Posts made by spoletta

I don't feel like there's much of a grind right now (except for bringing up cities).
After one or 2 days of casual playing you can join your friends in high level pve areas and pull your weight.

In the previous test when talents did matter a lot, that wasn't true, but in the last test they nailed that "horizontal" thing much better.

Ok, it could be me that has a limited vision on the matter, but...

Apart from fighting pve challenges, engaging in pvp, having trade battles, building nations, forming diplomatic relations... in short as you said "duking it out", what else do you expect from an MMO?

It definitely was available at a certain point in time.

The next test will start probably in a month and half. If you backed just to play right now, you can get a refund within 14 days of purchase.

@BECKFAST honestly I'm seeing nothing of the sort. He expressed a very detailed feedback and wishlist. A quite radical wishlist. Obviously he can't expect the reaction to be "Oh yeah you are totally right, we should really change all this !". People have different views on those matters.
We are expressing different views on those points, no one is being shut down. I actually see a quite constructive discussion going on.

When I say "Fight", I mean politics, I mean trades. Don't consider it limited to bashing heads.

In the last test I played in Koala Lumpur and we actually had a good activity until the last day. Sure, it wasn't the rush of the first 2 days, but that's to be expected.
If you were in Zenith, I can understand why you say that you had no need to trade. You had a nice food production and were close to copper, silver and coal mines. It was a great position resource wise.

For us, we were swamped in coal and really wanted something to smelt with it. At the same time the area of Criminal Den was rich in iron and poor in coal. Trades in that case were very possible. We had a few bugs with marketplaces which prevented most of it unfortunately.

In any case the amount of players in that test was too low to properly assess the trading mechanics. Resources for 1000 players laying around and around 50 players to make use of them. Obviously just grabbing them is easy.

About crafting. Sure, crafting somewhere else is possible, but then you are paying taxes and just buying them from a citizien of that city is probably more convenient. It's a tradeoff. Higher taxes will scare others from using your facilities, which means lower gains for the city, but will protect the products of your citiziens/residents. Politics and strategies.

Games like UO played perfectly without NPCs. For a more recent game like this, look at Legends of Aria. It had no NPCs at all except basic vendors, and yet it was played for years. If it hadn't been for the atrocious design decisions of the devs, it would still be played.
You don't need NPCs in a sandbox. You just need to create an environment which fosters interactions between players. That's all it takes for a game to last.

For beasts, as I understand it, you want more skeletal dragons. To which I agree, they are cool.

Thank you for your detailed feedback. I disagree with many of your points, but since you took quite the effort in providing them, I will give my opinion on them one by one.

#1 General Feedback on Alpha Tests

The way the Alpha test currently work are not beneficial. Not for you as the developers and not for us as players or testers. I have listed some reasons and hints for you how to stop that.

1. We do not know what to test! 
Information on how things should work are rare and often only mentioned during a video. We need proper documentation how things should work to test them. Maybe also add a test log so that we can find out if a bug occurred or if not. This does not help us and also not you. You need more precise bug reports.
   Testers going into the test are really lacking in info.

I agree. A short debrief on where we should focus our testing, would be appreciated.

1. Your test subject and design is wrong!
We need to grind and build up the city before actually testing the things you want to be tested. Additionally you had bugs that destroyed half the game. Example: Field fertility -> No trade, to easy rank up, Boom.

This is a common complaint. There are a few things that really need a fully developed landscape to show if they are correctly working or not (trading and sieges for example), and we finally get to those only at the end of the test. Some tests aimed at specific issues with prebuilt cities would be nice.

1. There is no test schedule!
The interest in the tests drops tremendously after about a week, but you schedule „new content“ several weeks after the start. Either find a way to make the game interesting for a longer time span or schedule the new content to be released just before interest drops

I don't see this as an issue. Last test was interesting from day one to the end. The fact that the testing was reduced to 3 weeks helped with that.

