Hello and goodbye
Greetings. I know this is a little unorthodox, to be saying hello in the "taking a leave" forum, but I thought it would be appropriate as I am a new player to Istaria - and one who is leaving in such short amount of time that a "hello" would just be frivolous. I'm posting this thread to share some of my thoughts on the game and on why I am leaving it. I said I wouldn't when I was in-game, but I feel I really have to put down my thoughts so that they're recorded for the sake of the new player.
This is going to be a long post. The tl;dr version is: I am a newbie who doesn't like the game because it was too hard.
Just as a bit of background, I'm a 23 year old veteran MMORPG player with experience dating back to EverQuest, having played it back when it was still considered the top dog. I've had stints with several other MMORPGs, including Lineage 2, City of Heroes, EVE Online, and World of WarCraft. I have been gaming quite literally since I could pick up a controller, and with the rise of online gaming, I've been quite the MMO-hound, seeking to enjoy a well-designed adventure with a good community.
A friend pointed me at this game, noting it for being a primarily PVE, player-based, dragon-sporting MMORPG. It looked intriguing, since I greatly enjoy player-run economies, diverse crafting skills, and dragons. I wanted to give it a shot to see if it might be worth paying for, since I can't go willy-nilly and pay for every MMO that comes along, so I decided to try the "free" route and test out a human.
I created Orlus Vangouille on the Chaos shard and was immediately met with greetings and welcomes in the New Player Assistance channel. The community definitely seemed strong from the get-go, and the Spirit Isle was a simple introduction that started out rather enjoyably. I dove right into things and despite a few nags in the game client that I had to figure out, things seemed alright. Aside from some things that other players in the New Player Assistance channel said were known and being worked on (such as the low spawn rate for level 1 monsters in the groups of level 2-3 monsters around the newbie area), I didn't have much to complain about, and I was drawn in.
Then I left the Spirit Isle and went to the newbie starting zone. I was eager to get some quests out of the way, and in my eagerness, a friendly higher-level player tossed some buffs on me and gave me several pieces of level 1 equipment that would have been otherwise unreachable to me. I thought, "What a great community this is, helping other people out," and it's true; I was very much impressed by the community in my short time playing. The reason why my time was so short, though, was because the game itself took a sharp and, in my opinion, unnecessary spike. This was not due altogether to my inexperience in the game, I think; most of my problems came from a lack of clarity in quests, locations, or even things that appear to be outright bugs that completely stalled my progress.
A brief list of my complaints:
1) Quest text in the quest log are very basic and sometimes entirely unclear as to their location, direction, or intention. While some may say "Follow the road southeast until you get to the bugs," for a quest involving killing bugs, others may say "Go northwest of town to talk to this NPC," where "northwest" here means "anywhere that is not southeast." NPCs sometimes have more detail in their dialogue, but some don't - and there's often no way of making an NPC repeat what they said for the quest text or viewing it again later in your quest log. Abandoning quests is troublesome, just to have an NPC repeat what they said, especially with multiple objective quests that would set you back a good deal of time if you lost all that progress. My trouble was with one quest that told me to look for an NPC northwest of the town; while answers in New Player Assistance were encouraging, none of them could give me a good location or directions, and while that's very nice, the QUEST ITSELF did not provide any help in actually completing it. I spent the greater part of two hours looking for an NPC that I still have not found.
Some may say that the quests shouldn't "lead you by the nose" and that "exploration is encouraged." I agree; a good game has a nice balance of holding your hand and letting you be free in searching. However, I believe there is a fine line between "The quest encouraging you to explore" and "The quest giving you nothing to go on at all, leading to hours of frustrating, fruitless wandering in abandon." Veteran players may not notice it or may tout the advantages of such a system - if a game is "too hard" for WoW-playing idiots to latch onto, then they won't clutter the game, but I refute this with "If your game is too hard for the willing and able to pick up on smoothly, you will lose new players until you're all alone on your server." Others suggest using a wiki or a map-pack; while this is notable in that the community has provided such measures, the GAME is responsible for my being able to PLAY it. I played WoW for four and a half years, and my mantra for all its addons and plugins and extras was "If you cannot play the game without all your bells and whistles, you shouldn't play the game." In this case, it's not that I was relying on addons too much - the newbie island was making me feel as though 3rd-party resources were REQUIRED to proceed.
