Edith3000

Something that's not been mentioned yet is the "new player" experience.

I tried to get my wife to play the game half a year ago. And she did for a while, but also needed help, all the time.

The game is hard to get into. And my biggest wish, after most of the bugs are fixed, is for this game to get more players. Here's a few suggestions based on what we ran into.

1. Consider adding more tutorial to the game. Not many questions are answered when you create a new character. How does all your stats work? How does combat work? How do you know that you'll beat a monster? How does stamina work? What uses stamina and how much? What should you do when your inventory is full? What's the goal of the game? What happens if you're carrying 5.000.000 gold while being almost naked and level 7? Little to none of this is explained to new players. They have to figure it out themselves.

2. Consider hiding/locking a lot more content away for new players. It doesn't take many minutes to hit level 2, 3, 4 and 5. But at these levels you have no idea if you should put your stat points to attack, defense or HP. You have no idea which buffs are good, or if you should save your points for level 25. And you don't have a clue about all the options you have in the menu. Crafting? Hell Forge? Blacksmith? Bounties?  Consider hiding these things until level 10, 20, 30 something. (OK don't lock the blacksmith, explain that one instead!)

3. Grinding is how you play this game. Quests give you XP, which is a bonus. But quests are just that. It's a bonus to your XP, but now how you progress in general. Problem is that you added so much stuff in the low level areas that you removed the need to grind entirely. You can get the first many levels by just doing quests. My wife got good at doing these quests. But all of a sudden there were no quests left, and she had no idea what to do. There was no mission and she was "stuck". Grinding hadn't been introduced to her as a concept. It's understandable that you can't quest your way through almost 5.000 levels of content. But with grinding being an essential part of the game, a tutorial should be given, showing that you can and should in fact just kill things until you ding the next level. The concept should be fed in slowly, so that you have to grind just a little already in the beginning of the game, more and more, until it's a regular part of what the player does in between quests. To that extent I would suggest litterally moving some of the low-level quests to higher level areas, or nerfing the XP rewards. It's ok on the lower levels if quests are 75% of the XP. Just as long as there's a little grind necessary between levels.

4. Speaking of low-level areas, they are the most complex areas in the whole game. Think about it. First real area you encounter is Mountain Path. And there's so many places to go, and so many things on the map. Compare that to a random level 1234 map which has two waypoints and a shop. You're throwing new people out on the deep end first. I would suggest that you move some of the fluff out of Mountain Path (And possibly other low-level areas) and put it elsewhere. Furthermore, consider adding a few more tutorial areas before you introduce Mountain Path. You go from a teeny tiny 6x6 map to a huge 18x18 map, and that's overwhelming. How about a 10x10 in between or something like that.

In essence it's all about making sure that you get to explain important concepts to new players while not overwhelming them. Right now, if you start the game from scratch you're thrown out on the deep end and there's not much to help you. It's pretty much just Kate Winslet being fat on a floating door, and it's impossible for you to get up.

- 4 Epics  -- The game is currently over-saturated with epics, with many selling for less than the cost of a handful of fsp.  As we've seen possible back in 2018 with the Writhing Ward, Steamwork Cuirass, and the Inferno Hammer, these items can be tiered and stats modified accordingly.  This would drive the demand for the less desirable epics up, as well as reinvigorate titan hunting and inventing, especially if inventing probabilities were adjusted as mentioned above.  As it stands right now, securing titans are no problem, but waiting for them to be finished off can take over a week due to general disinterest.

Epics will eventually be worthless aswell as they cannot keep raising the stamina gain on them. We have been capped at +7 and i doubt we will see anything more. They need a fundamental change entirely, or some bigger change overall.

  Any progress on increasing the 256 character limit on messages?  I just tried to send a 3 sentence message and was notified it was over the limit.  Seriously?  I know HCS changes servers a lot but are you paying by the word now?  I can't even give another player a decent explanation of game mechanics with the current limit, how are new players supposed to learn if all the current players won't even bother trying to help because they have to split their messages into segments so small it's not worth the effort? (<= 419 characters without spaces, 515 with spaces)

I find this limit extremely annoying as well. For me, any game is a LOT about communication, and there's just no way to really explain things, or discuss any topic, or have any sort of decent interaction when there's such a short limit

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(This is where I would have to hit send, the message was 236 at that point. I wouldn't even have managed to fit a dot to the end of that). 

The change drives people out off the game for the communication-reasons, since chat programs don't tend to have such harsh limits... and for those of us that log in daily mostly to communicate with friends, it then becomes a bit pointless to log in. It's easier to just hang out in the chat program we chose then. 

This limit makes no sense, and on top of that, there's no way to see you got messages unless you open that menu, it takes 15 seconds to just open the messages (yes, 15 SECONDS), and when you send a reply, there's no sent TO (name). just the name... so it is impossible to see which was yours and which was theirs.

Oh and the little read-icons. I don't read all messages at once all the time, when I open the menu, but it tells people that I have read theirs and they then think I am real rude because they THINK I seen it, even if I just went in to find a specific message and had to be fast with that 15 second lag and all the type-send-type-send-type-send lag to the person whose message I was actually looking for, since I for the most part can't fit replies into just one message without sounding real harsh and rude, and for  sure, unable to discuss any guild related issues or whatever, with my guild mates. I like being able to handle guild business the way my guild expects of me. This makes that much harder to do ingame. 

Just get rid of these limits cows... please. It's a real game-killer for me.

Hi there all