Posts made by GamerSeuss

@grofire We're not saying remove the talent. We're saying let them experiment with the balance. Be that experiment limiting it with what it might synergize with, lowering its bonuses, raising the bonuses of other powers, etc... They have a lot of work to still do here.

Now, for instance, if they took the Melee Talent, and dropped the +25 Evasion, they could probably make it more accessible by removing the alternate weapon slot restriction.

If they wanted to allow it to those using Mage Weapons as well, they could drop the damage from 150% to 125%, and maybe make it one of those talents you buy multiple ticks in to increase, so the first tick gives you the lowest value, and the last tick gives you the best your gonna get. As it is right now, it is a multi-tick but the stats given are for just one tick.

Let them play with the sliders and the talent make ups. Experiment with what synergies to include and what is not going to work for them. Sure, express your opinion, that is valuable feedback. Just don't automatically assume your opinion is the right answer and that they should throw other opinions out, or worse, muddy the water by just making the Talent Tree bigger, ,thus diffusing the test results.

I totally see what @spoletta is saying:

At its current level, Single Weapon Style is powerful, however, it is not made overpowered by the ability to stack with several other abilities out there. It is just powerful enough (maybe slightly on the high side) to stand alone. Also, its restrictions aren't exactly game breakingly difficult:
1-Handed Melee Weapon Required: Stops you from adding it to the much more powerful 2-H Melee Weapons, AND it prevents Mages from exploiting it when it is obviously meant to be a Melee talent.
Only weapon equipped (nothing in the 2 reserve weapon slots) just means you cannot hot-swap weapons and use this talent. Nothing prevents you from going with different styles, but you would have to take an extra moment or two to draw your alternate weapon setup.

For this, you get 25 bonus evasion(role play reason, you are not 'equipped' with a lot of other weapons to hold you down and prevent ease of movement. Extra weapons are stored away out of the way) and you get 50% damage increase, so every 2 hits are the equivalent to 3, not bad at all!

As @spoletta said, that falls right in line with, if slightly more powerful than what this game should be looking for, Talent-wise. To be able to stack those bonuses with increased accuracy, more damage adds, and then apply them to Mage weapons, when it is obviously more of a melee fighting technique that cannot channel magic would make them go way overboard.

[Edit]I am not ignoring what @grofire is saying either, by the way. YES, it is nice when there is some synergy within Talents so they work well together. It is nice to stack a few Talents to edge up the difference, the problem here is as @spoletta said, the person with the 10 stacking talents should not automatically decide the fight before the first blow is swung just because they are good at synergy. Their opponent should have a chance (and not just because they also min/maxed the synergies of their Talents). One thing this game is focused on is diversity and parity. By diversity, in this case, I mean that they want to encourage a wide range of talent choices, and by parity I mean that they want the diversified player to be on relative par with the specialist. Yes, the specialist can have some advantage, but it shouldn't get to the point that there ends up being only 3 or 4 optimum build choices out there that every mook who's played for awhile has gravitated towards.[/Edit]

@grofire They are trying to strike the balance so it doesn't feel like a grind.

In a game with grind, you can keep killing the same mobs over and over again, until you level out of them. In Fractured, each mob has a finite amount of KP and number of skills they unlock. If you didn't kill all the weak mobs you needed to go 100% in the beginning of your career, you can go back and quickly finish those, once better decked out in gear. No grind really. There is a huge difference between repetitive killing being required to learn all there is to know about something with a hard limit, and GRINDING your way through mobs for hours and hours to accumulate a few more experience points.

The closest thing to a real grind, in Fractured, is totally voluntary, and that's grinding for Gold or Materials. Other games require the grind, as well as meaningless fetch quests and such to get you anywhere, Fractured got rid of meaningless quests, and made any grinding finite, and thus not really grindy...however, still manages to reward those people with gold/materials who actively want to go out and farm for stuff.

I hear so many people complain about it, and yes, in this test, they have the numbers set a little off from what everyone is saying, I'm not going to say they don't, but that's only because they are trying to get to the right balance with progression of knowledge between too fast (what Players heavily complained about previously, maxing out KP way too early in the game) and too slow (having to kill some hard to find and highly contended mobs 50 times to get to 100%). I have faith that they will continue to adjust the slider until a happy medium is reached, so it isn't grindy, but also isn't handed to people without any effort whatsoever.

I never said all must be 'equal' I said that a brand new player, and a 2 year old veteran, both naked or in the same gear, should have pretty much the same effectiveness against the mobs out there. The only real difference, and this is vertical over horizontal progress, is that the veteran has more options about how they go about it. They've unlocked more skills, so can use different movesets, but all the relative power is the same, give or take (it is hard to go exactly the same, of course, but by giving a decent set of starter skills to everyone at character creation, you may never need to unlock another skill if you don't want to. Same with Talents)

@argottt hmmm, weird

@argottt That's because if you drag an item over another item they swap. If your doing it by looting, you cannot put items on a corpse, so the original item disappears.

