After 5 days of playing, I've made some assessments about the game as it stands now. These are my suggestions about what to do to make the game more assessable to new (and existing players). This version addresses specific improvements that I feel need to be made to the various user interfaces.
- New in-game Chat tabs. Currently, there are 3 divisions of the chat function, World, Users and Group. The Users and Group are useful filters, allowing the user to select the tab pertaining to the interest they want to see. The world tab gets a bit too busy and needs at least two other tabs to help the player deal with the glut of information coming at them.
- A skill tab. Put the skill increases (currently in popups) and existing skill experience messages into a new Skills tab. This consolidates the information currently displayed into a single data stream. Ensure all experience messages are displayed (The Animal Handling skill doesn't seem to generate a XP message in the Global chat currently).
- A combat tab. This information is currently displayed only over the mob's head. It's difficult to correlate the action (combat skill used) with the results. This information allows the player to study results and form effective combat strategies. (The overhead display is essentially useless with multiple people fighting the same monster.) Associate the player, skill and result into the same message and tag it as 'Combat', and put this information into a Combat tab. Optionally, allow a filter to this tab to show 'My Combat' to filter out other players results.
- A skill tab. Put the skill increases (currently in popups) and existing skill experience messages into a new Skills tab. This consolidates the information currently displayed into a single data stream. Ensure all experience messages are displayed (The Animal Handling skill doesn't seem to generate a XP message in the Global chat currently).
- Chat functions. It is very difficult to talk with a single person unless they are in your group. The /tell <player> <message> only works with a single space between the player and message. two spaces, and the message is eaten. A Reply function is vitally needed, it should open the chat interface and auto-fill the chat with "/tell <last player> ", so that communications between non-grouped players is faster. Ignore multiple spaces between elements in the command, so that the message isn't 'lost' entirely.
- Group invitation. Devise a mechanism to invite a player to the group remotely. If I'm logging on with only an hour to play and a friend is on, it takes too long to meet up to form a group (even if only for communication convenience). Even a simple "/invite <player>" command would help cut down the unnecessary travel time (and hazards) just to 'get together' to make communications easier.
- Group merges. Allow a group leader to simply merge two separate groups, not have to disband one group and manually invite to another. A command like "/merge <player>" would merge all players grouped with the targeted player into the initiator's group.
- Group display enhancement. One important thing for any group is knowing what skills each player has available. I would like to see the group display expanded to include player, armor, health, power Skill 1, Skill 2 at the minimum, with (optionally) associated skill levels of the equipped skills. This would allow groups to adapt their team tactics in accordance with the situation. A simple 3 letter abbreviation of the skill names would suffice.