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Issues that I have seen!

Dreadz

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
Okay I will start by saying that many may disagree or agree with me but in my sol opinion these are major issues that need to be heavily looked at and worked on before the further development of any content. ( ie... new areas, mobs, characters etc...)

Combat system
There are numerous amount of flaws that should be looked at. Many players have brought up the amount of time it may take to redo much of this and I do realize it may or may not be a easy fix. ( more than likely its a super super hard fix, but then again I'm not a programmer).

Skills
the current skill system is awsome but also very forceful. I understand that a server populated with numerous players this prob would be fixed. however, nobody likes to feel forced into raising skills they don't want. This is forced in two ways. first by reqs to do other things as in creating arrows. (you need alchemy, fletching, carpentry just to make arrows.) This doesn't even include the reqs to include fire magic, battle chemestry and other skills to have other arrows that do little to no damage. The other way is reqs on gear. finding gear for a particular skill is awfully hard..( Archery is the hardest skill to get gear for either good or bad)

Abilities

In the many years of playing and beta testing games I've never never ever seen a lvl 15 mob have abilities 3 - 4 times the power of the highest level player in game. This is crazy.


Armor
This is a huge issue. AC is not suppose to be fluid. AC is a static value of how well armor will protect you from an normal attack. Being able to loose armor then hp is really pointless and is in essence just another hp bar to watch and carry potions for. by having armor behave in this way there is no way possible to do actual builds to over come a particular objective.

dying of armor

This is really broke and needs looked at. Armor color for Blue just looks like an over lay. The Dark Gray looks green and as stated before there needs to be a way for each part to be dyed. ( ie... main part, trim, details)

Graphics issues

There are numerous places that you can fall through. The Ice lakes in Kurr Mountains. I've fallen through numerous times and is a real pain to have to /stuck back to the newb cave then run through 3 maps back to Kurr then run 10 miles back to where u were. I know you could just die but that is hard to do for Hard modes cause then they can't get the tombstone back.

which brings me to my next topic

Hard Mode

This is as it implys and rightfully so, however, what exactly are the perks to it. I've been playing it for 3 days which has been a very fun experience. But with the armor issues in the state they are I don't see much of a perk and neither does anyone else thus only a very few are playing this.

Events

there are none. I know this is starting to change but again for a major event to be held it would take a great deal of effort for the mods to accomplish. This is due impart to no ability to spawn mobs, port to other players and ability to spawn certain items.

PVP area

This is very new area and we all know it was put in untested, however the mobs need to be taken out, or the ability for mobs to use a "god " item and kill them for pvp events. I spoke with Auriel about events that this would be useful for. enough of that area

Kurr Mountains

Spawn point should be moved a bit closer to the center part of the map. This also should be done for all other maps. That way it is much shorter run from place to place. Its very tiring playing for 2 hours and 30 min of that is spent running just to grind.

Grind
I know its very very difficult to create a game with no grind factor. I will first say this game is one of the few that tries to do this, however, as mentioned before with forcing players to pick every single skill in the game just to have decent armor creates this effect. whether its for gear or the next skill its very tiresome and is actually starting to push myself and my wife away from the game.

(edit)
Camera needs to be put back.. you can't go into first person mode like it is

Also the white lettering in Kurr needs to be fixed.. having white lettered tombstones makes the horribly difficult to read

Now with all that said. I would like to say what I've said numerous times this info is my personal opinion. If its left as is I don't think the game will die per say but I do think that taking a look at these issues will create a game that is very enjoyable and fun.


now for my question that seems that nobody knows.

Is there gold hard mode gear in game?

This question can not seem to be answered by any player that I have spoke with.
 
Last edited:

Pcuvush

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
Regarding hardcore mode: I am playing hardcore since the sign has been visibly placed in Serbule, a few patches ago.

The Winter Court armor has great armor values, so that makes a real advantage. The lack of yellow Winter Court armor is not too bad, since I wear all colors on any of my characters. Sometimes even a green item just fits. The rarest armor should be rare. Obtaining the best armor for your 'build' should virtually never end.

