A New Player's Journey & Thoughts (The First Few Days)

[Slaughternaut]

We’re working on additional content which should help with the credit gathering. But we do this as a hobby and don’t get paid for any of it. There’s really only 2-3 of us actively working on the project.

I think you have some really good ideas and would like to see them get implemented. Do you have any interest in helping us out?

I hope that you don’t get the sense that I’m being overly judgemental. The work that has been does here is excellent, and I have absolutely no reservations about praising it either. There’s plenty that works REALLY well, I just didn’t mention any of it because that wasn’t the purpose of this thread. The purpose of the thread was to draw attention to what I felt were flaws with a server that I like. The people working on this project have nothing but my respect.

As for contributing, I may be able to help out with some scripting actually! I had spoken about this before, and I’ll have to get used to what’s being done in the C# environment, but in time I may very well be able to contribute codes and systems. I’ve built and scripted a few servers, so yeah! If you guys would like the help, I’m sure I’ll have something to offer sooner or later. I should probably take the time to learn more about the server first I think though. lol

Actually, that was one of the reasons I wanted to make this post now, while everything was still fresh as a new player, before I forgot all the little things I had to learn when first adjusting to the server. It’s a chance you only get once. Once I get the server actually figured out, I’ll definitely be happy to help.

[Taelon]

I am noticing a lot of the issues here are being addressed in the balance update. Item costs are getting reworked, I think we have gear being added in through a system down the line as well. If you really want to help us out, hop on the Test server when it gets up, this will have what we have so far for the balance stuff. It is a work in progress and again only 2-3 people are actively working on it, one of which can’t code (that’s me!)

I think issue with stuff not being available could fall back to crafters are used to making stuff on demand or they have no reason to gain more money so they just don’t make the stuff so it wont get put on the market. If the crafters have basic stuff up there for buy do you think that would help out more?

[zunath]

You’re good - I’m not taking offense to it. It’s part of making progress. Like I said before, the feedback really is appreciated. We’re definitely making steps towards offering other valid paths to pursue. The balance update includes a lot of non-balance stuff as well - including our new guild tasks which should provide a source of income for non-crafters.

My comment about only 2-3 people working on it was more of a time/attention thing. If we could all get full time salaries working on this I think the rate of feature development would go up hahaha

Just ping me on Discord on contributions. There’s a slew of github tickets that need attention (plus whatever’s sitting in our bug submissions that I haven’t sorted through yet). Plenty of things to do.

[The_Yellow_King]

You play a major crafter, why don’t you put stuff on the market for sale?
Not trying to call you out, trying to question why you don’t do it since you can give insight into the matter at hand.

[Taelon]

I play an engineer and fabricator, i meanly just run the hut and get on when it is required of me, I don’t do armor or weaponsmithing. I also spend a majority of my time when i can be playing on DM client.

[The_Yellow_King]

Engineers still make blasters, harvesters, ect.
I know I sell harvesters pretty cheap on the holonet, I don’t really bother selling blasters because I don’ t have the spare mats to make decent ones. I also sell cheap fab stuff so people have access to it, even though it is usually metal based stuff cause metal is just so much less of a pain to get lots of.

[GeneticsLuke]

Then you have my crafter who tends not to charge for pieces… he just does it because he likes the challenge of attempting to produce a superior object.

[Slaughternaut]

I would say that either miners should get powers that allow them to avoid combat like stealth or GS if they reach high enough levels so that they don’t have to be good at fighting. Because if you want to be a miner, then you should be able to play a miner. If you want to build a craftsman, then you should be able to build a craftsman. And if you want to build a warrior then you should be able to build a warrior. You shouldn’t have to only be a warrior so you can survive mining to make money. You should be able to sell your services as a warrior such as bodyguard, assassin, hitman, mercenary, etc.

If you want to argue against the stealth for miners for balance issues, then have the stealth only work in a way that NPC’s can’t see you (just have it adjust your faction for the duration, though it would have a few extra implications, or just script it so the AI ignores them). I wouldn’t want miners to have to depend on warriors to mine because that would mean that you need another player to be able to do your job, and with player density issues that’s a real problem.

