[2021] Vessels live stream May 16 - Official discussion thread

Oh wow, y'all have been busy! I'm just now starting to dive into this thread and read it, but I also wanted to poke and prod a bit more to get some feedback on a few things.

1 - Let's talk about vessel leveling. I'm going to be spending some time this weekend playing and getting some basic numbers (rate it takes to level from 1-30 on a common vessel vs. a legendary, things like that); are there any specific aspects of our leveling system you do like? What about things you think we could improve upon?

2 - How do you feel about the way necromancy crafting is as a whole? Do you feel like this aspect of crafting is pretty well fleshed out, or is there something lacking? Granted, I know we just put the goggles out there for everyone on test but they aren't available on live yet so current perception might be skewed. Necromancy is such a unique aspect to our game that I personally think it's pretty good as it is, but I'm always open to feedback.

3 - Tell me, do you find yourself interested in making a vessel for the higher quality aspects, or do you prefer purchasing vessels from more advanced crafters?

4 - We only have a few minutes to touch on these things in the live stream; what are the key items you hope to hear about during this stream?

Thanks everyone!

Wow, I asked and y'all are definitely delivering! These are seriously some great talking points and I will try my best to touch upon most of what's been brought up, either during the stream or after in this thread.

As a game designer, we carry a heavy burden not many other disciplines in game development carry; toeing the line between fun, challenging, rewarding, and engaging. One of the ongoing issues we have as designers is seeing our work from an objective perspective, or with "fresh eyes", and this is why I look to all of you to help us legit find the fun for our game. It's a luxury not many studios have, and having the ability to iterate and re-evaluate how we've implemented something after seeing how the end user actually takes to it is one of the most important aspects of my job. Sometimes we're constrained by tech and time limitations, but I personally want to work with all of you to build a game we can all be proud of and enjoy playing. To that end, it's also important to note that we're still putting this puzzle together; we've come a long way since the HungerDome days but we've still got some work to do, and I really appreciate that everyone understands that.

Anyway, keep those questions and feedback comin'! I love what you have all brought up so far and I really do thank you for keeping it objective and honest.

Whew, ok. Let me reply to this thread again in stages because this is one of those subjects that's probably going to require more than one stream to cover all the things. Talking with our team we initially wanted this stream to be an "intro" course into vessel creation, leveling, and how a new player can get a new vessel. I'm pretty sure we touched on a lot of those entry level points today, but for the current set of players or those who are more hardcore, we didn't really bring anything new or address a lot of your questions. So, with that being said let me touch on a few things we're going to work toward iterating. This is going to be a collaborative experience with all of you!

1. I completely forgot to mention this point, but I'm sure most of you already knew about this. We have a plan to now broaden XP gain into other aspects of game play, such as harvesting, crafting, and taking outposts.

2. We're going to go back and re-examine the amount of XP given on a mob kill. 50XP for a rank 1 and 50XP for an elite mob just doesn't feel right, and we're going to start establishing a better baseline for mob XP. This is one of those "Le duh" game developers, moment but this specific issue fell under our radar and now that I'm aware of it, I want to fix it ASAP.

3. New player experience and God's Reach fine tuning. We're at a point where we have a general idea of how we want this to feel and want to work on iterating on this experience, including XP gain, overall flow, and feel.

4. Sacrifice amounts: This is a big one and this one is probably going to take the most time to adjust and polish, but I agree with you. Some of the values on our loot items are not at the best rate for level gaining. Let's re-evaluate these values!

I have a lot of other ideas and possible solutions, but they all depend on how receptive the powers that be are to those ideas. I won't go into detail on them since it's always a possibility those ideas will get shot down, but I just want you to know that my current intent is to facilitate a solid playable experience. OK, I see some other posts here asking specific questions and I'll do my best to answer those, now!

I'm honestly not sure where we are with gold rates and if we'll be fine tuning them soon. I'll try to track down an answer for that, but ideally we should start building more content to help facilitate the lack of gold in the world or mitigate the current issue that's being brought up. This is one of those weird things in flux that I don't have much visibility on, but I hear ya! While EK vendors may still be difficult to find we're hoping that having vendor nodes in the free cities and temples will help alleviate some of this.

As for trash vendors, it's on our radar! It's something I really want in game, too, because it does help continue to foster an economy. Once we solidify our schedule and have some more ability to flex our tech asks I'm hoping this will come online.

I need to double-check where it's scheduled. Once I know more about it I'll let you all know!

Ahhhh! This! I can't believe I forgot to mention this one. Yes, XP curves have changed with 5.90! So with that said, please, please, please give us feedback on these changes. We tend to play like devs rather than actual players, which sometimes limits our ability to get the big picture. Once we have some more feedback we can go from there.

Oh no doubt, that's why it's something we want to make sure gets implemented with enough thought and cadence.

As for metrics, we're getting those! I'm so excited for this specific aspect of development that's currently in the works that I can't stop cheering about it. This actually goes hand-in-hand with trying to better the flow of our new player experience.

These are all fantastic questions, thank you for posing them. I think your first question kind of aligns well with the notion of the Advantage/Disadvantage system on character creation, where you are given an amount of stats to play with for more character customization. While it's something we're hoping to incorporate, it probably won't be in the works until a few cycles from now.

Vessel crafting and mounts! Wow, this is a pretty unique idea that I don't know if we've considered at all. I'm writing this one down because it seems like they can facilitate each other, but that will also have to be a backburner concept, at least for now.

