Suggestions with solutions
Hearts
✭✭✭
I won't post a list of the amount of bugs and just complain and complain, I will try to come with a solution where i can. I understand that certain things require skills and developers with really good skills are hard to find, I understand that skills come with time and mindless complaining wont help.
Some of the solutions i have might not make sense and im sorry about that.. And thats all i can say.
________________________________________________________________________________
Hacking/Botting
1. Why would you make speed be handled in the client? I dont know if it truly is and its only what i heard (I don't really reverse engineer or have ever attempted anything like this) but you really shouldn't trust your client. No matter how good it is, it will be broken.
2. You really need a dedicated GM team in the lowbie zones, you could ban hundreds of botters daily, seeing the state of the game, this is making your presentation score much lower which makes the game worse.
3. Which brings me to my final point, I know how the flagging and time for banning works.. lower the time frame for banning from monthly to weekly, even if the gold sellers buy new accounts how much will you lose based on the ugliness they are creating? People can't advance out of the starting zones without getting irritated by the botters, is this a game thats trying to grab some quick cash then go F2P or are you going to keep staying as a P2P for the fans.
4. Install a Warden, I can't believe you guys don't have that while at the same time trust your client (again, you might have a warden and might not trust your client, i'm just saying what others who are doing this have told me). And for the love of god dont trust a third party software for your anti-cheat, just look at Aion. Its ineffective and ugly and very easily broken.
5. Time measure Packet I/O to check for bots, bots do the same things at a set intervals while players dont, players never do the same thing, there will always be a delay. If you can't do that (I certainly can't and don't even know how to start) try some hacky method. Create another column in the character table that measures the login time, anything beyond lets say 24 hours (Set your own time) gets sent to the logs. No human will spend 24 hours online while being a level 10 (unless that human is a robot spy waiting for the uprising).
________________________________________________________________________________
Combat
1. There are some annoyances, mainly in PvP like Caltrops and Siege weapons, If you put down Caltrops and then try to pour oil on it, the oil will do no damage. I'm assuming this happens because Caltrops is defined as an object and not an effect, meaning the oil is basically LOS'd from the ground and stops one step higher. Just an assumption though. Personally I know how to counter this and its working for me, everyone is confident about the Caltrops so i end up killing 15 people and basically wipe the zerg out. But fix that, its most likely a bug and 99% of the people don't know how to counter it.
2. If the burden on the server gets too much, it ignores some stuff to reduce the amount of lag caused. For some reason, you guys decided that Spell Effects is not a priority. Let me state the obvious flaw with your decisions.
You remove the API for addons to state what buffs we have on us atm because you want us to look for the effects on our body to know (Crystal Fragment proc makes your hands glow and etc). But at the same time, you don't prioritise spell effects. So this scenario happens. Someone casts Negate Magic on us, we cannot move attack or anything, the server decides that spell effects isnt a priority so it removes the Negate Magic effect (do you see where i'm heading?). So we can't move, we cant attack, we cant do anything for 8 seconds, the big black bubble that is the Negate Magic effect doesn't show up and what happens. I will summarize with a few words.. "*** I'M LAGGED OUT!!".
I understand why you do this but this is a big flaw when it comes to PvP and this is only one scenario.
3. Which brings me to the next point, the lag. So you have put a lock on the campaigns, my estimation is that this cap is 900 (300 per alliance). And you have that cap for several reasons, one would be the burden on the server. So how come the server can't handle 100 players around the same area, lets say when you are trying to take a keep and its a threeway battle, all three alliances have their zergs there. The game lags out. Its kind of stupid when Cyrodiil is built for these interactions. Optimization could be better or lowering the amount of campaigns so the servers can focus on less campaigns and more people in them. Which also brings me to the next point.
4. The amount of campaigns is too much.. So there is 10 campaigns, 6 of them are empty, 1 is dominated by AD, 1 is dominated by DC, 1 is dominated by EP. The last one is filled and is the only one that is filled. So you have basically 6 completely useless campaigns (lower it when the timer runs out for current campaigns).
