Best posts made by spoletta

After playing for 10 days and getting a feeling of the decay rate of item and of the general impact that these new changes had on the players, I would like to offer the following feedback.

First of all, a summary of the current situation:

• The game right now has an itemization based on 3 levels for armors (primitive, non primitive, set) and 2 levels for weapons (primitive and non primitive).

• We have 3 levels of enchantments. Respectively called tier 1, 2 and 3.

• Durability is set as follows: all primitive items have 200 durability. Non primitive bows, wooden shields, wooden weapons and mage weapons have 300, metal weapons and metal shields have 400, Non primitive armors have 200 durability on cloth, 250 on leather, 300 on hide, 350 on metal. Set armors have 50 more durability over the non primitive version.

• Masteries in crafting go from 0 to 4. Each mastery increases the durability of the items crafted by 50%.

• Good and neutral players drop no gear on death. Red players drop almost always all the gear

Now let's see how easy or hard it is to achieve that (note: this post will not talk about the recipes which are already discussed in many other places, I will assume that the recipes are available):

• Crafting any primitive item is trivial

• Crafting a non primitive hide or cloth armor is easy with common materials, but requires some effort if you want to get some rare material.

• The same is true for leather armors, with the caveat that you have to tan the leather first, which adds a bit more effort to the total.

• Crafting a non primitive metal armor takes a lot of time and resources

• Crafting non primitive wooden weapons or shields is trivial, even when using rare woods.

• Crafting non primitive metal weapons takes some effort but is easy enough.

• Crafting set armors is like crafting a non set version but with the addition of some PvE drop which can be extremely hard in some cases, like the 5 dragon souls of an hunter set.

• Enchanting at t1 level is much harder than in the previous tests due to a "nerf" of the properties of the reagents, but still reasonably doable for anyone (and as a personal note: quite fun)

• Enchanting at t2 level requires some very specific reagent combinations which usually are not common. Doable but not something you do on throw away items.

• Enchanting at t3 is mostly a guild level effort

Now let's see how much this stuff will last:

• A weapon used regularly (archer or warrior) loses around 40 durability per day.

• A weapon used by a caster class will mostly not lose durability

• An armor used by a ranged class will mostly not lose durability

• An armor used by a melee class will lose around 10 per day.

• Gear drop rules have some impact on this, but mostly negligible. Items which require effort only change hands, don't get destroyed.

Finally, before going into the discussion of this, let's see which was the reaction of players to this system:

• Having a sort of gear progression which requires a certain amount of effort has been very well received by mostly all players.

• The non gear drop for good and neutral was very badly received by red players.

• The increased durability of items was well received by many players, but there is an underlying fear of how the economy will shape out.

With all that said, these are my thoughts on it, what I like and what I don't like:

My first reaction to this system was very negative. No gear drops and progress through gear definitely did not felt like this they aligned with how I expected this game to be. By playing and talking with other players though, I cannot ignore the fact that some of those changes were very well received. In particular the new gear system. Players like to have to work toward obtaining a certain gear and not having to replace it every other day due to it breaking, and honestly Arboreus would not really work without mechanics like this. Additionally, I feel that this amount of progress is mild enough that you can definitely perceive it, but it doesn't turn the game into a gear check or a world of "have" and "have not". You can still run in mostly primitive gear and achieve about the same stuff, just harder. As such, I'm willing to accept this as a part of Fractured. It doesn't 100% align with what I had in mind but it's not a deal breaker, and since the majority likes it, I could be fine with it too. It can be a fine compromise.

Talking about the gear drops though, this isn't really working well. Having items which require this level of effort to obtain automatically prevents any form of full gear drop in the game. While this may fine on a world like Arboreus, this warps some underlying mechanics and interaction on which Syndesia is based. Syndesia is a PvX world. PvP is half of it, and reds are part of this PvP system. They are meant to be a niche, to have disadvantages, and that the good guys should not be bothered too much by them. But this system has now gone too far in that direction. Playing a red in this system is impossibly punishing. What should the red penalties achieve? Those penalties ideally should prevent the creation of any large red figthing group, due to imposing them severe logistic restrictions, which makes them act more as solo robbers of carts and lone predators of PvE hotspots.
The current level of such restrictions do indeed manage that, but they manage to be so punishing that even solo actions are carried out only through petty tricks or borderline exploits which allows reds to act safely, because the level of risk is simply unbearable otherwise. Also, stuff like this should NEVER exist https://forum.fracturedmmo.com/topic/15019/player-spawn-locations-during-pvp-combat-is-a-big-issue . Player throwing themselves at the enemy knowing that they risk nothing is bad, no matter how you look at it. There must be some form of penalty at all times.
At the same time though, it is having very positive impacts too. Trades have picked up, acquiring an item is a safer investment. Players form groups to go around and look for rare resources. This is nice, and I would like this to continue, so scrapping this new system altogether would be a step in the wrong direction. Despite my initial reaction I believe that this system is proving to have better potential than the old one, so I would like to tune and find the right compromises on this one, rather than going back to the previous one.

Talking about durability instead, I honestly smell a disaster incoming. The economy will collapse. I would like everyone to understand that this game economy can work only if every week the amount of resources destroyed through durability is exactly equal to the amount of resources gathered. With the current durability this will simply not happen, and one of the the curprit of this are the masteries.

Like with the item progression, I do not like having a craft progression through grind and repetition, but I do understand that many like it, so I will accept that part too. In their current incarnation though, masteries are a terrible element of the game. While in this system gear progression players in different levels of gear can coexist, fight with and against each other with the same rules and varying degrees of advantage/disadvantage, this does not happen with masteries. A player with 4/4 in an item and one with 1/4 simply cannot coexist in the same economy.
This is a difficult concept to grasp, but durability is a very important stat. Many frown upon masteries because they "only increase durability, but no stats", but durability in a system where you can't repair and can't be looted is a HUGE element of value.
Even if enchantments were not in the game, a sword made with someone in 0/4 would be worth only 1/3 of one one built by someone in 4/4, because the latter has 3 times the durability. It will give me the advantages of that item for 3 times longer, so it is worth 3 times as much. Simple as that. These 2 items are made from the same materials, and simply cannot co exist. There is no competition on town position or price which can bridge that gap of value.
This is made even worse by the cost of enchants. Since higher level enchants have an high cost associated, the value of an item with higher durability is further incremented by being a better recipe for higher enchants. Enchants put on a higher durability item offer a bigger return of investment for the same resources. In the end the item from a 4/4 is impossibly more valuable than a 0/4. This means that you are either 4/4 or you don't craft, because the price of raw materials will be based on a 4/4 craft. This will 100% require a change.

The second critical flaw of this system is that as highlighted previously, some items simply do not degrade. The armor and jewels of any ranged character is almost eternal. The weapons of mages too. This is not good. Items have to get destroyed for all the economic system of Fractured to work.

In summary, the issues I currently perceive with the game are:

• Too heavy penalties for Red
• Not enough penalties for good and neutral
• Excessive progression of item value granted by masteries
• Items not breaking often enough to have a good economy
• Wood items are too easy to make

Based on that, I would propose the following changes:

Should we bring back gear drop for good players?
I'm mostly convinced that the answer is NO.
Not having them drop gear has had too many good impacts on the game. That should stay, and we should look elsewhere for a solution.

So, how we give them penalties for dying? How we rebalance a bit the huge disadvantage of red toward good players?
I would say that we should look back to the last time the system worked. For that we look at the last alpha, were we had goods drop 2, neutral drop 4, red drop all. This was also with an average value of the items which was drastically lower. So I guess that we can start just by rescaling this.

