You should never fish in nimbus since that has the most gankers
Remember when it was 1/3 hecate essence and sosogamer said to make it 1/12?
It’s all his fault.
2 Likes
personally i think 1/6 woulda been good
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The Far Reaches is literally only Insanity 3, it’s designed to be traversable lol
I don’t entirely believe Vetex doesn’t care about his community, however he can certainly be a bit… tunnel minded when it comes to changes
i literally said in the post how doing all of those feels like im getting the same things, meaning that they dont feel worth doing.
with the current system i can switch from getting archaic black jackets to getting drowned leather helmets or atlantean sunglasses
1 Like
vetex said we’re only meant to be in i0-1 (maybe i2)
add unique drops to everything, like more ‘rusty armor’ type things
add clam armor which can also be found diving in addition to fishing
add special pirate armor that can only be found from pirate ships
etc etc etc
Yes.
rant warning:
edit: also apparently some the information I read was wrong xd, the rant still goes over my general frustrations with the game but for this particular OP not so much OOPS
This reminds me a lot of the state of a few games I’ve playtested in the past.
Most indie devs come to the game making circle with the intent of making a game they would enjoy playing, regardless of how popular that game would realistically be. But once the game starts becoming actually popular, maybe the best bet is to make something good as opposed something only you would like. Vetex seems to have reached this position but for some whatever reason, I can only imagine is related to him wanting to make the perfect game for him, he refuses to use the feedback that specifically target pain-points players have, and issues in the experience testers because they don’t align with his judgement.
And I think this became more and more obvious with the introduction of Insanity, where its a feature introduced specifically to make the game unplayable unless you sacrifice a potion buff slot or a shit ton of stats just to mitigate it.
What is happening now clearly is a clash between players wanting the best version of the game they love and this solo developer whose idea of the best version of this game includes purposefully bad features for reasons I can’t even speculate on.
Other games where the whole fun of it is the power fantasy you get from getting really diverse gear and powers, such as Diablo 4, Path of exile, Throne And Liberty, Destiny 2, Warframe, Elden Ring, simply most action games in general, allow you to fully customize your character where you have hundreds of hours on in case you change your mind with nigh no restrictions whatsoever (games where you need currency to respec or re-gear are nowhere near as bad, you can just do grinding activities and eventually you’ll be able to FULLY reset yourself and have fun with something else). And all of these games are good, but not exclusively because they allow you to easily reset, but being able to easily reset is one of the reasons that make them so good, you can play however you want, whenever you want. AO allows you to play however you want, but only after redoing the whole story and grinding to max level which lasts like 10 hours average and then spending dozens of hours accumulating gear again, or you could spend dozens of hours in looking for a hard to find thing, in a hard to traverse zone with blatantly unfair survival conditions. Its either do the most tedious grinding ever or the most frustrating grinding ever, pick your poison.
I remember during late d4 beta days where the devs intended respecing your skill tree to be prohibited by insanely high prices at higher levels. Do you know what kind of feedback they got? That respecing is too expensive and I have this cool gear I wanna try out but my build doesn’t work with it, not having fun in the process. Do you know what devs did? They made respecing realistically expensive.
It baffles me that a developer would rather have a frustrating game than a fun one just because they are so unbending to feedback that isn’t obvious. The best games I’ve ever been apart of development testing were the ones willing to test full system overhauls months before open release windows just to see if its works, regardless of how unplausible they sounded on paper, they did it anyways and it sucked ass but they learned what was good and bad for it and used to make a slightly different but even better system. Vetex’s only excuse is time, but vetoing changes meant to make the game for fun and playable that were already finished or easy to implement is just beyond me.
I still love AO but goddam I wish it was able to genuinely compete with games with larger development teams. And it can, it should, but it doesn’t want to.
13 Likes
People say my takes are ass but there’s no way you can’t convince me the dark sea isn’t affecting performance somehow
Also it’d be nice to actually do some long dark sea runs without lagging or crashing 
2 Likes
also apparently vetex saw the trello thing and only vetoed the 1/12 chance increase
this means he has not vetoed the following:
-
Increase the interaction size and visibility of Hecate Essence -
Add an indicator for when a player is within a decent proximity of Hecate Essence (about 150m away). The player would see text like this as the bottom of the screen as a notification: “You feel an unusually potent, distinguishable presence of magic energy nearby." -
You should be given a forcefield and be temporarily unable to use abilities while selecting your new magic
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Wouldn’t even say it’s more difficult, instead of dodging and shooting for 2 minutes to kill a 140 npc i have to dodge and shoot for 5 minutes, just more tedious
Isn’t that what artificial difficulty is?
4 Likes
Spit your shit indeed
If of all people you’re one of the ones pushing for this then I doubt it.
have you seen magma? It doesn’t look like magma, it looks like a clump of spinning explosion pngs.
i don’t see it as much as other magics outside of ganks but surely changes actually affecting gameplay are far more important
Not when it looks like this, man.
What kind of magma is this?