Allereli
04-21-2009, 02:20 AM
my x-post from the Discussions folder (https://www.play.net/forums/redirect.asp?URL=https://www.play.net/forums/messages.asp?forum=102&category=8&topic=3&message=43764), just so it's saved somewhere. I know I'll get the hate comments, I don't care. If anyone wants to have a real discussion, I'll be happy to have one.
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This is going to be long. I apologize, but I have a lot to say.
There are many reasons to enjoy GS, the amount of detail and depth of the game is incredible; however, everything I am interested in seems to be going in the wrong direction. I speak only for myself as someone who has little interest in RPing tea parties and designing text Barbies or hunting until all my skills are maxed. I play because of the complicated systems in the game, specifically alchemy, scroll infusion and animate dead. My other major interest was running Twilight Hall, which I took seriously and had a vision to bring the House into the present, where the population is sparse and the game is geographically huge.
I leave with the hopes that things will change for the better and I'll feel good about coming back, but at this point I feel I cannot put my money and time into supporting the game. I have no delusions that all will be changed to everything I suggest, but the game needs to be more about fun and less about tedium, and I hope the staff can take my experiences to heart and can use my ideas, or find solutions of their own to make the game better.
I came back in January '07 after being gone for 5-6 years with nothing from my past experience in GS3 (1996-2001)--characters, items or friends. I started Allereli from scratch after I looked at the spell lists and decided I still wanted to play a sorcerer. I did almost no research out of game and looked to figure things out myself in terms of the changes from GS3 to 4. I came back wanting to be a different type of player: to be more involved with the community (house chairmanship was NOT planned), to at least attempt to RP, to not be stuck in the eternal grind, and to do things that no one had done before.
Alchemy
I had a great time learning the game again and I was shocked at everything I remembered. Early on I learned that alchemy was in the not-to-distant future and I wanted to be a part of it. I saw/still see tremendous potential for the system to be fun and its capabilities unlimited, it fit in perfectly with what I wanted for my character. In the beginning the GMs were receptive to feedback and changes were made but as time has passed, and Phase II has been implemented, those of us who actually managed to master are back to square one with the frustration of trying to gather the rare drops/gems for the recipes we actually want to use.
To master alchemy, I had to quit progressing for about four months and powerhunt about 15 levels to get away from the wall because the points per rank requirements were just too much to handle in combination with the amount of stuff needed. This is a failing of the guild system where people, who may not want to play to cap, but want to do alchemy, are forced into doing so much more extra work.
This work, for the most part, is not fun. It is extremely time consuming; I only managed to do it because I could play at work and I broke my arm and was out of commission from other interests for almost 5 months. I mastered alchemy on July 4, 2008 after working on it almost every day for at least 10 hours a day for 3-4 months. This was about 11 months from the time the system came out. I stayed positive about the system because of the people I had met who helped me through it. I had to do very little foraging the entire time, people handed me stuff left and right and in the very early days, I was part of a group that worked together to buy up as many gems as we needed, before they were available in the guild.
During my powerhunting days I started another account to hold all the stuff. My main is on a basic, but I put all my mules on a premium account, so I was now paying three times more per month than before. I also leveled up an empath for the sole purpose of helping with foraging, skinning, and for trading benefits, that I used to gather for the next tasks while I did reps with Allereli. It may seem like an extreme measure to take, but it's not uncommon for those who do alchemy.
Healthy people should not be committing this sort of time to a game. Using a capped sorcerer, mastered in illusions, and playing a normal amount of time (usually a couple of hours a day, sometimes more, while working to attain a post-graduate degree) as an example, it will take the average person about 2 years to master. You can cap a character easily in less time. I know of very few alchemists who have mastered without MAing, but I'm not bothered by the monetary costs as long as the end result is satisfying.
Steps were taken to make alchemy easier, but it's not enough. Why do you need to gather 72 fires for ONE TASK? Other ingredients don't drop enough to use the other recipes on a regular basis. I think having the amount of reps for general tasks reduced by half to a maximum of six--the same amount as in potions and trinkets--would be still be difficult to gather for without being insane, it is still 36 fires. The other rare ingredients for the mana potions, and now some phase II recipes, simply do not drop enough, there needs to be more of them.
