beginner experience - grind or no grind? (Page 3 of 3)

I agree with the OP first of all. Here are some thoughts and some things I would like to add myself.

First thing I heard is they are some post that says people have too much NIC (cash) in the first couple of days of gameplay. That might be true but I don't think everyone will have that possibility (thats if the dev don't change the current balance lol).  In anycase what hurts NIC/hour is the amount of items I have in my cargo since I got a combat robot (told this in an older post before). That said I believe I should get more NIC per hour in my opinion. Here is why :

- I want to PvP. pvp requires lots of NIC, it sucks NIC like a wife with your credit card on your payday... hehe.
- for PvE people, better equipment and at the end, better robots. Thus they could do more difficult missions alone or in small groups.

Here is the  beginner experience should be to my eyes: (Remember since I've already told this in an older post, its not my first time playing mmo's)

1. less griding. destroying the same robot with stupid AI over and over is not fun...its work. I play this game to have fun.

2. No story for the missions...nothing. I got a title, the objective and thats it. I don't feel immersion from this game at all. Even from the intro story. This is a big factor to me since I do read the stories and the text...yup I'm that kind of guy.

3. the missions and robots and all that is NPC (enemy and what I can shoot) are not dynamic... I know where are X robot, its all static...well from what I know right now and from a new player perspective, thats another point for fail here. Seriously, why would a faction or enemy stick around the same area for ages being destroyed LOL.

4. The land is beautiful really but its plains, plains plains, ohh a tree..plains plains..oh a mountain. mhhhh, is it that really empty. How about some type of dungeon (arena, area..well you imagine damn it) with lots of different landscape ..I don't know like a huge building that goes underground and in that underground you get into a kind of city which has lots of hallways, huge doors, lots of different heights and stuff. And you don't necessary know whats on the next corner...well might be a stupid idea but I would sure love to go there to discover whats in there thats for sure.

5. I think I've said this before but give more type of items in missions. ammo is good but thats just insulting me. I haven't done all missions but for the ones I've made, its only 20 ammo. Its not even enough for me to load my weapon...a single weapon LOL. Also, sure theres enough missions but from what I've seen myself in my assignment list, there doesn't seem to be enough at my level which I would love to have. so more missions, more versatility in missons.

In all, All i've been doing in my first day is farming a bit to get the hang of killing robots, then doing missions. Damn mission reward sucks...back to farming...seriously..its boring this way. I hate grinding. I rather play wow if I want to grind...

PS: you never have enough missions IMO.

The problem here is the same problem with new players in Steve. As a new player you get this urge to constantly move up to bigger and bigger hull/bot classes to get more guns, mods and DPS. But then, as with Steve, you run into a brick wall of performance and it is most felt in PvP when you get owned over and over by people in seemingly "less" capable stuff running mods you have no hope of using. In Steve after playing for four years of 0.0 PvP I rolled a new toon and this time I purposely remained in frigates and advanced my fitting, defensive and weapon skills all to high levels. The result was no matter what frigate I stepped into it was uber in comparision to everyone else. I then moved up into larger ships and all those skills went with me making anything I flew rather potent.

You can not think in terms of weeks with Perpetuum but rather months and years. You fail in larger bot classes because you are in to much of a hurry to advance to them. Close beta is prolly not going to run for to much longer so us new guys should just focus on having the toughest light/assault bots out there and not be crazy about getting into a heavy mech.

I have been playing about a week, with rerolling of a new toon as well, and I am in a Yagel using 2 ACs and 2 EM guns. I plan on being in that bot for some time while I build my skills.

Fighter pilots don't go from soloing in a Cessena to a high performance fighter in a week and the same applies to Perpetuum. You are understandably getting bored because there simply isn't a lot of "content" yet in the game. But, this is a closed beta and you here for testing purposes so lets grind some red crosses into the "tiles".

My 2 cents...as with everything your mileage may vary.

Just started a couple of days ago and I agree with some things posted, and not others.

Myself I would always like to see more bots/guns/pew-pew and the like, but before any of that can happen we need to let the dev's finish filling out what we have now, or we will end up with a STO scenario where lots of people start, say "This kinda sucks"  and quit.  Allowing the devs to finish bonusing the bots we have now will go farther than having them put eleventy thousand 'steps' between the different bot classes. 

Now, and apparently many others, I also play steve and love that game, and it's precicely the equipping and time based learning that I am drawn to with this game.  Missions/grinding/mining will always be a part of any game, and as with steve(and was mentioned before)  it's always the loots that you make you real cash with.  Adding bounties to NPC's would probably help a lot with some peoples ammo to reward ratio.

