Alpha Test 3 Recap and Thoughts

Also, some collected notes on previous comments re: death can be found here: https://wiki.orbusvr.com/Death

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Oh nice!

Love the dropped tradeable items thing. When ranking qualities that I like in an MMO, a strong death penalty is really high up there. Up there with limited fast travel (riding a blimp/train/etc in real time I don’t consider fast travel but an actual immersive form of traveling great distances).

So I’m a little late on my feedback and bug finds, sorry, busy weekend.

Main Feedback

  1. Warrior Feedback - I didn’t play the warrior much. I loved the combos, but I wish they gave more feedback when completed correctly just to let you know you got it. I think the combos added a good bit of flavor to the class that it was really lacking before. That said, I just can’t do it. I’m just a ranged DPS at heart.

  2. Musketeer Feedback - I really loved the musketeer rework. Getting to select your orbs and come up with a rotation prior to battle was a ton of fun. (This may have been answered previously) Are the orbs always going to be in the musketeer’s inventory? Would there be a way to create an orb dropdown menu in the 4 slots they have? Perhaps you could make them choose between a healing orb or a utility/dps orb in each slot to increase the weight of that decision. Choosing between Lifewell and Gravity would be a really tough call for me.

Because I enjoyed the class so much I spent a little extra time on it and found some interesting stuff. I had a much more difficult time grabbing the orbs than I remember from Alpha 2. I consistently found myself with my hand highlighted, but whiffing on the grab. I also tried unloading an orb, which produced some interesting results and led to a strange double loading bug. @Zin also found the double loading issue and mentioned it in the feedback thread, but I thought the video might help elaborate. Here are some videos highlighting these issues:

  1. I recall having an issue with the final dungeon boss not staying down on his knee for the duration of his vulnerability, but I may be remembering from a different test. I know fixing the issue with mobs spawning inside the walls was something that was reported from the last test, but I don’t remember being able to teleport through them myself.
    Here’s a video: https://youtu.be/yDCr3TqQCHE

Additional Notes

  • @Fluffuh mentioned having spells collide with each other during one of the dungeons runs. I thought it was a really neat idea. I don’t know how feasible it would be to do that, but I think it would lead to some pretty fun fireworks shenanigans.
  • I encountered an issue in Cenn’s farm where loot wasn’t falling all the way to the ground. It had some entertaining results. On an unrelated note, can we please have a ball to play catch with?
    https://youtu.be/oY84rYTxJaA
  • One of my friends came over to try out the game. After a couple hours he was hooked and he’s hoping to get a Vive and pick up the game sometime over the summer. He gave runemage a try and, while he wasn’t the best runemage out there, he was able to do something that I could not reproduce.
    https://youtu.be/AVaFBRtJNEE
  • I’m honestly a fan of the 24 hour tests (yeah, blasphemy, I get it). It’s easier for me to lock down a 24 hour block of time to devote to testing than it is reserve an entire weekend and I really had a harder time convincing myself to log in knowing that there were only 6 people online. That said, I’m not going to be incredibly disappointed if we continue to have 48 hour tests. I may just focus heavily on the first 24 hours.

I think that covers everything for this test. Thanks for all of your hard work. I can’t wait to see the fishing rework!

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That was mostly because I thought they did, I’m not sure it has a practical purpose. Outside of that, semantically… I’m not sure most magic actually has any mass to interact with outside of opposing elements interacting / earth, because rocks. Though I guess that depends on the magic (Is fireball a literal fireball, or a ball of napalm?)

These are the questions that keep me up at night.

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Ok, I never got to play warrior that long but I can see how it feels like your holding the sword by its pommel. It felt nice using the horn, but maybe turn down the time required to blow it by like a second or half a second because your unlikely to have the horn in your hand for any other reason than to use it so you don’t really have to worry about accidentally usage.

Musketeer was really fun to play and the gravity orb was my favorite to use. The only problem with it is that it is completely useless on any mildly big enemies. I can get gravity orb not affecting them because they are big, but at least make it stun them if nothing else. The healing for musketeer was pretty powerful, like if one of my allies were being attacked by a tongue monster, all I would have to do is throw a renew on them and they would take almost no net damage. Also the rock crab and the golem were much easier this time around. Me and another musketeer just rotated lifewells on our tank, and occasionally put out the emergency cure wounds if he didn’t make it out of the AE but no one actually died while fighting a boss.right now it’s probably good as a starting dungeon but it’s a bit easy if you know what to do.

Another minor bug I found was that if I had some orbs equipped on my musketeer and switched over to my fisher, the lure slot would be taken up by one of my orbs. Also the fishing ingredients did not stack so that was pretty annoying.

Also, maybe nerf musketeer for pvp, because I was unstoppable there, and there was one confrontation where me and pyarrows, who was also a musketeer, got into a fight in the arena and neither of us could win. The only reason I won was I was close to leveling, so I drew a frograt and leveled with it, and used that new buff to overpower him. Otherwise, that battle would not have ended unless one of us gave up.

That’s just my 2 dollar bill into the matter.

The size of the enemy does not affect the stunning or not, but basically bosses and elites cannot be pushbacked or stunned by the Gravity orb or Pushback spell currently. It just happens that all the bosses and elites are really big right now, but even when they are normal sized it won’t work against them. This was a design decision we made.