I actually want to piggyback on this a bit, because that actually sounds like a really cool idea. Miners could become the smuggler type and have a whole skill set that involved things like sneaking past enemies, mining faster (of course), expanded carry space, enhanced movement speeds, a much higher chance of getting better quality materials when they go gathering resources. Give them escape powers if their stealth fails them, etc. They can still do combat, just not like the mercenaries.

Mercenaries (Combat types) could get bounties from a bounty office and go kill (insert number) of (insert target enemies) and get paid in return for doing that. Kind of like repeatable quests that you could take on to generate income. Assassin jobs could be done in a similar fashion. You could even put up a job board that players could post on too. If we did things THAT way, mercs could afford to buy equipment from crafters, crafters could afford to buy materials from miners, and miners could self sustain like they already do. You could even put equipment crafting requests on the job board so crafters could contact you. (I’m assuming there’s a mail system of sorts in place. If not, they’re easy.)

Allow basic crafting components to be purchased from the store, but make them cost triple what you think a fair asking price would be, that way the miners can still undercut the store but have wiggle room to compete for better wages.

Therefore anything that forces me to wait on another player may very well cause me to log off and play somewhere else, but new players are vastly more likely to enter a server with 1 player than they are with 0 players. And that hurts server growth.

This is real right here. Alone on a server with nothing to do, you usually just drop off. But with no one on a server, the chances of anyone new showing up is slim, and the chances of them staying long is even slimmer. With just a single person online people are infinitely more likely to come onto the server.

You should be able to purchase anything that you can craft, but to a certain limit. The benefit of being able to craft something should be that it is cheaper and easier to craft it than to buy it. In addition you should be able to craft nicer things than you can buy in the stores or find in loot drops. For instance if you had a loot tier system (like many MMO’s), you could have loot tiers such as: Common, uncommon , rare, elite, and legendary, where you can buy all but legendary (or legendary and elite) at a store or find them in loot drops. But if you want the best of the best gear, you have to go to a specialist.

I think this really ties things up nicely. Like I had suggested above, make the stuff available in the shops more expensive (though not too much more, since the craftsman get extra tiers), and then give the craftsman the ability to make better equipment than you can buy in the stores or find in loot drops. Make certain that the best piece of every piece of equipment can only be made by a craftsman.

Combine all that stuff together, and then I really think that your GTN will get used to sell raw materials and lower grade equipment at competitive prices, and people will be able to afford to buy it. The bounty boards would give an in game platform for the custom jobs and Player posted jobs. It actually sounds like a really cool way to lay things out.

EDIT: Last minute before passing out thought.
You could put the very best/most rare materials in places that were dangerous to mine even for master smuglers, that way you would need expert mercs to take you in the same way you need expert smugglers to mine the stuff in the first place, and expert craftsman to get the most possible potential out of the stuff. It’s a win for everyone.

[The_Yellow_King]

I sit alone on the server a lot of the time, when other people are on I usually still don’t have much going on.
I am currently trying to build a new hub for roleplay for people to meet up at but I will probably finish it sometime this week.

[Aurianos]

I must admit i read a good portion of the post…and then skipped the rest, I feel I’ve explained this numerous times to people and it’s been explained to me just as many times.

You have 500 levels to invest into skills. there is a skill decay mechanic with a lock feature allowing you to have it so certain skills essential to your build do not decay when you hit that 500 mark so you can have that temp investment in 1h vibros or blasters while you work for sabers. You do not need to start with one to level your saber skill, you can actually buy a training saber the moment you set foot on viscara if you find the right merchant. So your time swinging or shooting the weapons you don’t wanna use can actually be pretty minimal. There’s also the fact FP can get to very high levels, to the hundreds even and it’s rather easy with some basica force gear with a blue mod or two.

