter regenning enemies such as trolls.

Larceny - Not only does this let you pick locks and pockets, but it also lets you impersonate NPCs and (to an extent) player characters. You can even make knockoff items to try to pass off to merchants. Oh, and you can "plagiarize" other people's skills too. (Not sure how useful that is in a game where you can get every skill already.)

[various forms of] Lore - Item lore, spell lore, rune lore, etc. help you to identify well-crafted or valuable items and, more importantly, cursed items from all those tombs you keep looting. There's also a perk to selling these things to shopkeepers.

Summoning - In addition to the usual get-you-a-pet-to-hit-things, "Audacity" allows you to speak with gods and "Profane Ritual" allows you to attempt to summon demons and God-Beasts as guild bosses. Oh, and you can summon other players, too.

Tracking - All actions performed such as walking leave traces such as footsteps or scent trails. By taking Tracking, you not only become better at spotting & following these traces, but also better at not leaving them yourself (e.g. cover yourself in mud to reduce scent emissions until you next enter water.) Basically, Stealth determines if someone in the same room can see you, Tracking determines if someone half a country away can hunt you down.

Riding - Makes you better at mount shenanigans - faster, less likely to fall off, etc. With most Weapon Talents this forms a Cross Talent that lets you fight while mounted and even be "stronger" when mounted than on foot; in particular, Riding + Spearplay = Jousting.

@Gothix

Haha
 
I always remember that blood epidemic in WoW. Maybe if they had epidemiologists it wouldn't be such a disaster! xD

They did! It was the first case of real-world epidemiologists studying a video game disease and was in the headlines for quite some time until Corrupted Blood was patched.

Ingame, people formed quarantines and there were bio-terrorists trying to spread the disease as much as possible, just like in real life.

I'm 100% sure Blizzard waited to patch it until they stopped getting free attention for it.

@finland said in Cosmetic outfits for Guilds:

@jetah I have Crowfall I know how the banner workd there. I personally hate it. Selling things for the guild. I hope to see just things related to our character and not the guild.

Cash guild features are awkward because who pays for them? The guildmaster? What happens when the guildmaster changes?

I suppose the guild could keep its own diamonds stock in the guild bank and use that to pay for premium features or something.

Well I mean the game costs $20~$30. So at $20~$30 you should at least get a copy of the (final) game. I could understand $50 ~ $100 for earlier alpha access though.

@maethor said in Dungeons:

I kinda have mixed feeling about Open dungeons, while I do miss the open dungeons from everquest where you could farm all day I remember the BS that also occurred in those same dungeons. You had people who would just camp a single boss for hours and hours and sell the loot rights to it. There were groups/guilds that would keep content on lockdown making it almost impossible to get certain pieces of loot, it was very common for epic weapons. I know because we were one of the guilds who did it. We would kill certain bosses on spawn that were required for certain epics. Pretty much unless you paid us we would destroy the epic piece or give it to a guild alt to preserve the boss timer.

This won't work in Fractured because the lack of a large power gap means any other guild (or two or three) can come murder you for trying it.

So what's more likely to happen is that several guilds will compete for the same boss spot, and if this ends up locking the boss off to most players the developers will just add more dungeons with the same boss.