Hi all. I've been around for about a week, and have a few observations that I wanted to bring up. This seemed the most appropriate place for it.
For the most part, I'm enjoying my time here. There are some very helpful players that I've seen around, and I haven't met anyone who didn't seem friendly, which is great.
I've come from trying out a few different shards over the past month. I played back in the old days on OSI before T2A was a thing, and I keep coming back to free shards every so often. I love the game, but like a lot of games, without a solid community, particularly people to play with and socialize with regularly, the tedium wins out. For this reason I was pretty hesitant to try this shard. I have seen enough of a rapport at times with some of the players and staff that I'm still hopeful at playing awhile.
There are some other issues though that I've noticed that make it an uphill climb. There are policies and settings that I think could be fine, but there isn't a large enough player base for it to be a good environment for the new player. The beginning skill bumps are nice, but there is a major hole in the beginning play here.
The thing that tipped me off to a lot of it was on my second day, when I spent about two hours going through the travel center and checking out every vendor I could find. I had at this point GM'd taming, gotten a couple of bakes and farmed over a 100K gp. I assumed that this would be enough to get me some decent newbie gear, and give me a good idea on how to gauge the economy here, so I could start saving up for some power scrolls.
It was not. There are little to no power scrolls out on the vendors. There were very few vendors that had much of anything of interest to a new player. I could not find more than two pieces of affordable gear that had LRC on it at all. I like the mage/necro tamer role, but I can't get the gear I need for it. I'm not looking for great gear, just an LRC suit.
I spent some more time grinding out gold, asking questions in chat, or of a few people here or there, and I'm completely convinced that the economy is broken. I've been playing here for five days, with a few very long days over the past weekend. I have placed a castle, I've bought a Radiant Fire, and Shield of the Dark Rose, but I can't piece together enough gear for a full LRC suit, or find any power scrolls to advance the skills i want to play, much less afford them. I only was able to afford the castle and these items because there is nothing else worth spending my gold on so I hoard it.
I thought that I might try archery, since I couldn't find some LRC. My first string broke within five minutes. There really needs to be something about that in the new player guides, near the top. I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it. i was lucky enough that someone in public was able to fix it for me, and I found the post that talked about it while they were doing so. I spent 50k in gold in the next two hours on strings because they kept breaking. After the first two I bought the most expensive ones I could off of the npc vendor, and those lasted less than twenty minutes. I have no idea who this mechanic is supposed to serve, but it's definitely not helping new players.
The progressive power scrolls are a problem. On a shard large enough to have an economy where you have many people that can farm them, and several vendors selling them, it can help to have to go in order. With the number of players here, and on most other small shards, its detrimental. There are not enough of them in circulation to make them available. I can see lowering the drop rate for the 120s, giving a reason for people to consume the lower ones, but there isn't a large enough population here to farm them to allow people to progress.
The BOD system is strange to me. On every other free shard I've played on, there are BODS for bowcrafting. Most have them for tinkering and and some for carpentry. I ran through several tailoring bods, but get the same rewards, some cloth, some sandals, some tokens and gold. In most places I would get a 5 or 10 use runic for some of the 20 item higher cloth bods sometimes. It seems like the runic rewards are in relatively short supply though, causing the lack of crafted gear on vendors.
I had been hoping to do some taming bods to possibly get a taming scroll, but not being able to pick up a new taming bod right away after turning in one makes it hard to keep motivated when you don't have a stock pile of them to continue doing it. I'm kinda curious why I can get a new smithing or tailoring bod right away, but not a taming one.
I do have to admit, I've done less than two dozen bods, so maybe I'm just impatient with them, but having gotten and completed them all at 100 skill in the craft when I got the bods, I'm not seeing what I expect.
I'm tied on what I think of the various keys(spellcasters/tools/etc). In most servers I've been on that have them there is a pretty wide disparity in how to get them, and that's fine. But none of them have as high of a requirement for them, particularly spell casters keys, although several others do require quests for them that take anywhere from an hour to days.. Given that it's super easy to get LRC gear from those, making it less needed, I find it both amusing and frustrating.
I'm having a hard time in general understanding some of the direction of some of the things implemented here. On several shards there are very strong indicators for a general play style that make some of their rules and implementations make sense, even if I don't agree with them. I have no idea here what the top bosses or areas are like here. There isn't enough information that I've found yet to give me a clue as to why this is.
For the new player, I'm doing pretty well with my tamed critters. It's what I prefer to base my characters on, but I like to have a backup, and given the lack of gear available, either from loot or from player vendors, I can't do much other than peace or disco the mobs for the pets to beat on.
I'm not saying that I think the way things are implemented are wrong. I am meaning to say these are things that I find odd about the server that I don't think are helping it retain new members. On the one hand, I'm finding it an interesting challenge to deal with the added difficulty of not being able to advance as quickly. On the other though, I spent almost three days in the same dungeon because it was the fastest place for me to make money while leveling the pets without risking them too much until I could afford bonding deeds, and now that I'm ready to move on to the next challenge, I really can't because of a lack of available items.
