Witty.'s CBT Feedback

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    CBT-1 ~ final version.

    Wishlist

    • The end-boss cinematic animation should be skippable. 10-15 seconds is too long.
    • Sprint should be renamed to Haste/Swiftness.
    • Prescience should be renamed to Block or Block Rate.
    • In-game chat needs their tags properly adjusted.
      German Chat’s tag should be replaced with [D]; Deutschland.
      Alliance Chat should be renamed to Guild Chat, its shortcut is /g to begin with.
      World Chat’s tag should be replaced with a [Y].
      Novice Chat should be renamed to Beginner [B].
    • There should be a clear distinction when whispering with from and to someone respectively, a colon between written text and the sender would suffice.
    • The Top-bar should be entirely customizable. I do not need two completely useless options constantly blocking what could otherwise be used by something with more substance.
    • Pop-ups need to stop. There is too much information, unnecessary information, at times which takes a great deal from what is actually happening in-game.
    • There should be an option to disable path finding.
    • The ability to use mounts in dungeons for faster travel.

    Translations and Localization:

    • Some skill descriptions are cumbersome to read and/or make little to no sense.
      What is Fortune? What is Prescience? Perception? Haste?
    • Skill names and attributes should be streamlined, to align more with widely used MMO language.
    • There are numerous occasions in cutscenes and quest chains in which personal pronouns change mid-way or otherwise. The OV and the translation do not always add up. Something else is spoken, but the translation is either completely wrong or takes creative liberties with its source material. Some texts are not translated or there are Chinese characters mid-sentence and/or lines are completely missing.
    • Despite the patch that seemed to fix certain latency issues. I do encounter severe rubber-banding in dungeons at times.
    • Hanyu Pinyin is fine. I am all for less clutter on screen. There already is quite a bit of clipping/overlapping and UX/UI inconveniences from going from Chinese letters to the Latin alphabet. Those need rework as well.

    Issues:

    • Once you have queued into a party, there seems to be a ‘buff’ which does not let you queue up for another party in a short period of time. If the party leader has that buff, the whole party is flagged, making it impossible to use matchmaking and/or invite other players into the party.
    • Looks like using the teleport function in dungeons might cause a problem which makes you invisible for party members even when re-joining them. (Couldn’t properly reproduce that bug though, so it might be something else).
    • UI-mapping does in fact not carry over to a different char.
    • There should be a way to select channels, or some way to prioritize in which mega-server ‘node’ you spawn. From my personal experience, dungeon listings are in fact node bound and not global. Making it even more frustrating if you were to spawn into a less populated ‘node’.
    • Resources gatherable in the world are not where they should be, despite them being shown on the mini map.
    • Events should not be time gated. It makes no sense for a game that offers service global sans China and Russia to have that many restrictions; and dedicating people when to play. Europe has 3 time-zones, and USA has twice that amount -I really do not see how this would work out if certain people are effectively excluded from events.
    • Some in-game cutscenes looked horrendous whereas others looked normal.

    Level-experience:

    • There should be a distinction between main/side-quests and important red quests. The quest log does not offer much help in that regard since quests are listed as is.
    • Offering GS-40 (blue) and GS-50 (white) gear directly through merchants defeats the purpose of doing lower-level dungeons, since their overall stats are in fact better than lower GS-gear.
    • Leveling-speed was decent. I did not get the feeling that a particular quest was a chore or was useless in nature. Those that I did read, followed a specific storyline and it made sense why I was helping generic NPC with Y and Z.
    • There should be a lower cooldown on your teleportation rune. 90 minutes is too long – it should be halved to 45 minutes tops.
    • I do not know if it is intended or not, but loot boxes – pre-opening- can be sold on the auction house. What is the point of gear being soul-bound if you can bypass it that way easily?