The items have an higher value, so to inflict the same value of penalty you need less gear to drop. I like zero drops on good players, so let's move from there. Good zero, neutral one, reds 1-2 depending on Karma. Reds should drop 1 when under -2000 (killing is -2500, so this red only stole a cart or similar levels of crime), 2 when under this value (they killed someone). Dropping all items is too much of a penalty. Losing only 2 I feel is bearable.
Why not zero on neutral? Hmm, I'm in doubt between zero and one. Because neutral players are the core of the PvP of Syndesia and they must feel confident in engaging in as much as activity as they want. After all any possible target is willingly participating. But at the same time it feels wrong... I feel like one would be better.

So, how would this solve the fact that blue are actually unaffected by any penalty for dying and can charge head first into a fight while risking only bandages? I would tie this with our current issue with durability, and simply apply this:

Every time you get purple health, you suffer an amount of durability damage on all your items equal to the 2/3 of the percentage of health lost. When you get executed, it counts as suffering all the remaining red health as purple health. What this translates to, is a 10 durability damage on your items when you get knocked down, and a total of 66 when you get killed, no matter how many times you were knocked down before that. You can get knocked once and lose 10 then be executed for the remaining 55, or get knocked 6 times for 6 and then be executed for 6.
In the end a full life lost is always 66.
This is a good deterrent to throwing away your life, and introduces a decent degrade on items, which affects even those which normally wouldn't suffer damage.
This though would not introduce a "reward" for reds killing them. And I think that it is fine. On Syndesia reds should go after good players to rob them of their loot and their carts, not to take their equipment. It would be too severe of an impact.

With this system, blue will most of the times go around with their best or close to best equipment, which is what most of them want. Reds will be able to run around in non primitive gear with t1 and t2 enchants, because it is reasonably possible to replace them if you lose only one or two. Neutral players too will mostly fight in non primitive t2 enchanted and bring out the sets only for the best occasions. This is a decently fair fight. You can fight against good equip using t1/t2 non primitive gear, and imposes that gear disadvantage on reds which is what is expected for Syndesia.

This should in my opinion solve the issue of reds, blue and item degradation.

Next issue, masteries. The +50% per level has to go. I would prefer an increase of stats to it, and many players would consider it more natural. So I propose that the 4 mastery levels become: first level +5% durability, second level +5% damage/armor, third level +5% durability, fourth level +5% damage/armor. This is more natural and gives someone at 4/4 a significant advantage of 10% in stats and 10% in durability over someone in 0/4. This is a big advantage but not big enough to completely put anyone else out of business.

Last issue, wood items. Currently with one yew tree you can make something like 10 yew bows. Definitely too easy. Wooden items will never have a value like this. They would have to require something like 10 times the current logs to give them a worth. Personally the best solution would be to give wooden item creation a bit more depth, introducing the kilns, long time curing like leather and so on. This though would require a major effort from the devs, which right now look very busy with that roadmap. So I would say that for now the easiest solution is that high quality trees only drop 1 log of their specific material, and all the other logs that they produce are simply light wood and hard wood. After all only some specific parts of a tree are good for crafting.

With that said, this was my wall of text and I would like everyone to drop in and contribute to finding the right compromise.

So, I have promised on discord to make a post with a few spoilers on what you may find in the next version of the game, and that I will do.

Please note that I have only a partial knowledge of what is to come. I simply had a way to take a look at the version under test, and it wasn't even the most recent version.

With that said, I guess that if we are talking about news, I really have to open with this:

There's a lot to unravel in this image.

First of all, there is now a thing called "Rank". This is a value tied to your character which increases as you increase your knowledge points.

Based on your rank you will have a certain amount of talents and a maximum proficiency level in schools (more on this later).

That's right, talents are no longer unlocked with KPs. Instead, you simply get more of them by increasing your knowledge points.

This by the way is true also for skills. You no longer spend KP to unlock them. You discovered a skill? Well you can use it! No more unlocking required, it's yours from the get go.

What this means is that you no longer have the risk of not getting to unlock talents because your spent too much on skills. KPs are simply no longer spent. This by the way also comes with a drawback. You can no longer focus early on the talents to unlock all of them as soon as possible.

The ranks are harder to get the more you have. This means that getting your first talents will be quite fast, but getting to 60 talents will take a while. To give some numbers to this "while", at 80k you already have 30 talents. How much for 60 talents? You are looking at more than 400k.

This brings the game back to the original idea that characters should be ready to join the fight very fast, but that the game should offer the possibility for dedicated players to push their limits to get an edge. Previously if you min maxed correctly, after you hit 200k KP you no longer had a reason to do any other activity. Now if you want every last talent point (and school proficiency) you will need to gather every last point of knowledge.

I believe that the game will benefit quite a lot from this system. Especially new players will be a lot less prone to false starts.

Moving on to the next big topic... school proficiencies!

So what are those? Well to know what they are I first have to show you how the tooltip of a skill looks like now, and what better skill to spoil than the good old fireball?

This graphic which I took from the new wiki (yes, there is a new wiki coming) reconstructs quite well what you will find in game, thanks to the marvelous work of our Wiki Guardian GorTavaro.

This often mistreated skill has received quite the buff in the new version! But what is that huge number we read there? That's a 50! Does it really mean that a fireball can inflict 50x INT damage? Well... yes and no. Depends on your proficiency in the pyromancy school. You see that there are 2 numbers there. 25 to 50. Those with a proficiency level of 0 will cast it with a (very respectable) 25XInt damage, those with the maximum proficiency (level 10) will cast a quite scary 50xInt spell. Any other proficiency level scales linearly, so for example at proficiency 4 you will cast at 35 X Int.

All skills have effects which scale with proficiency, but they don't all scale in the same way. Here, get a few more examples so that you get an idea:

Now, as you can imagine this new system required a redesign of all skills. And redesigned they were. You will find all of them here on the old wiki https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spells_%26_Abilities?so=search
They have some minor mistakes and they don't look as well as they do on the new wiki, but in the mean time it should sate your hunger.

Key takeaways from the redesign:

• Almost all spells are now castable in medium armor. Only the assassination skills are still forcing you to wear the light armors. But sweet heavens are those assassination skills powerful...

• The schools have changed, and all the skills were sorted into their new schools. In particular, the offensive melee skills have been sorted into schools specialised in one type of weapon. Those skills are usable only with weapons of that type!

• A lot of skills were added. Especially non magical ones.

Now I know that many of you by this point have a burning question: How do you increase your proficiency level?
The answer is orbs.

Remember well this icon here. You are looking at potentially the most sought after and frequently traded item in the future of Fractured!

Now, what I say here is hearsay, the version which I played didn't have them yet. That icon was obtained with... unconventional means (kids at home, don't do this).

There's supposed to be a different orb for each of the schools, and when consumed it increases your knowledge of that school. These orbs are obtained from "Elite" mobs. What are those? No idea either, sorry . Apparently, they are supposed to be about as rare as recipes.

And you won't need a single one. Each proficiency level you get requires progressively more orbs to unlock. Similarly to talents, unlocking the first ranks of proficiency in a school will be easy, unlocking the last ones will not. Consider also that there is a minimum rank required to gain a certain level of proficiency.

Same concept repeated. Easy gains of power until you reach a good level, then the path to power gets rougher the further in you go.

"Completing" a character is now a feat. And a very long term one.

Oh by the way, the monster too have heard of this concept and wanted in. The higher the difficulty (challenge rating) of a mob and the higher will be its proficiencies. You don't understand what "A world of pain" means until you meet the new dragons. Remember that cute bone wall that the skeletal dragon throws at you? Well that's inflicting 80 bleeding stacks now. And let's not talk about what his breath has become!

Well that's it!
Hope that these spoilers will keep you company while we wait for Fractured to be available to play again!

Link to the recorded Q&A: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1236981888

List of questions with timestamp:

00:12:07 - What does the partnership between Dynamight and Gamigo mean for the vision of Fractured?

00:13:10 - Will Dynamight retain the property of Fractured if it proves to be not profitable?

00:13:45 - Can the community expect a faster release of Fractured with the Gamigo's partnership?

00:15:09 - Does Dynamight possess creative control and specifically monetization control?

