115 replies to this topic

[Belaric]

I think unhappiness with the game is on the rise. I think it is because fewer players are left, and those that are left are more likely to point out problems a la Mr Siggs and the scavenging issue. If those problems are not dealt with - we lose more hard core players. Does the company care? I know they do - but you suck at showing it HCS. Systematic issues with buffs and their effect on game play should be dealt with, or at least responded to. We needed Shindrak to tell us where Chi Strike activated. Really?

FS may no longer be the flagship of HCS. As soon as the company reliably makes money from other sources why would they bother with this huge boatload of whiny children? So we need to whine now while we have an outside chance of being responded to.

Over and over again it has been pointed out that this game is stagnating and/or dying. I am bored of sticking my head in the sand. If this game was vital I would still be donating to catch EOC - as it is I can sleep my way there. Once the game loses donators trying to climb the mountain, there is zero left, in my estimation.

Divisions between play styles grow more clear cut when there are fewer of us on both sides. We all feel the sting more. It is time to stop fighting each other and work to keep the game we love alive. We are at a/the tipping point.

This game needs to be advertised - on a pay per click basis maybe - that would be cheap. How much would it cost to put a banner on the UHS site? I see big virtual breasts on that site and am mildly interested... I would be more interested in a Fallen Sword logo and the offer of hundreds of levels of content. Yep, I may be a deviant. How many games out there have the diversity and duration of this game?? This GAME, and the COMMUNITY that supports it ROCKS, - put it out there again!!!

We need to look after our new players and eliminate multis who profit from the new whilst simultaneously killing the game. Other games online either kill multies, or allow multiple accounts and make folk PAY to swap items between accounts - is this impossible in FS?

As a dwindling community we need to work together to keep the game alive. That means levellers stop bitching about PvP. PvP players stop acting like your toys got taken away. We are in the same microcosm, and it is getting more micro by the day. Respect each other. Please.

What does this mean? Talk to your guildies. Find out what is actually making game play irritating - find out the buff and enhancement activations that make a joke of faith in mathematics in this game. Ask for RJEM to be made a staff member - christ knows they need a committed play tester. Let us present a united front on issues that are genuinely broken - not the usual "I want buffs that sex me up" crap. Put your narrow perspective away. HCS have provided the shiny distraction thread, as they have before many times. I appreciate their willingness to ask for ideas. I'd like to see more response. I am tired of seeing promises to do things - they promise to promise to promise to gladly pay us next Tuesday for a Hamburger we are playing today. The hamburger tastes rancid boys. Cook it properly and we will eat more.

The forum is limited - you guys who read this, and if you agree that we need to work together to save this game - go back to your guildies and talk. Put ideas and polls in the forum as representations of the silent majority, and when we get ideas that all of us, whatever play style we inhabit, agree on - a) talk about it on the forum - get those silent guildies to send in tickets to HCS. Tickets are the way of the future. They may be ignored - but you cannot refute that they were sent. Threads on this forum can be ignored. Read, but ignored. Sent tickets have a history that support cannot refute. I am NOT advocating spam. I am advocating consistent, reasoned requests for action on issues that would make existing players happy, and new players an enhanced experience. My goal is always the game's health here. I want to play it into retirement.

What are my pet issues - that are mine alone? (I have not yet consulted with my own guildies on these)

1) Deal with multies. Multi abuse kills the game for new players. New players are what we need. It deforms game mechanics. Show us you are dealing with multies.

2) Deal with multies. Oh, wait. They destroy game mechanics, but... Soon enough multies won't even bother as there will not be enough honest players left to make this game worthwhile to mess with.

3) If you are going to keep enhancement activation %'s secret, fair enough, just make them consistent. Clever people play this game and build sets and play styles around ideas of activation rates. Less of the random crap.

4) Less of the random crap in general. Arena threads are full of it. PvP threads also. Do something with your random number generator. Make it convincing and tell us you did something, or state definitively that we are wrong and you are right. Making a game that rewards nerds with calculus knowledge dies when the rules stop working. You just get angry nerds who go elsewhere in search of certainty.

5) Think about the future. How many players of Eldevin are you (HCS) losing daily/weekly/monthly by not giving this game the support it requires? If 2 years ago Eldevin had come out how many FS players were there who would have jumped on board - compared to now?

