This is a collection of (somewhat) small quality of life changes and additions, which would improve the player experience.
I totally didn’t just search up things that annoyed people about the game and then came up with ways to fix those, how dare you accuse me of doing that
Washing basin buildings
Everyone knows the pain of wanting to take a picture but there’s a bunch of dirt built up on your character.
The solution? Change the wooden structures (I think they’re supposed to be outhouses?), which can usually be found near towns, by placing a washing basin (similar to the brig one) inside, and make the doors actually open if the player is trying to get inside. The washing basin should clear all layers of dirt when the player interacts with it, as opposed to the 2 layers of dirt that the brig variant removes.
This way the player can quickly get rid of dirt accumulation which would result in a lot less complaining about the dirt feature.
Boss drop pity
Bosses are meant to be a challenge, which tests your strength and skill in the game. The player is meant to learn when to punish the boss’ attacks and when to dodge them.
The main annoyance with bosses is farming for their drops.
Most of the bosses have a pretty decent drop rate for their items, especially when compared to other games, but the relatively long respawn cooldown and the part where the player can sometimes beat the same boss 20 times in a row and still not get a drop, just makes farming boss drops a boring slog. The player should be rewarded for being able to defeat bosses reliably, without dying themselves.
The fix I’m suggesting for this problem is inspired by a different roblox game called ‘Shadovia’. That game has a system where, every time you kill a boss and not get a specific item, the drop chance for said item is increased until it drops. This would obviously be a little too good for AO.
Instead, every time a player kills a boss in a successive streak without dying, there should be 1 added to the numerator of the fraction (for example, 1/10 → 2/10 → 3/10 with successive kills). This way, the more the player defeats the boss, the more likely they are to receive a drop. This would also, in the case of a base 1/10 drop rate, give a guaranteed drop after 10 successive kills without dying.
If the player does die, or leave the server, the drop rate will be set back down to the base value.
NPC shop additions
Currently, most static NPC shops are quite underwhelming. Sure, some are useful, but most of them just don’t sell anything useful outside of items which used to belong to other players.
So here are a few other suggestions to make some shop NPCs a bit more interesting.
- Redwake and Shell island shipwrights should both sell sea monster hunting attachment blueprints.
Reasoning: Redwake has a whole culture around hunting sea creatures, so it simply makes sense to have them sell the attachments. Shell island has the sailor style quest, which requires the player to kill sea creatures. Allowing the player to buy the attachment blueprints at the same island would encourage players to actually use the attachments, instead of simply using a gun or magic to deal with them.
Also it would make getting a specific attachment way easier, since the player would not have to rely on RNG to get it from sealed chests.
- Armourer NPCs should sell weapons. The NPCs will be able to sell a total of random 5 weapon types. 3 old variants, and 2 regular variants. This is true for the Bronze sea armourers. Further seas should sell weapons in the same ratio, however with higher tier weapons instead.
Kingdom island armourers should sell their kingdom’s weapons instead of regular weapons.
Reasoning: It gives more purpose to armourer NPCs outside of them just being an easy way to get iron armour. It also allows weapon classes to more reliably get the weapon types they are looking for, instead of having to rely on RNG or trading.
- Selling items to their respective NPCs should give the player their full value.
Currently, whenever the player tries to sell anything besides reagents, they don’t get the full galleon value of the item they sold. This makes selling items feel weird, because it makes the player think that they’re losing out on potential value of said item. It is also odd that every NPC accepts the full value of reagents.
To make selling items feel more ‘correct’, NPCs should only pay the full price of items that suit their profession, and pay 40% less for items that don’t
Below is a list of the NPC types with their respective items.
- Armourer → Weapons + armour pieces
- Fishmonger → Fish!
- Tailor → Accessories
- Alchemist → Potions + reagents
- Builder → Blueprints
- Ship builder → Built ship pieces + repair hammers
- Food merchant → Uncooked food + meals
Reasoning: this would encourage the player to sell their items to the respective merchant, and would give said items a larger chance to get back into circulation through the merchant reselling feature. (At least, I think that’s how that works)
- Alchemist NPCs should sell basic reagents and basic catalysts.
Sometimes, certain lower tier reagents can be harder to farm than higher tier reagents. (for example cloudstone, volcanic ash or arcane salt)
This is just kind of odd, considering higher tier reagents are better but should be more difficult to get.
Low tier catalysts are usually quite easy to get, so it would make sense to add an easier way to get more of them quickly, but for a small price instead.
This would encourage people to get more into brewing potions, since currently it requires quite a bit of farming to really get started with making decent potions.
Reasoning: it’s an easier way to get low tier reagents without having to sail across the entire sea for some specific ones, and would make rarer low tier reagents easier to get.
Increase the EXP rewards for tutorial quests
Quite self explanatory.
It simply doesn’t feel good to only get <100 exp from mandatory tutorial quests while you’re on Cirrus island or at Sailor’s lodge.
Yeah, they are supposed to be quests which teach you about something, but they just feel kind of worthless and annoying for people that already know about the mechanics that they are trying to teach the player.
The quests (except the cooking one) would feel more rewarding, and would probably have more impact on the player if they gave way more exp
Drawback visual effects
Currently, whenever a player uses an attack while they have drawback, one of their limbs begins to turn red along with a couple other visual effects. This would be perfectly fine, if it wasn’t permanent (unless you reload your character). This is a quite big turnoff for drawback for a lot of people, because permanent red limbs just looks bad.
This is why the red limb effect should slowly fade if the player isn’t in combat. It would work similar to the scratch mechanic where over time, it slowly returns your character to normal. The timer should be about 30 seconds per ‘layer’ of drawback, meaning it would take about 2-3 minutes to completely return to normal, if the player doesn’t use other attacks during that time.
Thank you for reading this!
Please leave some feedback (if you have any) or potential additions in the replies.
(but first I will go to bed, good night!)