00:16:55 - What does Gamigo gain out of this partnership?

00:17:52 - The press release from Gamigo says that they have worldwide IP right, does it mean that Gamigo owns the Fractured IP?

00:18:29 - What is the support from Gamigo, does it permit seeking outside funding?

00:19:14 - What is Gamigo's plan if Fractured doesn't meet profit expectations?

00:21:02 - Will Fractured be region locked? What languages will it be translated into?

00:21:37 - Will Dynamight ever support a plan for F2P or P2W features?

00:22:45 - If we have purchased a founder pack already, will we receive the same content after the partnership with Gamigo?

00:23:59 - Why choose Gamigo as Fractured Publisher?

00:27:10 - What does Gamigo announcement mean for Fractured playerbase?

00:30:12 - Has it helped registrations and new accounts?

00:31:20 - What is Gamigo's long term vision for Fractured?

00:32:06 - How can players be confident that Dynamights retains control over Fractured's directions and monetization?

00:32:55 - When can we expect alpha, beta and launch to happen?

00:34:55 - Will there be more servers in the upcoming test to handle the influx of new players?

00:36:33 - Will Fractured still be released on Steam? Will it use the Glyph launcher? Or any other launcher?

00:37:40 - How will redunds request be handled?
00:40:11 - Will we see more of Michele's art?

00:42:00 - Will a console version be released for Fractured?

00:42:30 - Will Gamigo intervene negatively with the translation of Fractured in other languages?

00:43:45 - When do we get steam keys?

00:45:45 - What is the strategy for the imminent loss of players that will affect Fractured due to the partnership with Gamigo?

00:47:13 - Discussion around the fact that Gamigo is supporting a game under development, which is contrary to everything they did before.

00:48:19 - Can we have more persistent test phases where we don't have start everything from zero?

00:51:20 - Has Wes had a chance to play Fractured? What are his favourite skill sets?

00:52:35 - Is there a roadmap somewhere?

00:54:25 - Another question about the launcher

00:56:25 - Has Gamigo any experience with a project which is not F2P? Does it have a plan for a monetization model which makes the game progress and not disappear?

00:57:20 - What features is Wes looking to? What would he change currently?

00:58:55 - Can we see the demons in the next test?

01:00:23 - When will fishing be added?

01:01:15 - Will we get the implementation that the spells interact with the environment?

01:01:40 - Will we get dual daggers?

01:02:35 - How long will the contract with the publisher last?

01:03:35 - When do we get the new builds on Glyph? Accounts need to be transferred?

01:04:15 - How long will Gamigo financial support last after release?

01:05:15 - What is Gamigo's plan to publicize Fractured?

Since the creation of the enchanting system, many combinations have come and gone and what we have today is a subset of the initial set of possible enchants. When they were first created, the enchant recipes covered reasonably well all the existing aspects, but with the removal of many of those, today this is no longer true.
In the current situation there are some aspects which are over used, and some that have literally zero recipes tied to them.

To be more specific, this is the current situation for each aspect in how many combinations it is used:

Primal Aspects:

Mind: 7
Body 14
Soul: 8

This here is the first issue. For those that didn't notice, all combinations have always one and exactly one aspect from the 3 primal ones. Now, here there isn't a real imbalance, because Body contains all the Resist X enchants, which we may consider as a single enchant type.

Manipulation:

Transform: 11
Negate: 8
Create: 7
Destroy: 0 !!!
Transfer: 2

Same concept as the primal aspects. All combinations have one and exactly one manipulation aspect from these 5. In here we can notice that all combinations that originally used destroy, are no longer existent. Most of the ones using transfer have gone as well. Right now, destroy on a reagent is completely useless. Negate contains mostly all the resistances, while transform and create contain almost all the combinations.

Universal:

Air: 3
Earth: 1
Water: 2
Fire: 2
Chaos: 10
Time: 4
Death: 2
Life: 3
Order: 10
Energy: 14!!!
Knowledge: 6

The other 2 aspects of the enchants come from the universal list, and here too we notice some serious imbalance. Most of the elemental aspects are almost not used (especially important now that we have legendary reagents coming from elementals). Similar for death and life. At the same time, chaos order and energy are grossly overused.

Luckily, rebalancing them isn't that difficult, because you do it separately from Primal, Manipulation and Universal aspects. At the same time though, the aspects have been clearly combined to provide a reasonable combination for that effect, and I would like to preserve that as much as possible. You also need to avoid duplicating combinations. In particular, I would propose the following changes:

For Primal:

No changes needed here

For Manipulation:

Accuracy, Critical Chance from Transform to Destroy
Cooldown Reduction from Transform to Transfer
Critical damage from Create to Destroy

This would give a bit of value to Destroy, and a little more use to Transfer. It would leave us with Transform having mostly all the stat bonuses and evasion. Negate would have all resistances, willpower and fortitude. Create would have many of the niche ones like lockpick, stealth and detection, plus 2 more generically used like mana and endurance. Destroy would have 3 generically used ones and transfer too. They would have around the same weight in total.

For Universal:

We clearly need to knock down a bit the value of Energy while giving to elemental aspects. I would move Bonus Endurance, Strength and Health Regen from Energy to Earth. Cooldown Reduction and Luck from Energy to Death.Dexterity from Energy to Air. Willpower from Energy to Water.
Bonus mana from Order to Life.
Critical chance from Chaos to Fire and Critical Damage from Order to Fire.
Lower Mana Cost from Order to Water.
Detection from Chaos to Air.

WIth these changes, Energy Chaos and Order would still be the most important universal aspects, but at least some dignity would be given to air, fire, water earth, life and death.

Q: Regarding the new continent, can you tell us a bit more about its features? Is it possible to start on it or the starting areas will be limited to Myr? Will the extreme environment of the area limit the food production capabilities of the cities there? - 09:15

A: You can start on Aerhen. Environment is not implemented yet, but when it does the cold will influence food production

Q: How often can we expect updates? Will we have events like city sieges? 10:08

A:Monthly updates are planned. There will be more events like the Dark Convergence

Q: Are all races and planets going to be in at the start of the beta? 11:35

A: Only humans and Syndesia are in at the moment, the other ones will be introduced with the updates.

Q: Is it possible for someone who dislikes pvp, even more open world, to enjoy the game? 12:06

A: Yes, it is possible. Especially with Wildfolk.

Q: Will penguins be in the new continent? 12:48

A: Unknown

Q: Will Aerhenn be mainly snow? 12:55

A: No

Q: Do we get a roadmap? 13:15

A: Should be shared soon

Q: Are there any implemented changes for unimplemented talents? 13:35

A: The talent tree has been redesigned. The first 2 circles are generic abilities not tiered to any specific gameplay. The third and outer circle instead contains more specific effects.

Q: Will Vegetables be implemented at the start of the beta? 14:35

A: Not yet

Q: Will Alchemy be implemented at the start? 15:05

A: No

Q: Will we get bigger carts? Higher cost/bigger volume 15:15

A: No

Q: Is the first tier of gems going to be cheaper to socket? 15:35

A: Gems are no longer needed. Just reagents.

Q: Are the cannons and the superior human technology coming? 16:15

A: Not scrapped, but not yet currently in.

Q: There are plans for short term competitive environments? 16:40

A: There are plans to implement Asteroids, informations will come at a later date.

Q: Are there plans to improve the chat and community interface? 17:23

A: There are plans for the chat but not for the community interface like cities.

Q: Are there going to be updates to the audio? 18:05

A: There have been many updates to the audio of many effects, but not yet on the ambience sounds.

Q: What time do the servers come up? 18:53

A: 4PM CET, 7 AM Pacific, 10AM Eastern

Q: Is the beta going to be stable enough to be playable when you live in places like Australia? 19:20

A: It is not easy to provide a stable game in Oceania, but there are a few compensations that should alleviate the ping issue.

