Closed Alpha Test 4 Feedback Thread

Alpha Feedback (Archived)
#101

For those of you who were having such bad luck on the fishing, how far out were you casting your line?

I’m not sure if I ever specifically mentioned this, but the farther out you cast your line, the more “chances” you are getting on a single lure “use”. Of course the tradeoff there is that there’s a higher chance you may get a bit farther out from shore, which means that you may lose the lure. But if you weren’t casting out very far, you may have been getting far fewer chances per lure “use” than intended. The “average” cast would probably take you around 6-8 seconds to reel in after casting it if you were actively reeling.

That said, I certainly think that we’ll be increasing the chances of either a) lure parts dropping or b) catching fish, so that either the lures don’t seem so valuable, or they remain that valuable but you have a much higher chance of catching something.

Re: the portaling other people, I assume that is going to stop once portaling requires a rare reagent since it wouldn’t really be worth portaling someone as a joke if it’s costing you something that takes an hour to farm. That said, adding some sort of sound effect to the portal as it’s beginning to cast would likely also help solve the problem since you could be aware that someone had snuck up behind you.

2 Likes
#102

I really love the game so far. It’s amazing, especially the new content.

With that said, here were some things that didn’t feel great to me this test-

Drop Rate
I think the gear drop rate is probably only a tad low, but without other items being in the game it was rough sometimes killing several dozen mobs and getting nothing.

Fishing
I feel very similar to Damage and Sour here.

The Ranger
Originally this was my favorite class, but it felt incredibly underwhelming after all the reworks. Both the utility and dps were much lower than the runemage. Working really hard I found myself still doing less damage as a ranger. The darkness arrow was really cool, but when limited to two arrows I wouldn’t really see myself using it to escape since you are already so much slower while in combat. Maybe in the future firing it could break pvp combat allowing you to escape. In order to increase utility without clogging your in game body with arrows, maybe certain combo arrows that combine multiple effects into one arrow could be allowed as you level up?

#103

Most my opinions on things that need to be changed have been discussed either by smooch or logan (minus the lovely portaling.) although i do believe you underestimate my level of stupidity when it comes to a good cruel joke.

The new zone deserves SERIOUS props. I LOVED it. It was just beautiful all the way around. well laid out the monsters may have been just a touch crowded but I’m not sure it should be altered at all.

I did find that when using sword rush on the boar alone it would sometimes glitch and not portal me to the boar but would deal the damage. This being said I was able to spam the sword rush and kill it before anyone could even come close to laying a finger on it.
As stated and you know the shield is graphically still on a stick from other peoples perspective. It seems to work 90% of the time. Every now and then I’ll get hit through it.
The sword as stated is like 15 degrees off from feeling like its in the correct position. (Oculus user) Theres a few mobs that feel are about impossible to hit. one of course is the boar his hitbox is just strange didnt really figure it out my group was killing them too quickly lol. The lizard boss that spits poison out was pretty good other than when I’d back up and he would chase me staying JUST outside of reach. I found myself teleporting extra far away then jumping in a square or so closer so I can hit him. Then first boss also when I would dodge the fire breath sometimes if I didn’t make it back infront of him before he quit doing it. he would turn the direction that I had jumped to and stand there for a few seconds (I believe its the shield from portaling to the other side of him hitting it) and the box is to the front of him I cant hit his leg.
The egg boss every time we killed him the walls stayed up. had to go to graveyard and even then the walls stayed up. No big deal just went another path.

On the final boss the “snakes” as we’ve been calling them every once in awhile one would drop inside the wall, near the entrance and it was not visible nor were we able to teleport inside the wall. long as the tank or someone got close enough to the wall he would pop out and be able to hit.
The “Eggs” that the plant boss threw out would sometimes land inside a “snake” and the snake would block ALL damage that was directed at the egg even if it was the warrior.

The fishing eh yea it needs a small increase in chance I feel. I was casting very far out and only caught 1 fish per 2 lures (same bait).
The new fishing I did love how its now done.

Thanks to all who join in fun and drug me around @Logan @Luvstosmooch (snugglebunnies 4life) @SourDeez @Johann and all others who I can’t remember their forum names :slight_smile:

Being the plant boss is supposed to be a world boss Bumping up their level to 12 would be in order? with new LOOTZ :slight_smile:

#104

The only problems I encountered this test (although I did have a fairly short time to play) was the boar hit boxes. I found as a rune mage the only time I could hit them with ice lance was when I lined the spell up perfectly with the middle of the board forehead.

