Part feed back/part bugs

[Sudhri]

There has been a great deal of back and forth for a mini map. I personally support a mini-map, for the following reasons:

The compass usually stops working ten minutes into game.

The information for ore, plants, etc. can sometimes (when working) be seen on the main map when opened.

A mini map on a screen shot for bugs could easily narrow down specific locations and help with faster fixes of issues with mobs, floating nodes, etc. and so on.

It could be a toggle off or on in settings making it completely optional to use.

It already exists with mods and people are most likely going to use it whether others like it or not.

It makes the constant walking traveling a little easier to navigate (this is a pretty big one for me, I hate having to stop every one to two minutes to make sure my map note is still where I put it, or when it stops showing up all together on the compass and I need to make sure I am heading where I want to go).

Things which could be implemented:
The tracking of resources from the compass to the mini map, with a bonus of saving the ones you have previously found (mined/cut down/harvested/etc.) You would be required to have interreacted with them at least once to save them to your map.

Saved map notes. (Permanent map notes for yourself on your mini maps to mark specific things you deem important)

In closing, it would eliminate the need for an outside piece of software which may or may not interfere with the game. Oh, and on an off topic, being able to customize the ui in general would be pretty nice too.

[Sudhri]

On another note, you guys should get with your lost ark team and take their character creation deal and put it in New world. That was the only real feature aside from the cutscenes that I found impressive with the other game.
Besides, people like customization options, so adding in some sort of npc to allow for appearance changes would go a long way in making people a little happier. This would also allow for cash shop items for appearances, hair, ears, etc.
Same would go for name change tokens in your cash shop.

On the topic of cosmetics, if you offered a program to allow people to submit outfits under whatever your parameters for creation are and gave the creators a small portion of the sales then you would have a potential endless supply of nice cosmetics for your store with little effort on the part of your dev team and still profit from it.

[Sudhri]

So, I double checked the store page on steam, it says:

" CARVE YOUR DESTINY
For thousands of years, Aeternum has been the source of fantastical legends—and now you’ve found it. Shipwrecked and without supplies or allies, you’ll need to make your way in a dangerous world where supernatural power has changed all the rules. In such a land, your destiny is whatever you make of it."

So, I’m just curious how, in a linear story line game, one’s destiny is what they make of it?
You can’t become angry earth.
You can’t become corrupted.
You can’t become a lost.
You can’t make any meaningful choices in any quest with different outcomes.
I won’t get into the lack of guild halls and what not again. . . .
The point is, the only thing you can really choose is what faction you are and what you might craft/farm/what train to join/or do in pvp day after day. This person takes that area, some one else takes it back, etc. etc. There literally are no meaningful choices other than what bench might be upgraded each day.
After all, the chances that people are going to beat the invasions are around a speculative 1-5%.

Even the forts and towns don’t really change in appearance when they become hamlets/villages/keeps/castles, etc. I saw an announcement that ‘castle (insert area name)’ was under attack the other day, and I thought to myself. . .castle, what castle? There are no castles in this game, just wooden forts that could most likely be burnt down if push came to shove.

But I digress, the advertised illusion of choices and deciding one’s fate as advertised is bordering on false advertisement with the game. Even the ad video makes it look like one should be able to choose corruption if they want, but that certainly isn’t an option in the game.

[Sudhri]

Suggestions:

Creatures, pull from mythology devs.
There is a whole host of things in greek, roman, chinese, egyptian, etc. mythos that could be used in this game given it’s supposed baseline.

Adjust the refining process, as it stands now the conversion and usage of multiple resources is a bit excessive. I’ll do a full outline for crafting later. . .it’ll be long and drawn out, but should make more sense than turning a silver ingot into a gold one.

The ‘creative’ deal for discord isn’t up yet. . .no idea when it actually will be. Hopefully that gets put in place soon and others can put forth beneficial assistance with the story line and more.

It may or may not be possible, but one way to get rid of bots might be to just have some sort of macros detection put in game and start kicking the ones using such things. This is only an idea, but I would assume that some sort of interaction that is not human input could be detected and flagged as cheating. EAC is on your mobi looking game, the ark one, why not put it on this one too?
Honestly, bots seem to be nearly non existent since the last update so far as I have seen on my new server, so maybe the issue with them isn’t as pressing as it once was.

There look to be lots of things coming in the big update, looking forward to it all! It looks exciting!