@grofire They may have made some changes from what they said pre-Kickstarter, but that doesn't violate anything.

Once they started taking investment money (Kickstarter) they pretty much set a level of expectation that they have to think LONG and HARD about changing. Money has changed hands, so now the investors (Kickstarter backers) can expect to be consulted directly if any major promise of the game at that point is being considered to be changed. As the main promise of Fractured, probably central to most backers, was the ability for a brand new player, gear aside, to be able to stand side by side with a 2 year old player and each do meaningful contributions to a battle. Any vertical growth must therefore be very very miniscule at best to meet this criteria.They also promised that the KP system would not simply be another Experience Point system by another name.

@argottt This has been posted elsewhere. Pretty much the center spot only gets one item, if you put a stack in there, all others are lost.

@Kralith Hey, I kinda like that last one

@spoletta I actually like this and consider it a feature.

That being said, I do think that they may need to put certain 'necessary facilities' in as prerequisites to town upgrades. I just don't know how much of these should require spending those valuable tech tree points.

As @Kralith said, with things like this, you get towns that are highly focused and specialized around certain things, and you also get towns that are more balanced. A town may want 3 or 4 Village level tech choices, and not want to wait until surpassing the Village level and spending the points they get for higher levels on those extras.

@HarbingerOP Wouldn't even call that a glitch, necessarily, just a rendering or texture imperfection. As they have already stated that the textures are far from complete, that shouldn't be a problem, and I know they do appreciate those things being pointed out regardless.

Took me a second to see what it was though. You mgiht want to include a brief description in addition to the screen shot, just in case.

@TekNicTerror They are not just testing new options, they are testing new focuses for Talents.

Almost all the previous options were about Vertical upticks in Stats, either Set Stats (Str, Dex, etc...) or Calculated Stats (Mana, HPs, Endurance) with a few special abilities mixed in, that had to be much more powerful to equate to the other Vertical Progression Scheme.

The new scheme involves Talents that are purely focused on small utility tweaks to things, generally geared towards specific combat build types. They add utility, but can do so in much smaller amounts because they aren't competing for the obvious Min/Maxer Vertical Progression options on the grid. The two sets of Talents DO NOT FIT on the same grid together.

The other thing that keeps them from temporarily expanding out the Talent Tree Grid is the fact that part of the whole Talent concept is plotting how you are going to spend your talent points with the specific number of selections availabe. Expanding the Tree, even temporarily, would skew the resulting data that the Devs want to get. If you combined both these sets of Talents onto 1 grid, your Min/Maxers would go for the Vertical Progression choices every single time, while your more role-play heavy, utility enjoying players, like say @spoletta would have a real hard time picking the Talents they really want, because they still want to remain at least competitive with the other players, and so they would end up spending most of their points on the Vertical Progression options, even though those aren't the options they want.

@grofire In fact, I made a point on numerous occasions to say that your opinion is just as valid as everyone else's. What @LordGorgeous said is true, however, the main thing we are naysaying, is just flat going backwards to the previous makeup without exploring new talents, as well as exploring new focal points to talent presentation.

As @OlivePit says, the new talent tree does allow for more interesting sustained ability, instead of bursts of OP attacks, and constantly growing statistics. There were a few who did in fact express a dislike of the previous Talent Tree's focus on just increasing numbers. That is flat and uninteresting.

Yes, you should definitely express whether you like a current set of talents, or not, keep doing that, that is encouraged. just allow the Devs to not focus on just your opinion of the best Talent tree, and let them mix it up and try new things before they attempt to go backwards.

@grofire you and your opinions are just as valid as everyone elses.

That being said, where you saw no viable choices, others reveled in the choices on offer, and look forward to what other options the Devs will come up with.

As to fixing it now, rather than later...Alpha is the time for fixing mechanics, and trying out options. Until they have tried out all the options they want to give a whirl to, they really can't go back and set a set of options and just iron out those options to the exclusion of all others. They need to get feedback. We had 2-3 tests at least with the last set of Talents (if not more) staying pretty much the same, now there's a new set, they deserve at least 1 or 2 Alphas, and then another set should be tried out. The Devs want the best options they can get for the gameplay that THEY envision for the future of Fractured. You are one voice, among many. They are not working for a bunch of Unique builds either, the nature of Fractured, with its ability to respec Talents and Skills at every Fireplace, and then Respec your whole character periodically means that eventually, we're going to get down to a certain set of builds out there. There will be no truly Unique options, because what 1 will build, 100 will duplicate, at least part of the time. The builds will be more geared towards what mob they are focusing on, or PvP, than on trying to totally spec out a fully unique character...nature of the beast.