1. Do the basics!
We are testing high level features. A lot. But the game still lacks fundamental features such as a proper chat, a proper access right management, configurable roles and permission in guilds. A proper map (with personal markers and stuff) a working mini map (zoom, etc.). You really should address this first. It will make testing easier and the game mechanics etc. don’t suffer for these reasons!
   I think that the devs are focusing on potentially stopping features. Implementing chats and minimaps is just a matter of doing it, they don't expect big issues in that area. Alpha tests are being used for those innovative systems which may or may not work. Problem here is that those alpha tests are also doubling as marketing, and a few potential new testers are being scared away by the lack of a few of those basic features.

1. You miss a lot of bugs!
Every time I start the game I recognize a lot of bugs. Too many to track them all. A log that glitches into the ground, a floating tree, a misplaced bridge, mobs that are stuck in the air and don’t attack. You should make them easily trackable. Add an ingame bug reporting function to the game that let the player enter a short description and send it along with some logs, game data and a screenshot to the devs.

I think that the forum works quite well for that. Alt-Tab from the game. Report the issue on the forum and back to playing. Less than 20 secs.

#2 The game design

Fractured was advertised as a whole new kind of game, but until now, you failed. You have to make a decision and you have to decide soon. 
You have to decide what you want Fractured to be: Do you want it to be that new and different game? Or do you want it to be the same boring kind of game that already exists a thousand times? The latter might look more beneficial. But those games lose their attraction quickly. The really good games either brought a great story, brought a new mechanic or founded a genre. See Half-Life, see GTA, see WoW, see Portal or the Total War games.

#2.1 Wrong Focus

To start directly into the right direction, we first have to determine why the game is currently heading down the path towards a standard „boring“ game. It is: Fighting!

This probably sound scary and surprising, just because the whole game is focussed on fighting. It really is. All the things you do, harvesting, mining, building, crafting, ranking up your city, is just needed to build better gear and to make fighting easier. And it goes even beyond. What can I use knowledge for? Higher stats and new abilities. What do I need them for? Fighting!

But what is the reason to fight? There is none. And this is why Fractured will fail going down its current path. When the players have achieved the highest gear, when they killed all the mobs and bosses, then the game is over. And if you are lucky you end up like WoW, which attracts players again every 2 year by bringing a new Add-on. If you are not, you will end up like almost all other MMORPGs. You will be forgotten after some time.

Here is where our opinions start to diverge. I think that Fractured right now is quite the innovative game already. Yes, there is a lot of focus on fighting .
That reflects the fact that 99% of the players, in the end, want to fight. Be it a pvp, or a commercial fight or a city influence fight, you come to a sandbox because it is a game shaped by the players. This means conflict, in all its forms. Be it with swords of with commercial offers, players want to fight.
Offer them a good fighting ground, and the game will last in time.

#2.2 Crafting

Long story short: Can I be the best archer, wizard and sword fighter all in one character? No I cannot. That is good. Why can I craft the best light / medium / heavy armor, the best sword, the best bow and the best mage staff then? Yes, but I should not be able. And if you know say it depends on the tech tree of the city, forget about it, I will get to that later. One character should never be able to craft everything.

As you know, crafting is not tied to players, and IMO that is a good thing. In a game where the economy is based on scarcity of resources, no repairs and long processing times, having someone being better/faster/cheaper at crafting would break the economy. You already can't craft everything and have to specialize. Your specialization is your choice of the city. A city can't craft everything.
I could agree with giving players the possibility of specializing in one craft type and becoming better at it with time, but with only cosmetic advantages to their crafts. Any kind of mechanical advantage in crafting is a bane of this economic system,.