In regards to the EP rate, I too would like to see that rate increased, but as I'm sure a lot of you have said or are aware of, too fast will turn this game into crap with a bunch of idiots running around in crap they shouldn't be in, thus ruining the game for others, and giving the ADD kids a month of fun, then off to the next shiny thing. 

Personally I think this game has a great deal of potential, but has the same if not more pitfalls that any sandbox style game has, the most major of which, in my opinion, is keeping the new and more experienced players engaged in actually interesting activities, and as with steve you'll have those people that just want to mine, but need to pay players to protect them, who will be attacked by raiders, which will start a corporate war, which will need supplies etc etc. 

My main point being sure voice your ideas here as the dev's want, but please don't start flame wars here, wait till the official game forums open and hate each other there, keep this place for improving the game.

Oh, BTW, agreeing with another post, current graphics will kill this game, and plz allow me to resize the chatbox.

I desperately want to contribute but I have no idea what the thread is about :-(

(somehow managed to reply to the wrong thread. whoops)

Also managed somehow not to edit my farked up post, and rather type a new one.  I should get some sleep -.-

Last edited by Kwitch (2010-06-28 20:30:23)

I agree that the new player experience needs some work.  I started the game a few days ago and it seems like I have two options for making money.  Kill an infinite number of drones or mine... and mining looks like more of a grind than drone genocide...

I agree with your transition ideas but think they should also take steps to make the crafting system more open to entry level players.  Perhaps make a tutorial experience that will grant them a few kernels, teach them a new design and have them build something worthwhile as a reward for going through the tutorial?

Last edited by Aegis (2010-07-07 20:58:22)

I find it odd that grinding drones yeilds more NIC/Hr than killing the next tier up bots (eg promethus/castel)

Drones always drop undamaged weapons and they are right next to the beginner stations so the travel time from kill zone to cargo drop off point is minimal and the loot dropped doesn't cost you anything to repair it before you sell it, and the dronesw drop more ammo than it takes to kill them. so it's all pure profit.

Examples: I've been playing for a few days, I'm now in a Prometheus. If I load up with 3 autocannons and grind drones, the drones drop more ammunition than I use, so my ammo costs are nil. Less than nill actuall. I can make a profit by selling autocannon ammo.
Add to that fact that miner modules are only .5U and sell for a decent amount and you get a recipe for an unbalanced risk/reward scenario. there is more risk killing other promethues' but there is less reward than killing drones. Unless you count the very rare "lvl 1 decoders" they drop which can sell for a staggering 10k. oh yay.

Couple of suggestions:
* Greatly Reduce the damage % of dropped gear from high level bots and drastically increase ammo drops to the point where you should be expected to atleast break even in the same type of bot (or close to). ie if I'm in a prometheus with 4 lasers fighting a scorpion (prometheus) have the rate of ammo dropped be consistent with the amount of ammo used to destroy it.

eg. if it has 700hp and i'm doing an average of 22 damage per shot, that should require a minimum of 32 ammo per kill (not including bonuses and skills). have the loot table drop between 15 and 50 laser ammo per kill.

* Increase drop rate of items from higher level bots to make them worth hunting (they take longer to killl and are located further away)

* Reduce npc buy price of small miner modules to about the same prce as small autocannons (still makes them decent loot for newbies but makes them less attraactive for 2nd level bots)

* Make the rewards from missions actually worthwhile. Why the heck would I recover 7 data files from scorpions for 7.5k nic, and have to pay 40k in ammo to kill them when in the same amount of time i could make 120k killing drones with zero expenditure?

Ok, played about a week.

Initially killed a few Drones - but died because I didn't have the Bot Status window open and didn't realize I was taking damage.

Got a new bot and went exploring to see what I could kill.... Quickly learned that Being able to outrange things was a great way to kill them without dying and that ammo costs sucked. Put points into targeting range skill and started using suicidal noob bots to do my ratting with (spending nothing on ammo).

At this point I tried a mission that was geared towards killing the same type of critters I was already killing.  Wasn't impressed.  The mission had me run to 3 different locations and I didn't feel that the reward was enough to pay for the transit time.

After a couple days, I got into an EW Light bot - primarily because of the range and speed.  This allowed me to wander around and kill random bots/mechs to see what kind of loot I would find.  Eventually settled upon one type of rat that I could kill easy enough and dropped sufficient loot. 

Still using light bots, ratting, and just collecting EPs.

The rate of EP gain is probably about right, I certainly wouldn't want it to be slower.  But if the feeling is that it takes too little time to get to the top of the totem - the answer is to increase the prerequisite levels.  Instead of 3's or 4's... make those 5's and 6's.  Especially Going from Basic Bot to Advanced - that should probably require level 7 Basic.