The reason I activated hardcore mode is because I always did corpse runs whether or not I had to. So it didn't make much of a difference. It does make a difference now in that I might loose some important effects on my corpse runs, since essential armor parts are damaged. That leads to being more careful when I am picking targets. It sometimes is harsh to retrieve my tombstone, but it worked in every case so far. Even when I drowned and froze in the sea of Kur and had to use any and all armor/life restoring abilities to get back my tombstone - it took quite some time and preparation, but it worked.
There are some bugs like leaving the necro tower in Kur through the well, where you fall through and into ice water. I guess you will have to report it if you die by the cold while falling and before falling through the world. You will have to heal yourself to 'safely' die by falling through the world.
I also believe that tools for anatomy, skinning, and the like should not be damaged, just armor and weapons.

I see hardcore mode as a test to check how hard or easy the default mode might and could become. In default mode you can try running through a dungeon, succeed 1 in 10 tries, and be happy. In hardcore mode you have to estimate your chances and possibly group for success. A ressurection ability would be more than convenience when considering the item damaging introduced as death penalty. Hardcore is about having to recover actively from failures. It also strips you from the easy travel by dying, in many cases.
From my point of view hardcore should be the standard. Or possibly a standard requirement for PvP. But since I am not really interested in PvP that opinion might not be very valid.

I am with you that the combat system needs changes. Issues have been mentioned in other treads and I am sure many people sent plenty of in-game suggestions about that. This has to be emphasized, since it is the very basic system in a game where half of the time is spent fighting.

Well, that was my personal opinion on a few of the points you mentioned :)
 

Dreadz

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
yes I agree with you that rare items should be just that rare. I think there are actually way too many gold items that can be found, however, with hard mode to my knowledge there has never been a gold item found. I would suspect there are indeed gold items for this mode due to I have found a couple purple ( although not for my skills of choice). If there are indeed gold hm gear the question is does it have the same drop rate? if not I think default mode should be changed to the same drop rate( so default gold armor is harder to find as is hard mode. If so the amount of hard mode gold in game is prob due to more mobs drop it and more are farmed.

I also agree with the pvp idea. Its one that I haven't really thought about but it would make it much more difficult for players or even have a hard mode pvp zone later on in game when the combat system is a bit more defined.
 

Dreadz

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
To update my question of "Is there gold hard mode gear in game?" yes there is .... I just found a gold hm helm with fire and psyc.
 

Irish Red Cap

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
Just a suggestion to add onto this thread Dreadz. Since I don't believe there are many hardcore players maybe increase the rarity of items found (and i only mean slightly like 3-5% increased rarity) while playing in hardcore mode, but then increase the amount of gear that is hard-core required to wear. This way people who want more of the higher end gear will turn hardcore rather than just go flood dungeons with tombs or using death as a convenient travel tool.
 

Citan

Project: Gorgon Developer
VIP
Stratics Veteran
Thanks for the feedback! It's hard to reply to this sort of post, though, because it covers so many issues. So I tend to just read these, as opposed to responding, but I don't want you to think I'm ignoring the feedback.

In terms of the combat system: everything will end up being "redone" several more times, I'm sure. But it's always easier to say "eh, **** it, this doesn't work, let's try something entirely new!" than it is to sit down, roll up your sleeves, and make the existing system work. Making a unique combat system work is REALLY hard. Getting all the pieces to line up is the hardest part, because they all intertwine.

(I also need to get all the major aspects of combat into the game before I can really look at how the pieces fit together well. For instance, the Axe skill has a "Knockdown" status effect, which is like a stun but also disables all the target's armor while they're stunned. This can be a HUGE effect... or it might be relatively pointless; it will all depend on the implementation details. This is why getting all the big-ticket skills into the game has been a priority for me.)

Getting combat to feel right will take tons of iteration. Aggro is too primitive right now -- monsters don't even notice when people heal others! Power costs are too cheap -- nobody bothers to eat food anymore, meaning I accidentally obsoleted major craft skills. I have to get ALL of these variables into place at the same time. And until most of them align, combat will feel wonky, to some degree or another, because they're a synergistic system.

Some of the systems will get totally rewritten, if they really can't be made to work. But I have to try to make them work, first. Armor is a great example. It's definitely not fundamentally unworkable. In fact it's pretty close to working well -- though I don't know if I will be able to get it "just right" or not yet.

It's not necessary for armor to be a static number to protect you. Armor protects you, that's the key thing. The only down side to this system is that unplanned monster additions can really mess up your plans. Which is good! Adding a bit more chaos to MMO combat is a good thing.

