We are gonna go under 300, boys! I am still playing this game, and I have bros on it, so I am not in danger of leaving until the weather warms, but WOW. I want to write yet another 'thoughts on Mortal' thread in hope people are reading these. I may say some of the same things. This will be the last one. This is how to fix the game. LISTEN. Show HENRIK. Show whoever is in charge.
I have made it to mastery, and I have looked over the mastery tree. Looking at it in the confines of a world without trinkets, I think mastery is mostly fair. I think the gold sink is mostly fair. However, I believe the fact that clade 20 is a grind similar to Mastery 50 is absolutely insane. This must be fixed. I would say remove clade as something you have to grind up. I would let people start mastery as soon as they enter nave. People need to get mastery for doing just about everything. The more you play, the more mastery you get. Rites of passage like placing a house, taking a tower, etc, all need to boost mastery for all involved. Each time you max a skill for the first time, you should get mastery. People need to see their mastery go up, even if it's just a little, no matter what they are doing this. This is very important.
The new player experience is stale. It is not just grindy, but the MO theory was that all new players want is to be protected. No. Every protection a nub can benefit from, a vet can benefit from 2x or more. They need to make it so that skills level faster. A lot of skills should level like sprinting. Book reads should be a few hours. There should be books that unlock previous reqs as well as the skill you are training. There is a level of intelligence required to play MO, but plotting out your book tree is just a waste of time. Should have to craft like 100 things to get to 70.
We have to get situations that do not 'protect' nubs but enable them to feel viable against veteran players. We need to see a group of fresh players beating a vet, not like old MO spamming /guards. Those are the kind of things that bind people to the game. Nubs fighting along vets to defeat PKers. Thus, we need to get rid of a lot of the NPC intervention especially in the wild, and we need to reward nubs and vets for even taking these fights. Both sides want this.
You should not need another player to help you skill up combat skills. Make it so you can skill up on a dummy. Bonus idea would be to add in a training NPC. Imagine people being able to spawn into a training area and fight npcs that were similar to mobs in the game (so no new coding required,) teach people how to parry, etc, and give them mastery rewards the first time they overcome a level of challenge.
There needs to be a massive increase of pickables in the wild. Even if you somehow keep the spawns similar, make them much much larger gain. Yesterday daily was Guano... 1 fucking guano in a terror bird nest. 1. haha. You can extrapolate that 1 terror bird shit would be more than 1 unit. More than like a drop of water. There needs to be something to reward people for transporting materials that are area specific to other places. That will get people moving across the map. There should be a game play loop for people who JUST wanna ride around the map with loot, and thus people who just want to ride around the map and kill people with loot have more targets.
See the idea? Create x rewarding thing and it will be contested. You did it with dungeons and pois, but the whole game needs to be like that. People in dungeons are just disappearing from the world. You want people to see each other. Not that dungeons are wrong, but just saying.
Then, the crown jewel going into End Game is Territory Control. Siege must be more common. There is no reason to make it so you have to invest to contest an outpost. It sucks that people set up dudes to contest and then just don't come, but there has to be another solution other than MAKE IT HARDER TO CONTEST.
That still doesn't fix the siege problem, which is that people need to be able to do asset damage. That is end game. It's griefy, but so is full loot. Siege is full loot end game. Need to remove a lot of the guard rails. I proposed that certain areas can be more protected than others, but the high value areas should be BLOODBATH. Remove siege windows, find a better way.
Remove all of the shit that is defining the loop of players. You have to be careful about shit like that, like daily tasks, it's good to get people involved, but if you have a loop of players where 75% of them are doing daily tasks, they are not playing the game. A daily should be A. something per city that is necessary per city. It would not take that much intellect for someone to look at what was going on in a city every day, like with the broker, and say THEY NEED THIS, then put up a daily FOR THAT. or B. some random shit that a player who is like I DUNNO WHAT TO DO can get into.
Players should be rewarded more for being able to define their own gameplay in a sandbox!
____
Bonus shit that I think needs to happen:
Remove weight lock. Find a better way. Losing weight while fighting a long battle getting camped or having to worry about being at 1800 hunger (like atm I can stay at 1400 hunger or so with full reserves so I could munch whatever in the moment,) should be something players have to plan for.
Fix Reagents and Arrows. Haha, on the other side it is absolutely aids to have to pick all of these things and store them in bags to keep inventory space open. I am happy they added favorite grabs, but that doesn't help out of house chests, and sometimes not everything is perfectly set up in your storage. Good direction, needs more.
Add weak spots back to spears. There has to be a way to make this work. 0 weak spot in a pierce weapon makes no sense. While mounted, ok, but on foot, nah.
Have random spawn treasure on the map. Put shit on top of mountains and hard to find places. Not places you can just log out, but random places. Let it continue to get more loot until it is picked, like an urn.
Remove fucking random spawn NPCs. As I said before, if you want to add in huntable treasure npcs that you kick up as you move by, that you can choose to chase, that's ok, but having all of these mobs crawl out of the ground is just bad gameplay. It does not create the illusion of a living world, it just makes you feel disappointed when you realize most of the interaction you have while traveling the map is with NPCs.
Add in player brokers! Absolutely essential.
