Posts made by Tuoni

@Manaia said in Concerns related to the attributes:

• WoW Classic I was in a highly competitive guild on the Dragonmaw US server, we had Ragnaros first kill. At least one priest was required to have divine spirit, one paladin required blessing of kings, no shadow priests allowed (they had to respec holy to raid), and so on. Other competitive guilds were the same; some even requiring their priests to be dwarves for Fear Ward.

Classic and especially Vanilla is a totally unique case. Without those extreme mix/maxings guilds would not have a chance to clear raids. That was absolutly crazy.

• When the QoL of faction changes came out, a lot of competitive Alliance Guilds rerolled to Horde because their racials were better. This through off the faction balance even more than it was. It severely crippled Dragonmaw Alliance's side to maintain competitive raiders. All this for a QoL change for faction changes.

But in other hand some servers got balanced as well because of the faction change. In addition, this feature has offered so much relief to players especially when they have changed guilds. Without this option many people (inclueding me) would stop playing for long time ago. This is also a very good income for developers.

Wouldn't the most hardcore and competitive players know how the stats work and interact and would be the ones who LEAST need the hand holding of attribute rerolls? I can't remember if it was you or someone else who said that if players make the mistake and not understand the stats then they should be able to reroll them otherwise might quit the game in frustration.

The meta will still exist, and it will exist in variants of str/dex/int based builds. There shouldn't be a need to reroll attributes for this. And the competitive scene will be better imo without this because the people with more insight and understanding to the game will have the better character builds.

What it comes to character creation mistakes yes but I guess you forgot the game mechanics and balance changes which can and will lead to build changes. Meta is hardly ever balanced between strength, dexterity and intelligence, and easily builds based on one attribute can be op when compared to others. It would not be extraordinary that almost every damage dealers are first mages and after a patch melee dps' get buffed and everyone wants to run those. Very hard to predict what will happen but one is certain, everything can happen.

I would like to see some kind of gathering progression system where some animals would need higher gathering skill level to get more and/or better resources from them. Perhaps this gathering skill would be called skinning and the actual skinning needs a proper skinning knife as well. Also getting better with skinning and with a specific animals could be nice feature. That would explain why you get at first zero or just one rabit leg, and later when you are getting better you mess less with the skinning part and you have a chance to get more.

I would also like to say that skinning a rabbit is a very different thing than skinning a bear and that shoud be taken account somehow.

@Manaia That META you mentioned also made me wonder that a need for rerolling or respeccing will most likely be regional as well. I bet demons will want or need that more often than beastmen for example, based purely on competitive mindset and environment.

I would not been worried about builds what people will use even the meta will form. That is true that some people will follow blindly what is in meta but not all of us, especially those who does not play at competitive level. I believe we are still going to see a lot of different build compinations because some people really plays how they like or what suits best for their playstyle. In addition meta builds are usually for the PvP end-game and in most cases PvE content, OWPvP, solo/group activities has very different builds in use. So regardless of attribute change possibilities I am very hopeful that we will see more than enough build variations.

One more thing came up on my mind. If attribute change will be too limited it will not go nicely together with the progession system. It would feel bad that you have a chance to unlock all skills and abilities in the game with one character but then you are left out (in practice) to actually use them because your points are distributed on wrong attributes. Attributes and character progression should support each other 100% and not create underwhelming situations. Why a game would want to have a totally free character progressions system and then restrict the actual use of it with other systems? This is actually something I hope that developers would ponder from the game designing point of view.

@Manaia Okay.. You have a quite a lot information here so it is hard to grap on everything, but lets try to check some of them. I am very familiar with WoW so its is easy to go through that.

• I would not say daily quests are a QoL content because those are implemented just to get players login daily. If you compared Dailies to pure reputation grind by killing mobs, yeah then maybe, but there is much involved with that system.
• This is quite common argument that LFG/LFR was a bad design, and even those took some social aspect from the game, those really offered a lot of QoL and nice possibility to more solo oriented players to group up with other people. I would say that only Classic fans are really enjoying with old dungeons and group system but most of people does not really have time for that in nowadays. I like to do something else with my playtime time than trying to get a group assembled just so I can arrange a wipe fest dungeon run session for next thee hours.
• I would say that Garrison was a failure in general like the whole expansion. Storyline was nice and guaranteed Blizzard quality but I think the rest of stuff was quite bad or decent at most.
• Yeah this forcing again... If this really was an issue I would really need some evidence of it. People can be "forced" to do anything in gaming communities (in bad ones) and it is not just limited to respeccing. We have to remember that build swaps offers guilds a lot of flexibility what it comes for raiding and is for sure used a LOT of more to good rather than bad.

