Closed Alpha Feedback Thread: April 20th

Nah, that’s okay, I’m sure it’s in the code someplace :slight_smile:

Okay everyone, I’m off to get some sleep. I’ve got things setup so that it should hopefully all go smoothly while I’m away. If it doesn’t, I’ve got an alert setup that should hopefully let me know if something goes wrong. If for some reason I don’t get alerted and I sleep through some downtime, I apologize in advance, but I don’t think that will happen. I’ll wake up in a few hours to check on things.

Hope you are all having a blast! Thanks for a great first Alpha day so far, it’s been a lot of fun.

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HOLY CRAP SO MUCH FUN!

My feedback. First @Riley_D could you please add a hybrid grip option in settings? For the touch controllers, it’s no problem whatsoever. But with my Vive controllers, holding on to anything for any amount of time starts to hurt and cramps. Can you please allow hybrid grip? Basically if you tap grip, it’s a toggle. If you HOLD it, it acts as a standard grip/drop feature.

My hands hurt from trying to hold on to musketeer bullets too long.

Second, something is up with the lvl 3 rock dudes in the farm in the starting area. They heal so fast and so often it takes forever to kill them with a group. Maybe make their heal cast SUPER noticeable but interruptable?

Third, holy crap 2 hours went by fast.

Fourth, I think we just need way more onboarding. Lots of info on… this is what you do, this is how you do everything, and all that. Everyone was helpful and answered questions but for the noobiest of noobs, there needs to be a blizzard like handholding onboarding process.

Fifth, I just wish there were more quests. Lots of things to do.

Sixth, I don’t know how to see how much health I have. could we add it as a wrist watch or something? No clue when I’m supposed to try and heal myself.

Bugs:

Something with the portals people make was broken. I’d walk through a portal they made and it would teleport me to the exact same spot but on an empty server or shard. I had to do the bugs/graveyard thing to be able to see people again.

Something up with the teleporting. It seems to really bug out on slopes.

Trackpad movement is really weird in that I’ll put my finger on the pad over and over to try and walk full speed. Am I missing something there or is it bugged? Sometimes I’ll slide my finger or touch the edge and sometimes it works and sometimes it goes super slow other times I don’t move. Not sure what’s going on there.

Lots of audio weirdness. Music would cut in and out often.

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First off really loving the first day of closed alpha super fun and having a blast making new friends. I was using musketeer for the most part and noticed if you equip an orb then I of course tried to take it back so I could save the heals for later I did grab the glowing effect from the end of the barrel but not the orb then let it go and it just stayed in the same spot floating forever. Also the teleportation areas around hills or slopes is very hard to navigate they will only let you move one step ahead or you can’t really tell where to go, I don’t know how easy it is to set it up to just have walls to where we can’t go instead of just not showing anything or only able to move one step at a time but would make a huge difference. Awesome job keep up the awesome work guys!

Even in the current state of the game, it’s been a blast to play!

Some of the issues I’ve come across:

  • The audio cutting in and out while I was playing which was a bit jarring.
  • When I looked up to check my experience progress while underneath a tree, it was inside the tree so i could no longer see the bar.
  • Issues with the quest system where it would only sometimes recognize that i was close enough for the quest to pop up (maybe have a quest box pop up next to the npc that we can tap?)
  • Stuck enemies inside the flower field that you could not hit.

Looking forward to playing more soon!

yes the sunflowers in the starting area, please remove the colliders from them. All they are doing is making the AI very buggy and preventing sliding through them. I think most would agree that not having colliders on them would not ruin immersion or anything as they are just a field of flowers.

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Glad I found this. I noticed the same thing when trying to use the sword throw with a front facing setup.

This was a great session tonight, I’m looking forward to playing more tomorrow. There were a lot of awesome people! Once I finish maxing out Musketeer, I think that I’ll try my hand at Runemage for a bit. I finally am starting to figure out how to cast some of the spells more reliably.