Q: Will the repair mechanic be implemented or be considered in the future? 20:19

A: No it will not be considered, but the durability has been increased and the master crafters will be able to craft items with higher durability

Q: Is there going to be a rags meta? People going around in basic equipment to avoid resources losses and thus affecting the game economy? 21:16

A: We don't expect that. Consider also that good and neutral players will no longer drop equip, only inventory. Red players will drop equipment based on their karma.

Q: Will the existing packets keep their benefits after the changes to the founder packs? Will the tutorials be skipable? 22:05

A: Yes, eternal VIP included. There have been many updates to the tutorial, please send feedback.

Q: Pretty much the same question 23:05

A: Same answer. Kickstarter packs apply too.

Q: Will the store and website work before the start of the beta?: 23:32

A: Should be fixed, retry. If you have still issues, please send feedback.

Q: Plese detail the current VIP perks: 24:30

A: Unchanged from the website and FAQ (and from the wiki!!! https://fractured.fandom.com/wiki/Fractured#VIP_membership ~ Spoletta). More details will follow on possible additional benefits.

Q: In the past tests we had many different systems for ranking up cities, in particular one which required a minimum number of residents for each rank and one which didn't. What is the model that will be applied for this test? 25:10

A: No minimum number of residents. Just resources.

Q: Will harbor towns get half of the cost of going inbetween continents? 25:45

A: Half sink. 1 quarter to departing town. 1 quarter to destination town.

Q: Are we going to get a more in depth crafting system with progression? 26:30

A: Yes, you will unlock new sets and recipes.

Q: Will there be any fast travel besides harbors? 27:39

A: No

Q: Will farming work the same on Aerhenn and Myr? 28:06

A: Yes

Q: Can we transport carts between continents? 28:24

A: Yes

Q: Will the Community managers place cities so that we can test sieges without antogonizing each other? 28:59

A: It will be considered.

Q: Will the backdoor to Shadowvale be opened? 29:26

A: Not yet, still a mistery!

Q: Are you thinking about new options for loot sharing? 29:43

A: Not in closed beta

Q: Is the game still using the deprecated SpatialOS Unity GDK for the backend or was it migrated to IMS zeuz? Are you allowed to selfhost? Who's the entity that owns the server (physically and legally) Gamigo or DS? 29:54

A: The infrastructure is managed by Gamigo. The plan is to upgrade from SpatialOS in the next months. It is part of the tests of this beta.

Q: The Gamigo data transfer news implies that gamigo US inc. is now hosting and managing the website and forum. I was told by a moderator that's not true and it's still DS for both. Could you clarify the physical and legal ownership of the server for the website/forum and who's in charge for configuration/maintenance of the server and who's in charge for updates on the code? 30:47

A: Migration is under way. The infrastructure will be managed by Gamigo, code and development by DS.

High atop an hill, three figures were hastily recapping their nefarious plan. The moon was clearly visible in the sky, casting a pale light and long shadows all over their improvised camp.

“That’s it everyone, the time has almost come. Stick to the plan and tomorrow at this hour we will be filthy rich.” Her low barking voice easily identified her as one of the Udoadra, wolf like people rarely seen on Syndesia. They were famed to be strong, noble and natural leaders.
This particular Udoadra went under the name of Rala and she did show the typical traits of her people… minus the noble part.
Indeed she would be more easily described as a scoundrel, always looking around for the next fool who could be easily detached from his belongings.

One week ago she had been approached by an old acquaintance of her, a bald man of an impossible to define age. He bore on his face the marks of a life spent over the sea, and the labyrinth of scars on his face told of more than enough swords.
Everyone referred to him as the “Ol’ man” to the point that many had started mistaking Olman for his real name, Rala included.

Rala knew that he had his own ways to catch the last news before the others, and that he always made sure to profit on his leads. Plenty of coins had found their way into Rala’s pocket thanks to this man, so when she approached her with this new lead, she knew that he could be thrusted, even if the information itself had been hard to believe.
"
Settlers had come to Myr
"
Those were his words..
Myr, a continent brimming with gold, silver and untapped resources, was the dream of a few and the nightmare of many.
Goblins, ogres and bandits roamed the fertile lands while the deserts were plagued by hordes of undead and by foul spider like creatures puked by the gods during a bad hangover. Any previous attempt of conquering those lands had been met with a quick and gory demise.

Yet, this group was trying to settle in there, and according to the Ol’man they already managed to establish the first cities. Too busy facing the unlimited dangers of that place, they were still unaware that their kin could be their worst enemy. In other words, the perfect target. Even more interesting was the fact that they had been organizing themselves around “banks”. Big chests left in the middle of the city, without any kind of lock or protection, where the settlers had been observed putting any kind of item. Including gold. A lot of gold.

Now, after having sailed to Myr from their island, they had been observing their target for a whole day from atop their hill. The newly founded city of Promolonia, and its “bank” were right there in plain sight.

With the help of a lit candle, Ol’ man opened his notes and started recounting the results of their observations with his high pitched and nasal voice.
“According to what we saw from here, the contents of that chest amount to:

• 1150 Animal pelts
• 85 Ingots of still undefined material
• Around 300 hundred stones. Small ones.
• 41 horses…”
  Ol’ man paused for a second, still disturbed by the sight of all those horses being taken in and out of that chest. Then he resumed his reading.
  “…
• Undefined amounts of plant samples and anatomical parts of goblins. Probably tongues.
• At least 20.000 gold coins
• And... “More than my fingers” wood planks. Thank you Trixie for your useful contribution.
  “
  That last sarcastic comment was directed at the third member of this unlikely group. If Rala was a rare sight on Syndesia, the creature knows as Trixie was exceedingly unique.
  Trixie was a Demon. An Hellfire Demon, known to be strong as a mountain and dumb as a rock.
  His real name was Trikel’raxat’kartala and even among his peers he had never been a particularly bright one.
  Rala had met him during her travels, and in an impressive feat even for the extremely social Udoadra, she had managed to befriend him. She had full thrust in her skills, and knew that a cunning plan was the best plan.
  She also knew though that violence made for an excellent plan B, so she hauled around this huge mass of muscles and ferocity wherever she went.
  She was also the one to call him Trixie, lamenting the fact that his name was impossible to pronounce and that someone should really institute a character limit for names. Convincing this huge demon that Trixie was an apt name for a terrifying warrior, had also been a surprisingly fun activity.

Truth to be told, the demon had been close to realizing that he had been tricked and that he should be very very angry at this weirdly chatty dog. Luckily for the 2 other members of the group, such realization had to give way to an intense craving for honey pastries while traversing through his fourth (out of five) synapse. Since no such pastries had ever been in sight, said realization had been stuck in a neural traffic jam ever since that day, and an untimely rampage from the demon had been so far avoided.

“Thank you for the detailed report” Rala cut short her two companions before they could start arguing, and then continued “The plan is easy. Shortly before the dawn there is a small activity of settlers leading their carts in and out of the city, most of them are stopping in front of the bank. We will disguise between them with our own cart, using the darkness to avoid being recognized. We approach the bank, grab everything that is easy the grab, gold coins first and then we disappear in the night before the dawn. Take only what looks like it could be worth its weight.”

A few minutes later, following the plan they had put together all three of them were slowly walking toward the city of Promolonia.

There were a few figures moving in the night. Each of them was busy with his own matters and hardly interested in meddling in the affair of others. Even less so when one of those “others” was hauling a cart which would have normally required a good horse.
“Are you sure that it was a good idea to leave the cart to him? I fear that we may be a little too conspicuous like this.” Ol’man voiced his concern, looking at the demon barely covered with the biggest cape they could find, effortlessly dragging the cart.
“We need the cart, and we don’t have an horse. This is the best option we have, as long as you don’t want to try hauling it yourself.” Was the quick answer from a very annoyed Rala.