On the subject of force powers please do know that breach and lightning actually are DoT’s starting from level two. Drain Life has always been an iffy one for me because i feel it’s a consular favoured power, you want that dark potency up, that high wis int and cha to fully benefit from using it, force push’s cooldown could be a bit lower but then it’s more constant knockdowns and it ruins peoples fun at max level push is pretty good and it warrants the cooldown. We are also in the midst of a rebalance update that will add a lot of new force powers and add a force user specialization system to maintain balance.

with land and the subject of areas i do not know why viscara has so few areas when there’s the completed lake and swamp areas which imo need to be implemented soon and host some stronger enemies because not everyone wants to go to mon cala. however do know that the idea of one person owning a lot of land is a thing of the past here as we have had two players more or less control a majority of land only for them to give it up because it is SUPER expensive to maintain land.

now the next issue i want to address is the lack of rp and such…well sadly we all know the pain of not being able to have a nice rp session but people are taking steps to change that, like me…i was very inspired by the fight circle event and i intend to actually bring a solid rp fight experience to the server. it will take me a while as i might end up turning a house into an arena so mobs don’t interfere but none the less we feel the disappointment too and are working towards fixing it in a way that we can all enjoy.

and finally i took the time to read the crafting complaints and…first off there’s a transport form planet to planet in the works iirc…give it time, mon cala isn’t a newbie safe planet, it is brutal just because of the god damned epic dodging snakes. secondly, you don’t need to craft but it’s highly reccomended you pick one sort of craft to invest in, like for me my crafting skills are all over the place when i should be focusing more on that sweet nectar known as sabercrafting as that is my characters art. but instead i’ve got levels in weaponcraft, armorcraft, fabrication, freaking medicine from ages ago and also there’s already basic equipment stores, sabers not included, furniture is also low level fabrication, anyone can make their own house furniture, hell i made all my crafting benches and a good portion of my furnishings for some xp bonus. also no, no practice saber in the basic store, they aren’t handed out like candy. but like i said…there is a merchant who has a training saber for sale.

all in all, i feel your experience is one that you had high expectations of and those expectations are still there which is great, but…you need to realize the development of systems and such is a bit slow as i think zuns the only one doing any coding work at this time and we are open to contributions, so if you’re able to take on some of the coding work load or build some new areas and such, please do so the more people chip in the better and the server will grow to be better.

[The_Yellow_King]

There are four claimable areas on Viscara, each of those have four plots, that is sixteen claimable locations.
We have an active playerbase of around 10, there is also most of moncal claimed which has another 8 plots.
We should have enough land for everyone comfortably to have two plots even.
It seems that a lot of it is owned by inactive players or overwhelmingly in favor of a few people, since players cant see who owns what it is hard to say.

[SweetSunrise]

Phew! I finally got through all those posts!

So I wanna give my input and perspective too.

• I agree, the server is overbearingly craft heavy. The crafting itself is pretty un-intuitive, compared to systems on other popular places like Arelith. Crafting is good for people that like to craft, but for people like me who hate wasting away hours at a bench, its horrible, boring, and super tedius. I’d much rather be out roleplaying or blowing stuff up with my force powers.

• Forcing characters to do things they wouldn’t normally otherwise do is a real issue for me. Sylia is totally not the type of person that would own land or her own ship, but shes doing both now because not doing so was having her left behind with substandard gear and substandard skills. I havent been able to devote time to raising my combat skills in weeks because I don’t have access to a ship. I understand you have the shuttle thing in the pipeline, but why are we waiting for the balance rework to implement it? Can we get it sooner please? The balance rework has been months in the making, since before I joined. How much longer is it going to be? If its a long time, then we should really think about putting the features you HAVE finished (like the shuttle) into an earlier update.

• There really is no hub currently. People help that by making crafting places open to the public, but there’s quite a few of those out right now, and nothing very central. I think the best thing that will really help us run into each other organically is to increase spawning of power crystal deposits. Everybody needs power crystals for something, yet nobody wants to mine Veldite. Widlands is littered with Veldite deposits and rarely has a good amount of power crystals. Find a way to increase power crystal spawns in the wildlands and you’ll suddenly find people running into each other a lot more

• Amon-Si (Lanari) has actually written some really helpful guides and he’s always happy to share his knowledge to help lift other players up! Check the guides section of the forums, and if there’s something you want to know that’s not there, ask and somebody might be willing to write you up something

• There are a few problems with the training saber currently. One being that you can only get it by buying from a smuggler. Another problem is that it isn’t finessable. I would suggest remaking the training saber as a rapier base item instead of katana. Then you can at least get better at using it the more you use it. Otherwise, raising Dex does nothing for your proficiency with the training saber. I would also suggest creating a starting path/background for padowans that would start you out with a training saber.