"Do we really want the potential of every demon PvPer having the same spec every cycle? Or every world boss killer to have the same build? To me, that sounds very boring and stale."

If we want the demons play this game, then the answer is yes. Usually those players are the most hardcore and competitive players. If they cannot use the best builds, and because of that they cannot compete with others, they leave. META is the thing especially in Tartaros and I would not want to try take that away from them. This would be "poking hornet nest" like you put it.

I guess some kind of seasons needs to be implemented at some point, not necessarily at the launch but later for sure. Seasons helps balance and periodize the end-game content and keep players more interested and stick with the game much longer.

Does city progression still have stages? (Hamlet -> Village -> Town -> City -> Metropolis)

If yes, how the progression from one step to another happens in practice? What kind of player actions have impact to the progression?

If no, how city development works then?

@Bramibal said in Looking for human English guild+town:

@WhoAteTheCat well I'm still trying to choose between beastmen and humans for my hero profile. I don't really understand the benefits and drawbacks of beastmen staying in Syndesia.

If I remember right, Beastmen are welcome to Syndesia as long as they want to and they do not get any debuffs, however, their special powers will only work in Arboreus. If I remember this wrong or this has changed I hope someone will correct me. Anyway, I am sure that beastmen are most powerfull when they are in their own home planet, like every races do.

@Mindark said in Concerns related to the attributes:

@Tuoni said in Concerns related to the attributes:

If I am e.g. a master crafter of swords and a bounty hunter who tries to catch criminals, I bet those determines my characters identity much more rather than attribute points in the background.

Thanks for the thought out reply. I like the detailed explanation behind your rationale. I think we share similar viewpoints here. I wanted to quote this small section of it to follow up on, not to discard or dismiss the rest of your post, which I largely agree with.

My big thing about identity goes as follows, hopefully I present it well enough. If your (collective, not you you) mastercrafter of swords and bounty hunter is your character's identity, would you not distribute attributes in a way that aligns and ties in with that character? That is an assumption I would make and I would assume others make. I am likely wrong in my assumptions, and I'm sure there is some sort of bias there. Given that assumption (and if I'm wrong with that assumption, none of the rest of this matters), severely changing your attributes will, likely, severely change who your character is.

About crafting skills, I am not sure if attributes have any impact to professions, I presume not, and if those do, I really hope it is a very minor effect. I can be a bounty hunter and still play a whatever role, class or build, however, most likely it would be either melee or ranged DPS because we are talking about ganking. This can easily be a group activity as well so I would not drop tank/healer options totally out either. So I would say that I would not distribute attribute points in mind that I am going to craft swords and do bounty hunting.

Ignoring attributes, what I don't want to see is mastercrafter of swords and bounty hunter by day, BATTLEMAGE BY NIGHT! What I would rather see is mastercrafter of swords and bounty hunter by day, hold my beer, I wanna try something by night! To expand on this, let's add attributes to this scenario. Our attributes would be "locked" (remember, I've conceded that attribute respecs can exist with a cost/cooldown associated to it) to our mastercrafter of the swords and bounty hunter character, but it doesn't stop him from using any other ability that he wants to. Him and his battlemage roommate can go around casting magic missile into the darkness. Builds are still available to him, but Gandalf's magic will still be a little stronger than Boba Fett's.

I kind of answered to this one post earlier where I told what kind of system would be the best possible guess atm and imo, so you can check it from there. ^^

I want to comment to that highlighted part. I guess this can be the case if both have a very balanced attribute distribution but if we are talking about min/maxers the power gap will be huge and the Boba Fett will more tickle the enemies rather than doing any serious damage.