With the help of a bit of luck and a of striking sense of dread in all those who met Trixie on the road, the trio finally entered the streets of their target. The bank was there in plain sight, without a single guard taking watch.
“Ok, quick now, grab whatever we can!” Rala issued the order with a whisper in the night.
The three of them jumped on that lone ornated chest sitting under a solid stone roof, almost in contrast with the poor state of the rest of the buildings in the city.

They all started rummaging through that chest, taking out all the gold coins they found and anything that looked expensive. No matter how much they took, there was always more. It seemed impossible for such a chest to hold all that stuff.
“Oh, these two could be useful!” Rala took out from the chest two very surprised horses and attached them to the cart.
“Wow, look at these gems in here, they are so… flawless! These must be worth a lot! Hey Trixie, would you stop eating everything you find and give us an hand?” Ol’man looked in the direction of the demon.

Trixie was standing there, immobile. He was staring into the void in front of him, apparently lost in thought. There was something ominous in the air around him.

“… not warrior name.” these words finally came out of his mouth.

They were softly spoken as if he was speaking with himself, and yet they sounded like fiery boiling rage.

“Eh?” Ol’man couldn’t hear well those words, but his instincts had just put him on full alert.

“TRIXIE NOT WARRIOR NAME! ME KILLS BAD DOG!” Trixie stared daggers at Rala.
“… seriously? After all these years you notice it NOW? When we are this close to getting awfully rich? Have you ever heard of bad timing you bird brained muscle head?” Rala looked more surprised by the surreal situation they were in, more than worried for their imminent fate.
Ol’man sidestepped closer to Rala, while keeping his eyes on the demon, which looked ready to jump on them at any moment.. “Please, tell me that we have a plan B ready.”
“Oh yes, we got a plan B! It is right there! Looking at us and trying to decide if he can eat both of us right now, or if he prefers to keep a bit of me as a late breakfast!”
“Excellent. So what exactly do we do now?” Ol’man kept staring the demon which was slowly advancing toward them.
“We run. NOW!”

---

Many hours later, in the afternoon following that hectic night, a bored guard was inventorying the results of the night assault.
A man clad in a dirty chain armor moved toward him. “So, did you found everything in the end?”
“Ah yes Sheriff, we got almost anything.”
“Almost? What is missing?”
“Oh sir you see, this is very weird, we found almost everything except for a few belongings of Jeremy, the cook. He swears that he had put there a stock of raw bear meat and a few trays of his baked products.”
“Baked products? What kind of baked products?”
“Honey pastries, sir.”

Yes, but with a clause.

Only in the starter towns if you are not a citizien (for the new players).

Only in your city for the citiziens (because we are actually feeding them already!).

Day 7 of the test.
To my knowledge, none of the cities has developed the market place technology.
The economy of this game is based around the concept that no one can be self sufficient because each area has only a specific set of resources and you need resources from far away places to properly prosperate.
Regions in the far north and far south sorely need someone to supply them with iron, while regions in the center have no coal.
Regions from the north provide all the reagents and skins from the trolls, regions from the south most of the dead oak and so on...
Not to mention that a city can't develop all techs, so they are forced to rely on other cities for some of the crafts.

So, why isn't this working? What has gone wrong? Why are all cities trying to be as self sufficient as possible?

I would like everyone (and especially governors) to share their opinions on why things turned out like this and what could be changed to generate more trading between cities.

I will start with my opinions on the matter and possible solutions:

1. Tech points are few and precious. Having to use one on a tech which to work needs the cooperation of other cities, feels risky.
2. Gold doesn't really hold value right now. We needed it at the beginning of the test for all those houses and city upgrades, but what use does it have now? The idea of separating from our resources and items in exchange for gold, doesn't sound very good.
3. We have a deep distrust between cities.
4. We don't have enough non citizien residents. The marketplace is an item exchange point even inside the same region, but since all cities have mostly made all the residents citiziens and tipically guilded them, we are already organized on that front.

Put all this together, and we have the current situation where we prefer hauling carts over half a continent.

So, what do I think that it should be done to improve the situation?

Personally I would go with the following solution.
I think that we all agree that if it didn't require a tech, we would all build one in our cities. But then you remove options from the tech tree, and having multiple choices is good. So I think that the marketplace tech should remain. It could just be an upgrade though. Something that you do to get a bonus in a city which is focusing its efforts in being a trading hub.

As such, I would make the market place a default building that you don't require any tech to build, but rewards to the city coffers only half of the usual income from the marketplace. The overcost is still payed, but half of it is simply gold sinked. You can then select the market place tech (rename it to trading hub) to gain that other half of the income AND the marketplace starts to generate prestige proportionally to the volume of the trades happening in it.

So, what are your opinions and possible solutions on the matter?

I missed the forums so much

Hello everyone!

At the end of the previous test @LordSkykal put together a quick poll to gather some feedback on the results of the test.
This was distributed on discord and has now been closed.

The questions in the poll where:

• How satisfied are you with the current state of the game? (Possible answers were between 1 and 10)
• Name the biggest thing you like about the game.
• Name the biggest thing you dislike about the game.
• What do you think is missing in the game?
• What do you think is not needed in the game?
• If you could change one thing in the game, which one would it be?
• How do you like the support of the Ambassador Team?
• Additional feedback (free answer)

The poll collected a total of 55 answers.

I will try to give a summary of the answers given to each question:

• How satisfied are you with the current state of the game?

Since this is a numerical answer, the summary will be easy.

The answer distribution was as follows:

• 1: No answers
• 2 : No answers
• 3: 2 answers
• 4: 3 answers
• 5: 6 answers
• 6: 9 answers
• 7 : 15 answers
• 8 : 12 answers
• 9: 5 answers
• 10: 3 answers

The distribution here is clearly centered on the value of 7, so the players rate positively the current state of the game. 80% of the players gave at least a rate of 6.

On to the next question.

• Name the biggest thing you like about the game.

Many players have indicated the same topics as most appreciated feature. In particular, in order of how many times they were named, the features named were:

• Skill system: This was indicated by almost a third of the players.This includes, players liking the variety of skills, the freedom of the char building, the way you discover skills and so on. Since it is one of the most defining features of FO, it is a good thing that people like it.
• Crafting system: Many players indicates the crafting system as their favorite feature of the game. The fact that the economy is fully player made, the time it takes to craft and so on.
• PvP: As a bit of surprise to me, a significant number of players indicated the current pvp mechanics and skill based combat as the best part of the game. Considering that in the previous beta this game flaw was identified in the clunky combat, it feels like the game has improved in this area.
• The mobs: Slightly less than 10% of the players indicated the varieti of mobs and the challenge they offer as their favorite element.
• The idea behind the game: A few players instead of indicating a specific feature, appreciated the overall feel of the game.

Moving to the next question, we see what players instead didn't like:

• Name the biggest thing you dislike about the game.

Making a summary here is very difficult, since the answers were not as repetitive as the liked features.

Notable mentions though go to crafting, which was one of the few features which many named as disliked. It received pretty as many likes as it received dislikes, with a subtle difference. Many when naming crafting as what they dislike also mentioned recipes, while no one mentioned them as something they liked.
The other major area of complaints was the pvp balance.
After this there were some less recurring points:

A couple of answers mentioned solo play being too hard.
3 mentioned the current bugs as their biggest issue.
3 mentioned the fact that the test had ended

Moving on to the next question.

• What do you think is missing in the game?

Here too we have some major recurring topics.
In order of frequency of apparition:

• Demons and Tartaros: This was expected. Fractured is marketed as the "3 planets" game and we are missing one, so clearly it is the top priority for many of the PvP players.
• Non PvP longterm content: Following this and with around the same amount of answers, we have people asking for more endgame content, many times specified as non - PvP longterm content. Clearly here it is the other part of the community speaking.
• More skills/monsters: Considering that the current variety of skills and monsters is the most liked part of the game, it makes sense that some players just want more.
• More equipment tiers: A non insignificant part of players asked for more equipment tiers. Not necessarily more powerful than the existing ones, more than one have asked for intermediate tiers between the current t1 and t2.
• Arena system: A couple of players asked to have the arena system implemented
• Solo support: A couple of players asked for more solo support. Personally I'm very surprised by this, I expected more, because if I had to cast my vote I would cast it here. The game is soloable but definitely not solo friendly, and helping players find other solo players to make small groups would be my priority, the game is simply a lot more fun played in groups of 2-4. But this is strictly my personal opinion.