Just adding in my notes on the spells

Frost - easy, fast works well

Fireball - Finish your first line straight and then go to the second line, don’t let it curve down

Shield - Pretty reliable to cast, if it does anything I haven’t noticed it

Arcane ray - Very random to cast, haven’t worked out a reliable way to get this one. That said it’s quite useful for getting a hit in when people are in the way/running and shooting

Weird black hole thingy - This just pops up occasionally, Doesn’t seem to do anything (gravity magic down the line?) also not reliable

First part of portal spell - This is the part of the portal I struggle with the most, the only thing I’ve found to help is to draw it really fast, I can’t work out why, but it seems to work (when I say work, I’m talking 30% of the time)

I know the system isn’t finished, these are more notes for other people who may be struggling to cast spells

Hi, here is my Experience wrap up.

I know that this is an Alpha and some things are not finished yet. This are just the points I actively noticed!
Also, I’m connecting from Germany, my ping is pretty bad and I know that this may cause some of the problems listed below.

  • Runemage casting still seems a bit unreliable.

    • Got a Fireball instead of a Frostbolt many times and the same goes the other way around.
    • Got Arcane Shield instead of Arcane Ray many times.
    • Sometimes it just won’t recognize anything at all.
    • First Teleport Rune needs up to 7 tries to get it right.
  • Musketeer:

    • Random Orbspawning prevents active combat planing
    • Orbs spawn on Hand when you sheet your gun with an orb missing
  • Warrior:

    • Saw many people using the “wiggle” tactic
    • Used Teleport many times to go up/down hills to short travel time.
  • Archer:

    • Aiming feels far better than in the last stress test. (Only played a couple of minutes with it)
  • More visual, acoustic and haptic feedback for things like:

    • Casting, was a spell not recognised?
    • Health state and Damage taken.
    • TouchMove-Locomotion if you can’t walk in the direction you are trying to.
    • Gear Piece usability for current selected class.
    • Enemy casting. Earth Elemental heals without a warning.
    • Door opening
    • Using Teleport-fields
    • Hit detection. Has an attack connected? (sound is not loud enough, visual effect goes under)
  • Hit detection feels a bit unpredictable.

    • Sometimes Fireball and Frostbolt do damage when a Monster is not hit directly. Sometimes there don’t.
    • Often other players get in the way and you do not know if the monster was hit at all.
  • Roads, even with Guards around, accumulate Monsters. Don’t “feel” safe this way.

  • Teleport-Locomotion allows to Hit Portal-fields from stairs and co from a huge distance.

  • Quest UI’s position often really bad and I needed to move/teleport

  • Sheep Model quality way behind everything else in the game.

  • EXP gain seams a bit low for a VR game with expected short play sessions.

  • Its easy to reopen the menu and move it to an unexpected position.

Overall, I had huge fun playing yesterday and today! Thanks to you all!
The game already looks really promising. In particular, I like:

  • The Artstyle!
  • That I’m not class bound and can level up any Class at will.
  • Always on MIC.
  • The Ingame Atmosphere.
  • How every class plays different not only in what there do, but also in how.
  • The creativity in the classes. Musketeer in particular, something I have not seen that often.

I can’t wait to see:

  • The housing system
  • Some form of mounts or a bigger “fast travel” network.
  • More things to do in a group and as a solo player.

Thanks for bringing back so many good memories of old MMORPG’s and the feeling of Adventure and Exploration.

@likwidtek your health bar is on your weapon!

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Awesome Game, so much fun! played for about 5.5 hours yesterday. My arm is dead from casting Runemage Spells. I had to switch wand hands.

