Your Opinion matters. at least to me.

[Devilduck]

Ladies and gentle men, and yeah you dragons too.

I have a question for you all. well sort of a series of questions.

Lets take a moment and pretend that we could set the priorities for what gets worked on next for Horizons. What would your choices be?

Would it be Concensual PvP?

Or Maybe rare loot and sets like whats in Diablo and Daoc.

Would it be improved mob spawn times?

What about furniture for houses?

Walking and moving NPCs?

let your imagination run wild. There are a few details. We know Dragon AROP is in works, so lets skip that. We know lairs are in work, so skip that too. tutitorials are being worked on. so we can skip that one too.

Reason I ask, is because, from watching IRC, and comments made by a couple of the devs, it seems to me that their priorities are off. I want to see what you the community thinks.

What do you think?

[LaughingOtter]

Taking a macro view, storyline. Toys are nice, there are things the game needs, and there are features that I'm waiting to see. Beyond all that, though, the changes are really incomplete without lore & storyline to back them up.

[Tzael]

Furniture for houses and mobile NPCs rank high on my list because of the immersion factor they offer, drawing players further into the world.

Rare loot is a nice addition, people want a reason to hunt other than experience and coin. By rare loot I am referring to the types of items that show up maybe once a month, anything that can be found in a day or three of 'farming' isn't rare imo.

Consentual PvP (restricted to an arena or island) would be a welcome addition to those who have levelled all they want to, and would like a bit of a challenge in between defending Istaria from the Withered Aegis. Yes PvP does attract some people who are of a less than savoury nature, but one of the things that helps make a game successful is the political element, who likes/dislikes who, etcetera.

What do I really, really, really want ? Quests. Lots and lots of quests, not just trophy hunter / town marshall / trainer quests, but involved quests like the Darkstaff quests or the recent player contribution from Laughing Otter. A decent variety of quests will make a huge difference to Istaria, and for the better.

[PJ]

I want my war...

[LaughingOtter]

Quests. Lots and lots of quests, not just trophy hunter / town marshall / trainer quests

Those are tasks, not quests. Tasks are good, but quests are better. That's part of the whole lore/storyline thing, too. A *big* part....

[Anima]

<Waves!>

My biggest problem is low frame rates during big group activities like hunting and events. Those are the thingsthat seem to bring the community together the most and are the most fun for me.

1.) A system that allows big events.

2.) A reason to hunt other than grinding levels and collecting components.
I.E. Pushing the Aegis back, clearing a town of unwanted invading critters orpraying for a rare loot drop while activly searching for named meanies.

3.) A central location to shop. Sounds silly I know.. but I'd love to visit Tazoon in that neat central area and bargan for rare loot stuffs or wanted components.

4.)As much as I don't like PvP. Having a consentual PvP arena would be a very nice addition. It would open new windows of opportunity for events, games, and to retain people that like PvP that are also found of the community here.

5.) Flesh out the current schools with more variety of abilitys and spells.


Thats my list... what matters the most to ME.

/setpref mindlessramblingon false

<Waves!>

[GreenEyedDragoness]

Dragon AROP

Confectioner love - EXPERT FOODS! and then some other stuff. How about Jman pie forms? A use for grapes!

A wood shop near Brist/Sable Shores

More content

Furniture

Make is easier formetalworkers with the whole iron, nickel, steel, cobalt fiasco.

[Aamer Khan]

Return the fun that captured our imaginations at the beginning.

To me, to accomplish that it would mean...

1. Return finishing machines to the shops in the fields.

2. Return the story arc by means of Events, Quests that provide and further the ingame lore.

3. Restore roving bands of mobs to give the world life.

4. Give us something to do besides level up secondary classes or add another craft. .

[LaughingOtter]

1. Return finishing machines to the shops in the fields.

2. Return the story arc by means of Events, Quests that provide and further the ingame lore.

3. Restore roving bands of mobs to give the world life.

4. Give us something to do besides level up secondary classes or add another craft. .

Amen, Brother Aamer!

[Drulgar]

Quests, especially class and race specific ones, not tasks. Furniture and racial structures that use the unused construction material.

[Bori Grimbattle]

1) A raison d'etre.

2) So Lore and lots of it. Lore on the Races, the Gods, the Heroes and Villains from before our time. Actual Artifacts and puzzles to solve, strange and wonderous things to find from the Age of the Gods which could give us........