On to the next question.

• What do you think is not needed in the game?

First of all a positive note. The most common answers were "Nothing" or "N/A" or "I like everything" or simply left it blank (this is the only answer were people left blank answers). We are talking about around half the answers. This is clearly a good sign for the game.

Now apart from a few answers which don't add a lot like "One shot builds" or similar things which clearly are not exactly a "feature", the only recurring answers were.

• Orbs: A few players indicate the orb system as not needed
• Processing times: Around the same number of players doesn't like waiting so long to get their resources.
• Weather system: A couple of players consider the weather system not needed.
• Recipes: A couple of players consider the recipe as not needed.

Next question.

• If you could change one thing in the game, which one would it be?

This is the answer which has shown the most disarray, but in general the only topics which were named more than once are the ones present in the previous answers.

• How do you like the support of the Ambassador Team?

Ok this is going to be very easy. With very few exceptions, most of which being "I didn't need them", the answer has been universally positive. Thanks for that

** Additional feedback (free answer)*

More balance. Demons. Polish features. Endgame content...

All of the answers provided added depth to the previous points, with some interesting ideas, but again they touch the same exact topics of the previous answers.

There were quite a few messages of encouragement though!

Hi,
this an old bug which presents itself randomly on some graphic cards (usually the old ones).
I'm afraid to say that so far no one managed to solve it.

This is an often discussed point.
While I did enjoy the classic crafting system, which is the one you described, I would invite you to analyze a bit more what is the Fractured approach.

It is indeed a problem of supply and demand, as you correctly explained, but you are underselling a lot the value of "time", and you are not considering the value of "scarcity". Fractured is heavily based on those 2.

In UO, mining and crafting something if you had the skill was literally a five minutes job. In Fractured, crafting a suit of armor takes a lot of work and a lot of hours.

The economy of UO in fact was not really solid and had a lot of issues. Many shards imposed a limitation of one single char per account to patch this issue. That kind of supply system which was limited by the existance of dedicated characters, crumbled when pocket workers got into the picture. If you had the skill, you no longer had a need.

In the current system of Fractured, everyone has the skill to be a "dedicated worker", but not everyone plays a dedicated worker. Being a worker in Fractured isn't a matter of what you have, but of what you do with your playing time. It is not an investment of character skills, but an investment of personal play time.

Items have a value because they require play time (and facility time) to be crafted.

To this, you have to add the scarcity of resources. Ore nodes are very limited and with long respawn times. Trees are everywhere, but the good ones not so much and have a 12 hour respawn time. Good quality hides are probably the easier to access, but they weight a lot and those that hunt those mobs rarely get more than a few.
Gathering isn't something that you can do while doing other activies "Oh look a Yew tree! Let's chop it down!", because the heavy item system prevents that. Only those that are going around actually gathering will get the resources to craft. This is very important.

Now, we never had a chance to test how good this works in the practice, so we can only look at it on paper. We never had a test which lasted long enough or with enough players to really see if the economy shapes up or not. A month into the beta, we may have something more solid to discuss.

If you are referring to me, I would kindly ask you to not twist my words from "I believe in the positive effects of dialogue between countries" to "I support war crimes". That's very rude. That was also a personal view on this issue that I shared with you outside the bounds of my duty as a moderator, because I thought of you as a friend after all this time spent together on this project. But it is only a personal view and does in no way influence how I uphold the rules of discord and this forum. Political discussions are banned by rule and by common sense.

If you have any complaints about the way I moderate this forum and the discord you are welcome to forward your complaints to the devs. Until then, any political discussion, no matter how important you feel it is, is banned from this forum and the discord. Thanks.

I do agree with some of the points made and disagree with a few other, in order:

Equipment costs and time gates on time gates

The resource cost on top of the time gate for gear was already pretty steep before, but now equipment costs have been increased across the board and the time gate and resource cost for crafting intermediate materials like leathers and ingots is still the same. In fact you produce less metal because the number of smelters you can place on a blacksmith plot was reduced from 8 to 6. This changes the time it takes to gear a person from what used to be like 6 hours to make a kit to something closer to 20 hours for a kit that requires intermediate resources.

We have clearly seen an increase in resource cost to make the equipment. The one on metal items is small, but for example a leather armor went from 11 to 50 resources needed. At the same time, the durability has been hugely increased. This overall means that making equipment is harder, but it lasts longer. I do understand the reasons that this was made. There were a few people which didn't like that weapons broke regularly, and other that wanted it harder to reach better equipment. This compounds with the new alignment system, because the items are less "disposable", so you have to reduce the amount you lose on death or it would be very punishing, especially considering the new tier of item sets which are very hard to make. I don't think that this is a good direction for the game. In my opinion, it works better with more disposable equipment. What we probably need is something between the current and the previous system. So items less durable than they are now, but more durable than what they were before. Resource costs rescaled down a bit, but still higher than what they were. Blue drop 1 item, neutral (and sheriff) drop 2. The current version went too much into the other direction, we probably need to adjust the aim a bit.

Also this is pretty imbalanced because mages do not need to go through any time gate and simply craft intermediate resources using monster drops like spider silk in the weaving table. Compared to mage gear the resources that go into metal gear is EXTREMELY limited and has a 6 hour respawn time, actually creating another issue where mathematically there is simply not enough nodes on the map for someone to outfit a 20 man clan in any reasonable amount of time.

Agree again. Hide, wood and silk items don't have enough depth, as I have said in multiple other treads. All items should be as complex as leather and metal to make.

Recipe tangent
Also on top of this I hear that monsters are supposed to drop recipes for equipment now. I think that's insane, from a game design perspective you are adding an RNG drop chance grind to mechanics that are already gated by both time gates as well as resource gates. Let people make gear. Recipes should be tied to tech if anything.

And agree again. Recipes are a bad idea. They are ultra high value items at the start of the game which then become trash later. I don't think that we need them, they are an item without a natural death, their effect is permanent. It doesn't fit in this game economy. I think that we can just remove them and have the items known by default. The game already gives you enough of a challenge to craft that stuff, considering that they are time limited items.

My solution for equipment crafting time/resource cost
If your going to make a full plate set cost 20 ingots, and your only going to let me place 6 smelters on a black smith plot, and it has to take 4 hours, than 5 ore should convert to 5 ingots like the tanning tubs do. This solves the problem with the dramatic scarcity of ore as well as drops the time it takes to make a kit back down to around 6 hours which I believe was reasonable.

This is were we disagree. The current scarcity of resouces is perfect, it is the cost in material of items that must go a bit down for metal.

Alignment and Risk vs Reward

I believe that the changes to alignment are HOT GARBAGE, first of all I get it Jacopo, you want to protect the newbies you want to make sure that they don't get slammed out of the game but these changes to neutral and blue do not make any sense at all in a resource driven game. If you want it so that people don't drop gear, then EVERYONE should not drop gear or EVERYONE should at least drop some gear. Having it like it is now is honestly insane unless you want to promote only naked mage red pvp.

It simply doesn't make sense to go red unless you are a very low tier low gear type build. You risk everything for the meager reward of bandages and wolf meat and some other trash, it just doesn't add up and really discourages the red playstyle to the degree that literally all the rocks on the map are constantly tapped with no contest because no one wants to go red because they are the only ones who get punished for pvping.

As I already said, this is a direct consequence of the new durability/cost paradigm. Fix that and I agree to going back to having blue and neutral drop something every time.