COME ON SV, you took a little step, but you took it way too late. Now you have to take a big step. I think you should remove trinkets and flux and orbs, but that's not the most huge problem. It still sucks, tho...
PEACE
I have made it to mastery, and I have looked over the mastery tree. Looking at it in the confines of a world without trinkets, I think mastery is mostly fair. I think the gold sink is mostly fair. However, I believe the fact that clade 20 is a grind similar to Mastery 50 is absolutely insane. This must be fixed. I would say remove clade as something you have to grind up. I would let people start mastery as soon as they enter nave. People need to get mastery for doing just about everything. The more you play, the more mastery you get. Rites of passage like placing a house, taking a tower, etc, all need to boost mastery for all involved. Each time you max a skill for the first time, you should get mastery. People need to see their mastery go up, even if it's just a little, no matter what they are doing this. This is very important.
The new player experience is stale. It is not just grindy, but the MO theory was that all new players want is to be protected. No. Every protection a nub can benefit from, a vet can benefit from 2x or more. They need to make it so that skills level faster. A lot of skills should level like sprinting. Book reads should be a few hours. There should be books that unlock previous reqs as well as the skill you are training. There is a level of intelligence required to play MO, but plotting out your book tree is just a waste of time. Should have to craft like 100 things to get to 70.
We have to get situations that do not 'protect' nubs but enable them to feel viable against veteran players. We need to see a group of fresh players beating a vet, not like old MO spamming /guards. Those are the kind of things that bind people to the game. Nubs fighting along vets to defeat PKers. Thus, we need to get rid of a lot of the NPC intervention especially in the wild, and we need to reward nubs and vets for even taking these fights. Both sides want this.
You should not need another player to help you skill up combat skills. Make it so you can skill up on a dummy. Bonus idea would be to add in a training NPC. Imagine people being able to spawn into a training area and fight npcs that were similar to mobs in the game (so no new coding required,) teach people how to parry, etc, and give them mastery rewards the first time they overcome a level of challenge.
There needs to be a massive increase of pickables in the wild. Even if you somehow keep the spawns similar, make them much much larger gain. Yesterday daily was Guano... 1 fucking guano in a terror bird nest. 1. haha. You can extrapolate that 1 terror bird shit would be more than 1 unit. More than like a drop of water. There needs to be something to reward people for transporting materials that are area specific to other places. That will get people moving across the map. There should be a game play loop for people who JUST wanna ride around the map with loot, and thus people who just want to ride around the map and kill people with loot have more targets.
See the idea? Create x rewarding thing and it will be contested. You did it with dungeons and pois, but the whole game needs to be like that. People in dungeons are just disappearing from the world. You want people to see each other. Not that dungeons are wrong, but just saying.
Then, the crown jewel going into End Game is Territory Control. Siege must be more common. There is no reason to make it so you have to invest to contest an outpost. It sucks that people set up dudes to contest and then just don't come, but there has to be another solution other than MAKE IT HARDER TO CONTEST.
That still doesn't fix the siege problem, which is that people need to be able to do asset damage. That is end game. It's griefy, but so is full loot. Siege is full loot end game. Need to remove a lot of the guard rails. I proposed that certain areas can be more protected than others, but the high value areas should be BLOODBATH. Remove siege windows, find a better way.
Remove all of the shit that is defining the loop of players. You have to be careful about shit like that, like daily tasks, it's good to get people involved, but if you have a loop of players where 75% of them are doing daily tasks, they are not playing the game. A daily should be A. something per city that is necessary per city. It would not take that much intellect for someone to look at what was going on in a city every day, like with the broker, and say THEY NEED THIS, then put up a daily FOR THAT. or B. some random shit that a player who is like I DUNNO WHAT TO DO can get into.
Players should be rewarded more for being able to define their own gameplay in a sandbox!
____
Bonus shit that I think needs to happen:
Remove weight lock. Find a better way. Losing weight while fighting a long battle getting camped or having to worry about being at 1800 hunger (like atm I can stay at 1400 hunger or so with full reserves so I could munch whatever in the moment,) should be something players have to plan for.
Fix Reagents and Arrows. Haha, on the other side it is absolutely aids to have to pick all of these things and store them in bags to keep inventory space open. I am happy they added favorite grabs, but that doesn't help out of house chests, and sometimes not everything is perfectly set up in your storage. Good direction, needs more.
Add weak spots back to spears. There has to be a way to make this work. 0 weak spot in a pierce weapon makes no sense. While mounted, ok, but on foot, nah.
Have random spawn treasure on the map. Put shit on top of mountains and hard to find places. Not places you can just log out, but random places. Let it continue to get more loot until it is picked, like an urn.
Remove fucking random spawn NPCs. As I said before, if you want to add in huntable treasure npcs that you kick up as you move by, that you can choose to chase, that's ok, but having all of these mobs crawl out of the ground is just bad gameplay. It does not create the illusion of a living world, it just makes you feel disappointed when you realize most of the interaction you have while traveling the map is with NPCs.
Add in player brokers! Absolutely essential.
COME ON SV, you took a little step, but you took it way too late. Now you have to take a big step. I think you should remove trinkets and flux and orbs, but that's not the most huge problem. It still sucks, tho...
PEACE
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