I come across as the merchant of misery here - Hoof, Grim, I REALLY appreciate the game you have made and maintain. I LOVE it. I play it frankly too much. You have done great things recently - the globals are awesome, the adjustments to buffs were cool. But always they come with promises to do more that takes TOO LONG. Or implementations in odd orders - PvP buff work before smasher medal would have been a good idea maybe? How much of a difference would that have made to the community if you had fixed gloat/honor etc. first? We will never know now. And that sucks. I am dedicated to the game. Enough to spend time on this post. It is my hobby - it is your livelihood - tell me what I am getting wrong here.

[Josh1404]

I'm unhappy with the game right now for 1 reason only. Because they have restrained pvp more and more and now it is little more than a bad joke. The BB is effectively dead, not many continue to gold hit regularly as pvp protection has stopped that as well. I mean even when they did give us a medal it lasted all of 2 days? Before they listened to the whiners and changed it in favour of the levellers. They never even gave it a fair trial and the poll they made seemed to not even matter to them. It was close in terms of votes for and against the smasher medal. Not enough to call it a majority for certain.

Introducing sealed in the first place was badly thought out. How can a buff so overpowered even be considered a decent buff to implement? They have now changed that which is the only decent change they have made in months IMO. But it should of never existed in the first place.

Now i was not really around much then but even i know there was a time before all of these restrictions with pvp that people accepted it. They knew it was part of the game and that it was going to stay there (or so they thought). And frankly the number of people we apparently lost in players leaving the game because of pvp we have lost anyway in pvpers from your restraint on that part of the game.

The quote in my signature is genuine, BG himself saying this is a PvP game! Can we really call it that now? First with pvp protection and the opt - in system, then with this proposed change of being able to bounty every hit. When will it end? Soon enough i can see pvp being removed entirely, after all it is seemingly what the majority of the levelers want. And of course the cows have to pander to the levelers, it is how the game works now!

Just thought i would throw in my two cents and express why i am unhappy with the game. But of course i enjoy pvp so my opinion does not count.

[Belaric]

Your opinion absolutely counts. But this thread is not about PvP vs the rest of the game. I explicitly stated that we all need to get along. I recognise that the PvP medal activity recently was a source of dissatisfaction - it PO'd people on both sides, and maybe lost us people from both sides. We cannot afford to lose too many more is my point.

If this thread degenerates into arguing who is doing most to kill the game, then it is already dead. We need to be united as a community and talk to the devs in an adult voice.

[Lahona]

Right now -- please, please, PLEASE! stop adding more and more 'icons' to a TEXT based game!

I just hunted blind -- I have no idea how well or badly my hunt went because I could not see my combats - the helper combat on screen for the old map has stopped working and view combat on the new map requires too much time mousing over unresponsive and undescriptive icons to find out what happened (many of the mouseovers just said "Lahona" and nothing more). I cannot even use the combat analyser as it isn't set up to analyse mouseovers (if that is even possible).

This addition to the game is not an improvement. It makes it pointless to even try to level efficiently. I no longer feel like leveling, and as I don't want to play any other aspect (I have no interest in arena, PvP or SE hunting) this one unasked for update has probably spelt the end of the game for me -- spelt it in pictures!

[PreyDragon]

You can't put all the blame to HCS, more and more people are getting tight with money because of this annoying recession that the world faces now. Banks are having to be bailed out all the time and there just isn't the money for people to do anything anymore.

[Belaric]

Thank you Lahona - this is the kind of thing we need to point out and have fixed as we need to make game play better for everyone. Basic hunting interface is 101 in the game. If we cannot see what is working, we cannot plan and act properly. Combat logs affect us all - hunting, PvP, relic, Titan hitting. If it is not clear then we do not know how to efficiently use our stam/gold/FSP on buffs. And this game is keyed to being efficient.

This is one example of what we need to make everyone happier.

[Belaric]

You can't put all the blame to HCS, more and more people are getting tight with money because of this annoying recession that the world faces now. Banks are having to be bailed out all the time and there just isn't the money for people to do anything anymore.

Again - I completely agree - there is less money in the pot. I do not blame HCS for that. But we are all dealing with the consequences of that. So in fact there is more incentive to get more click traffic - that is free income, as opposed to donators. I am looking for us as a community to realise that divided we fall. Donators vs Free players is just as bad as PvP vs Levellers, and just as irrelevant to keeping the game alive, that only HCS can do. But if we do not as a community work together to improve game experience then we are all doomed, is my point.