    Quality of Life:

    • The hiding pop-ups icon does not alleviate the constant bombardment of unnecessary information.
    • Talking to an NPC and completing a quest, should be something that does not require an additional mouse click on ‘accept’ rewards. The F should suffice in that scenario, to accept the reward.
    • Level-progression was fine during Beta and should be carried over as such to launch. There really is no need to make it slower with quests giving less EXP or increasing certain fetch quests.
    • When changing maps via teleport, you sometimes change back into ‘normal’ mode and need to press CRTL again to get back into action combat, there should be a hotfix of sorts.
    • Un-skippable story cutscenes should be skippable as well.
    • There should be more costumes in the shop at launch. If that's all we're going to see on launch-day, it will be a sad day indeed.

    Miscellaneous:

    • There needs to be a dedicated channel either here or on Discord for all the translation errors.

    I agree with much of what you said and appreciate how this was actually easy to read. With that being said, I have a couple of things I disagree with. The first, and probably most significant in terms of play experience is the time restrictions on events. I am all for extending the time ranges in one direction or another (for example, on NA, shifting things a bit later because EST player's aren't going to be playing much at 10am and PST one's certainly won't be at 7am), but I think having some sort of gate is good. Adding the artificial cap on progression keeps the player base more evenly distributed and also keeps people playing the game. There are plenty of games that have progression only capped by how fast you can go and how long you can grind, which more often than not ends up in a game where the distribution is very uneven and people stop playing earlier because they have hit gear cap or finished PvP allowances in one day or whatever else. Again though, some change is fine, I just don't want the gates to be fully opened, weirdly enough.

    Aside from that, the other one is much slighter involving dungeon gear, both in the context of selling boxes and the ilvl. First, the selling boxes thing does seem weird but I half expect it is a bug. Sometimes boxes are tradeable but more often they are not. In terms of leveling, I assume we are largely talking about the drops from drill difficulty. ilvl35 takes you all the way up until your final set of questing gear. That i40 stuff is definitely better, but when you can run a drill in <5 minutes, I don't necessarily think the drill stuff should be better. Also, the ilvl 50 white gear, aside from the weapon, is a significant DPS loss. Me and a friend loosely tested it, and it appeared about 20-30% less than the quest set of i40 blues. This seems to be due to losing all of the secondary stats that the blues have and whites don't. The weapon was a DPS increase tho. Also with this, keep in mind that you can fairly easily replace all of that within a few days of doing normal dungeon runs daily AND continuing the story after hitting student 1 awards you with purple i45 gear, which is better than everything up to gear dropped from normal dungeons.

    To emphasize that I agree with the majority of what you said though I want to highlight a couple of ideas you had that I especially like. More costumes at launch and ESPECIALLY changing stat names to be more consistent with what a western audience expects to see in an MMO. I'm more than fine with the game not using Strength, Dexterity, etc. But in the context of an MMO, or any game really, a player doesn't immediately know what sprint does (I initially thought it increased your sprint speed), whereas they do at least have a very good notion of what haste is. Similarly, perception in my mind would mean I would be better at finding the treasures that berate my ears (at least until I found the setting to turn that down, YOU CAN TURN THAT DOWN BTW), but not be better at blocking. I could go on, but I think you get my point; plus, they have said localization is WIP and I would imagine that this could all change (and hopefully will change) before launch. Thanks for the great post and I hope my input was worth the time to write it all out :)

    Quote from Seiz

    [...]The first, and probably most significant in terms of play experience is the time restrictions on events. I am all for extending the time ranges in one direction or another (for example, on NA, shifting things a bit later because EST player's aren't going to be playing much at 10am and PST one's certainly won't be at 7am), but I think having some sort of gate is good. Adding the artificial cap on progression keeps the player base more evenly distributed and also keeps people playing the game. There are plenty of games that have progression only capped by how fast you can go and how long you can grind, which more often than not ends up in a game where the distribution is very uneven and people stop playing earlier because they have hit gear cap or finished PvP allowances in one day or whatever else. Again though, some change is fine, I just don't want the gates to be fully opened, weirdly enough.


