[POLL] What is your *overall* rating for this Pre-Alpha Release 9? (UNOFFICIAL)

*** Thanks to everyone that's been voting in this long-running series of polls. One voter in this poll will be chosen at random and be sent a $25 Store Credit Gift Coupon! This poll will be closed in 2 weeks ***

Ok everyone, for those of you who've had a chance to playtest this Pre-Alpha Release 9, what is your *overall* rating?

Here were the areas highlighted in the release notes for R9:
PvP (Team PvP - Virtue vs Chaos)
Combat Systems (Reagents, Combos)
Combat Skills (50 new skills, new Tactics line)
Scenes (Ardoris, Blackblade Pass)
New Creatures (new mimic, ice elemental)
Intro Cinematic
Character Customization (nose, ear, hair)
Minimap System
Consumables (potions)
Books (premade e.g. instructions, Fire Lotus journals, etc)
Default Decks
Player Lot Item Limits

Feel free to break out your ratings to those categories above or any others and elaborate in the comments below (or link to a thread you may have started already).

Note: This poll is designed to show trends of overall sentiment with each subsequent Release. It's not designed to rate it as a final game, but merely as a snapshot of the community's opinion at that point in the development cycle. Previous polls here: R1, R2, R3, R4, R5, R6, R7, R8.

Thanks for voting and looking forward to your overall feedback!

 

I have been running around in various zones trying different caster builds. Many of the spells/abilities are very underwhelming when you put them against the fire tree which is probably the most powerful. The ice elemental really just walks around and looks cool while the fire elemental tears stuff up. Gonna start playing with melee builds.

 

As the poll stands now at the time of this post, over 45% of players rate this release as a 1 or a 2, meaning they don't like it much at all. The next largest block, around 36%, rates it as a middle-of-the-road 3. Admittedly, the sample size was eleven players when I checked, but those numbers are pretty underwhelming. Only two people thus far rate R9 as a 5, and nobody thinks it's a 4. I hate to say it, but I definitely feel the same dissatisfaction.

The deck system, magic and armor in particular are not coming together in a pleasing way for me. I told myself to keep an open mind about the deck system until I'd tried it for a couple of releases, and at this point I can safely say that I don't like it. When a game has a tech tree, the most rewarding places to invest your points are into new, cool abilities, or to upgrade/enhance/personalize an oft-used ability. I think Borderlands 2 had one of the best tech trees I'd seen in years. Each new point felt satisfying when spent.

But in SotA's deck/tree system, it seems like a huge number of points get dumped into Focus, which feels like chewing celery instead of steak. I don't receive any new, whiz-bang powers or skills for Focus. Instead, I just get the ability to... what, use powers I've already bought? Isn't that double-dipping? Why do I pay for skills, and then pay to make them usable? Focus just rubs me the wrong way. A game's mechanics should support the player's style, not the other way around. Investing focus points into the deck system for the sake of the deck system is... aggravating. I'd much rather be upgrading Lightning Bolt, or doing something useful with my armor tree.

And speaking of the armor tree....

Like a whole heck of a lot of people here, I'd like to spec a ranger-style character. Since there are no fixed classes in SotA, this should be a freestyle process that helps reinforce roleplaying. Many other people will also try to create hybrid fighter/caster types. It's pretty dang common in every RPG that includes such a system, like the Elder Scrolls series. But between armor slugs and fizzle, I have no idea how I could credibly do that and not have a hopelessly crippled character. Armor slugs combined with fizzle feels like getting penalized twice for the same thing.

More to the point, the armor trees have no options, as far as I can tell, to mitigate fizzle for some or all of the spellcasting schools. Only armor slugs can be reduced, and that makes me grind my teeth over the deck system even more. Why? Because if I'm pinning certain key skills to my hotbar using those oh-so-expensive Focus points, mitigating armor slugs is far less useful than attenuating fizzle. If I pin something, and it keeps fizzling repeatedly, it makes me want to send my keyboard and mouse out the window and into the pond outside.