2) Newbie combat is difficult, bordering on the frustrating. I'll go ahead and say that the game's combat system is likely not its major draw, as it is pretty much "click enemy, wait until dead." There's not a whole lot of innovation going on there, but in the same token, the game should not be frustratingly difficult to make up for its lack of combat ingenuity. For example, as a level 5 warrior, with the aforementioned gear donation from a charitable player, I was unable to kill a level 6 monster on the newbie island because it had loads of hit points. I seemed unable to hit it at all. When I did, it was for a pittance of its health. It, meanwhile, steadily whittled me down, sometimes taking off enormous (comparatively) amounts of HP. I died and had to spend time running back out to where it was, because it was on my way to a quest - a level 5 quest given to me at the town. When I got to my destination, the NPC wanted me to kill 5 skeletons which were around the local area. I set to work. Upon attacking my first skeleton, I tried to move him away from his friends (as I read undead are typically "community aggro" and will call for help). While fighting him just off to the side, a skeleton wandered toward us, then began attacking. I had barely gotten my first skeleton down to 75% when this happened, but I thought to myself, "I have cleric levels as well, and healing spells, I should be fine." This might have held true if another skeleton hadn't come from across the road and aggro'd me. Now with 3 skeletons on me, with only one of them even halfway damaged, I was being over-pressed to just survive. Then a fourth skeleton joined and it was just another death from there. Another long walk back from town, I had to wait as the skeleton who spawned very far away from all the others respawned 5 times to get my 5/5 skeletons for the quest, a process which took about half an hour.
I'd like to note that the beetles did a similar engagement when I went for my "kill the beetles" quest, but luckily dragons were farming for hoard items and were able to blast everything in the field all at once.
This is not fun.
3) The content seems exceedingly difficult for "Free" players, whereas dragons seem to have a natural advantage. I understand that this game is not meant to be free forever, and I was actually testing it out myself to see if it was worth subscribing to and playing for any length of time. However, seeing as I had all these problems, I have to wonder if it isn't INTENDED to be this difficult for free players, such that they don't overflow the server and cause more maintenance costs than can be covered by subscribers. And consider that people, like me, may be trying the game before they buy it may be turned off by such a strong difficulty curve. From this example, you have very few new players receiving a positive reception from the game - why bother paying for it, then? First impressions are often the most important.
4) This may just be a bug or a relic from the older set up of the quest system (it does, however, seem to have stemmed from poor quest description and writing), but when I was taking a break from the tedious exploration and combat quests, I went up to try the crafting. One quest was "You need to make X crafted item for the town and take them to this NPC." The NPC giving the quest had an enormous wall of text and seemed to indicate repeating the crafting tutorial from Spirit Isle all over again, so I skimmed through and decided my quest log would guide me - not a smart idea, given point #1. Anyway, I started up work on these crafted items. There was no way I could carry all the raw materials and do it all at once, so I figured I'd harvest a bit, craft some, harvest, craft, etc. It seemed to be working well until I went back to the NPC. He didn't want my crafted items. I talked to the questgiver - he wanted me to talk to him when I had sufficient RAW MATERIALS to make the items, as he wanted to TEACH ME how to make them. But I already knew how to make them, what is this?! Evidently he wanted to speak to me again after an UNDISCLOSED amount of raw material had been gathered. My quest log made NO mention of this fact. Regardless, I re-harvested the material and talked to him, seeing as how I had already made the requisite number of crafted items, I thought, "Surely he'll see me as completed." Nope. Upon receiving the "Make X amount of crafted item" portion of the quest, I had completed 0. The quest was asking a SUBSTANTIAL amount of these items, at least for a newbie like me, and I would have had to head back to town and deposit all my hard-earned wares (that I had worked for naught) just so I could carry the items he DID want.
Again, this seems to have originated in the fact that my quest said nothing about the first "hidden stage" of the quest where the NPC wanted me to gather a certain amount of raw material FIRST, and then speak with him. I can't tell you whether or not he said it for certain in the NPC quest text, but, if it's a crucial step that PREVENTS you from continuing, wouldn't you think that putting it in the quest log in painful detail would be important?
In any case, all of this simply made for a poor experience, and although I've played less than a week in this game, I am already so put off by its intricacies and nuances that I just can't see myself subscribing OR playing for free. Some people may say "Oh, not every game will please everyone," but I say, the game is fundamentally broken and far too unwieldy for new players to enjoy.
Thank you to those who were kind and, if the charitable dwarf and dragon (you know who you are) are reading this post, I will log in to Orlus again to give you back your equipment if you reply.
Originally Posted by StalePopcorn