Another serious problem is the work versus result. Many recipes produce lesser items compared to imbedding a ranger-made rod. Imbedding takes seconds, making items takes much longer and costs much more. There is really no point to the existence of these recipes except for training reps, to which I say it is disturbing to have to make so many of these inferior items. Allereli and my empath had an obscene amount of deeds when I was done mastering, because for the most part, that's all the items I made for reps were good for.
If the actual system weren't frustrating enough, the QC process has been absent. I can't count all the hours I spent testing new recipes to see if they worked, wandering to different guilds to see if everything needed was being sold and testing the resulting products. A year and a half after the release of alchemy, Phase II recipes are still coming out with serious problems--like they just plain don't work (either process or result), masters are teaching them wrong and loresongs to tell us what they do are non-existent.
The recipes themselves have also been frustrating in the ingredient requirements, and it seems like the GMs designing them do not think about them in terms of actual gameplay. To be able to use our hard-earned skills, we must continue to spend an extreme amount of time gathering materials. As someone who is now healthy, I only play about 2 hours a day on the week days and a bit more on weekends. I've mastered, but I cannot keep up with the material requirements for the phase II recipes. I saved just about every gem for over a year on 3+ gem mules and hundreds of jars, and when the animate healing potion was released, I had enough deathstones to make ONE potion. It's just discouraging. I'm aware that there's another recipe for the potion, but no one's been taught it yet, and still, I'm willing to bet the other recipe includes the glowing violet essence dust, which means we still have to compete with every other alchemist from all professions to make a potion that should be an ability that comes with enough necromancy lore, there will be more on this later.
Of the 12 existing sorcerer guild masters, after I am gone, only five will be truly active under their original players. Alchemy is not working to retain players, and not enough people are taking it up to warrant the development time.
The Sorcerer Profession
I did have a lot of fun playing a sorcerer up to a point, but I was always frustrated by limitations that are arbitrarily put solely on our profession defining spells, and on no other profession.
In telling someone about the sorcerer profession, this is what I would say:
"Well, our profession defining spells are 714, 725, 730 and 740. 714 is great, but there are no workshops anywhere except the Landing and Icemule, which for lower level success is essential. 725 is a pet with some interesting features and can be useful if you train heavily in lores, but mostly for RP. 730 has such great potential, but is full of bugs, the duration stinks, and you have to make or acquire animation crystals, I started using it regularly around level 60, which is early and I had to live with a low CS as a sacrifice to use the skill. You have to do over a year of work to be able to make the potion to heal your animate, unless you have circumstances that keep you at home for five to six months, then you can work 10-12 hours a day on it.
"Once you're done, you can make the animate healing potion, but I hope you were on Teras and saved up every single deathstone possible (they're really not common), because you need four per potion, and they're only found on Teras. Along with that you need a glowing violet essence dust, which drops only levels 35-50ish, I see them sometimes on the tables, and every other alchemist from every other profession wants them.
"740 works and you'll never have to use a gold ring.
"Our regular direct damage hunting spells have no damage factor boosts from our lores save pain, if you want to just kill things straight up with spells, play an immolation wizard, empath, or even a pure bard."
The problems with the profession have been reviewed over and over again by my fellow devoted sorcerers, I won't go into more detail, Strathspey knows the issues and I know he has plans to address them, but his plans are not a contract nor set in stone; I'll believe it when I see it. So far his plan to add functionality to animate dead using alchemy is a complete failure because the recipe is too demanding component-wise for an already component-heavy spell. As one of the few who can actually make it, I have no desire to gather that much stuff.
CHE System
Along with a volunteer GM staff, you have a devoted group of players interested in adding to the depth of the game by planning events and organizing groups through the CHE system. We volunteer a considerable amount of time for absolutely nothing in return in terms of benefits for our characters. As Chairman I had the opportunity to hear a lot of complaints and suggestions from a fairly large group of players, and doing the actual work gave me insight into how things get done behind the scenes.
Xynwen is well aware of my opinions on the system, both the good and the bad. I will simply say that I wish she were more flexible with how we used our points in order to better serve our members and appeal to new ones who don't live near our main structure, but I hope she sticks around and that she's given more support. There are quite a few systems the CHEs have been waiting on for over a year and a half, including dues, raffles and a bouncer capability.
Treatment of the Staff
My final and biggest issue is how the staff is treated. Development timeframes are an absolute joke with RSN and this is because you have a volunteer workforce. There is no incentive for staff to stick around and see projects through. I know it has been this way for years, but it seems to be getting worse and worse, especially on the development team. These are highly skilled people who need to be appropriately compensated for the amount of coding involved.