@Manaia said in Concerns related to the attributes:

My question to you:
Can you go deeper into how you'd like to see it? Go into more details of the "Your supporting details" section that I mentioned. How often is too often? Any other mechanics involved, or just a simple interface "restat" button?

When I started this thread I had no idea what is planned regarding to possibility to change attribute points. I am pleased to hear that most likely we all get one reroll and after that the reroll option can be purchased from the cash shop. I would say that is the minimum what we should get. However, this discussion popped up some good points why we should have this reroll option more often. If game mechanic changes or balancing fixes affects to the builds in way that people would want/need to reroll, then it would be reasonable to have a chance to reroll attributes for free. This became an issue in Albion like I mentioned before but the developers made a fix and at the moment those rerolls can be done almost from fly. I am not sure if Fractured needs that easy system but I think devs should monitor this during beta test phases. I am not sure if the option to get reroll only from cash shop is the best idea and I would prefer more a free reroll with a cooldown system (perhaps once / month) and on top of that the cash shop reroll option.

I think this kind of package would tackle the character creation mistakes, game mechanic/balance changes and would leave some options for situations when players get bored and just want to try something else out.

@Mindark said in Concerns related to the attributes:

At the moment the reason looks like to be a character identity which is quite small roleplaying feature tbh.

Identity is a lot more important, I think, than you realize it is. Maybe not to you, though. But you shouldn't dismiss it as a concern from the community because you don't personally care for it.

Character identity and generally the RPG part of MMORPGs are also important for me, however, perhaps I value different things, and I am not thinking only myself, I am trying to take account wider audience as well.

I want to go more deeply this character indentity part because it looks like general thoughts regarding to indentity are quite shallow, like attributes would determine the whole thing. Okay, I will next make a list from what parts a character identity can consists:

• Attributes
• Gender
• Name
• Race
• Appearance
• Playstyle
• Behaviour
• Character progression
• Activities
• Alignment

There can be of course more but these came up on my mind at the moment. I wanted to highlight few points which are the core parts of RP in MMORPGs. Character progression is where these games lean to and without that the game won't even exists, at least in form of RPG.

If we think of Fractured, the body of a character is the ability- and talent trees and other aspects are build around that and working more like as a limbs. Also activities are a very important part to determine a character's indentity, you may be a farmer, crafter (any kind), trader, gatherer, explorer or any kind of mix that mentioned before. Furthermore, you may be a dungeon crawler or monster hunter (what it comes to PvE content), or you participate a different PvP activities from sieges, to ganking or random ZvZ. I can even decide to play as a criminal or a player who tries to bounty hunt those to get profit.

So the character indenty consists from a compilation of different parts, some people may value one point when another value something else. One may value nothing, one may value everything and the rest of us any possible compination between these two extremes.

Now if we examine closely from what a character identity can consists it is easy to argue that attribute points are quite small part of the whole identity. Attributes are numbers behind the character and effecting passively to my actions. If I am e.g. a master crafter of swords and a bounty hunter who tries to catch criminals, I bet those determines my characters identity much more rather than attribute points in the background.

@Mindark said in Concerns related to the attributes:

One more question for the crowd. If you are in favor of respecs, do you feel that these should include race changes? I find that most the arguments being made in favor of respecs would suggest that race changes should also be included. I would definitely be opposed to that.

I guess it would be a smart option as well with some limitations of course. I would actually follow WoW model and make it a cash shop feature. It offers developers a good income opportunity and players a nice chance to change planets and guilds. This is propably a feature what players will start to hope for after the game has been up some time.

@Manaia Damn you are getting triggered. It looks like you miss the whole point. People can care of their characters identities and that is fine, even those who would be okay with attribute change possibility can care of their characters (and I presume most are) identity, however, they might value more other roleplaying aspects like character progression or their actions in game. Attributes are not equal to character identity, those are just one part of it, and because of the change is optional people who wants to grap on attributes set in the character creation can do so but it would be selfish to try deny that option from other players.