@LordGorgeous This is actually not too bad an idea. If you set the smallest Territory to like 5 players (Tribal Camp) and require they grow to 10 players before an upgrade is possible beyond Tier 1 Tech, then smaller guilds and individuals would band together. As they get more members, they can upgrade, pay the upgrade cost and show they have the minimum new member requirement and can go to Hamlet (10 Players, Tier 2), and they now need a total of 20 to upgrade again. Build to 20 Players, expand outward from the center, pay the upgrade cost, and go from Hamlet to Town (20 Players, Tier 3) and for the final upgrade, you need to build your town to 50 Players, pay your upgrade fee, then you go from Town to City (50 Players, no Tech Limit)

Establishing a Tribal Camp takes 'buying' the Camp Stone, and having 5 members. Around the Camp Stone, there are a few unclaimed plots for houses, and there are certain mandatory buildings that must be built to upgrade to the next level. When you upgrade, your border moves outward, you get a few more plots available to you, and your new tech arm opens up.

Very good, scalable system. Now, they need to smooth out what they have now before they go trying to implement this, however, but eventually, there should be room for such in Fractured...just realize that smaller towns can be raided just as big ones can.

@grofire I get where your coming from, some notes, however:

They are still experimenting with the Talent Tree, so going back to a previous version isn't the answer. They need to try some other things, that's true, but if they keep going backwards, they won't get to go forwards with development. Alpha is the time to test everything, even if a portion of the test isn't well received (in fact, that's what Alpha is for, to find those things that won't appeal to the larger player base first off)

It being an alpha, you can also pretty much bet that the number of equipment stage categories are not totally implemented yet. They know we're only in the game for 3 to 4 weeks, and they want to test the systems, not the variety as much, so they have probably artificially limited our choices some. They did add an extra stage to Mage/non-Melee light armor called 'Common/Commer' and then put an extra requirement to make the next stage, Scholar-wear. That is overall an improvement. (and Common gear is REALLY BAD)

Also remember, what you consider worth nothing, another player might enjoy. I agree, there are some talent nodes I'd love to see return (Mana Regen Rate increases) but it is still interesting, especially once fully implemented, what they have on the tree right now. Just stat bonuses (calculated and static stats) is very very boring for a mechanic like the Talent Tree. Interesting features, such as an AoE effect added to Mage Staff/Wand usage, or something like Armor Penetration are much more interesting to many PvE players in the game.

I'm not saying they shouldn't ever go back to some of the old nodes, but they should experiment with different configurations before rehashing old ones.

@splitmentality Some Answers:

The Lightning Bolt is Stamina/Endurance/Energy basically. It slowly goes down as you are actively doing things like running, and when activating certain non-magical skills it may go down faster. (like the melee skill Second Wind). When you run out of Endurance, I believe you start to consume food faster and you cannot activate endurance related skills, and you run slower, as if you were encumbered.

Moving while casting: This is a realism thing. Many novels and TTRPGs require you to not be moving, or moving only at a slow walk in order to cast magic, or you lose your focus, so that is likely the goal of the Devs here. As to one spell/ability interrupting another, that is kind of new to this test, so I haven't really experienced it yet to comment.

The strafing thing goes along with the movement feel they want for this game. Maybe not with magic (see previous comment) but with other powers, attacking while moving is kind of the dynamic they are going for.

The campires: First, I applaud the idea of you being able to remain seated at a campfire until you fill your mana and stamina fully, unless interrupted by a mob. That would be better than having to sit down 12 times, however, part of the game, as you'll find, is purposefully adding some slow-down frustrations to add some breadth to the game and make it seem longer.

Campfires part 2: As to the whole losing of part of your health until you make it back to town, that was implemented like 3 or 4 tests ago. Between that and the not fully restoring mana(which was implemented the first time this test) it is a way to prevent laying down a campfire really close to a mob and using it to totally abuse the situation.

Tooltips: Your idea for tooltips on things is overall good, however, that doesn't mean they will get implemented necessarily during Alpha. Tooltips are considered QoL improvements, and although some do get implemented during Alpha, they are not a focus now, but rather the mechanics themselves. During Alpha, a big part of it is seeing what it takes for newb players to figure things out for themselves, so they get a better idea among other things, what tool tips are needed, and which ones are wasted code.

Inverted Mouse button: I don't see how inverting the buttons, especially for right vs left handed players would be a big deal, and this will probably make it into settings in the future I'm guess. Until then, depending on your mouse driver, you can sometimes just invert your buttons in the Device Manager while playing, and switch them back when you exit the game.