Some have suggested making the game open-sourced and letting the players learn the language and working on the coding on their own terms. I hope that the product managers consider this as a solution.
Vanessa / Allereli
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This is going to be long. I apologize, but I have a lot to say.
There are many reasons to enjoy GS, the amount of detail and depth of the game is incredible; however, everything I am interested in seems to be going in the wrong direction. I speak only for myself as someone who has little interest in RPing tea parties and designing text Barbies or hunting until all my skills are maxed. I play because of the complicated systems in the game, specifically alchemy, scroll infusion and animate dead. My other major interest was running Twilight Hall, which I took seriously and had a vision to bring the House into the present, where the population is sparse and the game is geographically huge.
I leave with the hopes that things will change for the better and I'll feel good about coming back, but at this point I feel I cannot put my money and time into supporting the game. I have no delusions that all will be changed to everything I suggest, but the game needs to be more about fun and less about tedium, and I hope the staff can take my experiences to heart and can use my ideas, or find solutions of their own to make the game better.
I came back in January '07 after being gone for 5-6 years with nothing from my past experience in GS3 (1996-2001)--characters, items or friends. I started Allereli from scratch after I looked at the spell lists and decided I still wanted to play a sorcerer. I did almost no research out of game and looked to figure things out myself in terms of the changes from GS3 to 4. I came back wanting to be a different type of player: to be more involved with the community (house chairmanship was NOT planned), to at least attempt to RP, to not be stuck in the eternal grind, and to do things that no one had done before.
Alchemy
I had a great time learning the game again and I was shocked at everything I remembered. Early on I learned that alchemy was in the not-to-distant future and I wanted to be a part of it. I saw/still see tremendous potential for the system to be fun and its capabilities unlimited, it fit in perfectly with what I wanted for my character. In the beginning the GMs were receptive to feedback and changes were made but as time has passed, and Phase II has been implemented, those of us who actually managed to master are back to square one with the frustration of trying to gather the rare drops/gems for the recipes we actually want to use.
To master alchemy, I had to quit progressing for about four months and powerhunt about 15 levels to get away from the wall because the points per rank requirements were just too much to handle in combination with the amount of stuff needed. This is a failing of the guild system where people, who may not want to play to cap, but want to do alchemy, are forced into doing so much more extra work.
This work, for the most part, is not fun. It is extremely time consuming; I only managed to do it because I could play at work and I broke my arm and was out of commission from other interests for almost 5 months. I mastered alchemy on July 4, 2008 after working on it almost every day for at least 10 hours a day for 3-4 months. This was about 11 months from the time the system came out. I stayed positive about the system because of the people I had met who helped me through it. I had to do very little foraging the entire time, people handed me stuff left and right and in the very early days, I was part of a group that worked together to buy up as many gems as we needed, before they were available in the guild.
During my powerhunting days I started another account to hold all the stuff. My main is on a basic, but I put all my mules on a premium account, so I was now paying three times more per month than before. I also leveled up an empath for the sole purpose of helping with foraging, skinning, and for trading benefits, that I used to gather for the next tasks while I did reps with Allereli. It may seem like an extreme measure to take, but it's not uncommon for those who do alchemy.
Healthy people should not be committing this sort of time to a game. Using a capped sorcerer, mastered in illusions, and playing a normal amount of time (usually a couple of hours a day, sometimes more, while working to attain a post-graduate degree) as an example, it will take the average person about 2 years to master. You can cap a character easily in less time. I know of very few alchemists who have mastered without MAing, but I'm not bothered by the monetary costs as long as the end result is satisfying.
Steps were taken to make alchemy easier, but it's not enough. Why do you need to gather 72 fires for ONE TASK? Other ingredients don't drop enough to use the other recipes on a regular basis. I think having the amount of reps for general tasks reduced by half to a maximum of six--the same amount as in potions and trinkets--would be still be difficult to gather for without being insane, it is still 36 fires. The other rare ingredients for the mana potions, and now some phase II recipes, simply do not drop enough, there needs to be more of them.
Another serious problem is the work versus result. Many recipes produce lesser items compared to imbedding a ranger-made rod. Imbedding takes seconds, making items takes much longer and costs much more. There is really no point to the existence of these recipes except for training reps, to which I say it is disturbing to have to make so many of these inferior items. Allereli and my empath had an obscene amount of deeds when I was done mastering, because for the most part, that's all the items I made for reps were good for.