You may want to check on the physical and elemental resistance upper end gems, while swapping out gear to check, they seem to not be working at all.

Above guild/company improvements, npc merchants, and so forth bumped from above posts of course.

Adjust invasions difficulty down slightly, give people a little more of a chance to actually win against them. Also, adding more arena training grounds for spriggans, priests, and so forth wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

Many other things have been addressed with in the dev blog notes, and do not need to be re-iterated here.

Add in a housing upgrade option, obviously this would cost currency and raise taxes, but would provide the ability to upgrade your home storage limits and perhaps other things. Maybe a quest which allows you to place your own benches, similar to trophies, within reason. Say a three to four limit? You would obviously need rare things to upgrade them, just like trophies.
But perhaps toss in a reduction in crafting fee’s if done within your home?

Maybe add in bastard swords, no need for a new tree, just make them work with sword and board but with a higher damage than long swords and a different appearance.
On that note you could also add in war hammers (not the mauls used at this juncture), battle axes, and so forth that could work with the sword and board as well. Obviously this would take time, since there would need to be weapon quests, but it would add much needed variety.

Need more coffee now. . .more to come. . .

[Sudhri]

Troubling news of late, and even more troubling forums:

Duping, Coin Transfer, Trading Post, Storage and updates

Yeah we got unlucky today, the daily wheel already landed twice on wealth disabled [image]

Coin transfer disabled GIVE US A WARNING

Ok it needs to be done to fix the kiddies from do the kid things. But without a warning someone looking for armor may spend over an hour looking in the trader making a decision and then running a couple of zones away to buy something and then find the trader is INOPERATIVE. A little consideration for the players would be appropriate. At the Character screen there should be a BIG notice of emergency temporary changes to the game. When you open the Trader there should be a BIG warning that the …

Give players an item/gold spawner (a god mode menu) as compensation

This the type of person to suggest printing more money to fix the national debt.

Wipe all servers

Well hear hear to that. Whatever they do they need to do it fast, make a decision fast because they might patched todays exploit but who knows what will bring tomorrow or how many exploits are still out there just people are keeping it for themselves or in small groups because so far this game is only good for people who benefited from all those situations and they ‘walk free’ and for those who sell gold IRL and I bet make shit loads of money.

Delete this - problem is solved

Ok, what sort of verification are you looking for exactly? What will make people happy? Even a list of banned names won’t mean anything cuz there’s no character names asssociated with random online screenshots. There’s no clear metric for success. They’ve said they banned people. If we don’t believe what they say then it doesn’t matter what they say.

There are even more posts, mostly concerned with the nerfing of equipment, nerfing of gathering, increasing grind of crafting, the extreme imbalance of pve now with the super fast respawning enemies that have buffed hp and dmg. . .

Now, I try to be a fair person when it comes to judging the character of games, their development, and so on. . .but when the same mistake occurs over and over again it demonstrates gross negligence, incompetency, and dare I say . . .insanity? (If you are unaware of the actual definition of insanity, do look it up, preferably in a dictionary.)

That aside, this is the third time that dupes have been an issue, and apparently it is still the same method being used (If we are to believe the posts in multiple areas and forums). And, the ‘perma’ ban for those who have done it apparently isn’t so perma. . .

I mean honestly, it’s embarrassing. It makes the dev team and the mods look not only like liars, but also fools. Mind, similar things happened with fallout 76. . .well, we know how all of that ended, with a class action and zenimax/bethesda being bought out by microcoft.

Of course the time and effort needed for bug fixing and exploit fixing is very long and tedious, but you guys need to do something, and soon, before the worst happens.

By the by, as a wipe seems like the most intelligent option, as well as reversing several nerfs, adding npc merchants (to prevent the money shortage which is driving these gold dupers), and fixing drop rates, it will most certainly cause many people to stop playing.

I’m not sure if I would even play any more if things were wiped, mainly because of the time put in to get where I am. I don’t even play a second character due to the amount of time and grinding required for it (and there is no benefit in doing so).

The problems currently need to be discussed and decided on by senior programmers and developers, not corporate, and a decision needs to be reached on how to actually correct the issues in this game. Even if it is taking things down, reverting everything back to beta, and then dealing with the dupe issues before bringing it all back up and trying to advance from there.