3) Better defined classes and races. There should be a difference between them and not in looks only or what armour you can wear. So while we are waiting for this perhaps we could see........

4) Furniture, road and artifact building (not Empire Placed), the ability to wall in your town which leads to..

5) A working world model so we can keep the good guys <-----here and the bad guys -----> there and the bads guys cannot magically transport themselves through the wall to mess up the good guys like this <----bad---dogo----> which leads to...........

6) The return of the WA and the War with cities to save and races to free and things to build which leads to.......

7) A raison d'etre!

[Kulamata]

[*]Above all, make FUN the criterion for changes. NOT having some game mechanic "work better", but fun and only fun.[*]Moreterritory taken back from the WA.Rachival, the East and West Deadlands, and after an epic battle series, storming the Wedge and reclaiming the Eastern continent, rescuing who knows what races? The great, memorable events were all about driving back the WA; satyr islands, Feladan, recalling the dryads. Much more satisfying than defending against raids. We besiege them![*]Client improvements that would allow the above.[*]Raising the cap to 120. Don't mess with the game, don't use it as a time to slip in some nerfs, just extend the game.[*]Continuefixing the click, click, click of refreshing buffs. True Grit, Promote Vitality changes coming, welcome. Arboreal skin made passive was great.[*]Continuing and expanding the shift in emphasis from subtracting from the game to try to retain players, to adding to the game to attract and retain players.[*]Continuing innovative marketing. Not all will work, but trying things like the Mithril Contest is great. Open house is great, could use more publicity.[*]Continuing to expand, modify and improve SQA.[*]Continue class balancing; great strides are currently being made.[*]Make techingeasier. Tech comp drop increase is great,techs too, please. Easy teching premerge did not ruin the game. It did not drive players away.It was fun.[*]Try to reduce the grinding aspects of craft leveling. This went in the wrong direction for a while, and mitigating factors like local shops were only partially successful due to player loss. Stop equating running with crafting.[*]Lairs buildable in guild plots.[*]Loot with a "thrill factor". It does not much matter whether it is blighted equipment, crystals, shattered bit and pieces, whatever. What does matter is that it be good enough to provide a thrill when it is found. AE always flinched, but Tulga be brave. If Diablo II can survive having thrilling loot, so can Horizons.[/list]

[Rhaiannon]

For HZ to get back to the game I hope it will, it will need the following, beware, post is LONG:

1)rare loot. I?m not talking about stuff that any Joe can loot in a weeks worth of grinding, I?m talking quested for, above crafted quality, hard to acquire loot. How many of us are still using those accolade of expedition crystals we got way back when, stuff like that is what I?m talking about, just better and even harder to acquire. Every 2 weeks to a month there should be a new event and a new rop sized quest to do to progress the story line that rewards those that complete it with these rare items that will no longer be attainable when the quest vanishes, which brings us to:

2)More Events! There should be some storyline enhancing or advancing event every 2 weeks to 4 weeks, but no longer than 4 weeks. I?m sure someone there will toss a new story line twist in every now and then. It doesn?t all have to be Wa invade, gifted kick butt, wa retreats either. Make them kick our collective behinds! Give us a war

3)More dynamic wa! These undead forces are very unorganized, sure they?ve got bases in the north west and east, but they run around with no purpose. Complete the dynamic wa leader code and send them after us.

4)Consequences. Make us want to defend places like auguhndale. In other words, since there are now 3 servers plus blight, have the wa blight the terrain like they did at the end of the world event, destroy aug like they destroyed feladan if we cant kill them off in say a weeks time. Kind of like the original siege of aug, we can defend and the WA will keep pouring forth through the gaps in our defenses. If we fail, take the npc?s that are currently in the town of aug and set up a refugee camp somewhere else, im sure another race wouldn?t mind having a camp outside their town while the city burns to the ground. (would love to see plots destroyed too, but hey, cant have everything.) Blight the trees, uproot a few and have charred logs lying about. Turn the cities to rubble if we cant keep them from being overrun. Now, there is that lag problem so that?s my next point.

5)Lag. Finish that resource manager, implement it and get it going, if its half as good as you all say it is, it will destroy a good chunk of the lag in the game. Find other ways of streamlining the game as well, rewrite old code, make it more efficient.

6)Dragon. Finish up dragons, bring their quests to 100 and ill be happy, lairs and arop fall into this category.

7)Quests! Quests quests and more quests, not tasks. Quests like the gangalf series, or the dragon ability quest, give them a reward worth the time and you?ve got yourself a good start to a game.