So we just found out that we do have a full talent tree plus tons of abilities just for fighters. But nothing similar for crafters. If you really want to support crafting as play type. You have to implement it. Here are my recommendations:

1. Get rid of the tech tree (at least the way it currently is). 
Mining, Farming, Smithing, Tailoring, Woodworking, Alchemy, Architecture, Enchanting. Make it a skill tree! Just like the one you have for fighting. But: Make skill trees (at least for crafting) not that easily switchable, I also would like to skill trees for fighting not easily switchable as well, but that is another topic.

I like the current tech tree, and would love to see it expanded with many more options.

1. Get rid of the tiers. 
Honestly, what are they good for (absolutely nothing, say it again y’all). Either the best gear is overpowered and no one uses weaker gear or the best gear is not worth the effort. In the end tiers end up in programmers and designer creating things nobody wants to use.
Replace it with special weapons: Silver and Moon Steel against undeads, Gold and Sun Steel agains unholy creatures, and so on.

If you have played the last alpha, you know that tiers are mostly a thing of the past. All materials have a use. When they don't is because they are significantly easier to obtain, and their niche is being cheap. In a game where there is no repair, that is a good niche to have.

1. Standard weapons + crafting abilities.
A basic knife, a basic sword and the average armor is something a lot of blacksmiths can do. But very durable gear or very light gear? Maybe even very prestigious gear (I will come back to prestigious gear later). There could be abilities to need fewer materials, lower smelting temperatures or less fuel and to craft specialized weapons.

As I answered previously, I'm fine with cosmetic bonuses, but I'm wholly against mechanical advantages in crafting. If someone can win in trading with me because he has a mechanical advantage over me, then the game is a bad fighting ground. I want to win over a trading opponent because I'm better than him at trading, not because my swords are better than his by definition.

#2.3 Trading

I bet you know it yourself: Trading is and always was dead in Fractured. This has several reasons.

Trading failed in one test a few months ago. Calling it dead seems a bit harsh. It surely needs attention and a few changes, but it's not that far from working.

The first and simplest reason is that trading is not needed, except for crops for the city upkeep. This looks as if it is easy to fix. Simply make more resources exclusive and therefor targets for trades. And I will encourage you to do so. But not by restricting access, but by making traveling, especially with a wagon, a lot more dangerous. You should also implement my crafting ideas, which will make gear more exclusive as well.

Ok, here we actually agree. Harder access to distant resources is something needed in my opinion. Fetching resources outside your region should be possible but hard.

But besides this easy measure you will have to go a little deeper into the benefits of trading. Why does someone trade? There are four reasons:

1. Someone does trade for (buy) something that he or she cannot craft or mine itself
2. Someone does trade for (buy) something if it is a lot easier than crafting or mining it
3. Someone does trade (sell) something if he or she has too much of it
4. Someone does trade (sell) something that he or she can craft in order to get something that he cannot craft

As you may notice, in Fractured none of the 4 reasons will happen.

• Every player can craft everything. (1. + 4.)

This is false. You craft only the stuff from your city has researched, and only if you have access to the required resources.

• Trading is not easier at all (2.)
You have to go for long ways, your wanted Item can be sold while you are on the way, you need to farm or craft the coins to buy it and it is always more expensive than crafting it yourself (why should someone sell it for less), and your wanted item is probably a lot rare than the resources to craft it

If I want a bloodiron chainmail, then I need to find the iron, the copper, the coal, smelt it and craft it. Takes a lot of time and if I just want to farm monsters and buy stuff, I will buy the armor. Even if I want to craft it, someone who has easier access to those resources, will craft it and then put it in my city market, because he knows that my area has an hard time procuring those items.

• You never have to much.. You need several wagons full of coal and ore to craft a full set of armor. Why should you sell it? (3.)

If you are close to resource, you will have enough to sell. My city was close to coal, and we sold a lot of it in the last test.

You could install market rights for some cities and they take fees for executed trades (see my Political System section)

I liked the fact that 2 alpha ago the city took a cut from all the trades happening in the marketplace. It really made it so that it was in the city's best interest to be a succesful trading hub. I think that it should be brought back. 2-3% nothing more.