5. The game doesn't confirm when we use spells every time, sometimes when i'm casting something, nothing happens, the spell effect doesn't show up and the damage doesn't show up. The game completely ignored my command and nothing happened, which is frustrating because sometimes you think its lag but its just that the game just didn't get my command. If i press a key, that attack should happen, the weapon swap system is worse. Lets say i use a spell, it requires a 1 second long animation, 0.5 seconds for the actual spell to go through but another 0.5 seconds for the animation to complete. I cast my spell, the spell effect goes through, i PRESS the weapon swap button and nothing happens, i press it a second time because i'm in the middle of battle and i haven't figured out the mechanic of why it changes twice. So i press the weapon swap a second time but this time the animation of my attack is over and the weapon swap animation is starting, so right now i've clicked the weapon swap button while the animation is already starting which makes the game queue up ANOTHER weapon swap. When the current weapon swap animation is over and i'm with my second weapon, it will weapon swap once again to my primary weapon. This is annoying (obviously). You could put a timer on the que system, instead of making it que up at the start of the weapon swap animation (im assuming this is what's happening btw, i haven't actually seen the code for this) you could make it only que the weapon swap when the animation is 70-90% over, not when its starting.
________________________________________________________________________________
MISC
1. I do not understand the BoP system you guys implemented.. Why? You created Trading guilds so people can trade but the good PvE items are Bound? Why? I've run Wayrest Sewers over 60 times for the healing staff and the Worm Cult set, what do i have to show for it? No healing staff, 1 Worm Cult item. 60 times! I almost have the 1 million healing done achievement purely from DPSing and healing from Crystal Fragment. I could have bought the Worm Cult gear from someone who will just deconstruct it (what a waste, some guy seriously deconstructed one in front of me.) or i could sell one of my four Worm Cult hats that dropped for me (Yes, 60 runs, 1 item, 4 of the same piece thats 0.0000003% chance to happen and thats if the set items had 100% drop chance). I dont understand the reason for BoP, its just ruining the purpose you guys have for this game and thats a community created trading system
2. Now talking about the trading system, there's a flaw with the trading guilds and that is that its mostly unused (at my part and the people i've met). People are leaving the trading guilds, might not be noticeable and might be something that isn't happening at all in a large scale and is only happening to my surroundings but its kind of useless. I've been in four different trading guilds and they never had anything i actually needed, and these trading guilds were either 500 members guild, Veteran only guilds and others. It limits us, a lot, it was a great thought and a lot of people like it, i loved it as well at start but nothing i put in ever sells and i even tried putting them in really cheaply, with the current Guild Store system which is terrible for searching for the item you want. No one ever buys stuff (yes, some of you will say that you are and there will always be an exception to every rule).
Im sorry, most of you will hate this suggestion, i'm not really fond of it but.. An Auction House is kind of necessary in my part, at the moment almost every trading happens in zone chat, not in guild stores.
3. An Arena, a form of dueling with friends, anything that can hone our skills and understand the games mechanics. I don't need any leaderboard, and competition or anything at all that would make the Arena something that would make people say "I can't beat this class". Just a place for friendly duels to see who the better PvPer is or test out mechanics, anything like that. I didn't know the true mechanics of Velocious Curse, i know it says only 1 curse in the tooltip but that can be handled in different ways server wise.
Auras from group can't stack with each other
Auras from group can't stack with each other when cast by same caster
Same effects of spells will not stack, yet auras will remain on a target
And this is only what i came up with at the spot, all of them can work in the same way "1 curse on target" means.
A way to figure out the mechanics to become a better fighter (PvP and PvE) would be great. Especially when you removed any form of theorycrafting with the new addon API.
4. Veteran levels at the moment works as an extension from normal levels, the VR grind is insane. Instead of having Veteran Levels work in a vertical way make it work in a horizontal way.. Sorry thats as far as i've gotten with this idea but having it work in a vertical manner just creates tedious grinding and only two type of group loves it.. The roleplayers and the ones who love grinding (duh). Everyone else would hate it and are hating it, the true level cap is 138 where level 51 is 2x harder than level 50.
5. The VR dungeon rings that drop are all unenchantable, they are practically useless and in turn are one of the worst rings in the game. I don't see why this happened, they have good stats, but because of the fact that they are unenchantable makes them terrible, why have a ring with 14 health recovery when you can have a ring with 14 health recovery and 70 health.
This should be changed, change the stats into trait and in turn make them enchantable.
6. The Wall and Door repairs have different Alliance Points gain and cost a different amount as well. The Wall repair costs 300 Alliance Points but gives back 25 alliance points per repair. The Door repairs cost 200 Alliance Points but give 50 alliance points back. What? You could switch the prices on them because the prices are just so weird right now.
________________________________________________________________________________
I have one more thing to say, don't do any hacky fixes, the 10 minute timer on dungeon loot was extremely hacky. Dont do stuff like that, it looks ugly and makes the development team look bad.