ARPK Playstyle note
Anti Red Player Killer or ARPK players are at such a MASSIVE advantage right now, not only do you get GOLD for killing reds and jailing them but you can literally loot their entire kit without even risking your own, all you risk are bandages. Being a sheriff has never been more profitable. Compared to the red criminal, the blue arpk ganker is at such a massive advantage it doesn't even make sense.

This is correct. ARPK are supposed to be at an advantage on Syndesia (but they should drop as much as a Neutral).

Resident requirement nuance
So one of the reasons I really don't like these alignment changes is because you already had a very nuanced and elegant way of preventing Red players from going on absolute murdering sprees. Red players still needed to build towns and red players still needed to convince other players to come live there as residents. Removing this requirement from town rank ups is not only silly, it's completely counter intuitive to the type of environment you say you want to create. At this point why would any guild even need residents outside of sucking taxes out of them. Residents should 100% be a requirement for town upgrades and city holders should have to engage in a gameplay loop that involves enticing players to move in and stay there.

It was removed because it was flawed, it couldn't work unfortunately.
More residents, more techs. More techs, more residents. It activated a snowball effect on cities.
The current system is half good, but the cities need to have more incentives to attract residents. I'm in favor of increasing the taxes progressively for the houses, so that they actually represent a decent income for the city.

My solution for alignment
Like I said, I think the only way the alignment system will work properly for all types of players is if all players are generally subject to the same rules. If that means that full loot needs to be removed from everyone than so be it. Reds already have a massive disadvantage, they can be jailed and have to pay a fine or not play the character for a day or two, they don't need a second massive disadvantage that neither of the other alignments share. Either everyone drops none of their gear or everyone drops pieces based on karma. I would be fine with reds dropping all gear if blues at least dropped 2 pieces like it was before, in the games current state I honestly cannot say I can recommend the game to anybody mainly because of these alignment issues.

Again, this is all connected to the new durability paradigm. Fix that, and you fix this.

Alternate idea.

Everytime you enter combat (the game already detects combat state), your inventory and equipment are closed and you can't open them until you are out of combat.

Effects of this change:

1. You can't use bandages and herbals(or future consumables) from the backpack. You have to put them on the bar, making it part of your build.
2. You can't trash your gold when a red attacks you.
3. You can't switch armor during the fight. You can still switch weapons with the tab command.
4. It immediately clears your screen when you get attacked, allowing you to react faster in case that you were caught while reorganizing your inventory.

I'm going to provide my feedback on all aspects of the game as of the current alpha. Sorry, this will be long.

What did I test so far:

This time I've played with a quarterstaff mage with a focus on luck.
Fortunately this game is quite open to whacky builds like that, and in fact it turned out the character works very well. It's a good bruiser with good mobility, decent tanking, decent damage and good support abilities. It plays well both in solo and in group.
Together with a group, we decided to make our own city. The wonderful Koala Lumpur!
At this point of the test I'm out of the young player protection, and I'm probably around 90k KP. I've explored a good part of the continent, except Shadow Vale and the Southern regions.

So, with this basis, I will now provide my feedback on all areas of the game that I touched, starting from the ones which were more impacted by the last changes.

New talents

I think that this needs to be put as the first topic, since it has a huge influence on the next ones. The fact that the talent tree had been completely rewritten wasn't announced in any of the videos or blog articles, and yet it is probably the biggest change in this alpha in terms of impact on gameplay. Strictly speaking, the characters were hugely nerfed. All builds, without exception have seen their durability, damage and resources severely limited compared to the last alpha. While previously you had mana regen talents, lots of damage bonuses, huge health buffs, poison immunity and stuff like that, you know have a few mild bonuses for specific builds and some meager generic buffs.
I've had many discussions on this topic and I know that other players have different opinions on this (I'm sure you can find that thread if you look), but to me, this felt wonderful. Simply put, the previous talents were too strong and made you grow into a rabid killing machine which knew no challenges in the game. You were punished for learning too many skills, because those KP points had to go in talents. It was dumb to do otherwise. Now they are still there as a buff and they still provide you some progression, but they are mild enough that there is an actual choice between knowing more skills or having more talents. Obviously this is just a first draft of the new talent tree, half of it isn't even implemented, but as a general direction for them I fully approve this iteration.

New skills and redesigned skills

We had a huge amount of new skills. We all know these, I'm sure that many of us did in fact pause Jacopo's video at least a few dozen times as he predicted. I know I did.
What to me was more interesting though, is that many old skills were redesigned. In particular, all cooldowns based on attributes were turned into fixed cooldowns. This had a huge impact on builds. While previously you had some skills that gained both effects and CD reduction from an attribute making its scaling quadratic and hard to manage, now skills are usually quite linear. You got 12 INT? Good, your fireball is 2/3 of the effects of the one cast by that guy over there with 18 INT. Easy and linear.
A huge number of skills also became more restricted. In particular some skills were moved to heavy weapons only, some skills were disallowed from heavy armors, many were moved to spell channeling weapons only and so on. This is fine, but if I counted them correctly, we currently have around 100 skills, and only a third of them can actually be used without a spell channeling weapon. If we consider that many of those skills also require very specific weapons, then the choices available when you make a warrior type character have become quite narrow. Some restrictions could be lifted, or we need new weapon skills in my opinion.

Changes to attributes

As was already previewed, we have new effects for attributes. The most notable differences are that strenght no longer provides weapon damage, which has greatly diminished the damage of warriors, dexterity no longer provides movement speed, perception no longer provides critical damage and most of all, there is no longer a bonus when you reach 20 in a stat. The effects of this are again a decrease in the overall power of characters and that it is no longer that necessary to go high on a single stat to chase that bonus. Opens more builds, I like it.

PvE difficulty

The 3 previous points tie together into this one. How has the PvE experience changed in the game?
In one word, it is now brutal.
As I said many times already, characters are weaker. The world is a more dangerous place now.
Previously you started being unable to fight against a couple of goblins and ended up being capable of soloing a legend.
Now you still start being unable to kill a couple of goblins, especially considering the new issues with mana, but no longer scale that much in power. Currently, with a very specific build and after an extremely hard and long fight, I managed to solo a mountain troll. It was a real challenge.
In the previous alpha my mage archer could kill 2 of them while semi afk.
There are some things in the game now that you should never get close to if you are alone. The guys that I instead found too weak were the new ogres. We went in with an ill prepared group of 3. All melee, all crushing weapons (ogres are resistant to crushing damage), tier 0 equip no gems. We had no issues at all in there. For one of the hardest areas of the game, it felt quite disappointing.
Apart from hiccups like that one, I'm liking this new PvE. A lot.
The issue that I have with it though, is that it is poorly presented and it scares a lot of players. The game starts hard and stays hard. I've met a lot of confused players that didn't understand what were they doing wrong, or if they had to find a better weapon (spoiler: No, your primitive weapon already has the same damage of a forged one) or they selected a class that sucked or something else.
In general, nothing prepared them to this experience. Nothing told them that PvE wise this game was quite hardcore and that players wouldn't grow that much in power compared to other games.
This then mixed together with them not knowing what a lot of things meant. What is that purple on my health bar? Why did I start walking and taking damage from fatigue? And so on. This led to a lot of frustration in approaching players.
The tutorial needs to be more complete on these topics.

Imbuing

Now lets move to those mechanics that are supposed to provide the players with an actual increase in power. The first one is imbuing.
Now, I really like the reagent system of fractured, but I had a few issues with the imbuing mechanic. Sincerely speaking, it isn't worth it. Finding chipped gems is not so hard, and the bonus that a tier 1 imbue provides is actually good. The problem is that a chipped gem costs less than 100 gold and the reagents for a tier 1 imbue cost less than 50. This amount of resource invested are in line with the buff provided. Too bad that a flat 500g tax is applied to every imbue, even the tier 1! No way that those bonuses are worth investing so much gold!
On the other hand, a flawless gem easily costs you 2k, and the legendary reagents necessary for a tier 3 imbue probably another 5k. And yet the tax on tier 3 is still 500g.
This needs to be scaled based on the tier of the enchant. Very few players are going to bother with imbuing at that gold price, and that is a pity because the reagent system of Fractured is one of its best features.
Tier 1 imbuing should be easily accessible. Having tier 1 imbues should be the norm, you have to entice players into collecting all those reagents. The gold tax should be very low, 50 or 100 gold.
It should go up to 250g for a tier 2 and then around 1000g or even more for a tier 3.
Yes, I understand that we had issues with low gold sinks in the previous alpha, but let's not swing the pendulum to hard in the other direction.

