Preface
I stream for 4-6 hours a day at least 5 days a week. I try to play with all kinds of people from all different fellowships, both new players and old, experienced and inexperienced. I play with both European users and North American users due to the times that I play at, and even when I play outside those times, I find the same results. This is going to all come across as very negative, but I want to be clear: I LOVE THIS GAME. I just want to see it be better. I will be adding in Edits at the bottom as I remember more things, because this is pretty long already.
-Poison is overpowered. As a tank, two things kill me: when I mess up and don’t get out of the way of/block a tank buster hit, and poison. Sure, you can have mage decursing and musk healing, but then you now have 3 people focused, effectively, on keeping aggro. Scale it back, or make magic armor make a noticeable difference in the fight, because right now I see zero difference at end game between the two. If there is a difference (which I’ve heard people talk about physical/magical defense from both sides, so there isn’t anything conclusive), it’s not enough for me to care. Just like the luck rings….
-The luck rings are not useful enough, and there should be more gear with luck stats on it. I feel like the amount they increase my luck is so insubstantial that I don’t care to sacrifice on damage and survivability to gain a miniscule chance of getting better drops. I have gotten just as good of drops farming without them as with (yeah, I know, RNG, but come on)
-The voip issues which caused people to go to discord in the first place have created fragmentation in the community. Now you have some people using in-game, some people using discord (though any serious players are basically required to use discord), and people in different discords, and I am constantly having my immersion broken by needing to open up discord, scroll through 4-6 different discord channels and subchannels within each just to see what’s going on….and meanwhile the lfg on the main orbus unofficial discord is mostly lifeless.
-Due to the fragmentation, the in-game LFG is mostly useless for end-game. Guilds play with their own guilds mostly, and those who don’t float between the various guilds discords trying to find groups. I constantly find myself having my immersion broken because I need to switch discord channels or browse the various discord communities looking for people to play with.
-PVP is dead. I sit the in the pvp que all day every day and rarely ever get pulled in. PVP in the wilds is non-existent, it’s just a few people who kill only to steal loot. Give me a real benefit to PVP! There is zero benefit to partaking in either style of pvp, unless your goal is to steal loot and then sell it from a stall, and even then….
-Dram is mostly meaningless. It matters to have some, so you can buy a few odds and ends, maybe some dyes, a few potions, or ingredients for potions, etc, but for the most part once you hit a certain point, the only goal with dram is to have enough that you can buy a stall every month…so you can get more dram and buy another stall. It’s a vicious cycle.
-It takes far too long to level. On my first character it wasn’t too bad because I was doing quests, learning the game, etc. After that, it’s just grinding. Why can’t I get XP for making potions? For artificing? For buying and selling? For discovering things? For exploration? For reading lore? Harvesting materials? Hell, when I make the choice to walk instead of teleport, why am I not rewarded? It doesn’t have to be a huge amount of xp (not like kills give a ton of xp), just something to give me incentive to do things. Further on XP….
-We need daily quests. They can be simple kill-quests, or harvest material quests, or whatever, just give me something that every day will get me onto my alts and doing even a 5-10 minute quest with them.
-I am on most days. Even with that, sometimes my potions get over-aged. Give me a little bit of grace period with them! If it takes 8 days to age a potion, give me 4 to collect it before it spoils. Yes, I know, shame on me for not logging on every single day at the same time to check if they are ready, but come on.
-I am still seeing bugs that have been there since my first day playing in December despite them being reported. My in-game chat system, for example, still sits popped out from the rest of the windows, and while useable, it’s annoying and sometimes causes me to press delete instead of invite. I still have issues with adding friends sometimes in that if we don’t mutually add each other, they won’t show up in my list (sometimes it happens, sometimes not). So on. I understand it’s a small team, and you have a content roadmap to stick to, but these little things need to be dealt with.