The speed of KP acquisition is one of the things they have been sliding up and down from test to test. It isn't something that should really be hotpatched, as each setting level needs to be fully experienced to get good feedback. Having said that, once they get the speed down to where they want it, I do like your idea of making that last tick of Knowledge from a mob be bigger than those who came before it. Even if you just make it double or something. The very first, and the last tick would be the ones I think that would be the most knowledgable times in the game.

As you can see from other people's posts, if you've been looking, in regards to KP progress, that is a hot topic, especially this Alpha as they slowed it down quite a bit from previous tests, mainly because of player feedback of it being too fast (even though it was made faster because it is a short lived test) and there are some mobs that they feel are really becoming tedious to farm for KP because of their general rarity and thus contention to be killed by other groups, and they like give 1-2% per kill, while only respawning like 2-5 every 10 or more minutes.

Overall, good feedback for a new recruit though, hope you enjoy your experience as it evolves.

@BECKFAST Giving goals is good, they don't always have to be progression goals.

Late game, Fractured is going to rely on their Asteroid Content to satisfy the need for new goals to motivate players.

In addition to that, whether you agree or not about complete shakeups of previous systems, the point here is that it was a fundemental core promise of the game from its Kickstarter launch. That means they are pretty much locked into this particular concept in order to satisfy what advanced backers paid for. There is a lot of room for interpretation, however anything that was flat out promised in the Kickstarter launch, such as a dedication to Horizontal Progression, where power creep is not going to be a focus of the game, can only really be sacrificed if it becomes something they simply cannot do, not just something they change their minds on. That is One of the big things when it comes to Kickstarter backing. You are obligated to live up to your Kickstarter promises, or fail to deliver.

@BECKFAST
I can' t remember what I was responding to with 2, and I looked. Sorry about that, maybe I'll see it in the future. [edit] Okay, I found it, I was actually responding to 3. up above about charging a fee, and I was pointing out they are actually doing that already for home owners.[/edit]

As to 1. The Goal as the developers stated, for this game, was to not have that player diffusion. They want diffusion to be tied to just gear and build, not how long you've been playing. They expect everyone to max out KP fairly quickly, and then play around with different builds and party makeups for everything else. In other words, they are dedicated to the idea that a brand new player can enter the game, get loaned a set of gear, and completely on par, power-wise to everyone else in their 2 to 3 year old party. They might not have as many options (less gear to choose from, less skills and talents unlocked for various builds) but even just the starter skills and a decent set of comparable gear can make them fight alongside their companions and actually contribute fairly equally.

There is talk about some skill related talents, but they have as yet not found any talents for skills that fit the overall feel they want Fractured to have. They did however make the promise that beginners could compete right off the bat, so any real vertical progression would violate that promise.

As to 3, we'll have to agree to disagree. The developers want anyone owning property to have to work for more than just the gold to get it. Same reason personal plots can't be invaded and taken. They want you to have to build your property from the ground up. No just straight transfers. Yes, it is one type of economy they could encourage, but it is one they aren't interested in pursuing.

1. By planned, I mean it fits well with the developers's concept of how they want the game to go. Yes, just because its planned doesn't mean it fits your idea of what you would like to see, however, it is exactly on par with what others want from the game.

@munch said in Some Bugs from Criminal Hype:

There is an abuse you can do with Treasure chests, you can die to mobs, and while you have 10 seconds vulnerable you can loot the treasure chest. A fix to this will be doing that you have to kill all the mobs in the camp to be able to open the chest.
Treasure chest should only be available to be opened, once all mobs are killed.

There is an abuse you can do that you can die to the mobs, and then with the invulnerability buff you can open the chests.

Or even your friends can pull the mobs and you can open the chests.

These didn't need to be stated twice. Invulnerability right after death is to escape, but if someone wants to waste that time looting the chest, that's not an exploit so much as a strategy. Same with having one ally loot chests while the rest fight the mobs.

As to the slower progression, that I'm sure was put in because of the HUGE amount of complaining that progression was WAY WAY too fast in the last few tests. They are trying to strike a happy medium here and that will take adjusting it up and down, and letting it go at each level for an entire test to be sure.

As to the Mana Regen issue...I'm not sure, but their may be an unspoken penalty for being unarmored completely on mana regen. It makes sense to do so. There really should be penalties for being completely unarmored, and there were complaints about the 'naked mages' from previous tests.

@grofire are you saying it doesn't stop, or just bounces 2-3 times? If it is that it bounces, that's for realism, even a hard, inflexible object will bounce some. Helps to spread the logs out a little. If you say it doesn't stop, that could be an issue.