Best posts made by Roccandil

Right now the ingredient drops of animal mobs are quite random, and oddly so (how come most rabbits I kill don't have feet?)

I'd love to see the following system:

• You kill an animal
• You skin/butcher an animal, if you have the right tool
• Your loot results are determined by your knowledge of the animal (and perhaps the quality/type of tool)
• RNG has no part!

The animal knowledge trees would thus have ingredient unlocks as well as abilities, which would make it even more interesting to get knowledge for creatures without abilities (like rabbits!).

So, at rabbit knowledge level x%, you unlock the ability to always loot a rabbit foot.

As to humanoid mobs like goblins, this system could still work, but only for ingredients that are innate to their bodies, like tongues (and not simply something they might be carrying).

Talents

I really enjoyed the talent system! Gave me a good reason to go out doing everything different I could. I also felt like with talents, I was powerful enough to solo more content (notably wisps).

Suggestions on talents/knowledge:

• Sixty talent points seem too few somehow!
• Would be cool if crafting also provided knowledge.
• I wish the base attributes were set via the talent system.

Roads

I enjoyed the paved road system, especially since I wound up running through a bunch of town centers simply because it was beneficial to do so.

The ninety degree turns in the middle of nowhere felt odd, but I'm assuming all of those were in potentially claimable town locations.

Player-made stone roads need the speed bonus!

Cities

The bank, tavern, and town hall are cool. I also liked the wood stacking system for the carpenter.

I'm not entirely sure, however, I like how much crafting content is gated to cities (even though it will pressure players to join cities, which will help me out as a governor).

As a neutral point, I didn't notice any difference between large and small towns, other than the number of possible house plots. City status descriptions were somewhat confusing.

The worst part for me may have been laying claim blueprints: they often didn't work, for no apparent reason, even when the color said they were placeable.

Suggestions on towns (obvious permission problems aside):

• Would be very nice to have multiple bank tabs!
• Quarries: we need a quarry building for mass stone block production!
• Tree farms would also be a nice addition
• When mass-placing claims (or anything else, like tubs), would be awesome if I could check a "repeat" box, so I didn't have to navigate the crafting interface just to select the same thing again
• Are there going to be 5x5 or bigger house claims, so we can build the biggest houses?
• Would love a way for citizens to leave messages for me in the Town Hall

Other pros

I liked seeing the endurance bar become prominent.

Gripes

I don't enjoy the randomness inherent to the enchanting system. I tolerate it, but it feels like a good concept dragged down.

Target selection is frustrating. The best spells for me are those that don't require a target, simply because I can reliably use them in a fight.

Mob sniping/stealing shouldn't be possible. If party A gets a mob down to 1% health, lone player B shouldn't be able to take the last hit and get all the knowledge and loot. A system that weighs the damage done by varying parties involved to determine who gets the kill would be very nice.

I don't enjoy gear permanently wearing out. Would be nice if we could at least repair it.

I don't enjoy the amount of hard CC in the game (even in PvE). CC basically takes me out of the game, and I've never found that enjoyable.

We really need party icons on the map!

I'd love to be able to build a wizard tower on a wilderness plot! Specifically:

• Multiple interior stories (at least three!)
• Ability to place the crafting stations for weaving, staff creation, and item enchanting (as well as a real fireplace/bed for memorization)
• Outdoor herb garden plots and animal pens (in the eight tiles around the central tile)
• No upkeep; just up-front upgrade/build costs
• Customizations for my Aristocrat pack! (I'd trade existing bonuses for this.)

I could see other themes as well:

• Hunter's Lodge (allows placing of woodworking and leatherworking stations/tubs)
• Outlaw Camp (blacksmithing stations)

That would provide more options than just which city to join.

@Medic

Some big differences:

• Albion has vertical progression, but Fractured has horizontal progression, as implemented by the knowledge system.
• Albion is based on NPC PvE-only cities. In Fractured, as far as I know, all cities will be player-built. This will likely make the Fractured world far more immersive (more like EVE Online).
• Albion has many small maps. Fractured has a few much bigger ones (entire continents, at this point). The single Fractured continent in Alpha feels huge compared to AO's world. Also, I get the impression there will be much less teleporting around.
• Albion's endgame is PvP only, basically. Fractured will have a planet devoted mostly to PvE (Arboreus), although it can still be invaded to an extent.
• Fractured has RNG in combat (Albion, as far as I know, does not).
• Fractured characters will be combat-ready quickly, due to the starting attribute system, whereas in Albion, you are simply what gear you wear.

I was in the test, but I couldn't play it, since it's not supported on Win 8.1 I'm not going to upgrade my system (and potentially my hardware) just for New World, so we'll see if they make it any more backward compatible in future test.

If not, I'll be waiting a while. I did notice that the game didn't seem to have a lot of new concepts, just old ones bolted together.