• Materials not selling for anything is a problem, but its a problem created by lack of viable competition with our current reigning gear crafter. Its this way simply because that’s how Walessa does business. If we had another gear crafter that gave her some competition, we could start to see a more competitive market. But cant hold our breath for this, because we dont have a very large playerbase, and it really does take something special for someone to enjoy crafting that much to get as good as her. Right now, crafting is more like a painful necessity, so its probably not going to happen any time soon.

[Slaughternaut]

You do not need to start with one to level your saber skill, you can actually buy a training saber the moment you set foot on viscara if you find the right merchant.

Ok, I know how the points work now but a new player doesn’t know this, and beyond that, it doesn’t explain why a saber specialist is the only build that you can’t play from the start of the game. The item doesn’t have to be powerful. Hell, you don’t even have to make it look like a damn saber. But if it doesn’t increase the saber stats, saber users are at an unfair disadvantage at the beginning of the game. Or at least the new players will probably feel that way.

So your time swinging or shooting the weapons you don’t wanna use can actually be pretty minimal. There’s also the fact FP can get to very high levels, to the hundreds even and it’s rather easy with some basica force gear with a blue mod or two.

All this stuff you’re talking about here, is later game. How does that help early game? How doe that help new players? How does that help player retention? What does it hurt to give them a shitty training saber at the beginning of the game? As far as I can see, there’s no good reason not to give them a shitty training saber at the beginning of the game so they can level their skills like literally every single other person on the space station other than just obstinate refusal to change it. And as a new player, the intricacies of the system aren’t information you would be privy to either, and even if you were, the promise of one day, months from now possibly being competent isn’t that promising of a promise while you’re slogging through the grind.

On the subject of force powers please do know that breach and lightning actually are DoT’s starting from level two. Drain Life has always been an iffy one for me because i feel it’s a consular favoured power, you want that dark potency up, that high wis int and cha to fully benefit from using it, force push’s cooldown could be a bit lower but then it’s more constant knockdowns and it ruins peoples fun at max level push is pretty good and it warrants the cooldown.

I know, I was just more giving advice for ways in which existing powers may be capable of being altered to give us more/extra powers. Life drain isn’t iffy, it’s trash, and so is knockdown. If they get better later on that doesn’t mean that they’re good early game, and that’s all I’m talking about here is early game. The post is supposed to be about what it’s like for a brand new player, so keep that in mind. It’s supposed to point out things that longer term players wouldn’t know/see/remember because they’re already established.

[zunath]

Forcing characters to do things they wouldn’t normally otherwise do is a real issue for me. Sylia is totally not the type of person that would own land or her own ship, but shes doing both now because not doing so was having her left behind with substandard gear and substandard skills. I havent been able to devote time to raising my combat skills in weeks because I don’t have access to a ship. I understand you have the shuttle thing in the pipeline, but why are we waiting for the balance rework to implement it? Can we get it sooner please? The balance rework has been months in the making, since before I joined. How much longer is it going to be? If its a long time, then we should really think about putting the features you HAVE finished (like the shuttle) into an earlier update.

If it were that simple, we would have released it separately from the balance branch. But due to technical difficulties, we have to release it at the same time. I hope to rectify this in the future but for now you’re just going to have to be patient. Like I mentioned before, there’s only 2-3 of us working on this at the moment.

The balance changes were moved to our testing environment a couple days ago. Taelon and a handful of other players have been finding and reporting issues which have to be taken care of before it can be released. I don’t like doing big updates like this but sometimes it’s necessary. We’re literally touching every item and adjusting stats, for example.

I’ll keep tabs on this convo but I likely won’t be replying any further. I’ll just sound like a broken record.