    Agreed. Content soft-locks are not bad per se and needed to some degree to keep that artificial equilibrium. My problem though with that restriction is how the game is being advertised; offering service practically globally. I don't think you should in one breath claim to service all these regions, but in he next breath severely inconvenience other countries and their players.
    I don't know how the optimal time-windows for events should look like.

    It might not even be that much of an issue once the game fully launched, with players finding their own pace and knowing how to plan their game sessions. I just think it's a topic that's at least up for review.


    Quote from Seiz



    Aside from that, the other one is much slighter involving dungeon gear, both in the context of selling boxes and the ilvl. First, the selling boxes thing does seem weird but I half expect it is a bug. Sometimes boxes are tradeable but more often they are not. In terms of leveling, I assume we are largely talking about the drops from drill difficulty. ilvl35 takes you all the way up until your final set of questing gear. That i40 stuff is definitely better, but when you can run a drill in <5 minutes, I don't necessarily think the drill stuff should be better. Also, the ilvl 50 white gear, aside from the weapon, is a significant DPS loss. Me and a friend loosely tested it, and it appeared about 20-30% less than the quest set of i40 blues. This seems to be due to losing all of the secondary stats that the blues have and whites don't. The weapon was a DPS increase tho. Also with this, keep in mind that you can fairly easily replace all of that within a few days of doing normal dungeon runs daily AND continuing the story after hitting student 1 awards you with purple i45 gear, which is better than everything up to gear dropped from normal dungeons.

    It just doesn't make sense why you can buy the gear in the first place. White-GS-50 gear is worse than its blue predecessor, yes; but it gives you immediate access to Hard dungeon difficulty. Since there is no stat check, say, you have a certain amount of Prescience or Sprint. All it takes is the GS-level which in that case is gs-50.
    That was very poorly worded on my part. The blue-lvl-40 gear is better than the purple gs-35 gear if I recall correctly, I might be wrong though.

    I also disagree with a few points, but some others I agree with.


    The cooldown on the Rune is fine from my perspective. There is a lower cooldown (I believe 15m) to your class area teleport and from there you can teleport elsewhere. As flying is very fast as well, flying to a teleport location is also an option.

    Using mounts in dungeons would speed them up, but is that needed or wanted? Travel time in dungeons is not high even when returning from a respawn point.


    In regards to the equipment:

    Boxes seem like they are bugged. As noted by Seiz they are inconsistenly bound, or unbound to the character.

    It does seem like something that should be fixed as it would unbalance obtaining equipment by quite a lot, if players can just buy them from the auction house.


    The class vendor items are.. I'm not sure, maybe a left over catch up mechanic from the Chinese version?

    As it is, they do make all equipment (that is not accessories) up to pretty much max level, irrelevant.

    Quote from witty.

    yes; but it gives you immediate access to Hard dungeon difficulty.

    As far as I know dungeons dont have a hard equipment requirement. Only the level requirement matters for access.

    I agree with movement speed in dungeons. At least it should be possible to use out of combat sprint.


    Good work, thats why we were testing beta. I hope gameforge will or can adress some of the point in this forum. People investing much of their time to make it a better game. To be mentioned they do complete for free or even purchased the game.

    For that queueing buff, it is a 4 minutes penalty for anyone that cancels the queue once already matched. After entering the dungeon tho, it's a 15 minutes penalty if someone decides to leave. It is not only for the group leader, but anyone in the team with this penalty cannot queue again within the timeframe. The dev is doing this to ensure ppl don't leave after match, not a good way tho...The penalty used to be for the first one that leaves, but now it's for everyone. Dev did this because there is a very long daily dungeon right now in China (15 minutes vs 5 minutes for the shortest one) and ppl just leave and requeue if they are matched with this one. It's a long story for the penalty buff...


    UI mapping should transfer to another char if you ticked the "account shared" (sth like this I forgot the exact) on the UI customization panel.