[Lahona]

The PO factor is the change to the combat screen was added without any consultation with the player base. No trials were done on the alpha server to see if it was wanted or would even work.

We are constantly being given a dumbed down version of a game that we loved in the form it was first presented to us. It's a TEXT BASED game -- adding pictures and icons and mouseovers to everything just detracts from the game. Being treated like children and offered a childs game to play is what is sending more and more of us to the log out button.

[Chazz224]

Right now -- please, please, PLEASE! stop adding more and more 'icons' to a TEXT based game!

I just hunted blind -- I have no idea how well or badly my hunt went because I could not see my combats - the helper combat on screen for the old map has stopped working and view combat on the new map requires too much time mousing over unresponsive and undescriptive icons to find out what happened (many of the mouseovers just said "Lahona" and nothing more). I cannot even use the combat analyser as it isn't set up to analyse mouseovers (if that is even possible).

This addition to the game is not an improvement. It makes it pointless to even try to level efficiently. I no longer feel like leveling, and as I don't want to play any other aspect (I have no interest in arena, PvP or SE hunting) this one unasked for update has probably spelt the end of the game for me -- spelt it in pictures!

Is this topic related?

[Lahona]

Right now -- please, please, PLEASE! stop adding more and more 'icons' to a TEXT based game!

I just hunted blind -- I have no idea how well or badly my hunt went because I could not see my combats - the helper combat on screen for the old map has stopped working and view combat on the new map requires too much time mousing over unresponsive and undescriptive icons to find out what happened (many of the mouseovers just said "Lahona" and nothing more). I cannot even use the combat analyser as it isn't set up to analyse mouseovers (if that is even possible).

This addition to the game is not an improvement. It makes it pointless to even try to level efficiently. I no longer feel like leveling, and as I don't want to play any other aspect (I have no interest in arena, PvP or SE hunting) this one unasked for update has probably spelt the end of the game for me -- spelt it in pictures!

Is this topic related?

Yes it is -- it's an example of the way the game is being changed for the worse and to the detriment of player numbers. (Btw - it affects PvP players as well)

[Maehdros]

Will be interesting just how many players attend the HCS hosted DEV chat upcoming soon.


Will also be interesting just how many of those attending can converse like adults with one another and help come to a concensus on improving fallensword for everyone.

[Lahona]

Will be interesting just how many players attend the HCS hosted DEV chat upcoming soon.


Will also be interesting just how many of those attending can converse like adults with one another and help come to a concensus on improving fallensword for everyone.

And wouldn't it have been a good idea to hold that meeting over a long holiday weekend? Again, no thought has been shown re getting as much participation as possible.

[Bleltch]

Fix what needs fixed. Upgrades should only be introduced after the busted stuff is fixed. And upgrades are supposed to be better than what they replace. <<
Along with that the game is extremely expensive to be competitive. It used to be a "free to play" game. Now it's a "pay to win" game.

[Belaric]

The PO factor is the change to the combat screen was added without any consultation with the player base. No trials were done on the alpha server to see if it was wanted or would even work.

We are constantly being given a dumbed down version of a game that we loved in the form it was first presented to us. It's a TEXT BASED game -- adding pictures and icons and mouseovers to everything just detracts from the game. Being treated like children and offered a childs game to play is what is sending more and more of us to the log out button.

The devs cannot consult on everything. But they can respond in a reasoned fashion. The game was text based - with bubbles they are trying to avoid being hopelessly old fashioned. The question is who/which player base will pay more. And if the bubbles/mouseovers actually add anything other than CPU usage.

If innovation alienates without attracting new folk, it is worthless. Feedback will help direct efforts to improve the game. I'd like it to be focussed on mechanics based improvement rather than on mouseovers, but if it can be shown that a cuddly interface improves new user satisfaction, I'll live with it. I'd like to live with that and a commitment to making sure multis are not exploited any more, and that promised GvG overhauls actually happen - or are at least updated upon, so we know it hasn't been quietly put on a shelf.


Oh wait.. got a call from work... reminded me not to care so much about this game.

[Bleltch]

Will be interesting just how many players attend the HCS hosted DEV chat upcoming soon.


Will also be interesting just how many of those attending can converse like adults with one another and help come to a concensus on improving fallensword for everyone.