[Slaughternaut]

I’ll keep tabs on this convo but I likely won’t be replying any further. I’ll just sound like a broken record.

I was interested in hearing your thoughts on the smuggler/crafter/mercenary idea for the economy? I posted it here in case you missed it: my post on the thought

I understand though, not wanting to post much more here. There are some really good ideas getting thrown around, so hopefully good material for you guys, but you’re already working, and changes are coming as fast as they can, and every minute you spend responding here is time that could go into actually fixing stuff. I’m starting to feel the same way. I’ve said all I can really say personally, I think, so it’s just time to get in and play more and see what more there is to discover. I’ll still respond if people throw out something that hooks my interest, but I think I’ve talked about all my concerns.

[Daroff]

I must admit i read a good portion of the post…and then skipped the rest, I feel I’ve explained this numerous times to people and it’s been explained to me just as many times.

I was going to read the rest of your post, but saw this and didn’t bother. If you don’t have the time to engage, then don’t respond. Don’t half-heartedly and partially read what you’re responding to and then complain as though someone has personally requested that you respond, and that you are somehow being inconvenienced in having to do so. Maybe if things are constantly needing to be explained, then they need to be explained more clearly and directly to new players in some form other than this or discord, you know, like in the game?

[Slaughternaut]

I would also suggest creating a starting path/background for padowans that would start you out with a training saber.

This is a great idea. A force user background that gives you a training saber to start fixes a lot, and could give bonuses to either saber or force user based on background.

[Aurianos]

Life drain isn’t iffy, it’s trash, and so is knockdown.

i’ve seen life drain used mainly for rp and force push is actually quite useful if you can get the knockdown to proc on a boss that you need that slight KD time to beat it but if you have a high enough stat (i think wis is for push…) your push cannot be resisted unless it’s by a pc with a specific stance active or that pc has their resistances up a good chunk

All this stuff you’re talking about here, is later game.

actually this can all be done very early on, this is a good chance to use the holonet and ask about modded gear icly. see you could step onto viscara and say “My fp level is pretty shit right now, maybe there’s another forcie who can help me out” and then you ask on the holonet “Hello i wish to improve your connection to the force, is anyone willing to help me?” this gets you that higher fp pool even if it’s only a slight bonus but it also gets you rp with others, crafting isn’t a late game goal, it’s like every crafting system where if you take a craft at lvl 1 and do nothing with it…you’ll regret it when you had all those resources for that craft a solid 70% of the time. so no crafting isn’t endgame, it’s a skill that you should be using to get stats without taking majour risks in fighting.

example being viscara…say you’re a blaster character, everything rushes you and you die, so there’s getting more dex and a better blaster, how do you get that dex and better shooty stick? Engineering, run back to the station for a bit, harvest metal, crystals and electronics and in a short while you have a point or two more in dex that gives you the bonus you need and your blaster now shoots holes through anything because you decided to have someone shove an ease of use mod onto it so you could fit that +dmg mod onto it as well. same with sabers the prime carft for a saber lover (all guardians, i am one of these btw) is engineering because sabers count as electronics and thus you need engineering skills for fitting saber mods yourself and even crafting some powerful saber parts. which teaches you early on, because the item is higher tier doesn’t mean it’s better.

[The_Yellow_King]

Life drain isn’t iffy, it’s trash, and so is knockdown. If they get better later on that doesn’t mean that they’re good early game, and that’s all I’m talking about here is early game.

Life drain is pretty bad early game, but push is great if you have a group,and once you get skill level 5 you can get it to level 2 and the kd is long enough for an attack to get off.
Push was the bread and butter of my first force character because it helped him hit especially early game before his stats/skills got up there.

[Daroff]

Life drain is pretty bad early game, but push is great if you have a group,and once you get skill level 5 you can get it to level 2 and the kd is long enough for an attack to get off.
Push was the bread and butter of my first force character because it helped him hit especially early game before his stats/skills got up there.

Enough to get a single attack off at rank 2. But then you have to wait how long to use it again? It may be useful late game, but like Slaughternaut said, it’s trash for a very long time.