Character creation is at the moment a place where many new players can easily make mistakes and decisions they will regret later. This can of course happen to test phase players as well but most likely less. Game mechanics and balances between builds will change and people will get bored with their current roles and class at that moment. Albion Online is here a perfect example because they were in situation that a good amount of players got frustrated because of the too hard respeccing system. This was a serious problem because it leaded and it would been lead to even more people to quit the game. However, developers reacted to this issue and now they have made respeccing much more easier to guarantee customer satisfaction. Character identity did not weight much in that scale and if would been I do not even want to imagine how much less people Albion would have at the moment. I recently wanted to change my playstyle from ranged damage dealer/support (Cursed Staff) for melee DPS (Spear), I dicided to take the long road and grind spear fame separately even there is this option to move progression from weapon to another. Even I decided to take the long road I understand how important that option is to have, not just to everybody, but especially those who plays in the competitive level.

I would not use your poll here as a base because its not straight related to attribute changes and more like pages the topic. In addition, your poll it is not neutral, your personal opinion comes through the questions and it leads the reader to choose option 1. Furthermore, I like your style to try separate three people from attribute change side so your opinion looks better.

@Manaia said in Concerns related to the attributes:

@Farlander said in Concerns related to the attributes:

Respecing, if available to everyone, has absolutely no bearing on another player.

You've clearly not read my response I made to Tuoni regarding mega guilds "forcing" you to respec to how they want. Or peer pressure amongst any group of friends to have someone fit the role they want. Tuoni basically said "I don't care, so it's not a real issue." Are you saying that too? That if it doesn't impact you it's not a real possibility?

Actually, I gave you quite precise rationale but I guess you missed it.

@dj35 For gathering I would say that one good way would be a need to gather different resources rather than many. This would encourage the gatherer travel to different biomes, areas and planets as well.

The picture I linked gives good examples what kind of tasks could be considered in place of pure grind and killings mobs/animals. I would approach the matter from the theme of the ability itself. Like in that example we have a fire based AoE spell. So some of the tasks are related somehow to the fire or AoE hits (instead of killing certain number mobs).

@Gothix said in Your favorite Dailies, or what you would like to see them as.:

However, cool downs on professions are not so bad, because I can always do other things to get gold, and then spend gold to buy leather that I didn't get by tanning. There is always other options.

This is very important and one of my favorite features in sandbox MMOs. This is not of course only a matter of cooldowns and this concerns every activity in the game. Players can focus on activities they want to and make money that way. There is no need everyone to do everything (unless they want to) and they can focus just on few things and buy rest of the stuff with money they earned from their specializations.

Daily quest rewards are usually soul bound in MMOs..

Oh yeah, a good point.

...IF daily quest rewards were something that wasn't soul bound...

This would make those better or at least suit better in sandbox theme.

@Mindark said in Concerns related to the attributes:

Now, to address the "If you don't like it, don't do it" argument...that is a very wrong and shortsighted argument. This is an mmo. EVERY design decision effects everyone. Whether they use it or not. They help shape the meta of every aspect of the game. It is, however, a valid point when discussing single player games.

No, it is actually not. Every design decision may affect on everyone but the effects are usually positive so why would that be a problem. A feature like 'possibility to reroll attributes' will be a huge QoL thing, it does not offer advantage over other players and it prevents player frustration. Everyone has this chance but it is still optional if someone decides not to use that for any reasons. At the moment the reason looks like to be a character identity which is quite small roleplaying feature tbh, everyone can cherish their character's identity if they want to, however, I do not know why anyone should care about other players characters' identities.

@Farlander said in Concerns related to the attributes:

Respecing, if available to everyone, has absolutely no bearing on another player. Since all characters level horizontally no one will have any advantage respecing. It's a courtesy to players to help them make changes on their characters so that they have more fun with their playing experience. It's in the best interests to the devs to keep players around and enjoying the game rather than quit over their main/favorite character no longer being much fun because of the regrets of a poor decision on a choice they made or because the game changes in such a way decisions they made are no longer valid.

I wanted to highlight few points. Having an option to respec attributes does not offer advantage over other players so it does not have negative impacts. Avoiding player frustration is also somethig what developers should taken account when planning QoL things.

@Manaia said in Skills gained through different means:

@Tuoni Currently not a thing as of the latest test phase we had.