    Long teleport cooldown shouldn't be a problem in the future. There will be an item that resets the cd of your teleport and you will get tons of that item through daily playing.

    Quote from Tracy_T

    For that queueing buff, it is a 4 minutes penalty for anyone that cancels the queue once already matched. After entering the dungeon tho, it's a 15 minutes penalty if someone decides to leave. It is not only for the group leader, but anyone in the team with this penalty cannot queue again within the timeframe. The dev is doing this to ensure ppl don't leave after match, not a good way tho...The penalty used to be for the first one that leaves, but now it's for everyone. Dev did this because there is a very long daily dungeon right now in China (15 minutes vs 5 minutes for the shortest one) and ppl just leave and requeue if they are matched with this one. It's a long story for the penalty buff...


    UI mapping should transfer to another char if you ticked the "account shared" (sth like this I forgot the exact) on the UI customization panel.


    Long teleport cooldown shouldn't be a problem in the future. There will be an item that resets the cd of your teleport and you will get tons of that item through daily playing.

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    Quote

    For that queueing buff, it is a 4 minutes penalty for anyone that cancels the queue once already matched. After entering the dungeon tho, it's a 15 minutes penalty if someone decides to leave. It is not only for the group leader, but anyone in the team with this penalty cannot queue again within the timeframe. The dev is doing this to ensure ppl don't leave after match, not a good way tho...The penalty used to be for the first one that leaves, but now it's for everyone. Dev did this because there is a very long daily dungeon right now in China (15 minutes vs 5 minutes for the shortest one) and ppl just leave and requeue if they are matched with this one. It's a long story for the penalty buff...


    We don't have that very long dungeon on our version, do we? I don't think it's fair to penalize the entire party for something they have literally no control over. Besides, there was no explanation or anything along those lines that explained and/or justified why it's in there in the first place.

    Quote

    UI mapping should transfer to another char if you ticked the "account shared" (sth like this I forgot the exact) on the UI customization panel.


    It did not transfer even when ticking the box.

    Quote from witty.
    Quote

    For that queueing buff, it is a 4 minutes penalty for anyone that cancels the queue once already matched. After entering the dungeon tho, it's a 15 minutes penalty if someone decides to leave. It is not only for the group leader, but anyone in the team with this penalty cannot queue again within the timeframe. The dev is doing this to ensure ppl don't leave after match, not a good way tho...The penalty used to be for the first one that leaves, but now it's for everyone. Dev did this because there is a very long daily dungeon right now in China (15 minutes vs 5 minutes for the shortest one) and ppl just leave and requeue if they are matched with this one. It's a long story for the penalty buff...


    We don't have that very long dungeon on our version, do we? I don't think it's fair to penalize the entire party for something they have literally no control over. Besides, there was no explanation or anything along those lines that explained and/or justified why it's in there in the first place.

    Yes I agree it is unfair. They merge everything from current version in China so that penalty gets tranferred as well. In China we pay game time by minutes, so people are quite sensible to how long they spend on dailies. It's a different mechanism here in the west and I hope Gameforge can discuss this more. Even when that very long dungeon comes to the west, ppl should be given more freedom of what they want to play.


    More on the story, in the past, the daily dungeon used to be a fixed one instead of random. So everyone is doing a specific dungeon on a particular day. Later when they introduce this random daily, ONLY matching randomly count towards daily. We used to see which dungeon gets matched and decide if we want to do it (cancellation will give a 4 minutes penalty), and ppl cancel if they see it's the longest one. So the dev redesign so that now we can't see which dungeon we are entering beforehand. Then ppl start to kick one teammate out after entered and others can leave without a 15 min penalty. That's what leads to the current penalty system where once entered, everyone gets a 15 min buff and it won't disappear unless you finish the dungeon.


    Personally I feel bad that the dev is trying so hard to limit player's freedom. They can't control it anyway. Players now still leave that dungeon with that 15 min penalty and do other things for 15 min until they can requeue.