#2.4 NPCs

This section will be a relatively short one. We need NPCs, a lot. And we need real NPCs, not just mobs. We need merchants, we need bandits, we need farmers / miners and guards. The NPCs will make this whole game work. Let me explain:

1. Merchants

   This is simple, they will make trades. For their „own profit“. They buy at one market place, literally travel to another market place and sell it there. They never interact with players directly, only through markets. And of course they only buy or sell if they earn money. 
By implementing this, selling and buying will be easier and therefor more likely. They will also be good targets for bandits, both NPC and PC.
NPC merchants should retreat more and more if there are PC merchants. They are just an element to make trading work.
2. Bandits and other enemy humanoids

   They will make the environment more dangerous. In my opinion it should me almost impossible to travel offside of the main roads alone, even on the main roads it should be not that easy. This will stop players from doing everything on their own and cooperation is a lot more likely what will make the game interesting
3. Guards

   They will be the opposite of bandits and therefor make the environment safe. But they need to be supported by the cities (see Cities section for details)
4. Farmers / Miners / Builders etc.

   It might be the case that there are players who want to do mining or farming. But there might also be cities in which no player wants to do it. Here is the solution for it.

Shortly summed up: Almost everything that can be done by player can also be done by NPCs. This will help everyone to play as he or she likes and it will also make the world live from the beginning of the game on.

Note: Those NPCs should never be that cheap that you can run a whole city with them. They should just support to make the game less grindy if you reached a certain level of wealth and to keep the game from being stuck, as it feels so often during the tests.

Additionally there should be „high“ NPCs which have positions that will never be reached by players, such as deities or arch kings. See the section political system / religion.

This is the system that star citiziens is trying to implement. It is indeed very cool, but honestly I don't think that the correct execution of something like that is within the possibilities of a game that doesn't have multiple million dollars of funding. I think that the game can be perfectly fine without them.

#2.5 Cities

What are cities right now? Mainly Crafting Station Hubs. This has to change. Cities have to be central game elements.
Here are my ideas how to achieve this:

Renew city ranks and reform the city upkeep
The current implementation of city ranks is linear, boring and mostly annoying. Why is this the case? Yet again it has several reasons:

• You simply rank up a city by playing a lot. If you have one or two hands full of active players you rank up quickly. Therefor it is something you just do but not really enjoy.
• You have to grind a lot for ranking up a city. This is boring and annoying.
• Upkeep is very linear, it is just based on the rank of your city, nothing to think about, nothing to plan. Once again boring and possibly annoying.
• The tech tree is crappy since it makes you to almost not craft anything until you have ranked up.

To make cities have the impact on the game they should have we must rethink a lot. Let us start at the tech tree.

Currently a lot of buildings are locked behind the the tech tree, which is based on city ranks. I would recommend to avoid this for almost all buildings. So when you start a city it should be a minor settlement, which you have to build up, but you should have available almost all buildings. The only (currently available) buildings I would lock behind a tech tree are the marketplace and the prison. So yes, every city should be capable of building palisades and everything else right from the start.

So but what about the ranks now? They should still exist, but it should be fewer. Maybe something like settlement, village, town, city, metropolis. But what are these ranks now for? The improve the buildings you have. Let us have a look at the Palisades. They might rank up as follows:

• Rank 1 „Settlement“: Simple wood palisades with closable doors. They can protect you but not much more
• Rank 2 „Village“: Wooden palisades / wooden walls with guard walks around them. The protect you and you can defend from them.
• Rank 3 „Town“: Stone fundaments with wooden walls, with more protected guard walks. Better protection for the city and the defenders on them.
• Rank 4 „City“: Stone walls with defending weapon slits. Better protection for the city and the defenders on and in / behind them. Maybe defending weapons can be placed in places where the walls are thinner.
• Rank 5 „Metropolis“: Stone walls with platforms for defensive weapons. Even more protection and no weaknesses for defensive weapons.