Thank you for your time.
Edited by Hearts on May 21, 2014 2:33AM Some of the solutions i have might not make sense and im sorry about that.. And thats all i can say.
________________________________________________________________________________
Hacking/Botting
1. Why would you make speed be handled in the client? I dont know if it truly is and its only what i heard (I don't really reverse engineer or have ever attempted anything like this) but you really shouldn't trust your client. No matter how good it is, it will be broken.
2. You really need a dedicated GM team in the lowbie zones, you could ban hundreds of botters daily, seeing the state of the game, this is making your presentation score much lower which makes the game worse.
3. Which brings me to my final point, I know how the flagging and time for banning works.. lower the time frame for banning from monthly to weekly, even if the gold sellers buy new accounts how much will you lose based on the ugliness they are creating? People can't advance out of the starting zones without getting irritated by the botters, is this a game thats trying to grab some quick cash then go F2P or are you going to keep staying as a P2P for the fans.
4. Install a Warden, I can't believe you guys don't have that while at the same time trust your client (again, you might have a warden and might not trust your client, i'm just saying what others who are doing this have told me). And for the love of god dont trust a third party software for your anti-cheat, just look at Aion. Its ineffective and ugly and very easily broken.
5. Time measure Packet I/O to check for bots, bots do the same things at a set intervals while players dont, players never do the same thing, there will always be a delay. If you can't do that (I certainly can't and don't even know how to start) try some hacky method. Create another column in the character table that measures the login time, anything beyond lets say 24 hours (Set your own time) gets sent to the logs. No human will spend 24 hours online while being a level 10 (unless that human is a robot spy waiting for the uprising).
________________________________________________________________________________
Combat
1. There are some annoyances, mainly in PvP like Caltrops and Siege weapons, If you put down Caltrops and then try to pour oil on it, the oil will do no damage. I'm assuming this happens because Caltrops is defined as an object and not an effect, meaning the oil is basically LOS'd from the ground and stops one step higher. Just an assumption though. Personally I know how to counter this and its working for me, everyone is confident about the Caltrops so i end up killing 15 people and basically wipe the zerg out. But fix that, its most likely a bug and 99% of the people don't know how to counter it.
2. If the burden on the server gets too much, it ignores some stuff to reduce the amount of lag caused. For some reason, you guys decided that Spell Effects is not a priority. Let me state the obvious flaw with your decisions.
You remove the API for addons to state what buffs we have on us atm because you want us to look for the effects on our body to know (Crystal Fragment proc makes your hands glow and etc). But at the same time, you don't prioritise spell effects. So this scenario happens. Someone casts Negate Magic on us, we cannot move attack or anything, the server decides that spell effects isnt a priority so it removes the Negate Magic effect (do you see where i'm heading?). So we can't move, we cant attack, we cant do anything for 8 seconds, the big black bubble that is the Negate Magic effect doesn't show up and what happens. I will summarize with a few words.. "*** I'M LAGGED OUT!!".
I understand why you do this but this is a big flaw when it comes to PvP and this is only one scenario.
3. Which brings me to the next point, the lag. So you have put a lock on the campaigns, my estimation is that this cap is 900 (300 per alliance). And you have that cap for several reasons, one would be the burden on the server. So how come the server can't handle 100 players around the same area, lets say when you are trying to take a keep and its a threeway battle, all three alliances have their zergs there. The game lags out. Its kind of stupid when Cyrodiil is built for these interactions. Optimization could be better or lowering the amount of campaigns so the servers can focus on less campaigns and more people in them. Which also brings me to the next point.
4. The amount of campaigns is too much.. So there is 10 campaigns, 6 of them are empty, 1 is dominated by AD, 1 is dominated by DC, 1 is dominated by EP. The last one is filled and is the only one that is filled. So you have basically 6 completely useless campaigns (lower it when the timer runs out for current campaigns).