If the actual system weren't frustrating enough, the QC process has been absent. I can't count all the hours I spent testing new recipes to see if they worked, wandering to different guilds to see if everything needed was being sold and testing the resulting products. A year and a half after the release of alchemy, Phase II recipes are still coming out with serious problems--like they just plain don't work (either process or result), masters are teaching them wrong and loresongs to tell us what they do are non-existent.
The recipes themselves have also been frustrating in the ingredient requirements, and it seems like the GMs designing them do not think about them in terms of actual gameplay. To be able to use our hard-earned skills, we must continue to spend an extreme amount of time gathering materials. As someone who is now healthy, I only play about 2 hours a day on the week days and a bit more on weekends. I've mastered, but I cannot keep up with the material requirements for the phase II recipes. I saved just about every gem for over a year on 3+ gem mules and hundreds of jars, and when the animate healing potion was released, I had enough deathstones to make ONE potion. It's just discouraging. I'm aware that there's another recipe for the potion, but no one's been taught it yet, and still, I'm willing to bet the other recipe includes the glowing violet essence dust, which means we still have to compete with every other alchemist from all professions to make a potion that should be an ability that comes with enough necromancy lore, there will be more on this later.
Of the 12 existing sorcerer guild masters, after I am gone, only five will be truly active under their original players. Alchemy is not working to retain players, and not enough people are taking it up to warrant the development time.
The Sorcerer Profession
I did have a lot of fun playing a sorcerer up to a point, but I was always frustrated by limitations that are arbitrarily put solely on our profession defining spells, and on no other profession.
In telling someone about the sorcerer profession, this is what I would say:
"Well, our profession defining spells are 714, 725, 730 and 740. 714 is great, but there are no workshops anywhere except the Landing and Icemule, which for lower level success is essential. 725 is a pet with some interesting features and can be useful if you train heavily in lores, but mostly for RP. 730 has such great potential, but is full of bugs, the duration stinks, and you have to make or acquire animation crystals, I started using it regularly around level 60, which is early and I had to live with a low CS as a sacrifice to use the skill. You have to do over a year of work to be able to make the potion to heal your animate, unless you have circumstances that keep you at home for five to six months, then you can work 10-12 hours a day on it.
"Once you're done, you can make the animate healing potion, but I hope you were on Teras and saved up every single deathstone possible (they're really not common), because you need four per potion, and they're only found on Teras. Along with that you need a glowing violet essence dust, which drops only levels 35-50ish, I see them sometimes on the tables, and every other alchemist from every other profession wants them.
"740 works and you'll never have to use a gold ring.
"Our regular direct damage hunting spells have no damage factor boosts from our lores save pain, if you want to just kill things straight up with spells, play an immolation wizard, empath, or even a pure bard."
The problems with the profession have been reviewed over and over again by my fellow devoted sorcerers, I won't go into more detail, Strathspey knows the issues and I know he has plans to address them, but his plans are not a contract nor set in stone; I'll believe it when I see it. So far his plan to add functionality to animate dead using alchemy is a complete failure because the recipe is too demanding component-wise for an already component-heavy spell. As one of the few who can actually make it, I have no desire to gather that much stuff.
CHE System
Along with a volunteer GM staff, you have a devoted group of players interested in adding to the depth of the game by planning events and organizing groups through the CHE system. We volunteer a considerable amount of time for absolutely nothing in return in terms of benefits for our characters. As Chairman I had the opportunity to hear a lot of complaints and suggestions from a fairly large group of players, and doing the actual work gave me insight into how things get done behind the scenes.
Xynwen is well aware of my opinions on the system, both the good and the bad. I will simply say that I wish she were more flexible with how we used our points in order to better serve our members and appeal to new ones who don't live near our main structure, but I hope she sticks around and that she's given more support. There are quite a few systems the CHEs have been waiting on for over a year and a half, including dues, raffles and a bouncer capability.
Treatment of the Staff
My final and biggest issue is how the staff is treated. Development timeframes are an absolute joke with RSN and this is because you have a volunteer workforce. There is no incentive for staff to stick around and see projects through. I know it has been this way for years, but it seems to be getting worse and worse, especially on the development team. These are highly skilled people who need to be appropriately compensated for the amount of coding involved.
Some have suggested making the game open-sourced and letting the players learn the language and working on the coding on their own terms. I hope that the product managers consider this as a solution.
Vanessa / Allereli