8)Lore. Every game needs it, those without it die. Bring in libraries, places of interest where we can gather information, add lore to quests, create books to read that are purchasable from npc librarians for a rental fee and can be sold back for the same price.

9)World model. Fix the world model or create one, whichever is needed to keep the wa from walking through walls, this will allow for more interesting places to hunt, defenses to be constructed and wars and sieges to be waged.

10)Castles. You have the castle already made, let us build them in the frontier regions instead of adding more plots. Then, have the wa besiege them and try to tear them down. Now, by frontiers I don?t mean at the edge of town, I mean one fortress in one of the valleys up on the northern continent, maybe one at the very edge of the western deadlands and one at the edge of the eastern (they should be placed on mountains or raised above the landscape, these are fortresses, not playgrounds for the wa.) Now, make it so that they can be taken over, so have a blighted castle model in the background that if we have the castle built, and cant defend it and the wa occupy it for over a week, it turns blighted and we will have to do some construction on it as well as wage war to clear it out and make it useable again. These castles should have one of each resource processing station, and completed item station including one for dragons, ie a scale forge. We dragons are the allies of the living races, don?t hold us back or it may sting a bit when we remove our assistance from the empire. There should also be trainers of the major classes, that way people can switch classes in the field better. Yes, I know this brings up the usual bipeds are uber nonsense, but its needed. Place quest givers in these castles that will give quests for the region they are protecting the empire from. Now, this could also be taken a step further later when new lands are discovered, place a portal in pad, a structure we have to build for a portal, and a castle base with npcs there for starting quests, finish the castle and then we can explore the entire continent. Cause and effect.

11)Last but not least, Dungeons. Once the world model is in place, put some dungeons in, we mortals want the, therefore the devs should provide them. But please, don?t make them just places where we can grind, have quests be associated with them and make them HARD.

I think this would make a good start and bring HZ up to where it should be. A fresh beginning.

Edited to kill Msword bug.

[Theolaerynn]

1 ) Fix existing bugs and make the game stable. This includes the mem leaks and rendering issues.

2 ) Reduce the various forms of lag so that Horizons plays at *least* on par with the most popular MMORPGs.

3 ) Lore and general content. There are too many empty areas and too little information, the world feels empty.

4 ) Meaningful quests. RoP / ARoP are supreme examples, but even the bottlecap quest was fun.

5 ) Class balance. This can come later, because the school system is much more forgiving than rigid systems like those used in Everquest and such.

6 ) Racial bonuses that give small but meaningful advantages for the entire range of levels. The move to make certain race abilities affect base skills instead of current was a great idea, continue that trend. It doesn't break the game that Elves may be able to upgrade to that new bow 1 level earlier than all other races, but it does add nice flavor.

All in all, this should be about fun. It should not be about fixing stuff to fix stuff, and it should not be about fixing stuff that will break something now under the pretext that a new feature coming 'someday' will make it worth it. If you are fixing something that is mutli-part, in other words something that more than one change will be necessary to get it working as intended, wait to implement them all at once. Don't break it now because you know you will fix the rest of it soon, because you rarely do that.

And for god sakes, lose the new patcher until one can be implemented that doesn't ******** security!

[Isair]

What i think this game really *really needs is what has been sugested in every post here, QUESTS... and lots of them.
Tzael mentioned the darkstaff quests, those where fun, and the crystal quests where pretty cool aswell. Secondly, Events to move the storyline further.
If stuff like that enters the game , im sure it will attract both new and previous players (such as myself for one).
But it does cinda feel like a loooong way off don't it? i mean, stuff like Arop and
lairs have been in "coming soon" status for how long now?.

[refuse]

2) So Lore and lots of it. Lore on the Races, the Gods, the Heroes and Villains from before our time. Actual Artifacts and puzzles to solve, strange and wonderous things to find from the Age of the Gods which could give us........

3) Better defined classes and races. There should be a difference between them and not in looks only or what armour you can wear. So while we are waiting for this perhaps we could see........

6) The return of the WA and the War with cities to save and races to free and things to build which leads to.......

^^^^^^^^^That

Raising the cap to 120. Don't mess with the game, don't use it as a time to slip in some nerfs, just extend the game.

Uncap, so we don't have to ask for 140 in 6 months.

[Khoal]

I'd go for enhanced client and server performance. Less lag, a more robust and efficient graphics engine. Working standalone launcher maybe later.