Yeah I know but it might not been implemented yet especially if you think how barebones almost everything is still at the moment. Imo it was a good idea to build a tier system inside skills. Those can unlock more variations when milestone reached but also slight vertical progression on top of that as well. I actually found now the original plan for ability progression and it can be found from here: Feature Spotligh #3 . There is a picture of ability progression and inside it has build a 3 tier system (or actually 4 if lvl 0 is counted) with 6 different tasks.

"THERE’S MORE THAN ONE LEVEL!
In the paragraphs above, we’ve covered the process that turns an Unknown ability to Discovered, Ready To Learn, and finally usable. Abilities, however, are not only meant to be learnt once, since they feature up to 3 levels of power! Completing only 2 tasks of a Discovered ability allows you to study an ability to level 1. After that, you need to have at least 4 tasks completed to study it to level 2 and 6 tasks completed to study it to level 3.

*Different learning tasks of the same ability are usually balanced so that completing a couple can be usually done in your home planet, while completing all 6 almost always requires you to travel to other planets. Studying higher levels also needs more complex blank tomes crafted with exotic resources and sophisticated tools – so we expect them to be a common item in player commerce.

Similarly to what we said about talents, you don’t have to worry about ability leveling creating a too wide power gap between new players and veterans. Sure, leveling up an ability increases its power – be it a stronger effect, increased duration, reduced cooldown, and more. However, they’re always minor differences, mostly interesting on a competitive level. Level 1-2 abilities are more than enough to create effective builds for casual PvE and PvP."*

I was wondering, is that tier system build inside skills still a thing? If I remember right there was 6 tiers at some point planned or maybe it was 3... Anyway, reaching for the max would mean traveling to another planets and accomplish more dangerous tasks.

I tried to ponder something positive related to daily activities without making any difference between them. So if I answer to the original question what is my favourite daily, I guess the answer is still that there ain't one, however, I have something else in my mind. I have a long experience history from MMORPGs and I have seen a lot of different kind of daily activities, dailies or daily quests in use. Furthermore, I have done some research related to cultural history of digital gaming and I have collide to several articles and forum post where players are unhappy with daily activities (especially daily quests) and how those slowly kills the fun from the playing. So I base my arguments for these reasons. Even I do not have a personal favorite daily activity or daily quest I would say that the best ones are those which are necessary from economical point of view or those which are needed to pace the character progression, e.g. farming and crafting.

I suggest developers (in general) to use any daily activities or daily quests as less as possible, just use those which are necessary, and focus to polish the actual content and offer players a wide range of different activities to play with. People will login daily basis without a massive number of hooks if they just like the game and they have enough appealing things to do. Okay, lets put that aside and lets move on the actual suggestions.

When using daily timers I want the developers to really consider the precise time what should be used. This of course varies depending of the situation but I will use Albion Online's farming system as an example. I remember how growing crops was first set on 24h timer from the point when you put the seed on the ground. This lead to a problem that every day your farming activity went later unless you totally missed one day. I presume this caused a good amount of negative feedback from players and at the moment the timer is set to 22h, and that really feels a good change because it gives players a little leeway.

In my opinion weekly and monthly login bonuses are a much better hooks than dailies. Those gives players more freedom to plan and choose when they want to play and those are not getting boring as fast as daily login hooks. When I recently went back to Albion I instantly noticed that there was a daily, weekly and monthly rewards based on the players activities. The daily bonus is negligible and a totally whatever if you get that or not. However, those weekly and monthly chests contain significant rewards of items and money. The beauty of this system is that you can collect fame (exp) from any activity of the game and all those will account. So you can e.g. farm, craft, gather, refine, run dungeons or kill other players, and everytime you collect fame to those pools. It also seams that the limits are set quite easily achieveable so it surely encourages all players to play the game but it does not limit you anyway and you can do what ever you want to and still get the reward. This is a really good system and I do not have anything negative to say about it, at least at the moment.

I guess Albion is a good example because it is a very similar game and if I remember right the developers in Dynamight Studios are mentioned Albion as one of their paragons. So I guess it would be smart to follow which kind of improvements SBI does and at least try to avoid to make same mistakes. @Whisper I hope this post gives more to your original question or at least it is best what you can get from a player who has tired to run in daily rat race.