Something like this should be applied to all buildings, if you want ideas, tell me, I am just not going to put them all down here now, would be too much.
But you see, city ranks are not just bringing tech points anymore your city really becomes more and more what the rank calls it. It is advantageous to strive even for the highest level but also ranking up a little makes your city immediately feeling better.

Now it’s getting even better. From the rank „town“ on you are such an important city that you are granted market rights. Therefor you can now build a market place. From the rank „city“ on you have advanced territorial rights and can therefor imprison the evil guys, the prison is unlocked. Technically it should be fine to build the buildings earlier, but you cannot use them.

Additionally every city should be able to „book“ some NPC services. This is not really booking but more like organizing: The city is organizing for example:

• NPC guards to protect the city or the roads, mines or fields around the city
• NPC farmers to automate the farming (the plan what to plant has still to be set by players, only if environment is safe)
• NPC miners to automate the mining (crafting still has to be done by players, only if environment is safe)
• NPC builder to automate build buildings (materials have still to be collected)
• … (more can be created of course, harbors, traders, I dunno…)

Of course you attract more NPCs if you have a higher rank. In the beginning you can probably only effort one of these NPC services. And you have to provide tools, weapons, armor etc. to your NPCs. The areas which should be guarded have to be set by the players. Secured city grants prestige, secured roads attract merchants (PC and NPC, cause they won’t be robbed), secured fields, mines makes farmers / miners possible and the more secure the more farmers / miners are available. Other NPC services.. we will see.

Note: Of course players can secure an area as well. If bandits are killed a lot in certain areas (not bandit camps!) they should retreat to a minimum (like 1 bandit a day). If this remaining bandit is not killed anymore, after three days the number is doubled. After three days again, and again. Up to a maximum. By implementing this mechanics NPC and PC guards could exists. But PCs always should be the ones who secure an area in the first place.

As you can imagine the ranks are not easy to achieve. So what should the system behind it be? Let me tell you:

• The ranks have population requirements again. Only if you attract a lot of players, you can become a big city.
• The ranks may additionally have economical, religious or political requirements such as marketplace revenue. For the religious / political requirements please have a look at the section „Political / Religious system“
• The ranks have costs in form of coins, wood, stone and ingots. The actual costs depend on the buildings you have already in your city. They are needed to upgrade the buildings. This leaves space for strategies / tactics of how to achieve high population with few buildings etc.
• The upkeep costs are determined similar, they are based on the number of buildings in the city including the player’s houses. But there is another thing which is added: NPC Service costs.
• In order to attract new players, the cities can provide resources or even fully build houses for new citizens. If a player leaves a city, his house stays there. The city can decide if it will be offered to new players or destroyed.

This has several big advantages. The players do not have to pay for their own upkeep anymore. So also if some players are on vacation or drop out, the other players are not punished by loosing a rank. But having too many inactive players is still a problem. And it leaves room for a lot of strategies of how to attract players and to manage city life.

The game already has only 3 ranks for cities. Hamlet, town, village. An hamlet has all the basic services (bank, shrine, inn, workshop). A town adds a few crafting specializations to that, a village has a few more crafts and some global level techs.
Yes, technically we have 15 ranks, but since the upkeep is based on those former 3 ranks, the ranks before 4, 9 and 15 are just "Under construction" tiers. In the end all cities will end up at 4, 9 or 15
The point where I REALLY REALLY disagree with you, is in reintroducing the population requirements. Those were awful. They snowball. A bigger city has more to offer to players, so it becomes even bigger.
Snowball effects are the number one enemy in designing a sandbox. You want everything based on diminishing returns. The more ahead you are compared to competition, the easier it is for them to catch up to you. You can never bring the game into a state where someone can achieve a "Total Win", or the game ends. Removing the population requirement, made it possible for small cities to grow and become just as attractive to residents (which in the end are still needed) as the already fully developed cities. It keeps the "fight" open to new contestants.