As for our procedural maps, this is a fantastic question! We do have knobs and values that try to use as a baseline for generating those worlds. As we've found in the past, sometimes those knobs and values need tweaking. So, while it's a great system and far better in campaign map creation than what we had before, we still need to do some tweaking.

Ah, this is a good question. Ideally, we should have a vendor in place selling those major disciplines at a white quality, which means you'll have a bit more flexibility to test out those disciplines before you commit to them at a higher quality. I'm making that vendor now, actually.

This is a fantastic question that I'm not quite sure how to answer since we're still trying to find that balance between level curves, adding more ways to gain XP, and facilitating a better flow. Unfortunately, this specific issue is not going to be an easy fix, and it's going to take some time and collaboration with you all to figure out where our major holes are and how we can adjust accordingly.

This vendor might not make it into our next Live update, but he should be visible within the 5.90 release cycle. I'll make sure to call it out in the patch notes.

I knew some of y'all would call this out and I'm glad you did. I think this leads into an even bigger discussion about retro-fixing things, especially the crafting loop. With our current campaign cadence, time is an extremely high factor in not only leveling a current vessel, but collecting mats, organizing groups to help search for those rare materials and motherlodes, and crafting items. I can definitely see as a player how these specific aspects can compound into an even more stressful experience. I can totally sympathize when you collect these rare items and then get hit with a FLAWED assembly; it can be pretty disheartening and frustrating. Let me look at how our current recipes are set up and see what things we can do to help mitigate that problem. I can't make any promises on specific items just yet, but I'm all about looking at things as they are and seeing if there is something we can do to help alleviate some of the big pitfalls.

Here I go, again not saying everything I should. What can I say, I'm just so excited about this discussion that I'm not painting the full picture.

So, an upcoming feature that's currently in the works is introducing an item quality to disciplines which will also require a like quality vessel to slot those disciplines. I'm going to hold off on saying any more about this since Thomas Blair may have a better explanation for it, but hopefully this aspect will still keep some of that Shadowbane feel to it.

Oh, one other thing I touched on earlier; this subject is such a huge topic that I'm going to try and do at least one more followup live stream for this. Hopefully we'll have some more feedback on the leveling curve changes, maybe some more bug fixes with XP amounts with sacrifice items, and an opportunity to answer some of the more advanced questions. It's hard to talk about all of these things in just one live stream, so if I didn't touch on a point you were curious about please know I didn't intentionally ignore it or forget it. I think next stream will also be a bit more organized and may even include even more player feedback.

With that said, are there any lingering questions, concerns, or general curiosity that I haven't even touched up that you would like to hear more about? Thanks again for all the quality constructive feedback; it really does help!

It's an interesting thought and I totally understand why someone would want some kind of exchange for their vessel. The concept of exchanging vessels is a notion we've been kicking around, we're just not sure how to go about it with a well thought out system. On top of that, we're also trying to nail down our remaining must have tech asks. Your suggestion is a cool concept for sure, we'll just have to be smart about how we can go about this when we get the ability to get some more tech time. Definitely making a note of this one when we get a bit more bandwidth and time to polish.

You bring up some good points, especially how we could potentially be overwhelming new players or confusing them. We're in an interesting point in our dev cycle at the moment where we are still trying to create a game loop, entice new players, and also keep our current player base engaged. It's a tough line to toe, in all honesty, and from the sidelines it might seem very confusing, because we have so many irons in the fire. I don't have an easy answer for you with this specific subject because it really isn't an easy subject to tackle. From my understanding the concept of Gods Reach was introduced as a way to introduce new players to our game mechanics while also supplementing them with a new player experience. We're still working on this process and we've got some other things going through the pipe that may also facilitate game play for our more advanced players where what you just said (choices matter) will in fact be present.

With all that being said, it's just a matter of time and patience that we're asking for on the part of our players. Our ultimate goal is to make something we can all enjoy and be proud of, but that kind of game play requires some collaboration across the board. I don't know if I've alleviated or increased your concerns, but that's why community engagement is one of our biggest priorities.

I think I've mentioned this before, but this is definitely something we're cognizant of in house. We're working on actually playing more like players now rather than game devs. In fact, I just heard someone say "I played this last night and as I player I think it needs tweaking". It's just one of those difficult aspects of game development, but we're working on doing more engagement with our game. Our game is pretty intimidating and we are going to try and make strides to continue to iterate on it.

The Advantage/Disadvantage system is something we've talked about and still want to do. It's just a matter of scheduling it and planning for it accordingly. Most of y'all have played live products before so you understand that balancing is an ongoing thing, and it's something we're also aware of. It's an ongoing process that can feel pretty weird from both sides of the fence and we're still trying to find our cadence between balancing what's already in game and what's coming up. Hopefully we can keep making significant and noticeable strides in that regard.

Oh my gosh, I would love this! Let me talk with a few people and see if we can maybe do something along these lines. No promises, but I know I'm personally interested in this!

I also just want to take a moment to reiterate something. I really do appreciate all the engagement taking place, not just here but in other areas like Discord, Twitch, and Twitter. I just hope this doesn't come across as feeling hollow or like I'm just repeating the same phrase, but I legitimately thank you all for your objective comments and questions. Making a game isn't easy, but it definitely helps that you all have as much passion about our game as we do.THANK YOU!