There are other pain points, too. You'd better remember to equip a deck, because if you don't, your hotbar will disappear in combat mode, and you won't get an error about it. Oh, and remember to update the equipment bound to the deck each and every time you swap out a piece of armor or a weapon, or things may not work right, either. So you have to build a deck, equip your gear, bind the gear to the deck, equip the deck, update the deck each time you update your gear... c'mon, seriously?! Do I need to bind what I ate for breakfast to the deck, too? This is a ridiculously high-maintenance process, and only doing my yearly taxes involves more process and paperwork.

I'm not saying that the deck system can't be made to work, but it certainly isn't lighting up my life in its current incarnation. Maybe it's a different experience if you're primarily a PvP enthusiast. I'm not. At all. And so as far as my vote goes....

 

R9 is bad for several reasons. But the biggest one is the fact that you can cast any spell without requiring reagents. That was painfully bad for and made me turn off the game.

 

/Agree

Spell Sould Need Reagents.

 

I hear you and feel your pain. Did you play R8 though? I really thought the deck system was fun in that release. They did take a step back in this release for sure. However that doesn't mean they won't take two steps forward the next release.

I won't go into detail about the stuff that bothered me. I'm tired of repeating it for people in new threads. I've said my piece in those threads and they are still quite active threads so you can find it there.

So since everybody knows I didn't like R9 at all, keep in mind there is still hope for the deck system. I hope the devs see this poll and hear what our feedback is so they can focus on evolving the system to the point we can have fun again with it.

I won't get into slugs, discarding, skills that need other skills to use the skills, and all that stuff. However the devs have their work cut out for them. Another thing is they had a shortened month to work on things. So maybe with an additional week they would have had time to test it and have interal feedback that matches up with what we are saying here.

Keep up the hope, but definitely don't feel bad about giving this release a low grade. The end product will not be based on the public opinion polls of this single release. It will be the final product that counts.

 

Thank you for reading all of what I wrote. It came from a place of extreme frustration, and I know the final product will be better. But I did feel the need to voice how strongly I feel about where the deck system is today. I did indeed play R8 and didn't care for the deck system then, either. However, I promised myself that I would wait for two consecutive releases before making up my mind about it.

The changes in R9 solidified those feelings in a very rapid and negative way, sadly. That's why I wrote that long-winded post. Big changes are needed sooner rather than later. :-/

 

A little early for me to rate this yet because I really haven't had much time to play this so far. But I do have one positive comment on this release. The dev team did a nice job with Ardoris. I was quite pleased with the art work and layout. The aqueducts were a nice touch. The use of row houses in Ardoris feels appropriate for this particular city. I think that having village or town lots in there would probably ruin the mood of the town, especially when you end up with a variety of buildings that doesn't work with the 'atmosphere' of Ardoris. The only two buildings that ruined it were the two lighthouses that someone dropped in the two village waterfront lots. The bright lights have always been a distraction at night, and still are. Would be nice to tone them down a bit. I may comment again if I get a chance to play with the deck system a bit more.

 

While there are very few votes currently, I can say that the average rating has started off very low compared to how the other polls started. In fact, this has started the lowest ever, by a very large margin. Usually when votes start coming in, we're in the high 3.x, almost 4's. Instead, we're starting off well in the 2.x range. This has never happened in all previous polls. I really don't know why this is. Perhaps only those that are unable or won't play are rating it and everyone else is still in-game having too much fun? That's doubtful.

Please keep the votes coming in, and definitely do leave some commentary as to why you voted the way you did, especially if it's a low score.

Thanks again and good luck to the winner of the random voter drawing!

 

mmh, it is difficult to make a vote.
I have to rate the new scenes and the combat deck.

Ardoris is pretty but the combat system is ...

I picked blades and heavy armor.
So i have the penalty of slugs but i dont have the feeling it protects me more!
With blades i think i have to be at the right position, one square in front or behind i make no damage...

In PvP i fought several times against fire mages. They jumped around like mad and i seldom got the chance to hit with my sword!
But they always hit me with their fire bolts and so i died all the time.

Being forced to handle mouse and keyboard absolutely correct, i think melee combat is horrible with the combat deck system...!

 

I have played, and I can only give it a 3. This release just isn't feeling like it was ready for release yet. Too much unfinished thoughts. At least that's the way it feels. This is Pre-Alpha so I gave it the benefit of the doubt.

