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Massively Sums Up Shroud - "
Aron_Swordmaster
Member UncommonPosts: 181
And it just keeps going on like that. Deservedly so. This is the experience ark any normal person has in Shroud, a lot of hope maybe at the start, but the sheer level of loathing for anyone outside the RMT or Cult circles which translates to every design decision in game just alienates and, amusingly enough, grinds down the will of the new person coming in from outside to keep grinding inside the game.
And it doesn't really touch on the RMT either; it just talks about the game as a game, and declares it's bad even on that level.
Now remember that trying to get at the property he's talking about, you have to spend real money, or grind gold to give to RMTs to sell on the market for real money, which means trading with people who are so awful they'll steal items in game or go on insane tirades trying to defend their right to rip you off (read the comments from AltArmyXX below), or even declaring "total war" against critics (same guy on yet another sock, yet again).
Shroud is an unholy mess shit out by arseholes. One that's still asking you to give more, More, MORE!!! money every single month.
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Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
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It's actually gone backwards in many ways it seems; the author, in between dodging demands to order a Cease And Desist, made on the Shroud forums, and the same attempts to manipulate the moderation there to get critics banned as they apply everywhere they see it, mentions that there's no local player tracking on the maps.
But that used to be in, I have markers in my old alpha screen shots, yet it seems they've taken the markers out again.
Why?
Well, many of the few remaining backers want games like they played in the 1980s.
There were also a few high level Whales, and apparently someone on the Development team who are committed Silicon Valley Objectivists; they honestly thought that it was the rich that drove all activity; I can still remember the time in 2014 when Portalarium showed us the Pledge graph, and because they got most of their income from the upper percentiles, they stated they were going to target those people. The fact that an MMO can't survive without the player numbers just didn't seem to sink in... The game was being designed very early on to appeal to few people, as long as they could keep paying.
Whilst the high end Whales just assumed the player base would be entirely happy with paying real money to take part in their Makers world. They called for, then purchased Player Owned Towns assuming there would be hoards of people queing up to pay Rent to them, and then Tax to the game on top too. One infamous Whale even claimed he expected a minimum of 100,000 players at launch, but hopefully up to 1,000,000. And once more, the fact that even people who had already purchased the game were abandoning it was brushed over. They just didn't understand the natural order of things...
But more sinisterly... we know recently that Portalarium took time out to investigate how many people were botting the game; they got to 20 accounts before they gave up because, I kid you not, they claim their arm was tired. 20 isn't much, until you realise it's 20+ out of only 500 concurrent users at best that Shroud has, and they also weren't looking at the attended botting even before their arm hurt.
And for RMTs, if you make the game harder to play, your RMT services that offer quick ways around the limits are more valuable... that's simple economics. An awful lot of the pressure then to make the game new player unfriendly (as per the MassivelyOP article) and horribly dull and grindy is to keep that value up.
Hence we get the horrible, unfun mess that Shroud is today. It was never going to change over the last year, because Portalarium just weren't listening to anyone but those who wanted it to stay a mess.
It feels good when these whales loose their +10000$ fundings and developers will have to face the fact that i was right and they were wrong.
I made topics here at MMORPG a long time ago what was wrong with this game and now just about all see it the same way.
Only listening to the highest money funders wasn't such a smart move after all.
You and I disagree on a lot of things, but on something as basic as this, even you and I can see the common wisdom between our wildly different perspectives. It should have been obvious that in a social game, you need a lot of people. You can't design an MMO where you deliberately destroy the Massively Multiplayer parts.
In the case of people such as yourself, who wanted a PvP game, you also can't have it without enough players to support what is ultimately a minority playstyle... or going all in on PvP like something like EvE and trying to appeal to 100% of those players.
And you can't have fair PvP at all if you design the game so there's no power cap and people can continue to gain enormous advantages. Indeed, some within Shroud's community assumed they should have advantages by right, because of spending more or being around when particular exploits were available. There are people running around with 100+ GMs demanding the game server never be wiped who don't understand why the game is also dead, because no one wants PvP they don't have a hope in winning.
It's all so obviously stupid, but Portalarium and the backers truly believed all they needed to do was appeal to a tiny minority of real life rich people with no common sense.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/starr-reveals-and-describes-q4-2017-top-10-priorities-in-community-livestream.99893/
Some ask themself why this list comes out now some months before release?
Lord_Darkmoon - This lists reads as if they just now start creating a game...
This upset one of the whales -
Baron Drocis Fondorlatos - Are you saying that all of the assets (sound, graphics) and the game engine (integration of assets in a meaningful way) came 100% complete 4 years ago? Are you saying that they just sat around not doing anything month to month despite all the evidence to the contrary?
I'm not sure exactly how anyone could reach that conclusion. If it's intentionally snarky or dismissive of all the development teams hard work, I take offense to that. That's the kind of comment that I personally find to be the most unhelpful. It reads as if reality doesn't matter, only a sense of individual entitlement matters.