A few things:

-RuneMage spells are not consistent. I would draw a “perfect” fireball and get frostbolt. I would draw nothing like a frostbolt and get frostbolt. I could draw arcane ray a little better. The shield spell I could draw 100% of the time. All other spells was like rolling the dice, very random no matter what I drew.
-need a better spot for health, really hard to see how much health I have, it would be nice if I could move my health bar around to where I want it
-lots of problems where I could’t put loot in my backpack. I must have lost ~15 bags of loot b/c I could’t put them in my backpack. This would happen 1 out 5 times
-Need something where I can see my damage on the monster when in a group, need my color of damage to be a little different color. Also really hard to tell if m spell hit the monster or hit the tank, can’t tell if it went through
-Teleport works a little odd sometimes, when I’ teleporting near the mountains or sometimes in open fields, the teleport area doesn’t expand, sometimes I have to go back before forward. Doesn’t make a lot sense

Experience is 300% faster for this test than at launch (you think it’s slow now? ) The sword wiggling does very little damage and is not an optimal way to play the warrior. Earth elementals heal at 30% hp. A well placed stun can prevent the heal.

Yeah but at launch there will be quests which give XP. I don’t think Riley is planning for this to be that much of a grind >: )

Currently, with the content available? Yes, I think it’s a bit too slow. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good challenge. But I don’t like grinding and even less in a VR Game. When more Quest and Activities are Implemented I think even the lower rate will be fine. As long as it does not feel like we have to do the same thing over hours do gain XP. (Except in the Endgame, but even there it can be made fun with quests)

About the Earth Elementals, the game currently does not do a good job of telling a player when an enemy does something. Some mobs already do it like the “dragon” near the starting zone or the “ghost”. I think self healing should be a visible cast for the players to react to.

From what I’ve seen so far. Playing in a group far out trumps playing solo. Ive been playing as a warrior, the earth elementals heal when near a certain % as long as he gets stunned near 20% hp he can’t heal or dps has to do a large burst to keep it from happening. While I do agree a small cast. Bar above him would be a nice added touch kinda like the red zone aoe attacks. Plus I really do think the xp currently is pretty fair… I’ve seen many a people hit 8 in just 3-4 hours. And that’s after he fixed the extreme xp lol.

Hey guys –

I’m back around! And we’ve got a special surprise for you this morning that will be coming out here in a bit…hehe.

In the mean time, I have read this whole thread and just want to say thank you for all the great feedback! I don’t have time currently to respond point-by-point to everything everyone is saying but just know that it has all been read and considered by us.

A few things I did want to point out/respond to:

  • I did see a lot of people waggling to win with the Warrior, but I can assure you that is not an optimal way to play the class. The amount of damage you do is based on how far you swing the sword between strikes. At low levels it doesn’t make a huge difference (because it’s 1 dmg for a “waggle” swing vs. 4 dmg for a “big swing”) but at high levels the difference will be huge.
  • We actually removed the 300% XP bonus yesterday because people were running around in a giant group and killing monsters too easily and getting like a level every 5 minutes which we didn’t want. The downside to that is that it made solo or small group questing take way longer than we want it to. So the level of XP you’re getting solo now is the pace at which you’ll get it in the final game, but as you all noted there will be other activities (such as a monster log and quests) that will be big XP boosts. Before the next test we will be re-working how XP rewards work for large mobs of people and at that point we will reinstate the 300% bonus, since during the Alpha we don’t want to it to feel like a “grind” to level up. So I guess the bottom line is, don’t make too many assumptions about the current XP rewards, it is very “off” right now. And yes right now if you are running around in a group and killing monsters you are getting XP way faster than you should be, but oh well :slight_smile:

I’ll be back soon with an update.

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Oh also I’m pleased to report that the server seems to have done totally fine all night without any problems, which gives me great hope that I am not going to lose a ton of sleep over the next few months haha. Let me know if anyone who played last night ran into issues like not being able to connect or the server crashing on them or anything, but as far as I can tell from the logs all was well.

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Just curious would you prefer a log of ideas /thoughts/ concerns once the alpha is closed or a daily comment after game play? I’ll load ya up each day if you would like or I can make one heck of a post afterwards haha.

Edit:when I say closed after you shut the servers down this weekend

It’s pretty much up to you. I’ll read it all either way eventually. I do prioritize responding to bugs and game breaking things day of, but I also won’t necessarily have time to respond to each and every piece of feedback after the test is over, either, since the next test is literally 2 weeks away and we have a ton to add before then :slight_smile:

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