Note: Please add a way to know in which type of equipment you will be able to socket the gem after the imbue process.

Enchanting

Unfortunately I can't give much feedback on enchanting. That is because I never enchanted a single item. Building a city takes a lot of gold and we never had enough to bother with enchanting.
That said, even if I had the gold to spare, I probably wouldn't have bothered increasing my leather armor's armor values by 30% at the cost of 3250 gold. It would have given me a damage reduction of around 15% compared to the tier 0 against slashing damage. Considering that an armor lasts around 1 week before having to be changed, I wouldn't have found the cost to be right. Probably the cost for enchanting the armor must get lower, at least for the tiers that don't provide a new socket.
Completely different approach to weapons instead. Yes, a weapon lasts you only 3 or 4 days of use, but at the same time we are talking about 1000 gold for a 30% damage increase. That's juicy.
I feel that if we find that the price for enchanting a weapon is the correct one, and I think it is, then the price for upgrading the armor should be at most the same.
The other problem is that mages don't scale in damage with the enchant system. Since it is an inherent property, the "Spell channeling" should scale with the tier level of the item. In this case I suggest that for each tier of the spell channeling item, the spell effects are increased by 15%/10%/15%/10%.

Now let's move to city level stuff:

City Progression

The city progressions has been changed in a way that in the end all cities will be either tier 4, 9 or 15. This is because there is no difference between food requirements at the inbetween ranks. This means that a city which is not at those ranks is simply a hamlet/town/village under construction.
Sounds good, it can work.
In this way when you go into an hamlet you know that you will find all the basic necessieties: bank, shrine, market, inn, basic crafting.
Now, how many hamlets/town/villages we are going to have is strictly related to how much food it will be possible to produce. In my opinion out of the 35 cities of Myr, we shouldn't get more than 5 or 6 rank 15, and then we should have around a dozen rank 9.
I'm sure that our resident Lord of Famine (@OlivePit) will be able to provide a better feedback than me on this matter, so I will leave this to him.

Tech Tree

As was promised, the new Tech tree promotes more specialization.
Interesting the fact that you need at least rank 5 to get the tanning tubes and rank 10 to get the advanced smeltery. You also need rank 5 to craft mage apparel and rank 10 for assassin clothes.
It kind of works, but we had too few cities to really understand how it would all mesh together.
What I was instead surprised to see, is that there was no t1-t4 branch for jewel crafting, they were instead put inside the blacksmith tree. The blacksmith tree already provides enchants on a huge number of crafts, ranging from weapons to armors to shields. Adding jewels to it may be too much. It could have used its own separate branch. Jewel enchants are extremely powerful. On the other hand, the carpentry branch only works on a total of 6 items, but I guess that the bow and crossbow section will get expanded a lot. Finally, there is the witchcraft branch, which is useless. It is used to enchant only the 4 mage staffs. Maybe that witchcraft and jewels could become just one single branch of enchants?

On another note, right now the flawless gems are quite rare, so having them be required for both jewels and staffs feels a bit too much. Maybe that the staffs could instead require 3 fine gems?

Market

Not much to say about the market.
It works.
I don't have particular comments about it. It is fine like this and I don't think that further changes are required.

Residents

The link between residents and cities has been changed.
Previously your rank was tied to the number of residents, now as long as you have at least 20 citiziens (10 in this alpha) then you can reach any rank.
This is good and bad.
It is bad because the previous system made it so you were forced to cooperate with solo players and small groups so that your city could grow. Strenght was in the numbers.
The flaw of the previous system was that winner took all. If you had more residents, you were also more likely to get more because you had more techs and benefits to offer.
In this new system, you don't have this issue, since you don't need residents. At the same time though... you don't need residents! So there is nothing stopping you from locking your city services to your citiziens and completely monopolize the city for your guild.
For this system to work, you needed the residents to actually provide you something. And that something couldn't be those meager 500g per week of their taxes. So first of all that tax is now doubled. We also have a more deep tax system which allows to make residents pay for the use of city services. By the way, I didn't find a way to tax the enchanting. Considering that it requires a lot of research points, I think that the city should be able to profit on it.
So now residents are strictly an economy resource. Ok, can work I guess.

What I don't like (but is not something from this alpha) is that resident plots should look like resident plots. Not factory backyards. There should be a limit to the number of refining facilities on a plot! Some look very dumb.
Since we have now defined residents as coin bags, then I think that the best solution to this, is to increase the weekly plot tax by an amount that depends on the number of facilities on your plot. You are using the city techs, so you should pay the taxes for it. At leats there's a reason to keep the number of forges on your plot to a sensible number!
Also, the plots inside the city, should have no refining facilities at all. You shouldn't be able to use the land plots as just additional space for your facilities. If you want more forges, build another blacksmith.
This in any case is tied to the next point.

Refining

This isn't something related to this alpha, but it is (in my opinion) a still unsolved situation.
I will make a different thread for it though.

Ok, I'm mostly done for those that are still reading.
Two last points that I want to touch.

1. Rare monsters are now too hard to study. Things like bandit archamages are very rarely found and give too few knowledge point. It takes an eternity to get their skills.
2. Many mage spells were changed in effects, and now there are very few direct damage spells. That is fine, but there are some iconic spells out there that now have really no place. I'm looking at you fireball. Low damage and much smaller area of effect for 3 memory points. Please show some mercy to our beloved fireball!

In the previous alpha, I was against the idea of being able to use the consumables directly from the inventory. With the previous memory system, it made sense that having consumables on the bar was a way to offset having low memory. With this new memory system though, you need all your skill slots.
At the same time though, using items from inventory still feels wrong. You open the game to the use of macros and stuff that in general don't make the game a better place. But you can't really avoid players using things like herbal remedies. You would simply keep getting killed every time you get poisoned. That's not really feasible.

There was a proposal at a certain point to have a second skill bar dedicated to consumables which now I think makes a lot of sense.

Just 2 slots initially. It then increases in slots with the enchants of the armor.
With this implemented, you can safely prevent any use of items from the backpack (except food).
I'm counting on the fact that from the next alpha we will have herbalism and medicine, so I expect many new consumables being introduced into the game, giving value to additional consumable slots.

As an additional note regarding the herbal remedy. I still think that they are too powerful as a consumable. It simply completely removes the effects.
Can we add some scaling to it? Consumables are supposed to scale on Constitution. Remedies could decrease the poison rank by 1/2/3/4 at 0/12/18/24 CON instead of outright removing it.

Hmm, I don't fully like it, but one possibility would be that you add a "Storage" tab to smelters and tanning tubes, like you currently have in the woodcutting station. When the smelter is done, the ingot/hide is transferred directly to the storage. This storage is personal, only the person who started the process can access it, similar to a bank.
To avoid abusing the smelters and tubes as additional storages, the storage for the smelters can hold only a single ingot and the tubes can hold only 8 leather. You can't tan or smelt anything if your personal storage for that facility isn't completely free.

I don't like it because it creates an abstract storage space, but it would solve the issue by reusing mechanics that we already have (storage tab and personal storages).

The choice of your home region is an important one for a good part of your playing experience. It shapes a lot of capabilities of your characters. As such, I do agree that there should be a more clear way for players to select the region. Something like a board in the starting towns which lists for each city of the continent:

• Techs
• Tax level
• Number of citizens/Residents
• Nation
• Currently in debt or not
• Optionally, a short presentation of the city written by the Governor.