 

To be honest this has been the worse release for me in awhile as well. I still rated it a 3 though to be honest if I had voted in this poll a day ago it would have probably been a 2. This release was very unstable. I crashed a lot and for the first couple of days had trouble even getting in game, then when I did I would often lock up and crash. Not to mention all the junk on merchants is a pain it is hard to get what you are actually looking for now before I knew who to go to, to get certain items. I also really wish they would give us a full set of each type of gear some reagents and some starter gold. That way we could be ready to test combat right away instead of having to spend time getting gold then going to merchants all over town hoping they have what we need.

Lately though the release has been pretty stable for me so I have finally actually gotten to get some testing time in and it has been decent. After trying pvp for the first time this release I admit I didn't like the deck combat as much as I did in pve. However I think the main problem is the lack of a customizable ui. Not to mention all the lag. I also still am not a fan of all the slugs heavy armor has. It is especially bad since it is not as easy this release as it was last to just click off all the slugs. They really need to come up with something better then slugs to penalize heavy armor, but still keep it a viable option. I also tried one of the default decks and quickly decided I just needed to build my own.

I liked the books and the mini map system a lot. I haven't seen much of Ardoris though what I have seen I enjoyed.

 

Yeah positioning is a pain with melee not to mention the lag. You have to be right on top of someone in order to hit them. Then even if you are right on top of them you lag a tiny bit and next thing you know you are swinging at empty air it is definitely frustrating. I had much of the same problem as you have. Not being able to hit people while spellcasters and other ranged dance around and take you down.

 

combat system need some improvements from what i have seen

Intro Cinematic
Character Customization (nose, ear, hair)
Minimap System

Books (premade e.g. instructions, Fire Lotus journals, etc)
Default Decks
Player Lot Item Limits

why implementing those things during the combat release ??? woudnt it be better to focus on combat only ??

 

I thought movement reaction is terrible. I feel like you press to move forward and 1 second later you move ( Probably less). Skill reactions are just as bad and trust me it has nothing to do with my connection or computer. I really hope you guys step this up because for me this is an instant turn off for mmorpg's,

 

you mean in the open world , or in the player hosted pvp arena ??

i think matchmaking is one of the most important points for a combat release and it is totally missing in the release 9 patch notes ! combat can only be fun if players have fun doing basic attacks , freedom to choose there playstile and a good ping to enjoy combat.

why make those arenas player hosted , did i read that right ?? so when the player who host the game would disconnect or rage quit , the game need to search a new host ?? woudnt it be better to open up servers in europe and us for those minigames , so every player can be sure to not have lag ??
in open world pvp you might encounter some laggers , but why should players have lag in the minigames aswell ?? one server could run several pvp minigame instances

will us and european players mixed up via the matchmaking for the pvp arenas and instances ?? will pvp and pve players separated via matchmaking ??

 

last release was a 3, this release only a 2 for me, since the Network Connection errors prevent me from doing more testing. Also I get a Neverending Combat Bug very often, which makes it very hard to harvest resources, since I can't do mining during combat anymore (was possible in R8; maybe I'm doing something wrong). And my opinion on the lack of single player elements (not story!) hasn't changed, but this hasn't affected my rating (this time; but it will on future releases). I'm not interested in PvP, so I didn't test it (and I don't believe someone is interested in my opinion of a playstyle I'm not really interested in). And last but least I don't like the idea of Chaos vs Order, since in my opinion it's much too simplistic, just not human behavior and leads to penalizing people who don't act according to a predetermined attitude...

P.S. Since this post sounds very negative, two positive things: I still like the deck based combat system and the new city looks very nice

 

I would really like to hear from these people who are voting 5. What made this a 5 for you guys? I'm curious to hear what they did while playing.

although I'm not saying people not to share your feedback if R9 wasn't a good experience. The devs need to know what's wrong. I just want to know why people are voting 5 for?

 

1

The game is becoming UO2, focused on already established UO guilds and PvP. It's a trajectory that will be hard to break, especially when there is complete silence on other promised aspects of the game.

Congratulations to that part of the community and those who wanted it!

 

Vyrinor, i readed another post of yours about the actual silence about the "Classic Ultima" part of the game. I agree with the points you brought there, and i am confident that the silence will break sooner than later. Do not despair.

Ill post some thought about R9 soon.