#105

I had similar experiences with the boars as well. Ranged shots to the front of the boar seemed to have a fairly high chance of going straight through the boar without hitting it, sometimes hitting another enemy behind it (Worst for Runemages & Musketeers due to their attacks generally going straight until they hit another obstacle). Attacking from the sides had a far higher chance of having a successful hit. Aside from that issue, the monsters in the jungle were awesome to fight!

#106

I was fortunate to have a good amount of time to play this test so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Fishing
I didn’t think that I would spend much time fishing during this test but I was surprised to find it very enjoyable and I think it’s because it’s much more than just finding a nice tile to sit on and throw your lure out. It requires farming for ingredients, trial and error with different combinations of lures and fishing locations, and some exploration. Some issues I had with it were the exp gains, graphical errors on the text, and sometimes unable to teleport while fishing. I fished about 13 sharks and 6 other fish before I hit level 2 and noticed that sometimes when I would catch a shark there was no exp gain at all. Occasionally on the pop up when you catch a fish the text would be scrambled like some alien language. When fishing off a dock the lure was unable to be pulled up unless you moved to a shore edge and sometimes was unable to teleport when this happened.

Ranger
My main issue is inventory space. Like the musketeer your ammunition takes up inventory space which feels somewhat limiting in that I had to decide to leave some at home to have more space for farming things. Maybe if there was a quiver that you could store the other arrows in or something.

Runemage
I played this class the most during the test and I really like where the rune casting system is at. There were no issues with the teleport/resurrect spell like in previous tests and had good success casting all of the spells reliably.

PVE
Updates to the wererabbits and Cenn’s Farm area were great and felt better balanced for early leveling. Multiple mobs stuck in the hillside by The Twins village that are unattackable. The new zone looked wonderful and also felt well balanced as far as difficulty even for solo leveling. Some areas felt overly populated especially by boars. Unfortunately was unable to test the new dungeon apart from the trash mobs, I look forward to some sort of group finder in game.

PVP
I’m looking forward to the arena returning and didn’t have a chance to test the new bounty system. Other players were able to test it on me though.

Harvesting
The amount of plants seemed to be much lower this test and I was unable to find some at all specifically the Queens Ear, Roto Spore, Reedflute, and Blood Caps and perhaps I just overlooked them. It would be nice if these items stacked in your house chest instead of having multiple stacks of the same item.

Overall this test made for a great weekend yet again and I look forward to seeing the outside again.

#107

I found some blood caps! Riley mentioned to me that the others besides Roto Spore were in the patch notes as known issues when I asked about them in discord.

Also- yes on the stacking haha I can’t wait until we can use them up in alchemy :stuck_out_tongue:

#108

Closed Alpha Test 4 Feedback! (As always, all feedback is given in the spirit of respect and love for the game)

Summary: Played for about 12 hours, mostly on Runemage and Ranger.

Praise!

  • New zone is excellent. Has a different thematic feel to it artistically, and the new mobs with distinct behavior feed into it. The increased mob density makes it feel more dangerous as a higher level zone.
  • The new dungeon is also very well done. I like that it’s showcasing a non-linear outdoor approach to dungeons, illustrating we’ll be getting a good variety in the long run. The bosses each feel distinct with mechanics that need to be learned and compensated for. Difficulty felt pretty good overall at 12.
  • Thank you for making ingredients stack!

Major Feedback

  • Inventory Management. While the stacking of ingredients helped a bit with inventory, we are increasingly getting desperate for a better gear management system. As it stands now, switching between musketeer and ranger is particularly onerous, and as other systems get fleshed out, the inventory situation is getting worse. I think some system of switching classes and having each class on the character have it’s own stored associated equipment would go a long way to improving this situation.

  • Drop Rates. The removal of drops for your non-active classes resulted in what felt like a total dearth in equipment drops. There were a number of situations where I spent hours in a group killing the appropriate mob for a given equipment drop and not seeing a single thing. It also makes it difficult to gear up an alt if you literally can’t get the drops for it and can’t get a group going at the desired level. A possible weighted compromise would be something like a 3/1/1/1 split, where half the time you get a drop, it’s for your class, and the other half it’s distributed between the remaining classes. (As a quick random side note on drops, it may be beneficial to have some type of general rare drop you can only get from dungeon trash to discourage skipping it.)

  • Lag. I may need to try the direct client next time, but I seem to still be getting more and more lag spikes and hiccups while playing. I did catch my latency meter at one point above my head showing with a 326 ms latency, but the rest of the time I didn’t see anything show up, despite frequent hitches. My rig and my connection are pretty robust, and I didn’t have these issues nearly at all during the first couple playtests. I also had more issues where I’d end up floating in the middle of nowhere after zoning and need to return to the graveyard.