This was one of my suggestions for a next-gen open world MMO, and I think it largely applies to Fractured too:

Been thinking about this more, and here’s a more in-depth example of what a next-gen MMO could do:

Dynamic Wildlife Biomes

In my experience, MMOs usually have static mob spawners that do little more than replace mobs at static intervals.

Instead, what if wildlife were dynamic, changing in the world and changing the world? Here’s one possible implementation:

• Boar mobs are configured to seek out forest biomes
• A core boar spawner is placed in a forest biome, adding X boars over Y interval
• If the active boar population in the area reaches Z, then level up the spawner

The leveled spawner can now do several new things:

• Send squads of boars to investigate nearby territory for expansion
• Spawn higher-level boars, tougher, of course, and with better possible ingredients if killed
• Spawn a Boar dungeon in the heart of the forest, with (naturally) a nasty boar boss. If players complete this dungeon too many times, the spawner is considered subdued, and loses a level, ultimately reverting back to core and despawning the dungeon

The boars will thus seek to expand their territory within specific biomes (and not human-recognized territories, of course), going to war with the current wildlife in those biomes if needed. If successful, the boars will place an auxiliary boar spawner in the conquered biome, that works in all ways like the core spawner, except it can be destroyed.

At the same time, any predator that considers boars to be prey will find the increased population of boars a tasty, tasty treat! They may attempt to move in to the forest biome, and thus place an auxiliary spawner of their own kind within the boar biome (since the boars themselves are a biome to the predator).

Note how this makes “kill X mob” missions more interesting. A faction may not want boars to increase in its area, and thus will post meaningful “kill X mob” quests to control the boar population.

Or, a faction may want to prevent an enemy faction from reaping the benefits of higher-level boar ingredients, and thus post PvP boar-poaching missions, or PvP missions to complete a boar dungeon in enemy territory.

Note also how this makes world dungeons more interesting. Their appearance is dependent on more subtle world conditions, defeating them can have subtle world effects, and leaving them alone can also have subtle world effects.

Finally, the Corruption mechanic could tie right into this dynamic wildlife, by (what else) corrupting it. Corruption could send its tendrils into that boar dungeon, and it might start spawning corrupted boars in the area: tougher and more aggressive, desiring to spread Corruption as far as possible.

Furthermore, a corrupted dungeon within X distance of a faction town could have innate negative effects on the town, thus spawning more meaningful faction missions.

Again, I think the above framework transcends PvE or PvP, and provides a means to make both more meaningful.

At least in the open world, am hoping for ecosystems, with cause and effect (kill the apex predators, and the bunnies go wild, etc.).

Would be cool to see lairs that only spawn if certain conditions are met (too many bunnies? a killer rabbit dungeon spawns! ).

The more I play Alpha, the more the attribute system feels out of place (for reasons already described here). I'd consider the following:

• Use Albion's "you are what you wear" system, such that all gear innately provides attributes.
• Varying races get an innate multiplier to certain attributes, or just flat bonuses or penalties.
• Merge attributes into the talent tree system. Maybe even have unique racial talent trees (my favorite option! ).

Mainly hoping to be part of a good sandbox MMO from the start, and Fractured sounded very interesting.

Horizontal progression: very curious to see how that works in practice.

@Whisper

Good question! If I had to solve the problem, I'd look at the following:

• Logistics. Make it hard to project power, and easy to defend the home/town/castle (which has the advantage of being true to RL).
• As others have pointed out, limit guild and alliance sizes: or make them progressively more costly to maintain (again, representing a kind of logistics).

Continuing the above thread, one inherent aspect of MMOs that's foisted on developers is instant communications across the MMO world: it's like FTL comms everywhere. In RL medieval settings, the communication lag across massive distances would make unification far more difficult.

Representing that by hugely increasing maintenance costs for bigger guilds/alliances seems reasonable: "bigger" meaning more members and/or more territory controlled. (You don't meet your payments, your alliance disbands!)

Hmm. I'm not sure I see Steampunk as mixing timelines. Technology generally springs from necessity, but it doesn't seem likely that the beastmen or the demons would ever need or want to use advanced technology, no matter how much time passed over the centuries, since both races have significant innate, divine, and magical power available to them.

Humans, on the other hand, are weak in comparison, thus it makes sense they would try to compete via technology. In that vein, steampunk tech seems a reasonable development.

I also note that the human Lich transformation could again be called an attempt to bridge a power gap (perhaps even allowing unlimited lifespans to better pursue technological advancement), whereas the Angel and Abomination transformations seem more about karma reversal.

The counter to what I'm saying is magic: if humans have enough access to arcane power, they might pursue magic-based tech instead of steam (spellpunk? ).

Even so, that's competing in kind against the magic of Beastmen and Demons, whom I'd expect to be experienced in the arcane arts, whereas steampunk tech may be more likely to present military problems Beastmen and Demons have yet to encounter or defend against.

