I have played this game over various days of the beta.
Ending Results:
Level 40+ - Highlander
For starters, the grind really isnt the issue in any game, unless you are literally losing experience killing mobs. The real issue falls in the amount of content and distractions a player will have during the grind.
Example: Talking with friends while grinding makes the time go by faster
Example2: Trying to craft by RNGing items off mobs to make the better item helps alleviate some monotone grinding.
Example3: Minigames / Events to ease the player into doing various things besides grinding.
This build of the beta only had the few quests with a grind. There was crafting, however it was not as intricate besides grab item A + item B = item C
Overall, the grind is fine, just needs more content (as it will come in the future im sure).
Crafting
Everyone wants to craft, but there are some issues with the current craft system.
Bug or unintentional feature - Naming your weapons / description will usually give errors about using too much data (over 150kb) when linking the weapon. This should never occur and that error message should really only apply to player imported emotes / content.
Crafting is simple and easy to pick up as long as you find the recipe, however that’s it.
Make the crafting into a minigame, the better the score the better quality the item. Think on it and think of the various games you played before that could be put in as a crafting system.
Quantity of craft items should be increased due to variety and customization. Hats are nice variety but there should be more oomph to it. from 1-40 i got a handful of recipes. Most were potentia recipes from the caves. I’d like to find a variety of weapons that will cater to the players of that area’s level, which can be sold on broker or through player shop.
Chats
The chat system had some huge flaws that made going into any other chat room type useless. This is with party, normal, shout, and private chat. Private chat had a good idea to have each specific pm in a list and you select which to view, but when you changed maps all chat history removed.
Sometimes chats would disappear off the specific type of chat rooms and never came back, a full client restart would fix this issue. Changing maps again, however, makes restarting useless.
A good way to fix this overall would be customizable chats. I don’t want shout in the chat but would like to just see party / normal chat.
Another issue is there should be more channels, mainly a Trade channel. This will be a spam channel that people can look through to see what people are buying / selling / trading. Make a 2 post per 2 minute limitation and it will ease the spam.
UI
the User Interface isn’t noticeably bad, in fact its decent for what it was supposed to do. I do like customization tho, skillbar placement, chat placement, portrait / hp-sp bar placement, boss hp placement, etc should be able to be moved around or have options to be re-positioned around the screen. Not everyone is going to like the same layout.
This can be fixed with multiple methods. The main option would be a click on it in an edit mode and drag the element around the screen to wherever. Tera did good at this as an example, however the optimization of it was horrible (flash ftl). Another alternative is set locations around the screen in the options / gameplay menu.
Keybinds
This game needs keybinds. By keybinds i mean the following:
-Keyboard Keybinds
-Mouse Keybinds
-3rd party hardware like the orb weaver contraption keybinds (i’ve never used one, so sorry if the keybind works through the software or firmware for the device)
z,x are not bad, however most players are used to w,a,s,d as movement keys, not the arrows. IMHO Mouse + Keyboard will make a beast setup if jump is right click and left click is attack, etc.
Trade Broker
Trade broker definitely needs some work. I noticed listing some items made them “disappear”. Even when searching for them it was useless and I could not find where the item went. Restarting the client did not fix it.
The resolution to the problem came on its own. It’s not that it disappeared but it was INVISIBLE to me. I do not know why. I logged in a day later and the item sold for the set value i listed it for.
The following features would be a good addition to the trade broker:
5 tabs: Search, Recently Sold, Listings, Brokered Items (bought / sold), Personal History
-Search: It would have a search bar for finding specific items, then a filter that would filter out level, rarity, cost, broker name (if not hidden). There should be a negotiate button so people can try to negotiate with the player who listed the item (if online).
-Recently Sold: Price listed, sold for however much, nothing too special here.
-Listings: Listed items, how much you listed them for, current average price (other same items sold for average)
-Brokered Items: items that the player has sold (gold collection) and bought (item collection).
-Personal History: History of the players purchase / selling of the trade broker. Time back could be like a month to a year, depending on how IMC would set up the database for the trade broker.
A Quickbuy feature can be listed to auto buy say a set of resources between a price range.
Example - I want to buy 100 seeds, but not all players sell stacks of 100 seeds. So I can set a range to buy the seeds (say 40-50silver a piece) and the function will go from cheapest up in the set range to buy the items until it hits 100. There will be no negotiations attempted, just straight out buys for listed broker price. This is a good way to skip out on wasting time trying to click buy from various brokered items of the same item.
I will list more later when I have more time. But feel free to debate me or give feedback on these ideas.