-- Crafting
Crafting stations should be per-character, always. No one should be able to sneak in on a crafting station while I'm using it and take my materials. I was able to do this, tucked between people crafting while someone was using the crafting station, removed other players things, did my combine, and replaced their items, because I'm not an asshole. A shifty person could sit inside the forge and wait for people and just take things as people craft.
Crafting is 100% in its infancy so talking much about the systems seems a bit preemptive.
-- QoL
- I'm still gunna hammer the main city size, that place is so big they are duplicating things with crafting. I got to level 8 on my shaman and had SoW and thought, "this is how fast you should travel this place naturally." reduce the size of the city by the percentage of level 8 SoW. I feel like this is one of those things I'll just have to conceptually live with because I doubt they will scale the city DOWN...I expect it to grow actually LOL...
- Group Buffs: I liked the idea of an "All in one" stat buff for Shaman but it would be nice if it was group wide, heck increase the mana consumption to compensate for that. This is a pretty minor complaint and is more a "It would be nice if...", plus it will likely be a thing in later levels to get group versions of spells.
- Chat windows; Main chat should only be important things for my character, not something ALL spam goes to, grouping with a bard for an hour basically made me try everything under the sun to make their chat only appear in another window. Preferably it should be laid out like this; Main Chat (XP events, skill-ups, chat, my death), Hits me (All detrimental effects that hit the player), My hits (all detrimental effects the player causes), Others (Actions and Effects that other people cause to other things). This shouldn't be set in stone, I mean people can change it but for a "New Player Experience" having a person have their chat FILL with spam every few seconds is intense.
- All "Options" with numerical values should be accompanied by either a text box to alter that value or a guidance to do more complicated changes like "Hold Shift and Right click" in order to type in exact numbers especially when you have decimal level changes.
- "MUD" commands: These things should be tied to the "look" feature that is typically introduced to players in their early class quests, especially if you are going to be as stringent as to require "/take moss" vs "/take Moondew Moss. Make it so using "Look" causes your character to observe the exact usage names required to interact with using the other "MUD" commands. For example: Player uses LOOK (You see a large amount of, what looks to be, Moondew Moss clinging to the side of the well, this could be what you were told to look for by Soandso)
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Non-issues
Merchants offering different prices: 100% will cause friction in the game for a long time. Not an issue for players of the game that like bargain hunting and know the systems. While it is annoying in the start, it pans out to be a "Character" system as you get used to it.
Quests: Players not knowing what goes where lasts only a little while. Eventually "Secret" quests are all found and those hidden gems are farmed to oblivion. I think this is a double-edged sword though, devs want the experience to be fun and unique but nothing stops websites from existing and data-mining. Understanding and accepting that this WILL be the case in this game is a good place to build from, as a dev. You won't ever keep the mystery forever.
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Some cool things
I didn't know that HoT spells stacked with other hot's. Had another SHM in my group and both of us put the HoT we had on a person and they we getting double ticks, a pretty nice feature, makes healing classes useful even when they are the same class in a group.
The darkness in places leads to some very cool atmospheres, add in "Survival" as a trait and you are able to place fires and torches around a dungeon. I'm a sucker for interaction with a world so having this is pretty cool. Pop down your fire and then put down a couple torches if you need so that people can avoid hazards. I think making the 1st dungeon a bit MORE environmentally dangerous would be interesting.
The paths to level are pretty varied, but people all go the same route it felt like. I loved that the Shaded Dunes did the dust-storm, hopefully that system will push people to leave that zone and rotate around a bit. I wonder if the other zones have similar type things. Gets the imagination rolling.
Kharzette
now that you're here, in technical but still relatively layman's terms, how do u even go about tackling memory leaks on a server handling persistent and randomly dropped connections doing who knows what like this game probably is. I feel like you have to do a regularly scheduled shutdown and reboot which hopefully coincides with patch days, and keeping it stable for that amount of time is the real trick?