@Gothix said in The End of most Sandbox PVP Games-The losing side.:

If some people will "suck at playing" it should be their own problem in a sandbox game. They should learn to play instead of asking for game to be converted to a theme park with various limits that insure balance.

Thank you for understanding.

Actually, I don't understand. Even a real sandbox can't exist without rules allowing emergent gameplay:

• A boundary (the box)
• Sand (follows its own extremely complex rules)
• Tools/toys (for moving sand around, or moving around on sand)
• Possibly water (to harden sand and allow more construction types with molds, and whatnot)

Is anyone disputing that reality?

Rather, what we're actually talking about is sharing the sandbox with others!

If one bully takes everyone else's toys, the ability for everyone else to use the sandbox becomes artificially limited. That's the problem. As you said:

We want to play a game that does not limit the possibilities.

Blaming the victims for not being good enough, well, I probably shouldn't say more, I might violate forum rules....

Cool topic!

On Arboreus, I'd create a wingless, herbivorous dragon, that can combine bio-chemicals stored in chambers in a large, horn-like structure on its head to breathe fire.

That's secondarily a defense mechanism, but primarily a way to unlock tasty seeds from huge, otherwise uncrackable, fire-tree cones, representing a symbiotic relationship with the forest.

Given that Arboreus itself attacks evil-aligned players who venture there, it seems reasonable that the tamable creatures on it wouldn't be easily tamed (if at all) by evil-aligned players.

@Xzait

RNG is a way to mask a lack of real content by increasing repetition; in short, RNG makes bad systems look better. In the process, RNG devalues a player's time and effort.

Despite that, RNG-based systems attract customers, for much the same reasons that lotteries and casinos attract customers. RNG offers an easy out to developers, and a significant percentage of people like it, so I get why it's common.

I prefer deterministic systems that provide emergent gameplay, however, chess perhaps being the quintessential example of RNG-free mechanics with incredible replayability (go being another).

At any rate, for me RNG reduces replayability. The more RNG a game has, the less I will play it.

Hmm: I'm surprised "escapism" isn't on the lists of reasons to game. That could be important to designers, because realism doesn't necessarily appeal to those wanting to take a break from reality.

For example, I've already got a real life job where things decay and break, and I have to maintain them, and I haven't liked that mechanic in games!

In that sense, the counter of escapism would probably be "simulation".

@insomnia said in shitty game:

What a shitty game. What incompetent retards thinks it's a good idea to give people useless gear and make it a pain to get better. You do fuck all damage as a "warrior". Yet you don't seem to be able to get a better weapon. When you die, you revive weaker, making you die faster. If you respawn at a city, you lose all your shit. So now i have to run where i was, with no gear! This game deserves to fail. What a pile of garbage. I died and have to spend what! 20 fucking minutes or so, i would guess, because on top of this shit. Traveling is ridiculesly slow. And you have no idea where your corpse is

I agree with three of your points:

• Most gear upgrades are gated behind cities, and I don't like that.
• Losing your gear isn't fun, whether to death or decay, and I've never really liked that in any game I've played. The good news is that the starter gear is easy to replace, and you can become much more powerful simply by getting knowledge, although even that is technically city-gated now, which I don't like. (At the least you should be able to upgrade your points in your home, whether it's in a city or not.)
• Traveling is indeed incredibly slow, and most of my game sessions in Alpha so far have been spent traveling, which is hard on my hand! I do expect content density to increase on the map, and I hope that removes some of the travel-boredom.

So, in short: most content is city-gated and travel-gated. While I don't want the game to fail, I'm not sure those mechanics are going to appeal to enough people to populate the world long-term.

@Kralith

Most gear upgrades are gated behind cities, and I don't like that design or direction for the game. I consider solo gameplay to be extremely important to the health of an MMO, and Fractured is more and more shafting solo players.

Losing all your gear when dying plus the immense travel times (and difficulty of finding your corpse) is another effective way to push away customers.

The business problem is opportunity cost. A game is meant to provide entertainment, and if most potential customers feel they have a much better chance of finding that entertainment elsewhere, well, you're probably not going to stay in business long.

I find myself bored with Fractured very quickly now: it's mostly chores plus traveling (and really wonky combat, though I'm hoping that's just Alpha). I do like the knowledge system, but the more I see of the overall design direction, the more I'm thinking this won't be my game.

Under the new talent tree, you can play as a mage without needing any gear crafted in cities, or needing any enchantments. They do help, of course, but you don't need them.

Would love to see crafting added to the knowledge reward system! Could be as simple as every new recipe you make, you get a one-time knowledge gain.

Or, it could be like killing mobs, where you have to craft several to fully unlock all the knowledge (and maybe get an extra bonus like a skill).

Either way, I think it would improve the game.