-Artificing is currently used to add additional damage to attacks. What you end up with is people using the same combos and stacking the tilesets in opposing ways so they can get double the damage bonus off of what is effectively the same thing. Runes are a language. The runes you have chosen to use in the game are real, legit runes. You can give them a new meaning, but that meaning must be consistent across classes. If I’m wearing pants instead of shorts, does saying hello mean something different? (well, maybe if you’re really into ankles, I guess so, but that’s besides the point lol). So why does the frostbolt F rune mean one thing to me and another to a mage? Ideally, this system should not be used to add damage solely, but to give the end user flexibility in how they approach combat. As a warrior, I should be able to use those runes to give my attacks a chance at triggering frost damage, or poison. I should be able to say “if I combine the runes for cleave and provoke, it will give my weapon a chance at triggering an aoe provoke”. Giving players the flexibility to find out what works best is exactly what the Affix system does, it’s just more customizable based on the needs/wants of that player. Extra damage is nice, but it’s only one part, and as a tank, I don’t care about extra damage, I just want to be able to hold aggro and not die, and currently the artificing system does not help with that.
Fellowships
-Fellowships are pointless and do nothing but fragment the community. On average this game has around 70-100 people online. At peak hours, maybe 150-200. Of those, end-game players make up maybe half of that? All of those end-game players hop in their separate discords with their separate guilds and (usually) run with the same groups of people only. Now, I don’t mean to sleight those of you who do that, it’s fine, and I get the appeal of having a solid, reliable group of people that you get along with and can have a good time playing with. I get it. But in a game with a playerbase this size, all it does is fragment people into 5-10 person cliques. Guilds work in most MMORPGS because of the large enough playerbases to support them, but in this game, it currently doesn’t have a place.
I’ve heard of, and came up with, a few proposed ways to make fellowships have some purpose.
Such as chests in the fellowship hall that are accessible by fellowship members. If you put in shareable chests in the fellowship hall (so you can share loot with other fellowship members), you need to give incentive to players to want to give up their own hard-earned materials for other people. If I don’t have incentive, I’m going to use/sell them myself…I don’t want to farm for everyone else for no reason. On top that, fellowships will become even more exclusive, because people won’t want to share with people they don’t know.
Lets say you could share Shard Dungeon shards and Fragments with your fellowship-mates (something that many fellowships would currently like, to an extent). But that’s like the latest end-game content, and as soon as you allow that, you are cutting down on how much of the new content people are even going to bother with. Why do a tier 1 when you can jump right to an easy tier 3? Or higher? The entire idea of sharing things as a fellowship just doesn’t work unless you have so many controls on it to make it borderline pointless to even bother. With how small the playerbase is, it’s just as easy to just group up and use them (or, if it was implemented, trade them).
Due to the rule that one guild can only have one stall per city, why not change it so each guild of at least X amount of active members is gifted a market stall, of which any member can sell things in. You would end up with so many of everything for sale…how would anyone putting stuff in there get paid? Part-per-share system? On top of that, it would be a nightmare to set prices. And who could set them? At the end of the day, the market is going to balance itself out and most every stall will have most everything, in which case you might as well do fixed pricing….in which case you might as well not even bother with stalls.
How about fellowships getting points from things their members are doing? If a player harvests, crafts, kills, buys, sells, joins parties, completes quests, etc, all those things give points, which add to the total of points that a guild has (we already have the guild xp system, for example, it just doesn’t mean anything). So give that guild a reason to do it, maybe make it so that the active players are what make a difference, not just the total. For example, a weekly reset on fellowship xp/points. Then, each week, award a “boon” (maybe a damage boost, or xp boost or dram boost or something). The problem is, once you do that, there is no benefit to being in a less populated guild. All the hardcore players are going to be in the same guilds because it’s going to offer them the biggest advantage (depending on the boon, of course, because as I mentioned, dram is pointless).
Following up on the xp/points system is an idea I had that stems from Elder Scrolls Online, and ties mainly into the PVP. If you were to take the core concept of how that pvp works (each faction starts in one zone and works towards the middle, capturing points along the way that give them benefits which help them capture more points, get more gear, etc), and apply it to Orbus, you would end up with something like each of the three wilds zones having multiple points they need to capture AND defend. This leads to some interesting gameplay like night raids, different time zones using that to their benefit, etc. Given how big the three wilds zones are, and how small the player base currently is, that could be a real ton of fun.