  • Communication. Losing voice chat with one or more people in the vicinity is extremely jarring and frustrating in a social game like this, especially when you can’t even tell it’s happening. I realize this is probably a hard bug to track down but man does it suck.

  • Interface. Given that we occasionally need to relog to fix issues, it would be amazing if we had an option to exit to the character selection screen as opposed to out of the game completely, as then we wouldn’t need to take off the headset and go back to the PC to reinitialize the game.

  • Communication. As the world size grows, the need for additional ways to communicate over distances beyond the group compass gets more critical. Right now we need to periodically pop out of VR to check discord to see if something is going down or if someone needs an additional member for a dungeon run. I realize this is a really really difficult thing to solve, especially in VR, but some form of friends list or proto-guild or something would go a long way to fostering and supporting the community.

Other Feedback

  • Ranger improvements felt pretty good overall, though the CC trap didn’t seem to work reliably. It’s hard not to compare it to the Runemage CC and have it fall short. The other arrows seemed pretty great.

  • The mechanics of fishing (in terms of casting, hooking, reeling and fighting) all seemed really solid. I especially liked the way the line goes from white to red to show tension without using additional UI elements. I wasn’t entirely clear if I was better off reeling in my casts quickly, slowly, or just letting them drift in on their own, but I tried them all with minimal result. Not being able to fish without a custom crafted lure seemed odd (I’d be fine if you lower my chances or let me only get basic fish, or even just have it give me nothing but a little fishing experience and information on what type of lure I should, but please consider not blocking fishing altogether.). I went through all 120 casts across 4 lures and managed to catch 4 fish, all of which were from a single lure in two different locations, so I got nothing on about 90 casts in a row. (I did get two messages about a Sunfish being present, though it wasn’t clear how to act on that information in context.) I do think the activity of it was pretty relaxing, and I can see myself pulling up a chair after a long day and just fishin’. Oh, one thing worth considering is giving a multi-fishing bonus like some games have, where fishing with other players actually increases your chances to get something. This reinforces and encourages fishing as a social experience. Lastly, the Lure staying equipped but not registering even after it’s out of charges feels kinda odd. Having some type of indication that the last lure charge was used up as you reeled it in and show it expire/get destroyed would be nice.

  • Navigation. While teleport rituals are awesome, given that they are expected to have an expensive reagent attached to them at some point, I believe we need additional connection points added to the game world. For example, things like having steps at the north end of Highsteppe, so you can go directly into the Jungle Zone or over to Green Lady Forest without having to go all the way down to Loch Laroo and then back up and around past God’s Eye Lake to Loch Caplargh. Previously this could be done with the warrior sword throw teleport, but now that that’s out, options are limited. Additional airship travel routes would also help, but the more those are added to the existing route, the longer it takes to utilize.
    .
    Various Minor Bugs
    Inconsistent mob pathing in certain areas, boar hit box issues, you still can’t get some of the harvestables like the king sweetie apples, ingredient re-sizing when switching hands during crafting, mobs breaking CC teleporting to their target, loot stuck in the ceiling on final jungle dungeon boss, no icon on the mage jungle shoulders, getting stuck in combat often, tooltip issues in inventory, etc.

All that being said, it was another exciting playtest and I can’t wait for the next one. It really feels like we are part of something special here. At one point I was standing on the shoreline with @Decnav while we were both fishing, waiting for the world to come down. We were reminiscing about how we’ve gone from 300 baud modems to muds to MMOs to Orbus, all within our lifetime, and how incredible that is.

I love the community that is forming, especially with the diverse cast of grumpyfaces (@Logan when he’s not getting his drops, @SourDeez when he’s leveling up alt classes), Leeroy Jenkins’s (@Luvstosmooch), scholars (@Zardulu), trolls (@Cinyman) goofballs (pretty much everyone), and everyone else inbetween included.

PS. Sorry for accidentally walking into and talking during the interview at one point, I didn’t know it was an official thing. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#109

i found that casting the up arrow intended for ice lance was giving me mana shield 50% of the time. had another mage try it and he started getting it as well

#110

I also got the shield spell a lot when drawing the frost rune. I eventually moved to a modified frost rune and it happened a lot less after that. Maybe 1 in 25 or so.

#111

Check out this video OrbusVR https://www.twitch.tv/videos/149086082

30mins of not sober gaming

#112