5. The game doesn't confirm when we use spells every time, sometimes when i'm casting something, nothing happens, the spell effect doesn't show up and the damage doesn't show up. The game completely ignored my command and nothing happened, which is frustrating because sometimes you think its lag but its just that the game just didn't get my command. If i press a key, that attack should happen, the weapon swap system is worse. Lets say i use a spell, it requires a 1 second long animation, 0.5 seconds for the actual spell to go through but another 0.5 seconds for the animation to complete. I cast my spell, the spell effect goes through, i PRESS the weapon swap button and nothing happens, i press it a second time because i'm in the middle of battle and i haven't figured out the mechanic of why it changes twice. So i press the weapon swap a second time but this time the animation of my attack is over and the weapon swap animation is starting, so right now i've clicked the weapon swap button while the animation is already starting which makes the game queue up ANOTHER weapon swap. When the current weapon swap animation is over and i'm with my second weapon, it will weapon swap once again to my primary weapon. This is annoying (obviously). You could put a timer on the que system, instead of making it que up at the start of the weapon swap animation (im assuming this is what's happening btw, i haven't actually seen the code for this) you could make it only que the weapon swap when the animation is 70-90% over, not when its starting.
________________________________________________________________________________
MISC
1. I do not understand the BoP system you guys implemented.. Why? You created Trading guilds so people can trade but the good PvE items are Bound? Why? I've run Wayrest Sewers over 60 times for the healing staff and the Worm Cult set, what do i have to show for it? No healing staff, 1 Worm Cult item. 60 times! I almost have the 1 million healing done achievement purely from DPSing and healing from Crystal Fragment. I could have bought the Worm Cult gear from someone who will just deconstruct it (what a waste, some guy seriously deconstructed one in front of me.) or i could sell one of my four Worm Cult hats that dropped for me (Yes, 60 runs, 1 item, 4 of the same piece thats 0.0000003% chance to happen and thats if the set items had 100% drop chance). I dont understand the reason for BoP, its just ruining the purpose you guys have for this game and thats a community created trading system
2. Now talking about the trading system, there's a flaw with the trading guilds and that is that its mostly unused (at my part and the people i've met). People are leaving the trading guilds, might not be noticeable and might be something that isn't happening at all in a large scale and is only happening to my surroundings but its kind of useless. I've been in four different trading guilds and they never had anything i actually needed, and these trading guilds were either 500 members guild, Veteran only guilds and others. It limits us, a lot, it was a great thought and a lot of people like it, i loved it as well at start but nothing i put in ever sells and i even tried putting them in really cheaply, with the current Guild Store system which is terrible for searching for the item you want. No one ever buys stuff (yes, some of you will say that you are and there will always be an exception to every rule).
Im sorry, most of you will hate this suggestion, i'm not really fond of it but.. An Auction House is kind of necessary in my part, at the moment almost every trading happens in zone chat, not in guild stores.
3. An Arena, a form of dueling with friends, anything that can hone our skills and understand the games mechanics. I don't need any leaderboard, and competition or anything at all that would make the Arena something that would make people say "I can't beat this class". Just a place for friendly duels to see who the better PvPer is or test out mechanics, anything like that. I didn't know the true mechanics of Velocious Curse, i know it says only 1 curse in the tooltip but that can be handled in different ways server wise.
Auras from group can't stack with each other
Auras from group can't stack with each other when cast by same caster
Same effects of spells will not stack, yet auras will remain on a target
And this is only what i came up with at the spot, all of them can work in the same way "1 curse on target" means.
A way to figure out the mechanics to become a better fighter (PvP and PvE) would be great. Especially when you removed any form of theorycrafting with the new addon API.
4. Veteran levels at the moment works as an extension from normal levels, the VR grind is insane. Instead of having Veteran Levels work in a vertical way make it work in a horizontal way.. Sorry thats as far as i've gotten with this idea but having it work in a vertical manner just creates tedious grinding and only two type of group loves it.. The roleplayers and the ones who love grinding (duh). Everyone else would hate it and are hating it, the true level cap is 138 where level 51 is 2x harder than level 50.
5. The VR dungeon rings that drop are all unenchantable, they are practically useless and in turn are one of the worst rings in the game. I don't see why this happened, they have good stats, but because of the fact that they are unenchantable makes them terrible, why have a ring with 14 health recovery when you can have a ring with 14 health recovery and 70 health.
This should be changed, change the stats into trait and in turn make them enchantable.
6. The Wall and Door repairs have different Alliance Points gain and cost a different amount as well. The Wall repair costs 300 Alliance Points but gives back 25 alliance points per repair. The Door repairs cost 200 Alliance Points but give 50 alliance points back. What? You could switch the prices on them because the prices are just so weird right now.
________________________________________________________________________________
I have one more thing to say, don't do any hacky fixes, the 10 minute timer on dungeon loot was extremely hacky. Dont do stuff like that, it looks ugly and makes the development team look bad.
Thank you for your time.
2