PvE & QoL - Think of the Casuals! - 2.5

Game Discussion
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Well, here we are once again, way earlier than usual as some of you may have already noticed, but I decided to make this ‘interlude’ thread to talk about some of the issues that you, the community, are complaining about justifiably.

Aside from a few questions and pools that I’ll post below, I’ll also show you an idea targeted to eliminate the current issues of Deckhands and the overall casual player experience.

The creation of this topic was inspired by this topic that raised some fair issues about the current state of PvE and the casual player experience of the game: “Thoughts on casual players?”

Deckhands

I’ll start by being frank: we absolutely didn’t know how things would turn out with the Renown system during the closed testing of the game by making Renown a big part of it; we have our fair share of ideas to tackle this issue to make it more PvE, but most importantly, more casual friendly, as do you.

Deckhand Rework - Orbay789567

Replace the current renown requirement system for upgrading your Deckhands. Upgrading a max level Deckhand to legendary requires you to be on the leaderboard (1.25 million renown). This is simply way too high of a goal just to upgrade your Deckhands. It should be replaced with a “feat requirement” (the actions that are listed on your bounty poster/assassination contact). The Deckhand would ask you the complete a certain feat or multiple feats before allowing you to upgrade it to the next tier. With every upgrade, the feat(s) would become harder to achieve. So for example, a Deckhand you’ve hired named Bob would ask you to kill 200 pirates before letting you upgrade it to the next tier. Once you’ve upgraded him once, he would then ask you to kill 300 pirates AND 200 Assassins. A potential list of feats that your Deckhands could ask of you:

  • Defeat x amount of pirates/assassins/Navy marines
  • Defeat Commodore Kai/Architect Merlot
  • Save x amount of castaways
  • Release x amount of prisoners
  • Stop x amount of executions
  • Commit x amount of cases of property damage
  • etc.

Deckhands would only want feats that fit your reputation path, taking into account whether you are in the Grand Navy, Assassin Syndicate, an independent organization, or clanless.

This suggestion impacts the levelling part of the Deckhands, but I can assure you guys that we also have some ideas for the recruitment part too.

Shoutout to Orbay789567 for the suggestion!

New Players’ QoL

Here’s the thing, new players aren’t really at their ease when playing Arcane Odyssey for the first time, some of them may completely miss an entire mechanic, e.g. jewelcrafting, or may tend to forget how to do some of the stuff they’ve done.

For that reason, we’ve come up with some ideas, some of which you may have already requested.

Display Fish Hunger Value - Meta

The base Hunger value that a fish would give when cooked should be displayed on their tooltip. This value could be displayed similarly to food, but with a “when cooked/prepared” tacked at the end.

Tutorial + Tips Book - Night

Often suggested, this idea would help both new and returning players in refreshing their memories about the mechanics of the game by just being able to read again what each tutorial says, along with being able to ‘store’ the tips that appear over time, with categories related to what they’re about in this case.

Jewelcrafting and Diving Points NPCs at Palo Town - Night

These two features lack an explanation for new players; especially jewelcrafting which might turn out to be very confusing for a new player.

Their quests would give a smoother introduction to said mechanics for new players.

Radial Tool UI - Night

Similar to Animal Crossing’s quick tool selection, this system would basically work by pressing ‘H’ when not having a weapon or fighting style equipped and would open up a radial UI that has six slots, one per tool, and it could also not force the player to put only one type of tool per slot to help creativity.

Polls and Questions

And now… some polls and some questions so that we may get a clearer idea of you feel about the game.

Polls

What would you rank Arcane Odyssey’s current PvE experience?
  • Perfect
  • Good
  • Decent
  • Mediocre
  • Lacklustre
  • Horrible

0 voters

What would you rank Arcane Odyssey’s current Casual player experience?
  • Perfect
  • Good
  • Decent
  • Mediocre
  • Lacklustre
  • Horrible

0 voters

Questions

Please quote the questions that you want to answer to.

  • Do you feel satisfied with the current PvE experience? If not, how would you improve/change it?
  • Do you feel satisfied with the connection between PvE and PvP?
  • Do you think the current system for ranking up in the Grand Navy and Assassin Syndicate is fine? If not, how would you improve/change it?
  • Do you believe that Renown as it is is flawed? If yes, how would you improve/change it?
  • What do you think should be added for players that don’t wish to engage in PvP?

Conclusion

The thread that inspired this edition made us think about the current state of the game in terms of how casual/new players experience Arcane Odyssey, and we want to improve the situation so that we’ll be able to lay the foundations for a great Full Release.

You can find the previous edition of PvE & QoL here.

27 Likes
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Deckhand feats and fish value sound nice

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I wanna add a little something here. You know how Shop NPCs at towns have a little icon above their head that you can see through walls?

