Posts made by spoletta

I can't help you there because I didn't play Albion, but yours is a false problem. If you buy a package, then you can upgrade it paying the difference. So just get a package to try the game, see for yourself how it works and then decide if you want to upgrade or not.

From the FAQs:

VIP membership is a monthly subscription planned to be priced around $10/month. It provides the following perks:

Discounts on Store items
Unique cosmetic rewards for accumulated VIP time
Other vanity rewards we might think of in the future
Additional study slots
Increased Knowledge Point gains

Now, without knowing the game it is hard to understand what the last 2 points mean, so I will elaborate a second on those.
The game has no experience points, it is instead based on knowledge points. They are a similar concept, but the knowledge points have a cap on how many you can get from the same source, because at a certain point you know everything about that topic.

For example, you kill trolls for a whole day. In an experience system, you get xp each time you kill a troll. If there is a levelling system, you probably get less and less as you level up.
In the knowledge point system, after around 20-30 minutes, you stop gaining knowledge points, since you have completely studied the trolls.
The biggest difference here is in how you reach the "level cap" on the 2 systems. In an xp system you don't need to cover every possible content to get to the max level, you just need to grind here and there, changing zones after a certain level.
In the KP system, to get to the max knowledge, you need to kill all monsters, find all locations and all resources. You need to study everything. It is based a lot more on exploration rather than grinding.

What the VIP does, is increasing the rate at which you "study" monsters. So if you go to the mountain troll area, and need to kill 15 to completely study them, someone with the VIP can probably do that by killing only 8.
The important point though is that both will receive the same amount of KP from the mountain trolls. The VIP will just make it a little faster (you will soon discover that the travel time is the biggest factor in "levelling" a new char, not the time spent killing, and VIP will not help you there).

So, is the VIP a P2W feature? Depends on how you define it, we had long discussions on this matter. It allows you to complete a char a bit faster, that's for sure. But both the VIP and the non VIP will reach the same final point, so my vote is for not P2W. It's not like it takes much time to complete a char, even without a VIP.

The biggest advantages of VIP are the vanity rewards (which beware, are not tradable).

Welcome Ciedar!

Welcome!
Yes @Oleh, the game is still in alpha test, this means that it is currently played in testing sessions. The next one starts on the 22 of this month 4PM CET.

Mostly Star Citizien.

@Specter there's some problem going on with the website. Some people can't log in on their account. It could be related with this issue.

That is definitely not normal. Are you trying from here, right? https://fracturedmmo.com/store/#pack

This looks like it's going to be a really fun test. Let's just hope that all those other gaming events don't hinder it too much.

Being red in this coming alpha already comes with massive limitations compared to the previous one.
The loot thing is one, but also don't forget that now a red can't use inns, banks and shrines of the other cities. This means that you will see them operating mostly in the close vicinity of their city. From the description on the blog, I'm not even sure if they can use the city marketplaces!

What you said is certainly true, but you are also missing one piece of the picture.
In the previous test, being red was the only way to participate in pvp. Many players didn't want to pk. They wanted to pvp.
In the coming test, we are going to see those that just want pvp going grey and those that are actually intent on going pk which will go red. This will give a much better idea of the situation and will allow to tune the penalties more accurately.

Welcome Carsus, feel free to ask!

While a pacifist way to complete your knowledge could be interesting, I fear that it is one of those features that we will never see.
The reason is that as you correctly identified, it would interest a very small amount of players. At the same time, it is quite a major feature, which requires a lot of work and testing to be added to the game.
This game isn't being developed by thousand of people, so we can't expect features which fall into the "Nice to have" category. Especially if they are complex to implement.

I do expect there to be something similar for beasts and tamers, but you are always going to kill goblins, elementals and similar.

I could be wrong, but I think that evil players CAN summon legends.
The restriction is in place to avoid blue players summoning legends. If you want to go after these endgame objectives, you must be willing to partecipate into the risk of it.

Greetings to you Keyn!

Assuming that you intend killing 10 blue players, then he is in deep red karma. That's 24 hours of jail, which seems reasonable. Consider that if he kills even just one guy after he is out of jail, he is again deep into red, so 24 hours more. Karma doesn't reset after getting out of jail, it just freezes.

No, I'm not going to play a PK. Last time I played a bounty hunter,

Only rumors.
Earliest possible date is end of 2022.

No dual wield as far as I know, but a lot has changed for the assassins.

Maybe a little tax on deposit? That way you still get to make it safe, but allow the merchants who want to carry the risk to gain a little extra.

Ok, since at this point we are discussing about possible alternatives to the full linking of market visibility, then I'm sorry you broke the dam and I'm going to express my idea too!

I'm going to wait the results of this test, but in principle I'm against the full visibility of marketplaces. As was said, I can attribute that to hearsay... and hearsay it should be! You should have an idea of what is in the other markets, but shouldn't have exact info.
What I would like to see, is that you can see buy orders, items being sold et similar in other marketplaces, but with a percentage of error on prices and quantities. For example, if town x buys 10 gold short swords at 2000 gold each, I will see something like "Town x buys around 12 short swords at about 1920 gold". You have the info. You know that there you can buy/sell that item, but the exact conditions are slightly randomized in what you see.

Merchant guilds are implemented as a tech tree element. If your city has a merchant guild, then from any marketplace you can always see the exact data of your marketplace, increasing the trades toward your city, and you also get an higher share of profits on each trade in your marketplace. For example, if usually the marketplace tax is 8%, half sink half to the city, having that tech would turn it into 3% sink, 5% to the city.

You can never see what is being sold or bought in a lawless city. Those are meant to represent the high risk/high reward content for merchants. They are sure to offer looted items at good prices, and need a lot of things to go by since they have little trades going on, but there are obvious risks in going there and you have little info in what they actually sell/buy.

Optionally: If we see that there is actually enough interest by part of the players to justify making the system more interesting, then the merchant guild tech allows you to register as a merchant of that city in the city hall. By doing this, you have to pay a fee every week to the city (again, half sink, half to the coffers), but after registering, you can always see the full and accurate info on all products being sold everywhere (except the lawless cities).

Don't misunderstand, I'm not against discussing ideas like this.

I'm just worried that until we see how this test shakes up, we are bound to be missing too many actual gameplay info to have a clear picture.

This will be the first time (hopefully) where we see trading actually work like it is intended in a player driven economy.

Who knows what will happen? Maybe that we discover that it gives too much power to guilds, or to cities or to solo players or... whatever. We don't know the actual issues that come with it. We are trying to fix a car before knowing what is wrong with it.

I'm a huge fan of Spice and Wolf novels, so I obviously love the idea of Merchant guilds in Fractured as a second power parallel to nations, but until we know in which scenario they are going to deployed, we can't understand if they are a good idea or not for the health of the game. That's where my concern lies.