Before I get started, I want to make it plain that this is an attempt at constructive criticism and that I hope these suggestions give us all a better play experience. I’m heavily impressed with the server and everything that has been put into it, and the people all seem really cool. I’m hoping to continue playing and having a great time! With that being said, I want to talk about how my experience has fallen short, because I think it will be informative to those who are more established already.
1.) Force Users
The experience of playing a Force User was miserable. The selection of force powers is lack luster, and needs to be expanded, and the cost of the powers doesn’t seem to have anything to do with their utility. I spent the vast majority of my time either meditating to regain FP or waiting to meditate. The time spent playing vs. the time spent standing around waiting to play was about 50/50 and that was with a partner. To be blunt, that’s garbage, and I’m sure plenty of people show up, try to make a character who uses the force, and within the first hour or two, leave forever.
Beyond all the not playing that you’re forced to do in order to be a force user, you also can’t start play with a lightsaber item of any kind, so you feel as though you’re wasting skill points in something that you don’t want, and don’t want to use. Which means that when you run out of force powers you don’t want to get engaged in the fight with another weapon because that would split your XP and would also be leveling you up in something you don’t want to use.
All in all, you spend a huge portion of the time feeling as though you can’t do anything, that you’re not contributing, and that you’d be having more fun playing something else. And you know what? You’d be right. I built a new character as a sniper. It was tons of fun. Way better to play. I’ll be honest, for a while I didn’t know if I would stay. The sniper turned me around. That’s how bad it was, the difference was night and day.
Suggestions:
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Create Area of Effect versions of force powers
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Create Damage over Time versions of force powers
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Introduce some additional Force Powers (This could be it’s own discussion.)
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Reduce FP costs to cast force powers by 1/4
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Double the rate of FP regain in the Meditation ability
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Force Push isn’t nearly strong enough to warrant the cooldown
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Drain Life needs to always drain a larger percentage of the damage dealt, because 10% of your low level damage can often times be 1 point or even no healing at all, and with the lack of a DoT, longer casting time, and higher FP cost, it’s just not worth having.
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The rate at which force powers are resisted seems absurdly high especially considering how strictly limited you already are with the FP cost and the cooldown timers to begin with. Using that 8 FP Force Lightning to get 1 point of damage is pretty harsh.
2.) Land Ownership
Owning land offers obvious and intense benefits, and yet, a single person can own limitless plots of land, and all the land has been snatched up already as a result.
Suggestions:
Either make it so that you can only own 1 plot of land per character, find a way to implement the bonuses of land ownership in a way that works more like the apartments, or dump more areas in that are specifically for land grabs. The planet’s being developed right? So areas for just construction makes fine sense. Any of these, or a combination of them.
3.) Documentation & Quests
I’ve played about 20 hours on the server so far, and what I can say for certain is that if it wasn’t for the Discord, I would have left in the first few hours. Things aren’t necessarily well documented, and you often times have to go searching an entire (and often times very large) area for a single NPC. A lot of map markers that could have be helpful are missing as well, even on the space station, and including things like simple area transitions on world.
It took forever to discover that the quests were important. Many of the quests and NPC’s seem almost hidden. There are still quests that I found out today that I have missed, despite having been fairly certain that I had done all of them. Apparently I’m missing a quest line out in the mountains. But I digress. I would have given up long ago if there weren’t people there to actively help answer my basically never ending questions. Especially due to problem 4.
Suggestions:
There’s no easy way around it. Documentation just has to be done. It sucks, but someone needs to write the stuff down in a way that is easy for new players to make sense of it. You should also do a little bit more to help players either know where to find the NPC’s to get these quests, or at least let them know that they should be out scouting every corner of every area, because some of the NPC’s for quests are straight out hidden.
4.) RP and Player Interaction
This is the main reason I play NWN, and unfortunately, up until today there was very little of this. People are very helpful on the Discord, and that’s great. But what about interacting with people IC? Well, that was basically non-existent. Where’s the social hub in the city? The cantina? Where do people gather? Nowhere, it seems. Or perhaps in their own private houses. But either way, they’re certainly not easy to find.
Suggestions:
Making it exceedingly difficult to travel from planet to planet makes it harder for newer and older players to find one another. Add in a shuttle. Needing to build your own spaceship to leave the planet just does not make sense. Why aren’t people interacting? Hard to say being new. But maybe it’s because there’s not a lot of time to RP in between all the grinding you have to do because of our final topic of discussion today.
5.) Crafting
The server should be called “Crafting: The Eternity” because that’s what it feels like. At first, the crafting system seems like a neat add-on. But by now I’ve come to see that the crafting system invasively controls huge portions of the manner in which your character advances, and I have to say, it’s not in a good way.
Want a lightsaber? Crafting. Want to go to a different planet? Crafting. Want to furnish your house for the XP bonus? Crafting. Want even basic level gear? Crafting. I got quoted a price of 15k today to furnish my house, and that was by the only player on the server who had the materials to be able to even do it for me. Crafting basically controls the pace at which your character can progress, and since you can’t count on any new player having any kind of help, that makes it essentially seem impossible.
In addition, gaining crafting XP is extremely slow due in large part to the fact that it is so difficult to gather resources. There’s not much in the way of good storage, the items don’t stack and often times take up multiple inventory spaces, and the amount of overall XP gained from the creation of singular items isn’t very high. This requires tons of back and forth carrying components.
Suggestions:
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Put in a shuttle system to other planets, give benefits for having a ship rather than penalizing people for having their ships docked.
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Allow people to buy basic versions of equipment at the store. Basic furniture, basic crafting components, etc. I can buy a basic weapon and basic armor. Why can’t I buy a chair?
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Give players wider varieties of ways to make income instead of forcing every person on the planet to be a mine worker. Bounty quests. Something! My Sith shouldn’t be more experienced in wielding a damn Resource Extractor than a Lightsaber.
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Loot drops. Not everything should revolve around crafting. Sure, the crafting system should be able to make the best gear on the server, I agree with that. But that doesn’t mean it should be the ONLY gear on the server. Drop some lower to mid strength gear as loot in applicable locations.
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Put a practice saber in the store with the other basic weapons.
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Make your crafting components out of stackable items that only take up a single inventory slot, or implement a persistent personal storage system, but either way, make it easier to carry your stuff.
Misc:
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Using a shield counts as using heavy armor for XP splitting but not for whether your abilities work or not.
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Using a shield counts as splitting your weapon XP while dual wielding would not (Unless you went out of your way to dual wield two different weapon types)
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Using a single blade slows the rate at which you gain extra attacks at way too high of a rate to be balanced when compared with dual wielding or twin weapons. Especially when you consider the problems faced with shields listed above.
Conclusion:
I really enjoy the server, and the people are great. It has a TON of potential, and has been a lot of fun. I hope that some of these are helpful and ignite some discussion.