Typical wall of text incoming! As always, all feedback is given the spirit of constructive feedback, goodwill and supporting the product.
Status: Level 12 runemage and musketeer, 8 warrior and ranger, 2 fisher. I spent most of my time this playsession harvesting, so I ended up with a lot of materials, and crafted all 5 potions.
First Up, @Riley_D 's targeted feedback question:
"1) Did people continue experiencing voice chat issues? I heard mention of it affecting Logan early on the first day, but then didn’t hear of it after that, but not sure if that’s because it stopped happening or because people just stopped entioning it, haha. As far as I know I only have one output_log of that issue, so I haven’t been able to track it down yet…"
I had it happen to me fairly extensively on Saturday with Cinyman. I was able to hear him through the compass and I could see his voice indicator show up on his name, but no audio coming through.
"2) How did you all feel about the Alchemy in general? The process of it in terms of making potions, how hard the ingredients were to get, the potion effects, etc."
I really enjoyed the physicality, presentation and overall experience of alchemy. As others have mentioned, you definitely get some anxiety when brewing as you don’t want to mess up and waste all those materials.
That being said, I have two main concerns. The first one is that this process does not lend itself at all to experimentation due to the large number of permutations and minimal number of possible success scenarios. This does cause it to miss out a bit on the mad-alchemist-in-the-lab combining various ingredients and discovery new combinations. The second, which many have mentioned is that given the amount of time to collect the materials, the complexity of brewing, and the resultant potions, I don’t see many of these getting a lot of use, with the possible exception of the Empowered Strikes potion (depending on how much it increases crit rate). This is largely a balance concern, so it’s fairly easily addressed by extending the duration/impact of various effects and/or the number of potions you receive from the combination. It would also be nice if there was a way to level up in alchemy in some way. Also, there are already more alchemical reagents in the game than can fit in the alchemy box, which feels a bit awkward needing to shuffle items back and forth. Maybe change it to a larger L-Shaped desk so we could fit at least a stack of each? In general I found that it may be difficult to memorize the alchemy recipes the way we do with runemage spells because it’s not the type of thing you can do constantly, due to material constraints. I’m pretty sure the majority of players will need to have a VR cheat-sheet or check in advance before each alchemy session.
"3) Thoughts on the new relative strength indicators?"
I liked how these made the UI cleaner, but I had some trouble really processing a few of them at a glance and in the distance. The color progression also goes green->yellow->pink->red->purple, and I think most players are used to MMO progression being grey (if applicable) -> grey -> blue -> yellow -> orange -> red. I think the number of points thing may be a little too subtle, but I’m sure we’ll get used to it. One thought I did have was that it may be difficult to use this information to share with other, lower level players in terms of “hey my level 5 friend, these mobs are green to my level 20 runemage, so you may or may not be able to hunt them effectively” kinda situation. Lastly, I’m pretty sure the adult lizardmen conned triangle (with the banner but still) but they are one of the toughest non-boss mobs in the game at the moment.
Various other feedback, much of which others have mentioned:
- Oh my god, thank you for having logout bring you back to character selection! Helps resolve a lot of issues very quickly.
- Definitely got stuck teleporting along waterlines in various places, but the interior edge of spider island was really bad. It happens with or without fishing pole being equipped at all.
- Harvesting has a really long respawn associated with it, and some mats are in such small quantity, I’m a little concerned that people will end up fighting over the nodes.
- Given how big the world is getting, I’m worried that having an expensive teleport reagent is really going to stifle adventuring.
- Inventory management continues to get rougher and rougher as items get added for the various subsystems. Without some way to expand it or retaining gear per class independent of the backpack, it’s going to be fairly untenable to have gear for more than a couple classes when adventuring. This may be intended, but for testing it’s increasingly challenging.
- The boulders near Elongata were not lighting up for anyone regardless of class.
- Idea for additional potions: Essence of the X (where X is each of the classes). Long duration buff that lets you get the gear drops for the other classes.
- We definitely need some additional ways to communicate in-game beyond the compass (which is awesome), as right now for forming groups and trying to do world bosses, we spam discord chat for an hour and hope enough people respond. Typically others will show up after, disappointed that they missed out.
- Quest interface seem significantly improved. The waving worked well for me each time, the text was legible, I was able to advance and accept. Some of the quests themselves seemed out of order, and the last safari quest which focused on jungle mobs didn’t seem to be completable.
- Was testing Arcane Explosion out as a level 12 runemage surrounded by level 1 wererabbits and half the time it wouldn’t kill them. Given the complexity of the rune, it’s really not viable for combat at the moment given it’s balance.
*I think one the quests called the big fire breathing lizards Fire Bugs but I believe I saw you guys refer to them as Dragonbugs before. Which one is correct? (So I can update wiki)
- SImilarly, the wiki and one of the quests refers to Kingsport Lake as the lake near the newbie zone, but the compass still refers to it as God’s Eye Lake. Which one is accurate? (I’d kinda assume Kingsport Lake is the waterway running along Kingsport, in the Jungle zone)
*There are a couple teleport destinations where the player can get attacked immediately upon porting. This happens most often with the one near the Lakewood Inn, but I believe it can happen in the Jungle near the tigers as well. Is this intentional?
- I still have some issues with getting tooltips to appear reliable (aside from in the trade interface, where they don’t show up for anyone). I find that if I move the item to another spot, I can often get it to work. If me supplying video of this would help, I’d be happy to do so.
- Really minor, not sure how much of this is from minor terrain changes, but there are an increasing number of floating plants, trees, and harvest nodes across the game world.
- Had some friends try the game this weekend for the first time, they were having a lot of difficulty at level 1 with the mobs at Cenn’s Farm, especially the self-healing golem. They may be a bit extreme for brand new players without a critical mass of noobs to bring them down.
shame on me. I think I experienced the typical voice but only once or twice, not sure if it was me or the other person though. However, this test my voice would consistently sound garbled/cut out for short periods of time (a completely separate issue than the other voice bug). I assume this was on my end somehow because it wasn’t happening to other people and it’s never happened to me before.(I’ll submit a few output logs next time if it happens again)
I’ll be sure to make some next test.