Is armor "just" another health bar? Yes and no. Remember that all the systems need to interact together, and the armor bar interacts with the treasure system closely. The idea behind Gorgon's treasure system is that treasure makes your abilities do more. Not in a passive way, but in an active way, when you actually use those abilities. So a "tanky" character doesn't just stand around laughing at monsters because he's invincible -- he uses his abilities to tank, which in this case means healing his armor. A "tanking suit" of equipment would be one with a lot of effects that restore armor while also doing damage and/or taunting. However, that same suit wouldn't be able to heal health damage -- that's a different combat role.

But this system doesn't work out right until monsters are doing JUST the right amount of damage and players have JUST the right amount of armor and restoration abilities, and taunting works just right, and so on. Until the pieces line up very carefully, it will all seem a bit disjoint. And until I have a lot of people playing, it takes a very long time to get enough data to make more changes. So it's sort of a chicken and egg problem -- please be patient with me, I'm working on it as quickly as I can! And if I really can't make it work, then I'll find a different system that does work.

Skills - I definitely recognize the annoyance factor in having lots of prerequisites on items. On the one hand, I want there to be occasional items that are amazing, but would require a lot of effort on your part to use. But it's happening way too often right now. I'm going to try some different things to see if we can address that. This morning I put up a new version that adds "loot belts" -- items which help tailor loot to two specific skills. Hopefully this will address the problem, but I won't know for a few weeks.

When it comes to crafting skills, to some extent, they're supposed to be a pain. If they weren't a pain, everybody would have all the skills maxed. Which is kinda fun for some players, but it isn't any fun for dedicated crafters, who want to make stuff for other players. I want many archers to buy their high-level arrows from other players! (We just need other players for that to work...) Similarly, not every single person on the server is expected to grow 500 potatoes or whatever to max out cooking. It's no fun being a chef if everybody is also a chef -- you'd have nobody to sell your food to.

There will be forty or fifty major crafting trees to explore in the final game, and different character builds will need stuff from different ones. The goal is to create niches for different crafters to fill, so that not every armor-crafter on the server is struggling to compete with everybody else -- there are lots of different craft skills for different combat skills, so they're more able to find customers for their specific niche.

But I haven't added a lot of those more "niche" crafting skills, because there's not enough players to fill the handful of crafting niches there are now, yet.

Dyes - yep, Aaron and Vince are busy fixing the dye issues. The next iteration of armor should fix the dye problems.

Hardcore mode - I don't think there'll ever be a time when the small benefits of hardcore mode really make up for the down side, at least not substantially. The hardcore armor is definitely a bit better, but mostly it's a prestige thing -- you're showing off that you're playing the game in a harder way.

I don't really even WANT the rewards to be so good that more casual players feel like they're missing out by not going hardcore. That will push people to switch to hardcore when they don't want to, just for the rewards, and then get frustrated and quit.

(I expect there will be "hardcore only" guilds, which will make the experience make a lot more sense for a lot of players.)

(And yep, as you noted, there is Legendary hardcore gear. It has the same chance of dropping as on any other item.)

PvP area - being able to switch the spawns on/off is a good idea! I left some hook beasts in because there are interesting one-v-one strategies using the monsters, and it seemed more interesting than a large maze with literally nothing else in it. But it's just a shot in the dark as to what's interesting for PvP.

---

I also want to say that I really appreciate this sort of feedback, Dreadz, and I like getting it repeatedly from time to time - every month or two would be great. It's NOT enough just to have said this stuff once months ago, because the game keeps changing. For instance, I've changed the Power costs of abilities many times. If you said the Power costs were borked six months ago, that feedback is useless to me now. Unless somebody else says it again today, I won't realize the Power costs are still borked. (In fact, they've gone through many iterations of borked/not borked/borked again.) So please don't assume that "he already knows all that." I am constantly trying to address different issues -- HUNDREDS of different issues -- and the only way I know if I'm succeeding is by seeing new feedback.

There's been a drop off in feedback, even as there's been an uptick in players. Which tells me that players think I already know everything that's broken. That's not so. I don't know if monsters are hitting too hard or too easy at any given level. I don't know if pets are too powerful or too weak. I didn't know (until people told me) that they weren't getting enough gear at mid level. Without a constant stream of feedback, I don't know anything! So please tell me whatever you're experiencing, everybody! (And please include things that DO work, when you think of it -- that feedback is just as useful as what DOESN'T work.)
 

Brandon Lamb

Visitor
Stratics Veteran
@Citan awesome reply, it is such a huge shift when developers reply versus games in development that are completely "radio silent".
 
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