The problem arises once the playerbase is large enough. Using a few current guilds as an example, you’re going to end up with Alphabet controlling one area, Nova controlling another and Nox in another (just an example, it could be any guilds). The issue with this is that there are unique resources in each area, meaning whichever guild controls those wilds, they are going to control the market on certain resources and as a result, certain products made from those resources. So you’ll either have overpriced resources, or you’ll have an effective “mandatory” trading system of those resources, or, you’ll end up with something like The Community going in with their no-kill policies and doing harvesting for everyone…but if there is something to gain, why would you let anyone take “your” fellowships resources? It’s either, at best, balanced and effectively pointless, or at worst, a strong deterrent from anyone doing anything in the wilds if they’re not in one of the three major guilds (discouraging new players from even bothering). If the playerbase was high enough, this would be alright, because you’re going to get enough people competing that the tides can shift quite rapidly, but you’re bound to run into the same problem that ESO ran into, which is that nobody wants to play on the losing team. So if you’re serious about pvp, you join the strongest pvp Fellowship, and you steamroll everyone else. Certain design choices and balance choices can mitigate that, but you still need a reason to want to do it, some kind of unique gear or perk that you can only get from doing pvp…but it can’t be something you NEED to do, because not everyone likes pvp. Again, that comes back to fragmentation.
I decided I’ve been putting off writing out my gripes for far too long, so that’s what this thread is about. I mean no disrespect to the developers, you are all working hard, and I don’t mean to trash anything you’ve done, I’m just commenting on places I could see improvement. Thank you, all of you, for everything you have done to get the game to this point 
Edit 1: Warrior hit detection still has a lot of issues. I am constantly focusing on moving forward or backwards slightly to find the “sweet spot” where my hits register (despite me visibly seeing my sword hitting them…you wanna talk about immersion breaking?). The attack movements of the enemies often make me miss my combos. Some enemies, like vulpes, require me to walk so their head is between my legs and I’m hitting their butts. This is uncomfortable and immersion breaking. It’s even worse when you basically have to be inside a boss to hit.
Edit 2: When I find these unique little places (the abandoned campground and the dragon bones in the desert, the little nook at the back of the top of lamavoran wilds, etc) give me a reward for finding it. It doesn’t have to be anything tangible even, just exploration xp. Or place lore in all of those places. Or both. Or put pieces to a puzzle there, a quest of sorts. Just give these reasons a place to exist.
Edit 3: Complaints about fellowships aside for a moment, why can’t I see who in my fellowship is online? Why is this relegated only to the friends list? Why can’t I check the last active time and total active time of people in my fellowship? If you’re going to have a limit on fellowships, I need those tools to keep on top of things.
Edit 4: The game often feels very static. Sure, the monsters walk back and forth and can spawn in a few places, but things like encounters or events or something to mix things up would really help liven things up (roving pack of bandits that are 1 level higher than most in that area, for example).
Edit 5: What’s up with journal? Why is there still no way to keep manual written notes anywhere in the book? Why is there no way to keep track in game of the teleportation runes? Why can’t I tack a note onto my potions to say how long they take to age and what their grace period once aged is(before over-aging)? Why can’t I keep track of what runes do what and how I should be using them for different classes in artificing?
And what of the map(s)? Why are there still some missing? Why can’t I view them all linked together as a “world map”? I think the best thing that could be done is have a cartographer quest added in at lower levels that gives you a single map page that you can put on your belt, and says “but there are still more out there!”. As you get into each new zone, you have to track down or complete quests to earn the map for that area. Each map you discover adds on to the existing map page(s), making a nice big fold out map you can use to help figure out the lands.
Sounds like purchasing chest expansions is on the way, but I’m pretty sure that lots of people buy potions in game and wouldn’t agree with you completely here. Dram can save you time.