Lord_Darkmoon - There are so many features on this list, so many important and fundamental features I have to ask myself why they come now. Now so shortly before release. Some things like the story aspects sound as if they mean we get a different game.
Sorry to offend you but I would have expected such a list 2 years ago. Now we get so many fundamental things compressed into a few months...
Baron Drocis Fondorlatos - You should watch the video. You should play the game for context.
There is a skeleton of a completed game right now. As the developers have said MANY times, the last 20% of development is piecing together what the average player thinks of as "the game". If you could incorporate that into your expectations, you'd have very little difficulty understanding that the "important fundamental features" are arriving preciously when they mean to.
If you played the game, you'd be in a position to offer constructive and actionable feedback instead of reading a list of priorities and making incorrect assumptions about them. I'm not saying this as a slight against you, only offering this so there's no more confusion about what's going on here (game development).
Lord_Darkmoon - I play the game and I follow it since the Kickstarter. For once if you recall the NUE was never planned but included because it was necessary. Somehow I get the impression that fear is now a driving factor. Oh my god we need better quest, more rewards, new users need more guidance.
Why wasn't this planned from the beginning or at least much earlier? The list reads as if a huge chunk (not 20%) of the game is now shoved in because they realized they missed something fundamental. That is my impression.
Baron Drocis Fondorlatos - Actually the "list" has always existed, and they're just now sharing it because they're trying to improve on their communication with the community.
The idea that the list somehow represents more than 20% of the game is not a conclusion that I reached when I finished all the quests, which is why I assume that whatever amount of the game you've played is not a fair representation that would lead someone to speak confidently about what percentage of the game is complete and what still needs work.
Lord_Darkmoon - Why should I suffer through the game if it is simply not fun yet? I play up to a point where I would have to force myself to play any further.
For me this list came out of nowhere as a reaction to the recent criticism.
But I understand that some here defend so much about this game. Yet for me it gets harder and harder to keep going. Yet in the end I will judge the game at release and yes it will be compared to other RPGs, too.
Baron Drocis Fondorlatos - I had to force myself to play through all the quests because they were bad. Very bad.
But the difference is that I provided that feedback AFTER playing them. I did that so the dev team could make the quests better and we'd have a better game. You're welcome. Let me say that again, YOU'RE WELCOME.
But now I have to go out on the forums and read nonsense from people that didn't even play the game. They didn't even confirm whatever suspicions they had and give the development team an opportunity to FIX what was broken. No, they just made stuff up and said "why wasn't this done years ago?" That's not helpful. That's not going to produce a better game, in fact it's more likely to make the game worse because then the development team has to guess what's good and what's bad.
The recent criticism was that they were not giving enough communication of what their priorities were. The list was always there, they just didn't share it before.
Well again, you're welcome. I'm happy that I can be the one helping to make this game better for your benefit. And in the end if you decide you like it after years of griping about it without offering good feedback, I hope you remember who was here making the game better....me (and many others like me, that didn't just make stuff up and whine, we played it and tried to make it better).
Lord_Darkmoon - Sorry, Baron but I can't take you serious anymore for two reasons:
1. You are taking discussion onto a very aggressive level attacking others for their opinions and their way of playing and providing feedback.
2. You are playing by rules you made up and if others don't play along you are attacking them. Yet those are your rules and you make them appear that they are the only rules that apply. Let me tell you: You are wrong.
I am out of this discussion. Congratulations for scaring players away with your behavior.
This Baron Drocis Fondorlatos is a good example of the "wonderful community" they have over at SotA forums. Arrogant with a elitist behavior.
Lord_Darkmoon explained to this whale what he had accomplished in his last response - I am out of this discussion. Congratulations for scaring players away with your behavior.
Developers and moderators are to blame why SotA forums today is a elite controlled forum where whales can say just about whatever they like.
I like the good old game concept of having to figure things out myself, so unlike others I don't miss the dreaded mmo story pointers telling you what to do next, but that has no meaning without all the other things such as actually being fun, interesting, involving to play, logical UI and UX that explains basic mechanics by its presence alone, incentive to grind (unlike some I like grind), and so on.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Besides which, as Jim Sterling might say, stop shooting the messenger and concern yourself more with the fact the message is still valid after all this time. When companies stop exploiting people, and the people stop letting them do it is the time we should stop talking about it, not before.
Or perhaps you'd like to direct your "this is boring me" observations to the sociopaths who continue to stalk any critic of the game years later...? I had the fun experience of that particular one admitting he has escalated his attacks on my accounts recently... and yes, that got reported on to the Police in short order. I only wish I had the luxury of self absorbed eunni like you do.
Do you tone-police every forum, or is it just Shroud you do it for? And why?
The only SHOCKING thing about this one is that this time, MMORPG.com actually wrote an article pointing out the negative sides of the game and are not banning anyone saying anything negative about it like they have in the past, for other MMO betas.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
I had horse in Okinawa and it wasn't good and everything I read about this game sounds as bad.