All of the pretty graphics and in-game wars, sad to say, won't amount to a hill of beans if our FPS drops through the floor when we see them.

Just my opinion.

[Stranyr]

Ladies and gentle men, and yeah you dragons too.

I have a question for you all. well sort of a series of questions.

Lets take a moment and pretend that we could set the priorities for what gets worked on next for Horizons. What would your choices be?

Would it be Concensual PvP?

Not on my list of things that are important at all

Or Maybe rare loot and sets like whats in Diablo and Daoc.

Rare loot is already in on Blight and sets I am not really interested in.

Would it be improved mob spawn times?

Improving the mob spawns would be high on my list :)

What about furniture for houses?

Furniture would be really nice! I know alot of crafters would be quite pleased with this.

Walking and moving NPCs?

Meh.. not really that important to me, I know I would start to get pissy if they had some of them walk around though hehe Vault keepers would NOT be a good idea to give motion to!

let your imagination run wild. There are a few details. We know Dragon AROP is in works, so lets skip that. We know lairs are in work, so skip that too. tutitorials are being worked on. so we can skip that one too.

Reason I ask, is because, from watching IRC, and comments made by a couple of the devs, it seems to me that their priorities are off. I want to see what you the community thinks.

What do you think?

Mostly I think the priorities should be Finishing the rework on schools that they are currently doing, Get the missing forms etc in the game and the cap to 120 set up.

While that is going on get a New Event going, something that will take some time, the dryad event and satyr event were both quite good at keeping people motivated to play. Somthing along those line even if it's not to free a race.
Maybe something like "push back theWA's wall" ( the big red wall that stops (mostly) people from going any further east.

Fluff keeps MMO's going.. the little things that keep you busy, but it's Large scale events that really make MMO's Fun and worth while.

[Astroth]

What I really want to see is PvP; more quests, tasks, and events; and most of all more dragon interactions!


Every good game I have played had PvP, except Horizons. PvP is a different style of hunting. Instead you have stronger oppenents at times, who may run or attack. Maybe have a new PvP continent, or like others said have island(s) for PvP.


I want there to be more quests, tasks, etc. More tasks and quests gets rid of the sense of repetition (or w/e the word is!). Also some events ran daily, or weekly would be nice! If PvP was implemented, we can have big moshes and the winner, or winning team gets a prize. For example, a battle held once a week where it is everyone vs. everyone. Then the winner gets a special weapon or armor depending on their class. And that person can't play the following week in the event. Of course there would be broadcasting saying to get ready, and when it starts.

The most important thing to me would be Dragon interactions. Ride-able dragons (biped asks a dragon for ride maybeeven offers some money or item, the dragon then sits down and right click biped pressing a button that sends message to biped Press accept if you would like to hop on NAME) Something like that. :)

Another dragon interaction would be flying attacks. Such as "Aerial Slam" this will be where you are flying and press this while targeting mob and you speed and slam on top of them. Or when executed from ground, you'll fly up and slam onto the mob. Plus others such as a flying attack where you do a "fly-by" and shoot fire.

And of course, Ancient Rite of Passage!!

:)

[EDIT]

Housing decorations would be nice! And have settings for each item/decoration you put in there. For example, after the item is down, you can right click and go to properties:

Blue Love Seat
O Public Interaction
O Guild Interaction
O Public Pick-upable
O Guild Pick-upable

Something like that, for guild houses you can make items pick-upable (couldnt think of right word lol) and all guild members can take item. Or interaction meaning sit down on it, use or what ever.


My last idea is to make items droppable! Everyone game I have played except Horizons again, allows you to drop items. And it has a model for it on the ground. Even if it doesn't quite show the same details as described in the info, you can still drop it. And also have a timer of say... 1hour after being dropped it will disappear to stop littering of Istaria.

I believe this is the last edit! :-P

[Theolaerynn]

Beyond any doubt INGAME lore is the top prioity for me. That letter sent out by Chris or David or whoever was just crap. You don't dictate lore to players offline.

Oooh, good catch, I forgot to clarify that in my post. When I speak of game lore, I mean lore you find through quests or other means in the game.

Lore outside of the game breaks immersion for me. I am not in character and I do not get nearly the same enjoyment out of it. It is the same reason while telling someone who doesn't play the game about the epic battle you were in last night just doesn't compare to being in game with that person fighting that epic battle together.