    Quote from witty.
    Quote from Shiala

    [...]

    Quote from witty.

    yes; but it gives you immediate access to Hard dungeon difficulty.

    As far as I know dungeons dont have a hard equipment requirement. Only the level requirement matters for access.

    There is a gear-score check. You can't queue and/or enter hard dungeon difficulty with a gear-score

    Hey I'm back and too lazy to read through everything this moment, so apologies if someone already said this, but the GS isn't a requirement its a recommendation (and maybe a requirement for matchmaking). I was in hard at 44gs, but as I was playing with friends, I'm not sure if we were running with a full party or not. But you can at least get in if you wind up a group, even if you can't matchmake.

    Quote from witty.
    Quote

    UI mapping should transfer to another char if you ticked the "account shared" (sth like this I forgot the exact) on the UI customization panel.


    It did not transfer even when ticking the box.

    Interesting. My UI settings followed across all my characters. And if I changed something in one the change would be reflected when I logged into another one. I wonder what the differences are?

    Thanks for the more in-depth explanation on why it's in our game in the first place. Only time will tell if it becomes an issue in our version as well. All I've seen so far were people leaving prematurely because they, the party, could not kill the hidden boss on the first try.


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    Quote from Seiz
    Quote from witty.
    Quote from Shiala

    [...]

    Quote from witty.

    yes; but it gives you immediate access to Hard dungeon difficulty.

    As far as I know dungeons dont have a hard equipment requirement. Only the level requirement matters for access.

    There is a gear-score check. You can't queue and/or enter hard dungeon difficulty with a gear-score

    Hey I'm back and too lazy to read through everything this moment, so apologies if someone already said this, but the GS isn't a requirement its a recommendation (and maybe a requirement for matchmaking). I was in hard at 44gs, but as I was playing with friends, I'm not sure if we were running with a full party or not. But you can at least get in if you wind up a group, even if you can't matchmake.

    Interesting. My supposition was that having a gearscore below 45 would not give you permission to, as far as I can recall anyway, enter and/or matchmake, since that option was greyed-out. Will try again in CBT-2 and see how it goes. Thanks for the input.


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    Quote from doctre
    Quote from witty.
    Quote

    UI mapping should transfer to another char if you ticked the "account shared" (sth like this I forgot the exact) on the UI customization panel.


    It did not transfer even when ticking the box.

    Interesting. My UI settings followed across all my characters. And if I changed something in one the change would be reflected when I logged into another one. I wonder what the differences are?

    Yeah, I've heard conflicting statements on that one. Some said it did not carry over for others it did. I tried it on 4 occasions and my set-up did not carry over to my other toons. My surmise; it being caused by the emergency-maintenances and thus not carrying over, or it being reset on different toons. Will test that again in CBT-2, I appreciate the feedback.

    Quote from Seiz

    I agree with much of what you said and appreciate how this was actually easy to read. With that being said, I have a couple of things I disagree with. The first, and probably most significant in terms of play experience is the time restrictions on events. I am all for extending the time ranges in one direction or another (for example, on NA, shifting things a bit later because EST player's aren't going to be playing much at 10am and PST one's certainly won't be at 7am), but I think having some sort of gate is good. Adding the artificial cap on progression keeps the player base more evenly distributed and also keeps people playing the game. There are plenty of games that have progression only capped by how fast you can go and how long you can grind, which more often than not ends up in a game where the distribution is very uneven and people stop playing earlier because they have hit gear cap or finished PvP allowances in one day or whatever else. Again though, some change is fine, I just don't want the gates to be fully opened, weirdly enough.

    I haven't done the events in SOLO yet (one of the things I'm hoping to test this beta). Are they real-time scheduled? Some level of gating is definitely important, but "X event happens at Y time intervals" is IMO not a great way to do it. Daily/weekly/etc lockouts maintain the gating while allowing people to complete content when they are able to.