#2.6 The Environment

As I mentioned before, the environment should be hostile. This can be achieved by several factors:

• Beasts and animals, which will leave the area when settlements and or NPCs / PCs get closer

The environment has become a lot more hostile in the last test, but I do agree that some additional random danger could be nice.

• Bandits which will maraud around in the uncivilized territories. They rob PCs and NPCs (merchants and so on)

Bandit patrols ambushing travelers could be nice.

• Giant beasts and epical creatures that guard special places of interest or rare materials (dragon hort, e. g.)

This we already have.

• World bosses (fun, heroic players, etc.)

This we already have.

This will make the city system work. NPC or PC Guards will make the territories safer, which will enable trading, mining, etc. Of course both NPC and PC trading, mining, etc. Safety is the most important thing in the game. Actually it should be anyway, it is still a survival game! Therefor safe homes and places are important, there are some mechanics that will make this work:

• Logging out should only be possible close to a campfire or within a city
• Players who log out in the wilderness very likely be robbed the longer they stay logged out, if you leave your wagon in a (non-evil) city this should not happen, but of course still can (evil players, PvP, Dunno about PvE)
• Players who log out being not in a tavern / hostel will still lose their saturation and energy, of course at a reduced rate based on the location

This safety mechanics will make cities very important and beneficial. It will still be possible to play just as a citizen and not care about much of it, but if you want to engage in this politics and strategies you can. Let us now look on what the political system may be.

This could be too harsh. Remember that the game must still be fun, and many players are very casual. Logging out outside an inn already requires 30 seconds. I think that it is enough of a penalty.

@Eidans This is the system used in Legends of Aria, and while it works decently, it has one major flaw.
You can't defend first. Even if you know that the guy right there is obviously going to attack you, you can't attack him first. You have to wait while he casts his buffs and casts his biggest spell on you, or he simply follows you and waits until you are low on hp. It puts the victim at a severe disadvantage.
The system currently implemented, makes it so that if you want to be a bad guy, you have to flag in the city. If I see you approaching, I can attack on sight since you already declared your intentions.

By the way, PK already drop their full equip right now.

If you mean the legends, then there are going to be more for sure. Myr is only one of the 9 continents afterall.

@DarkShorn I think you are referring to the big rye fields right inside the starting city, right?
Those could indeed be set to a 30 second respawn time if needed, since you can't harvest them after the tutorial is completed.

Yeah, it makes much more sense.
The game can go into a beta release, or even early access with just one continent per world.

I tanked quite well in leather armor, but it was a quite peculiar build. Bleeding strike is nice, but it requires a slashing or piercing weapon, so it was a bit hard to put into a build.

The mount system right now is just a sketch. Once taming makes it into the game, I'm sure we will see more mounts.

Welcome!

Looking at Myr, I would expect the coast to have a different temperature than Shadow Vale's desert.

The mana cost is high, but the effect if fairly powerful.
Works very well with bloodlust.

The bleeding part is the most important part of the spell. INT *6 piercing damage is something around 60 damage on many targets.
Bleeding does around 80 pure every second.

I've had to fight the sproutling which used this skilll, so I think I can answer a few of your questions.
When you hit someone with a melee weapon that has the barbed skin, you get hit by the barbs. They hit only you, they don't shoot all around. The range of the melee weapon doesn't matter. If you hit with a melee weapon, you get hit by the barbs, simple. I managed to fight them by using spells and ranged weapons in melee range, in which case, the barbed skin doesn't hit you.
Barbed skin cannot critically hit, you cannot dodge it since it is not a melee attack, and can't block it since it is not a projectile or a melee attack. As the spell description says though, you can limit the effects with an evasion save.

They don't stack. It will just refresh the bleed.

@asspirin Don't worry, I'm just trying to shamelessly hide the fact that until yesterday I hadn't yet done the status page on the wiki