I do wish the dev team the best of luck, I’ll check back in a month or so, but I am willing to bet. . .the same issues will re arise.

[Sudhri]

[Dev Blog] Update from the Team: Exploits

Bad actors discovered through packet manipulation, a bug that allowed players to duplicate in-game coin and resources – a similar attack against a different game system was also recently used in housing. Together for these exploits we have permanently banned over 1200 players, removing their items from the economy, and cancelling their trade post listings. We took decisive action against obvious bad actors with a first pass on November 2nd, permanently banning accounts of the most egregious offe…

Great job here!

Though, this in itself, along with the previous duping should bring up the issues not only with drop rates, but also the economy itself.
If the economy and gold gain weren’t in such a poor state to begin with then I would imagine that the vast numbers shown with duping gold might not have occurred, but this is of course speculation. Still, with the scrambling for money and the extreme time requirements to gain wealth and number of exploiters one does have to consider that this is indeed a symptom of the greater problem. The main way to address this, aside from getting rid of the cheaters, is of course to fix the root of the problem. Poor economic design and loot tables which either aren’t working correctly or are working at levels so low that people feel they have to cheat in order to advance or make money. The blame rests with the economic team and the cheaters, it’s not just a one sided thing with the continued use of exploits.

That aside, it is good to see swift action in this area. Hopefully the issue is resolved quickly and the exploit is removed until the next one is discovered.

On another note, the devs should consider this: Games are meant to be fun, relaxing, enjoyable, and a break from reality and the stress of real life. When they get too grindy, too rng, and too frustrating to play then it becomes worse than a 60 hr a week job and people will quickly loose interest and seek out something else.

There is also a saying, from an anime no less, but it is still valid. It goes something like this:
Mistakes happen, it is when they repeatedly happen that you show you weren’t paying attention and then they turn into negligence.

Keep up the good work, I realize it must be very frustrating trying to improve this game and balance pvp and pve, when both aspects are so very different. Personally, I would have stuck with the pve and set up arenas for pvp that were slightly scaled, and not messed with the stats/abilities in pve at all.

[Bigdogg001]

What is going on with the auction or trade post that cant use or sell on it thought was good to go in 1.05

[Sudhri]

If you check the forums, or even the link in my post above, you will see that duping has once more reared it’s ugly head. To be honest, getting rid of duping is typically one of the hardest things for a game designer to do, since there are multiple ways it can be accomplished.

[Sudhri]

Well, I wish the devs the best of luck. I think after this latest patch and how royally everything got f’d up I’m done. I’ll check back in a year if the game is still around.

[Sudhri]

I’ll make a suggestion for the devs. . .create a survey and tally it. It might be more effective if you are trying to figure out player desires numbers wise. Just add a link to it on the start of the game, since the forums are limited and don’t contain all the players still playing. Or link it on both the game and the forums.

[Sudhri]

Something which might help in the future for seasonal events, is to have an in game calendar which can be used for seasonal event changes/spawning/etc.
Obviously the days don’t line up, but if an accurate calendar were used to replace misc mobs and add in seasonal event areas it would greatly improve some aspects of the game. Incidentally seasonal items could be made as part of these events as rewards, furniture, clothing, even cosmetics, etc.
Of course there would have to be some challenge involved and you would only want to use various holidays known to the time period, this could cover a whole spectrum of mythos and holidays.
Using the holiday themes and such should easily provide potential seasonal quests, bosses, and reward ideas.

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Other things which could improve interest would be hidden puzzles, dungeons, etc.
For puzzles sometimes simple is better, slide puzzles, actual puzzles(jig saw), and so forth. These can be used as mini games with increasing difficulty and increasing rewards, but they would have to be hidden/shifting in location/ and even locked behind certain benchmarks (level/crafting level/weapon level/etc.). Mini game puzzles and challenges could easily provide unique gear depending on difficulty and what ever benchmarks are used to reach unlock phase for doing puzzles or quests. Anything from gear to recipes to resources to consumables could be made as rewards. Riddles and other things could also be used.
Some of these could also be seasonal or a rare % of discovery as hidden things in dungeons(The puzzles not the rewards, effort must be put forth for reward lest it be meaningless).

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Something else to consider in the long term is to attach some worth to titles. Small bonuses to something based on the title used and how it was acquired. I.e. combat ones give bonuses to dmg, refining bonuses to production qty, etc. This should be something simple to add in. . .