TLDR: Missions suck. EP rate is certainly not too fast but prerequisite levels could probably be increased for some things.

I'm only a week old, but let me try to help newb to newb

1) I managed to crash the tutorial myself and have never ran it so ... I agree in part
2) Because if they stuck valuable stuff point blank on the station that would cause major issues - you learning to mine shouldn't be at the cost of heavy mechs mining titan ore directly on the station
3) You have basic arkhe's with autos and <racial> arkhe's that sport one missile/laser/EM gun.  Once you get past shooting newbie bots the variety increases - 3 lights, 3 assaults, 3 ewar's and various combinations and fits
4) Yes, they could be better but they also are unimportant
5) Wouldn't make sense because humans actually aren't on the planet, the assignments are more like bulletin board listings of tasks
6) The textures could be better, but simple textures also run faster
7) I've seen fog, and on the beach you see waves and such.  Each robot has a different gradient scale it can handle for balance.  56 degree slope is fairly all terrain IMO, that would be difficult to walk up for humans, let alone at 50 kph.  All terrain hummers can't even race up that slope without using low pressure tires and going slow - you'd be changing wheels constantly
8) You did, check your skills
9) The story is on the forum, which is sufficient for a beta test
10) The level of difficulty really jumps up after you get past the arkhe's.  My corp of EVE buddies have different spawns we do with 2, 3, 4, and 5 people and each pays better than the one before.

For saying "you take things with a grain of salt" you're making sweeping generalizations based on shooting newbie bots in a newbie bot.  That would be like me judging EVE based on an hour in an ibis.

Last edited by Darin Raltin (2010-08-03 17:50:54)

(A new challenger approaches!)

someone who responds to replies. I will have to be extra careful in how I word a response, don't want to leave any confusion in my explanations. You're not looking for player feedback, yet you post in many topics hash criticisms on pretty standard threads and share your own?

Has been requested. Is more or less low on the list. As closed beta testers, our comments are useful... but what they really need data on is economy, pvp, resource gathering. Sure, lets put a permanent button somewhere.
   

Why did you post in the topic about mining solidbit a reply that was counter-productive to getting this changed? Why was your response 'omg, why did you ask me to post in the relevant topic'?
 

Closed beta, lets have developers work on game code for function before putting the npc's in frilly dresses.
 

*points up*
 

Yes, because that is an important feature that will make or break game balance. We should have the limited team of one person that is fixing broken graphics work on tarting your avatar up.
 

*points up*
   

At least three threads about this that I can think of. It's cool that you're posting it here though, where no changes are requested or proposed, just griping. I am sure this is productive.
 

Can we give them heavy mechs, full extensions, and their own outposts when they start too? Perhaps a fully stocked minibar? go back to wow.
 

Closed. Beta. No. Funding. Quit. ***.
   

At least you recognized that you are part of the problem for 1/10 of your complaints.

Closed beta still. You are a tester. If you don't understand something, ask. If you don't get an answer that helps you, ask again. I have yet to see you 'ask' for anything. All I've seen is 'I wouldn't pay for this' bs type comments like your farts don't stink. This is not a release candidate for a game. We all have experienced the same tutorial, the same struggles with learning a new system, and look at the same graphics. Yet we post constructive posts in the correct places so Dev's can read them, consider them, and maybe we change things.

Why the focused fire? A favor returned. Also, your 'opinion' is completely worthy of complaints if you meant to influence anyone by them. Because then you are a candidate for being incorrect.

Second:
[2]Why did I mine worthless stuff in the tutorial? why not mine something good?

Third:
Why did you post in the topic about mining solidbit a reply that was counter-productive to getting this changed? Why was your response 'omg, why did you ask me to post in the relevant topic'?

Fourth:
I dont understand what you mean about the mining posts...confused.

First:
All I can say, is ya..I dont search for existing topics on forums before posting.. I BROWSE the existing topics and respond to them. I dont have the time or energy to go digging up existing topics.  If its not hot or relevant it dosnt appear at the top of the list on a given topic I wont bother reading it.

Seems to be an issue with forum users, always people telling others what to do...pfft.
from:
http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/topi … al-mining/

So:
My response was meant to provide insight. Saying you mined worthless stuff in one thread, then going into another and saying 'i don't want to post in the correct thread' when the process of cross-posting like that is finding a relevant thread and posting in it... just seemed like you were doing what you said you don't do, and thus contradicting yourself.

I merely pointed it out in hopes that you post your ideas in a contributing way.