I want to suggest we should do that for cooking pots/cauldrons/Jewelcrafting tables too. Of course not for the ones in the brig but for the ones you find in towns. The reason for this is so that it’s easier to identify where these types of things are on islands. I’ve been playing quite a lot recently and only yesterday I found out there’s a jewel table at Forest of cerunno. Additively, I don’t even know if there’s one at redwake either. If there’s no jewel table at redwake please add one somewhere.

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Yes, we’ve already suggested this in our private forum.

1 Like
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Great, another worthless suggestion from me.

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I’d improve(or fix) the npc classes, rn rivals are either op savants or pure build users.
To this day I haven’t seen a proper warlock or warlord npc with functional imbuements

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With these casual changes I do have a question regarding something relating to pvp that would likely improve the casual player experience.
I would like to see vetex’s stance on pvp servers that exist primarily for other players to fight.

I know how he is with munera but I just have to be honest and say,
Munera sucks bro
Most attacks are barely even big enough to fit in the arena and if that weren’t bad enough, YOU ARE NOT SAFE FROM THE GRAVY THERE making pvping at munera as a criminal, one of the most tedious, annoying, and IRRATIONALLY RAGE INDUCING experiences a player can have atm.

I believe that a pvp server seperate from the base game (that obviously has no other rewards than simply being able to fight in peace) would be perfect for the game as it solves the rampant rking issue (Not entirely, but it makes it FAR less rampant.) And it would keep a good portion of the pvp heads away from the casual players that just wanna enjoy the game without needing to look behind their shoulder each second.

It would also help the casual players who WANT to pvp but cant due to the lack of A. Friends, B. Skill, or C. Fair builds.

So all in all. I feel like one of the best directions vetex can take for improving the casual experience, is adding pvp servers for the pvpers to fight in. Essentially taking the cats out of the mousehole.

10 Likes
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I hope we get a minor level cap raise this dark sea update too.
Even if it’s just to 130 or even 150 I would be perfectly fine with it.
It’s been nearly half a year still stuck at 125 :skull:

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I feel like the ranking system is fine, but I’d love to see more depths but in them, right now the only thing you really get for joining the Navy/Assassin Syndicate is bonus renown on kills, wich has also been added for players not in factiojns now, to a lesser extent.
Things like special missions given by your higher ups in your faction, unique features, and I beg you, customizable drip, would be very nice.
For the Navy I understand their soldiers should have uniforms, but the higher ups? I’m pretty sure Commodore Kai doesn’t have the drip of a default Commodore.
Additionaly, for Assassins, right now it feels more like some sort of cult than orginization, like why do you make you wear a uniform? They shouldn’t care of what you put if you do your job, I would love the feeling of a ruthless organization, with a real feel of survival fittest to be more present. The Assassins color scheme isn’t even good for well assassins, if you wanna be stealthy, you aren’t gonna wear bright red and super luxurious gauntlets (higher ups). A more black/grey color scheme would be so much more logical, and as I said before customizable drip too. This isn’t a cult, this is a mercenary organisation, sorry for mentioning Deepwoken, but if you look at their equivalent (The Knives of Eylis) they don’t have a forced costume do they? They can wear what ever the frick they want, if they do their job corretly

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I rate it good, but that might largely be attributed to how closely I follow development so I already have a decent understanding of most systems by the time they come out. The average player that just checks announcements every once in a while would probably take a lot longer to figure out things on their own due to some aspects of the game lacking proper guidance.

I feel like there’s a various contributors to making the game less casual-friendly than it’s intended to be; things like lack of proper tutorials, being eclipsed by the more tryhard side of the fanbase, the variety of features that can come off as confusing, etc. . While I don’t think the game necessarily needs to become hand-holding, for the type of game AO is I think it would be more of a benefit than a detriment to give better explanations & guides in-game.

Right now I’d say for casual players the experience can be mediocre if you go in with zero understanding, and decent with a basic grasp of the game’s systems. I can see this being improved overtime as the game has more QoL features implemented into it

On a personal level there’s not much left to be desired from me, I enjoy the game’s PvE most of the time. It could definitely be improved though, and I’m a fan of the approach of showing through telling via quests. The cooking quests and brewing quest are good examples of this, I hope more tutorial-like quests of this nature are sprinkled throughout the game for more features.

The connection between pve → pvp is alright, since to get the most optimal things for pvp you’d need to grind out some pve features such as grinding bosses, opening sealed chests, and increasing your gem level and these are all natural parts of the game’s progression to an extent.