So I imagine taking two Musketeers should make the content a little easy right now, because there are no hard DPS checks on anything. In the next dungeon we are currently designing, though, you would be at a pretty big disadvantage without 3 solid DPS (of which a Musketeer can serve as one if they are outfitted for a DPS role rather than healing), because there are boss fights where you specifically need to kill enemies at a certain speed or you will be overwhelmed.

3 DPS, 1 Healer, and 1 Tank is the “ideal” group comp that we are targeting while building the content. Obviously you can deviate from that as you see fit, but it will be harder to beat. That first dungeon is a lot more forgiving in terms of group composition, which I think makes sense as it’s the first dungeon and low-level to boot.

When tuning the boss fights, I’m basically starting from the standpoint that in terms of the boss, if it’s a straight up “boss stays on the tank the whole time” fight, then the Musketeer should be able to keep the Tank alive using basically just their Renew orb with the occasional Cure Wounds thrown in for good measure. But then for harder dungeons what we do is we then add a bunch of other stuff you have to deal with on top of that. Adds. Environmental hazards. Party-wide damage. Requirements to move the boss around the room to avoid stuff. Etc. The difference is that a lot of that stuff is avoidable (e.g. get out of the AoE area quickly, move the boss perfectly, kill the adds really fast…) But most likely you won’t have perfect execution, which means there will be mistakes, which means more damage for the healer to take on.

So I guess what I’m saying is, it sounds like the Musketeer healing is about where it needs to be right now, considering that the current boss fights basically have no real areas where you can make mistakes and take extra damage. Once we start throwing all of those into the mix, you’ll need all that extra healing output that’s overkill right now to keep everyone alive because they’re not perfectly executing the fight. And that’s really what the healing is for – it’s what allows you to defeat the boss even though you’re not perfect at it. And of course the higher the dungeon level, the less margin there will be for error – messing up the environmental hazard mechanic twice might be an irrecoverable mistake, for example.

Anywho, just some general thoughts on that :slight_smile:

I’m really excited about the next dungeon we’re working on right now. It has some boss fights that I think are going to be super interesting and fun, and really take it up another level in terms of the mechanics and the coordination required out of the group. I also can’t wait until I get to design the first “end-game” dungeon…mwahaha. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Playing as a dedicated healer, I feel that the musketeer class is in a good place right now. As long as I plan ahead for the fight and my group works well together, then things tend to go smoothly.

24 hour tests is probably best to keep the numbers up. Moving the test to Saturday will help a lot, as well as resetting levels and slowing down progressive, which will cause more people to be online longer. :yum:

Moving to one day Saturday tests would not help me. Saturday is a much busier day with more stuff to do, more people at home, and more interruptions.

Fridays, on the other hand, I am clear all day and most the night. I can clock a full 13 hours straight on Friday.

Maybe the 48 hour (Fri/Sat) are a happy medium as it seems some people don’t like Fridays and the others, like me, are much too busy on a Saturday.

Resetting levels and slowing progession combined with shorter tests will simply mean we have less time to do the same content we’ve been doing for weeks. This seems counterintuitive to the point of these tests: testing new mechanics before the beta. We can only repeat the same material so many times.

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It is counter-intuitive, if their goal is to have us test as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. However, that in itself is counter-intuitive to keeping the population number high, as long as possible. The less time it takes us to max out and run the dungeon/world boss, the less time the average person will play over-all. The less time we play over-all, the lower the server population will be at any given time. Slowing progress/grinding is a time tested strategy for keeping populations up in traditional MMORPGs. As much as people complain about it, it still works.

It seems those of us, myself included, that are going to play 6 hours or more each test will do so regardless of how long it takes to hit level cap. Many players, it seems, simply go to the farm and hit level 4, then go to the dogs and hit level 8 in under an hour and go straight off to the dungeon. When they complete or give up on the dungeon they log off.

Ultimately, it depends on what the goal is, more rapid testing (less time spend playing over-all) or more people online longer (more time spend playing over-all).

To be clear, I agree that we should be focused on faster testing for the alpha tests. I was merely offering suggestions to Riley_D since he brought up low server population in the original post.

While your stance is true if we only kept the same amount of content per test, but that’s not the case. If he adds bandits and crafting and fishing, spending a long time just getting to where we left off previously will cut into what he actually wants us to be working on. So in essence, making us waste time repeating content cuts into the new stuff we need to be working on.

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I agree. The biggest problem with VR right now is the lack of players and I have seen a bunch of promising games fail bc they assumed they would have a large player base. Having solo quests would help keep the game interesting while the game becomes more popular and while the industry itself grows.

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I feel like one of the biggest issues right now that’s causing boredom is the gear.

During the process in which you are leveling up your first class, you are also grinding gear for it, which is well paced and ends up working well. However, while getting all that gear for your first class, you also find a full set of gear for all the other classes too. This causes you to have a full set of level 8 gear ready to go as soon as you start to level any alt class, thus you have no need to grind out gear at all on 3 classes.

So on 3 of 4 classes, players are grinding out XP just so see a few numbers get bigger… No new spells/abilities, no new gear, it’s very tedious and boring at that point. Then do the same thing for each CBT.

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