And wouldn't it have been a good idea to hold that meeting over a long holiday weekend? Again, no thought has been shown re getting as much participation as possible.

Typically they only listen to a few select players anyway.

[Belaric]

Will be interesting just how many players attend the HCS hosted DEV chat upcoming soon.


Will also be interesting just how many of those attending can converse like adults with one another and help come to a concensus on improving fallensword for everyone.

And wouldn't it have been a good idea to hold that meeting over a long holiday weekend? Again, no thought has been shown re getting as much participation as possible.

Typically they only listen to a few select players anyway.

That is the devs choice. Talk is proverbially cheap. I will not try to talk there. Come together, find issues. Clear cut problems. Submit ticket. As a community. And again. The coders among the community can point out how it can be done. We live in the house that Hoof built. If his foundation is wonky in terms of programming, well.....

Right now, let us find issues that effect us all. Like combat logs. Like buffs that do not work as advertised. Let us be united on ideas like multies are choking the life out of the roots of the game. Nothing radical. Just say it clearly, and in a calm, rational voice.

[Maehdros]

Will be interesting just how many players attend the HCS hosted DEV chat upcoming soon.


Will also be interesting just how many of those attending can converse like adults with one another and help come to a concensus on improving fallensword for everyone.

And wouldn't it have been a good idea to hold that meeting over a long holiday weekend? Again, no thought has been shown re getting as much participation as possible.

Cows have real lives too Holidays and all

[Belaric]

Will be interesting just how many players attend the HCS hosted DEV chat upcoming soon.


Will also be interesting just how many of those attending can converse like adults with one another and help come to a concensus on improving fallensword for everyone.

And wouldn't it have been a good idea to hold that meeting over a long holiday weekend? Again, no thought has been shown re getting as much participation as possible.

Cows have real lives too Holidays and all

Both of you are right. There was a long weekend over which it may have been a good idea to try to talk to the community when the community may have been more available, and, oh yeah, the Cows have lives and maybe religious observances to make at this time of year.

The Cows are not our enemies here. They are our best and most valued friends. I am asking you all to go and find the pet peeves that have plagued your game experience, find others that have shared that peeve, and, instead of shrieking about it randomly, talk about it to the devs. I have played this game for well over 3 years. I am over the Cows making promises to do stuff, and then it dies. I want us, in a calm, adult fashion, to hold them accountable for why they are taking so long on delivering upgrades they promise. Give us a timeline, give us reasons for delay. Or... tell us to take a hike and that you are in charge and that questions will not be tolerated, and accept the consequences. I am cool with with dictatorship. I can log out. Just don't string us along any more. Is that too much?

[Chazz224]

Right now, let us find issues that effect us all. Like combat logs. Like buffs that do not work as advertised. Let us be united on ideas like multies are choking the life out of the roots of the game. Nothing radical. Just say it clearly, and in a calm, rational voice.

+1

The game should fix such issues, i agree. However, one of the main fixes in this game that's been desperately needed is PvP.

I'm not looking to flame or derail this in anyway, it's my opinion. We all level up, we all use pots, and buffs. but leveling is a once a week thing for most, others perhaps a once a month thing for others. PvP good, bad, or in different is an everyday thing, regardless of who likes or dislikes it. People purchase buffs to attack, defend, or to clear bounties. People buy gear for multiple reasons as well. The PvP activity has and is dying which end up resulting in less buffs being sold, less people having a need to spend money on offers, less gear being sold, less people also logging in.

I agree that both sides of the community must come together or else this game is in trouble. Also note that this game has survived 5+years because of all the aspects it has and one of the strongest is PvP. People log in to see if they were hit, if they were put on the bb, to see if they have to put someone a bb, which again leads to buffs being sold, gear being purchased, etc etc etc... in short PvP is a vital part of the game and its needed despite opposed views for such reasons.

It also needs to be encouraged and improved.

[Maehdros]

Right now, let us find issues that effect us all. Like combat logs. Like buffs that do not work as advertised. Let us be united on ideas like multies are choking the life out of the roots of the game. Nothing radical. Just say it clearly, and in a calm, rational voice.

+1

The game should fix such issues, i agree. However, one of the main fixes in this game that's been desperately needed is PvP.

Broken things need to be fixed, PERIOD. Retaining customers and players should be the goal of any business. Lets not get into a debate about pvp vs leveling on another thread eh? we know it just gets messy.