The only part of the game that’s really pvp influencing pve is the deckhand system, but enough people have stated their qualms against that already

Well while I don’t pvp on my grand navy file at all, I guess it’s kind of understandable that these clan-adjacent factions would have a reliance on a pvp-centered mechanic (renown) since clans & infamy are also more pvp-oriented. But I do think maybe ranking up being a bit more in-depth would be a cool thing, for example maybe having to do a faction-specific quest once you reach the renown requirement for it. I’m also interested in seeing if there’ll be any benefits added to these factions later on other than the personal bank. One qualm I do have though is how your renown gets completely wiped once you join one of these factions, which can be quite the inconvenience of you join it later on in the game while having a sizeable amount of renown. I also find island claiming pretty pointless currently, but that’s probably because we haven’t gotten to the building update and beyond yet.

I do think it could use some more tuning and tweaks. It’s strange how much of the game affects renown, yet renown is called a pvp-only feature. I’m Not sure how good of an idea this is, but maybe broadening the scope of renown past pvp so that pve players can also enjoy and benefit from it without having to worry about being hunted would be an interesting idea, i.e Making renown more accessible from pve and giving it more pve uses. I guess deckhands fall under this, but with how the current system is structured (needing insanely high renown which is essentially pvp-exclusive for a minuscule pve boost) it’s not really good in execution.

This is a tough one. I don’t really think the solution is just adding a disable pvp option, but I’m not sure what else can really dissuade PvPers from using pve players as a kill count increase. Sure there’s love potions and gels, but that doesn’t really work as a complete solution since not everyone has them and they can be overridden.

3 Likes
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tl;dr The factions rn are boring af, and don’t really feel like factions, but more like goofy cults

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wall of text

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The pvp server sounds so nice actually, something I end up being internally scared for is being Rk’ed so being able to get around it in some way makes me feel much more safe when playing.

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I like the deckhand change

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A way to stay near neutral without constantly having to juggle saving castaways for fish and stealing from private storage would be great.

I don’t mean true neutral, I mean to cap off your fame/bounty at like 1k and just not let it go any further as an option so that you constantly stay at the very bottom of the bounty/contract list where that the reward for hunting you would be less than hunting an NPC.

Even more so if the future deckhand reworks will properly separate it from fame/bounty.

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For QoL, there should be some sort of tutorial telling players that they need clan flags in order to capture islands. After the feature was added I haven’t seen a single claimed island in the servers I join, this probably happens because you can only get them from thorin and no one really goes there

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I’m sorry for a balancing change but the server got deleted, so now there’s no place to suggest combat changes now, so…

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Yes, but only because it’s tied to deckhands, like we’ve been discussing. Deckhands should either be recruited by a pve version of renown based on how many quests the player has done/how much of the storyline they’ve completed, or have it based on what level the player is. The latter option would be ideal if you don’t want to confuse players with pvp infamy and storyline-based renown. But for the former, there should be a cap on how much storyline renown is acquired, or we risk repeating the same system currently in place. Aside from deckhands, I have no input on the current renown system, since I don’t participate in bounty hunting nor do I aspire to hold any title or be on the leaderboard.

I understand that Vetex doesn’t want to turn off global pvp, but there should at least be a relatively fail-proof solution to the problem of pvpers farming casuals. If he ever considers global pvp toggling, then he should attach it to infamy. If your pvp toggle is off, you cannot bounty hunt players or npcs, assassinate players or npcs, join the Grand Navy, join the Assassin Syndicate, or claim islands. If your pvp toggle is off, you remain neutral and cannot gain any sort of infamy required to be on the leaderboard. When you toggle it on, there’s a cooldown of x minutes until you can turn it off again and vice versa. Any infamy you gained is wiped when you turn pvp off.

If global pvp is forever and always off the table as an option, then there needs to be a “defensive” mode like in Red Dead Online. In RDO it gives you immunity from headshots and being lassoed, and prevents players from using aim assist on you or your horse. While in defensive mode, attacking another player puts you into offensive mode. When you attack a player who is in defensive mode, you receive a “Hostility penalty” that makes you more visible on the map. None of those features (headshots, lassos, aim assist, real-time map or minimap) exist in AO, so it could come in the form of damage reduction. It could halve all damage received from another player, negate all damage done to our ship by another player, fine the offender in either galleons or infamy, and update their location on the bounty board. An additional feature similar to RDO’s “parley” could exist should you get killed. When selected, it prevents your attacker from being able to do damage to you, and prevents you from doing any damage to them, for 10 minutes.

2 Likes
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Idk where I saw this but…

Make people unable to Hunt the same person’s bounty more than once every 24h, and killing them again without the bounty would give 70% less renown to the Hunter (the prey would also lose 70% less fame) and killing them a third time wouldnt give anything to the Hunter, the prey also wouldnt lose any fame

9 Likes